Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

Heh Heh Heh. After the article talks up all of benefits of remote working, and how they can hire in any of 50 countries, there's a link to "these are our remote positions".

Every one of which has leading text stating:

  Remote in North America only

Something seems off. Pass.

View on HN

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.

There are 212 job openings listed on Stripe's careers page as either located in the United States or remote. Of those, 17 are remote (~8%) & the rest are not. So even excluding non-US listings, it's a small percentage -- Seattle has ~30%, SF has ~50%, NYC has ~11%.

Even though a single job listing can/does represent multiple job openings, that's true for all the listings as well. So all other things being equal, I would expect Stripe to have way more remote listings if it's been as successful as this post implies. Which leads me to believe the reality is much more nuanced and that the blog post is a bit heavy with PR fluff (no shame!).

Also, big fan.

Its worth noting that this article is about the Stripe remote _engineering_ hub. Stripe intentionally scaled its engineering presence remote first. There are remote Stripes in other parts of the company but this post was about the concerted effort to hire engineers remotely. Further as patio11 mentions downthread that the math on this is hard to diagnose from the outside. I don’t have any specific information about this but I wouldn’t be surprised if the single job title “Infrastructure Engineer - Remote” will be hired into more than all engineering roles in NYC.

The numbers from the blogpost “ Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population.“ is a fairly straightforward way to read the posting about this.

Disclaimer, I am a “Infrastructure Engineer - Remote” at Stripe.

I'm pretty confident that we made only true claims, particularly the ones with numbers. If your model doesn't agree with our SQL, I think the maximally polite observation I can make is that one of us is probably wrong.

Or both.

> As we mentioned, our remote hiring is in scaled production mode in the U.S. and Canada, and in early stages elsewhere.

What if I'm based elsewhere, but would be happy to work North American timezones?

Time zones are not the sole constraint we have, and many of those constraints are not ones that we can simply waive by mutual agreement. For example, some activities we engage in are restricted to regulated entities in some countries, and those restrictions are things we have to thoroughly understand, sometimes negotiate, and plan for prior to onboarding employees in a particular jurisdiction.

That's the easy bit, hard is pay wages in another country and ensuring your obey all local laws and regulations. You basically have to set up an entity in the countries you wish to hire from and then become familiar in the law there which is quite a hurdle.

I would suggest amending the article, as it seems to imply positions are currently available outside the US and Canada, when this is not the case. This section in particular:

>We have increased the places we can hire remotely from. Today, Stripes are based in over 50 cities worldwide. 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.

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%.

I would caution people from attempting to math from a count of positions, as in some cases one job listing will result in many people getting hired (a very common case for e.g. engineers), and we do parallel listings when we accept a job in multiple offices. e.g. 33% of listings for Backend/API Engineer, Reliability Tooling are remote, not because we intend to hire 33% of that team remote but just because we'd hire for that team in Remote, SF, or Seattle.

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.

The article specifically calls out:

  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.

Looks like they are starting with larger countries, possibly because they are actually looking into the employment law there?

I wonder what the benefits of having remote employees are, compared to remote workforce without employee status?

They're most likely outsourcing it, that list is too random and one shot to be any epxertise grown in house.

In any case, I'm still skeptical, they could have been paying people in USD as contractors since day dot if that was the real problem, but its not, its timezones.

According to Stripe employees in the thread, the problem is that Stripe works in a heavily regulated industry (credit card processing) and that introduces difficulties that couldn’t be solved by paying people as contractors

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com