Stripe’s fifth engineering hub is Remote
This is such a smart move.<p>I was one of the first two simul-hire remotes at Mapbox (when the company was ~12 people) and, until I left in 2017, the longest-term remote there at seven years. I&#x27;ve been fully remote for thirteen years. At Mapbox, I unofficially took on the role of internal advocate for remote culture. It wasn&#x27;t always easy to be remote, but as the company grew, Eric, the CEO, was fond of saying that &quot;everyone is remote&quot; since more and more physical hubs for work sprang up across many timezones. It was a tough balance, particularly as increasingly more work and customer opportunities centered around the Bay Area, and the spiritual heart of the company switched coasts from the official HQ in DC to the larger and faster growing office in SF.<p>Personally, I can&#x27;t overstate how much being a remote employee and even freelancer has impacted my quality of life and my opportunities. For the most part, I was able to focus on my work and hook in to the rest of my teammates as needed. The best times of this were when the company engineering culture was very asynchronous and allowed for it. Slack and always-on expectations, as well as much more complex software in later years, made this more difficult, but still manageable.<p>It wasn&#x27;t without struggle, though. Often it was lonely, isolating, I felt out of the loop on some decisions, I didn&#x27;t get some in-jokes and nicknames, I missed the non-holiday parties and happy hours, etc. Even with that stuff aside, it takes a real commitment from the leadership to fully integrate remote team members. Kudos to Stripe for putting themselves out there and holding themselves accountable to the goal with a public statement and metrics.<p>The key snippet from the Stripe announcement is this:<p>&gt; improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs<p>The future of much of the technical work that needs to happen is remote, and I&#x27;m glad to see Stripe embrace that.