Thread by @patio11

A year ago, Stripe opened an all-remote engineering office. We hired ~100 engineers and tripled the number of remotes across the company.

Here is what we learned:

stripe.com/blog/remote-hu…

Some thoughts:

All technology improvements, including organizational technology, improve both futures which are forseeable and those which are not.

We didn't have coronavirus in our outlook a year ago, but having remote infrastructure firmed up prior to 2020 turned out to be crucial.

The tools for working over the Internet are so, so good now, and they're getting better rapidly.

Organizations / people / culture are a much harder, and more important, thing to iterate on.

One of the things I most appreciate from Joel Spolsky's (@spolsky) writing is the importance of breaking bread with each other, and society is early in its understanding of how to break bread over the Internet.

A thing that I've seen and participated in: remotes joining teams in "boba runs." Get the same thing locally and post a photo in the channel.

The monkey brain needs to know who its tribe is. We have rituals for this online ex-work; workplaces need to figure them out, too.

Supporting remote teammates as a manager is a learned skill. It's hard. We've gotten better at managing over the years, and explicitly coaching managers on how to manage has been something that we repeatedly discover to be important.

We run a twice annual survey ("StripeSat") to measure employee satisfaction. Being able to slice the data by location (including remote status) has been crucial in helping us course correct on e.g. employee engagement issues.

With your Dangerous Professional hat on: hiring across jurisdictions is extremely complicated. This is particularly true when you have a low risk budget and high standards for wanting all employees to feel like they're treated equitably.

There would be more remote engineers in the world if governments were to ask "How long does it take a company to hire their first professional here?"

Stripe Atlas can incorporate tech companies in ~3 business days. The lead time on employment is much longer. It shouldn't be.

Stripe can hire remotes in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, UK, and the U.S.

The U.S. and Canada are at scale; we're looking to accelerate elsewhere as soon as we can.