10 ms·

Million dollar question - how are the remote stripes going to be compensated? Are they going to be compensated pegged on their geo-locale (which then just makes

Million dollar question - how are the remote stripes going to be compensated? Are they going to be compensated pegged on their geo-locale (which then just makes it like international offices without the office)? I'm pretty sure the dublin and singapore stripes are paid much lower than their sf counterparts. How are they going to resolve this for the remotes? Not poking at stripe, but generally as I think of remote work, I think we're probably to going to think of true value based salary scales (you are creating X$ of value, therefore you are to be paid a fraction of that) as opposed to geo based scales (you may be an icpc world finalist living in Kathmandu but you will be paid 1/10th of a boot camper from SF because 3rd world).

speby 7y ago
Why is this even a question? If remote workers don't like the comp/pay being offered, they could go looking at other companies in their market (or other remote work opportunities). This is a non-issue.
- danso 7y ago
  What do you mean “why is this even a question?”? It’s a question that frequently comes up in remote worn discussions. Stripe being a big company, and now making a big commitment to remote work, is likely to be an example other companies draw from.
  - sparkpy724 7y ago
    Can you name a single company that pays Remote Employees SF/Bay Area salaries? Edit: Fair enough. There are companies that pay everyone SF level salaries but you can also find companies like Gitlab - 100% Remote but they explicitly downscale from SF salaries based on location. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
    - agentile 7y ago
      BaseCamp. https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-career.md#pay--promotions https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-ca...
      - ztratar 7y ago
        Do you see any reported salaries? The numbers on Glassdoor for Basecamp are quite low when they claim top 10%.
        1123581321 7y ago
        Here’s their announcement about it that explains their methodology and that they started in 2018. https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...
    - bevacqua 7y ago
      Elastic https://elastic.co https://elastic.co Some stats: - Not just "Remote but in the US" - 1,000+ employees - 40+ countries - Local holidays - Co-working Space stipend, if you want it - Almost nobody goes to the offices we do have - Everything is written down and x/referenced: GH, email, Slack - Zoom for face to face - Engineering All Hands: Usually twice a year, once EU, once US - You work on your own Timezone, expecting otherwise is ridiculous Source: I work for Elastic
      - pkaye 7y ago
        So they pay everyone at San Francisco rates?
    - danso 7y ago
      Sure -- an other example of a company that does salary-by-location is Buffer, which posts its salary calculator online: https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-scientist-2/average/ https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-scientist-2/average/ My point wasn't to say that Stripe should do one thing or the other regarding location-adjusted alaries. I was asking the previous commenter why he indignant that the question be asked of Stripe at all, as if it were irrelevant.
throwaway4721 7y ago
They are compensated according to locale. Our Google sheet of offer anecdata contains a few entries for Stripe, some remote and some SF. I’ve seen a salary difference of 30%. I don’t know the people who entered them personally so I can’t speak to how well they performed during the interview, so take that with a grain of salt.
- robocat 7y ago
  I just don't understand this. If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? USD200k is a good carrot where I live, so you would be able to attract the best engineers living here (with far less competition and far less churn). I get it that SF has network effects, but good remote engineers also tap into the same network.
  - rifung 7y ago
    > If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? If they can get those other people to join paying 100k, why wouldn't they want to save 100k per engineer? Companies pay you what they need to in order to get you to join and unfortunately, market rates are still largely decided by location.
  - kossae 7y ago
    > then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? Because they don't have to. Peoples' expectations of salary are likely in line with their local job markets, so even great developers living in a rural area will likely either accept the average base salary for their locale, or move to SF for the larger payday (and all of the expenses that come with it).
    - 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
      This should be reversing because the internet grants us easy access to this data, so market signals should be forming, but it isn't reversing, which is suspicious. Getting the data is harder, but we do already have data sets to compare to (and can apply inflation, CoL, other adjustments as time goes on). The only real reason for zip-code adjustments would be some labor-related, CONUS, or state laws that I'd be unfamiliar with. If I deliver the same business value as a Silicon Valley engineer, and you're paying me less, I'm getting arbitrage'd.
ngngngng 7y ago
Walmart Labs hires for my skillset pretty often. When they first started they hired remote at Silicon Valley salaries. They've now moved to a scale based on zip code. I'll always regret not jumping on that job before they made that switch.
ebg13 7y ago
What stops a person from lying (within a reasonable time difference) about where they live?
- perlgeek 7y ago
  Ethics? Fear of voiding the employment contract if based on false information? I also don't think it's practical. Here in Germany at least, the address of residency is used in so many contexts (health insurance, pension schemes, tax things etc.) that I doubt this would go unnoticed very long. For example the city you live in determines which regional tax office handles your income tax, and I'm pretty sure it's easy to notice for a company if some of the income tax goes to an address that doesn't match the employee's city.
  - def_true_false 7y ago
    It's not like people always keep their residence up to date though. If you are still able to receive official correspondence at your previous address (e.g. parents' home), why would you bother changing it? Even more so across a border -- it's trivial to have multiple residences at the same time and they are not guaranteed to be unique, nor are they necessarily considered tax residences. That is, you can be tax resident in a country where you don't have permanent residence even if you have permanent residence in another country.
- hbosch 7y ago
  Their W-2.
balfirevic 7y ago
Salary scales are based on equilibrium between several forces: 1) Value that employee brings to the company 2) Value that company brings to the employee (mostly, but not exclusively, salary) 3) Alternatives available for both the company and employee I don't see a good reason to expect this (admittedly simplified) model to change with remote work arrangement.
- austenallred 7y ago
  3) is pretty drastically different in a remote environment
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    Yes, of course. I wanted to emphasize that the underlying forces are the same even if the results end up different. That's why Bay Area companies don't usually offer Bay Area salaries for remote workers around the world. And also why Croatian companies don't hire remote workers in San Francisco :)
- goobynight 7y ago
  "Having to live in the bay area" could be seen as negative value that the company was formerly "providing". Is it equivalent to a 30% pay cut? Probably not. Is it worth at least 15k a year (post tax, so more like 20k minimum) at the absolute minimum? Yes.
  - deathanatos 7y ago
    Median US 1 bedroom rent: $1,209 / mo [1] Median SF 1 bedroom rent: $3,690 / mo [2] That's a difference of $29,772 / yr. Post-tax. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/rental-prices-are-soaring-around-the-us-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/rental-prices-are-soaring-ar... [2]: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroom-rent-sf-3690-month-zumper/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroo...
drited 7y ago
What's wrong with targeting equal disposable incomes (after covering essentials like housing/schools/childcare etc)? I see this in my field where I work remote and most people in my field work in NYC or London. My gross income is way lower than my former classmates who settled in NYC. However I have a bigger house, equally good school and childcare for 1/10th the annual cost etc. Don't see why I should get a salary that reflects the massively inflated cost of living in a city that I don't live in. Instead I think it should be about targeting a quality of life commensurate with the contribution made & scarceness of the skillset. The cost of providing that quality of life will vary dramatically between someone living in a rural area vs San Francisco and so should the pay imo.

