Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in

To add another story... a previous company I worked at had an HQ of about 700 people in Chicago with satellite offices of 20ish people in a number of locations, one of which I worked at. After a couple years it was extremely obvious that the satellite offices were not only left out of important discussions and considerations from HQ, but were also treated very poorly in comparison when it came to bonuses and promotions. This despite many of the satellites being more percentage-profitable with higher growth than HQ. It led to a toxic environment and a personal lesson to be wary of working away from an HQ.

Broadly, there are tradeoffs, including organizational risk tolerance, and which margins one is permitted or not permitted to take which risks on.

For example, some software companies are regulated in some jurisdictions. A not-too-hypothetical regulation is "regulatee understands and enthusiastically consents to unannounced site inspections by regulator at any time of our choosing." Thankfully, this doesn't apply to most software companies, but ones who it does apply to have hopefully long-since had a chat with their competent legal professionals about precisely what the definition of a "site" is.

There are many, many issues like this, and they're fractally complicated. Even the basics of "How do I hire a full-time white collar employee with the standard package plus equity?" vary substantially between jurisdictions. Setting up the infrastructure for it in a jurisdiction can take the better part of a year. (It would be an excellent thing, for everyone, if jurisdictions decided to compete on ease to employ their residents.)

Its certainly a lot harder to hire someone in a country that you don't have a presence in, usually this means setting up things like employer tax arrangements, pensions, health benifits etc. Some companies get around this by having their remote employees in countries where they don't have a legal entity become independent contractors, and there's a couple of startups looking to solve this problem as a service.

However seeing as Stripe are advertising office based Roles in 6 different countries having all the remote roles as "North America Only" just seems plain lazy. I get that timezones might be an issue for some roles, although its better to then advertise a remote role as "GMT-8 to GMT-5" or whatever rather than a geographic location

I think GitLab does a decent job of that. I think There is a list of countries and how you could work with them. I.e. employed vs contracted vs not-at-all

From a legal perspective I get the limitations to local countries. I considered hiring remote (currently not easily possible due to company policies on eg in presence card pickup and activation) and would’ve scoped to the EU only in that case.

There are great people available outside of the EU, but the additional legal hassle makes the trade-off not worth it unless you expect a large amount of remote employees in that country.

I am sure there are legal reasons but if I had to set up a remote company I would probably try to restrict the timezones. My current company has dev teams in South America and India. They are all good people but dealing with India [13 hours) is a big pain because somebody has to make calls during his personal time instead of work time. It’s a real burden. And in my view you absolutely have to make direct calls from time to time. You can’t resolve all issues with asynchronous communication.

I work at Stripe, in the remote hub, from Tokyo. Stripe has a large and growing workforce outside of North America and so far it seems to be going OK.

The biggest challenge (from a trenches perspective) is timezones, so teams end up being either NA+APAC or NA+EU.

There are two issues at least. First is working in a country whose government could demand or seize your company-issued equipment, jeopardizing privacy and corporate secrets. Second is tax regulation. If you are an working in a country where your company doesn’t have a presence, suddenly the government can make the case that now there is a reason to tax the company because your working there can constitute presence. So not only would you be potentially liable for taxed earnings but so too your employer. Also some companies have announced that they would adjust compensation in accordance with cost of living, so moving from the Bay Area to Idaho or Belize would no longer be as favorable (I’m sure it would still afford a very comfortable standard of living regardless).

Note that I am not a tax attorney nor an expert on international affairs. These are some things I’ve gathered for why I can’t sit on a beachfront property in Thailand or South America and work.

In ideal world yes, but reality is that it requires significantly more effort, e.g.: "anywhere in the world" would really mean "anywhere in the world except Iran, Crimea, and other countries/regions that US thinks you should not do business with". Sometimes a company may not be even allowed to have non-US citizen employees.

Then, you have to make sure you can handle payroll, taxes, and overall operations.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing: expanding from an office-centric to all-US is a good start - baby steps.

Yes and no, depending on jurisdiction and the compromises you’re willing to make.

Hotjar, for instance, use contractor arrangements for most countries, then setup employment infrastructure in countries where there’s enough hires (or potential hires) to make the investment in overhead worthwhile.

The article says they have people in "Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, UK, and the U.S."

Definitely - see GitLab and hundreds of others.

1)

We're extremely solicitous of there being advancement opportunities for everyone in every office. This is something that we're looking at over time. Companies that can't manage this will lose to ones who can, as their seasoned talent moves to places where it is valued appropriately.

Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to be senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people reporting to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

2)

Like most employers, we craft compensation to be competitive with what we perceive as the market. We expect that geography will continue to influence who the “marginal buyer” is for most engineering talent, which will in turn influence prevailing compensation. That said, we expect that the importance of geography in determining compensation will continue to shrink, and data suggest that candidates outside of major tech epicenters have found our offers to be very competitive.

While a lot is said and written about how geographic compensation “should” be done, tech company hiring is at root a highly competitive and vibrant market. If our (or any other company’s) strategy is wrong, the market will quickly tell us.

Feel free to check back in the next time you're looking; our appetite for "remotes in the same city / metro area we have an office in" has been increasing over time, particularly as individual offices mature.

I work at Stripe, including on this post. As we mentioned, our remote hiring is in scaled production mode in the U.S. and Canada, and in early stages elsewhere. We anticipate this will change, and are working towards changing it, as quickly as various constraints allow.

I work at Stripe, though not on anything related to hiring, and will ask someone to take a look. It would surprise me if the situation was actually as strict as that text states.

Also telling - there are 17 “Remote” listings out of 270 job ads in total. For a new normal, I would expect a share higher than 6%.

Yes this is strange. I was so excited after reading the post and checked open positions only to get disappointed.

Yea I'd love to work at Stripe, but I prefer being able to live wherever I want in the world.

I believe this is often because of tax purposes. Dealing with international jurisdictions gets complicated and it may not be worth it to Stripe if they believe they can hire enough talent within NA.

It’s not that they couldn’t, it’s just that they don’t see the value in doing so.

  We have increased the places we can hire remotely from.
  [...]
  We now have the capability to hire remote employees in
  Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India,
  Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands,
  Singapore, Sweden, UK, and the U.S.

It might be due to tax reasons if the remote workers are not contractors. This has been an issue for my UK headquartered employer

Their service is not available in most countries either.

I wonder about this as well because usually the inclusion of remote engineers is usually to pay less comp than main locations especially when outside the country.

I'm already looking forward to the front page in 2025: "What's the secret of our success? We did the unthinkable and co-located our whole team in one office."

I already saw posts with titles likes “post remote work”. Keeps workers entertained.