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Comment by mahesh_rm | Hacker News Reader

..Remote (North America Only)..

I'm having a hard time reconciling "They see how people purchase food differently in bodegas, konbini, and darshinis. They know why it is important to engineer robustness in the face of slow, unreliable internet connections. They have worked in and run businesses that don’t have access to global payments infrastructure." with this precision.

What's the point of mentioning typical south american or asian shops names and then offer north america only remote jobs ?

"And though we intend to hire remote engineers in Europe and Asia eventually, our hubs in Dublin and Singapore are not sufficiently established to support remotes just yet."

I read that, but the timezone problem doesn't really explain why south america was slashed.

Overall it seems a bit strange to explain "we officially have a remote hub" and "remote workers need to be supported by physical hubs".

"There is substantial organizational, legal, and financial infrastructure required to support each new jurisdiction we hire in, so we have to be measured in how quickly we expand."

Each country you want to pay salary in comes with legal aspects. Therefore they have to be a bit tactical with where they try to hire people.

As remote guy I see potential for disruption in this area. So far umbrella subsidiaries or agencies and invoice-based contracting does the job, but stuff like IP rights and liability is quite complex. We would need some Stripe-like service for employment matters.

In the US there are PEOs (professional employer organizations) that function as virtual co-employers that allow companies to hire in all 50 states without establishing a physical presence, handles payroll, state taxes, health insurance and benefits in all the states etc.

Something like that, but on a global scale, would be amazing for remote hiring. What unfortunately now seems to happen is that remote foreign employees get classified as contractors (which probably wouldn't stand up to any real scrutiny), which isn't great for either party.

This is spot on. People who've never had to deal with the administrative overhead of having to accommodate a new locale per employee don't realize how difficult it can be. There is substantial tooling on the front office side with respect to remote work, but the back office is sorely lacking and one of the key inhibiters of more companies doing this at sufficient scale.

I wonder if there are additional restrictions based on being in financial services. It may require different licenses, registrations, insurance and employer regulations (e.g. different collective bargaining agreement) compared to traditional industries.

I work remotely for a U.S. based company from South Africa. I don't think they do anything special for each different territory. The IRS stuff just has two categories - U.S. and outside U.S.

I'd love to apply for an engineering job at Stripe.

If you don't care about the laws in South Africa that's fine but they are too big to risk that.

You're acting like hiring a local firm for a few hours to advise on this is somehow constricting. Its not.

Hiring in other locales is a perceived difficulty. Not a reality.

Establishing a registered entity to employ in a foreign country is not a few hours advice. It is difficult, expensive and time consuming.

Not sure if this is true in Stripe's case, but in some cases contracts with clients (especially governments, financial firms, healthcare companies, and the like) have stipulations as to where work can be performed.

They clearly state in the article that this is because they aren't currently set up as well to accommodate remote people across disparate time zones, but are looking to resolve that.

South America, Mexico, and other North American countries exist in the same timezones as the US and Canada. Is it something to do with hiring regulations being too much of a pain to deal with in countries where Stripe doesn't feel like the best talent is?

Additionally, why not just offer remote positions that require you to work US hours? I manage just fine as someone self-employed and remote working with people in the UK. This wouldn't need to be a permanent solution, but I don't see why exclusion is necessary here.

Moving to remote work is hard and filled with problems to begin with. Adding different national holidays, connectivity challenges, cultures, languages, etc on top of that adds to the complexity. If remote work failed, is it because remote work doesn't work, or is it because of employees in different countries, or is it because of cultural differences, or is it because of...?

Starting with a limited trial seems a more risk-averse move. If remote work proves itself out, it can be expanded more easily than it can be retracted.

Mexico is part of North America, remember NAFTA? (North American Free Trade Agreement)

It's as easy to hire Mexican remote employees as Canadians, see W8-BEN

W8-BEN has nothing to do with work autorization, rather with IRS reporting of accounts.

Exactly. Companies are afraid of wiring money to Mexican/Canadian accounts. (IANAL btw, but work remotely from Mexico)

Does that include Mexico? People in HR sometimes forgets that north america means Canada, US & Mexico

For now!

If you want to test out workers outside of USA but not have to solve the timezone related issues I recommend Colombia. There is at least one interested person there.

As someone who's worked remote with "timezone issues" before they're not for the company to solve.

If you live in Europe but work for a US company that requires you to work US times, it's simple, you work US times. This is how I've worked before and it's worked out perfectly. In fact, I'm a bit of a night owl so I much preferred it.

I disagree — those issues are totally for the company to solve. Or at least, the company should be prepared to meet employees halfway. If a North American company is going to insist that I work North American hours whilst living in Europe, I'm just not going to work there. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I live in Europe and work for a very remote-friendly, NY-based company, and I work pretty normal European hours. I have 2-3 hours of overlap with the various members of my team, and that's all I need. (In fact, I'm more productive in the morning here because it's easier for me to focus when our group chat is mostly quiet.)

Of course, it's not as simple as saying that you can work from anywhere for anybody at any time, but I don't think it's fair to say that timezone issues are not for the company to solve.

> And I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Your not, what AP thinks is reasonable would be considered rediculous if you frame it under normal satellite office scenarios. Can you imagine Sydney Googlers all catching the late train into the city to work the night shift. Like come on.

Re stripe limiting to NA only I get their concerns but its a failing approach. They're going to build out remote teams and a bunch of practices that rely on this timezone sync.

Swapping out real-time communication to async communication is going to be much, much harder once those practices are ingrained.

They also need to add more than just engineering into this remote hub. Having all your non engineers in offices is going to create a very odd adversarial culture.

No, this is not how the timezone should be solved, and great if it works for you, but this is just not sane for most people.

To solve the timezone issue, you put in place as much tools and processes as possible around working asynchronously instead of having meetings all days. This is why most remote setups work better in fully remote companies - they are more incentivised to put those things in place.

I work at a company where everyone is expected to be in the office. But we have early birds and night owls employed by the same company to work together. We don't have a formalized solution as night owls do as you described and get on up if they have work due in the morning. Or the early birds will stay up late to help the night owls finish.

But a lot of companies take on "Core hours" and essentially solve the timezone problem even with a physical office. With core hours management is deciding that they don't want to solve the "timezone issues".

I wonder how well the opposite end of the spectrum would work. Our async communication tools are pretty good these days. You could keep someone solving the problem all day long with just 3 or 4 hires but instead people choose to work on the problem in scheduled bursts of 6 hours with their entire team.

Also GitLab employee here. I work for the Geo team (geographical replication and disaster recovery), and funny thing is we are also sparsely geographically distributed. No single person in the same country. We have people spread out with all impossible timezones combinations, from US west-coast, Brazil, Europe (east/west) going all the way to Australia.

if you are interested and want to solve this for your company, look into Gitlab. They are solving it and have very good public documentation on this.

GitLab employee here, yes we do! I honestly couldn't go back to a company without asynchronous communication.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/

I think one of the fundamental things about remote work culture is default working async with occasional blocks of scheduled sync time, instead of default working sync with occasional affordance for async time (when you're at a meeting away from your desk etc.). You're working more the way an open-source project works, with higher-bandwidth higher-latency communication channels like email or code review tools instead of in-person conversations.

If you have timezone issues at all (outside of your on-call rotation), that means you haven't figured out your remote story yet. Which is totally fine! I'd have trouble imagining how you figure it out without already doing it. So it makes sense that they're starting in a half-remote state and then intending to get really remote at some point.

Remote, Oregon.

Probably simplifies everything legally.

I wonder because Stripe has a subsidiary in the EU already.

Is this bad? I think it’s totally understandable.

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