1) Career Opportunities: what’s the rate of promotion, moving into management for remotes vs non remotes
2) Compensation: is an engineer an engineer an engineer? Or are there SF engineers and Tulsa engineers and Austin engineers, each with different salary bands?
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.
The compensation one is interesting. It’s absolutely an evolving space and I’m always interested in how different companies are thinking about it.
This sounds great, and I wish more organisations did this - for most, it seems there is an absolute limit at which your career path stops dead.
Managers get to cheat, to some degree. They instead are tasked with organizing a whole bunch of people - who can achieve things that a single person never could. So a manager has a much easier "I made the company 10% more money" story than an IC.
Some organizations try to fight this bias, but it is hard and takes a clear framework for promotion guidelines and constant vigilance.