In a move widely welcomed by the developer community, Stripe, the online payments software startup valued at $22.5 billion, says it is adding a fifth engineering hub to the four it has in Dublin, San Francisco, Seattle and Singapore – and the 100-strong team it is looking to build this year will be based remotely; albeit initially just from the US.
Saying the new hires will be deployed across every major engineering workstream at the company, Stripe’s Head of Engineering wrote today: “We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74 percent of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.”
We’ve decided that Stripe’s fifth engineering hub will be Remote: https://t.co/XeXYX3Bdwh
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) May 2, 2019
He added: “The technological substrate of collaboration has gotten shockingly good over the last decade. Most engineering work at Stripe happens in conversations between engineers, quiet thinking, and turning those thoughts into artifacts. Of these, thinking is the only one that doesn’t primarily happen online.”
Stripe Engineering Hub: Today’s Tools Make Remote Work Easy
“There was a time when writing on a whiteboard had substantially higher bandwidth than a Word doc over email. Thankfully Google Docs, Slack, git, Zoom, and the like deliver high-bandwidth synchronous collaboration on creative work. The experience of using them is so remarkably good that we only notice it when something is broken. Since you write code via pull requests and not whiteboards, your reviewer needs to have access to the same PR; having access to the same whiteboard is strictly optional.”
Content from our partners
“While we did not initially plan to make hiring remotes a huge part of our engineering efforts, our remote employees have outperformed all expectations”.
Facing some predictable complaints from eager engineers that “remote” might as well be anywhere, so why just recruit for this round from the US, the company’s Patrick McKenzie tweeted: We aren’t in a position to scale up a full program for remotes outside North America yet”, adding that he expects that to change in the future.
We have remotes elsewhere but aren't in a position to scale up a full program for remotes outside of North America yet.
We expect this to change as our other hubs get more mature and we start metabolizing what we learn from this new round of experiments.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) May 2, 2019
The announcement comes a week after Stripe launched Stripe Billing in Europe: aproduct built on top of Stripe’s core payments infrastructure, that aims to simplify the recurring billing process for SaaS and subscription-based companies, such as Slack and Meetup in the US, saying the release gives European businesses of all sizes “access to enterprise-grade tools to implement subscription models quickly and at scale.”
Is your company considering expanding the extent to which it supports remote work? What are the issues holding you back? Let Computer Business Review know here.