speby 7y ago

Why is this even a question? If remote workers don't like the comp/pay being offered, they could go looking at other companies in their market (or other remote work opportunities). This is a non-issue.

danso 7y ago
What do you mean “why is this even a question?”? It’s a question that frequently comes up in remote worn discussions. Stripe being a big company, and now making a big commitment to remote work, is likely to be an example other companies draw from.
- sparkpy724 7y ago
  Can you name a single company that pays Remote Employees SF/Bay Area salaries? Edit: Fair enough. There are companies that pay everyone SF level salaries but you can also find companies like Gitlab - 100% Remote but they explicitly downscale from SF salaries based on location. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
  - agentile 7y ago
    BaseCamp. https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-career.md#pay--promotions https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/blob/master/making-a-ca...
    - ztratar 7y ago
      Do you see any reported salaries? The numbers on Glassdoor for Basecamp are quite low when they claim top 10%.
      - 1123581321 7y ago
        Here’s their announcement about it that explains their methodology and that they started in 2018. https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...
  - bevacqua 7y ago
    Elastic https://elastic.co https://elastic.co Some stats: - Not just "Remote but in the US" - 1,000+ employees - 40+ countries - Local holidays - Co-working Space stipend, if you want it - Almost nobody goes to the offices we do have - Everything is written down and x/referenced: GH, email, Slack - Zoom for face to face - Engineering All Hands: Usually twice a year, once EU, once US - You work on your own Timezone, expecting otherwise is ridiculous Source: I work for Elastic
    - pkaye 7y ago
      So they pay everyone at San Francisco rates?
  - danso 7y ago
    Sure -- an other example of a company that does salary-by-location is Buffer, which posts its salary calculator online: https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-scientist-2/average/ https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-scientist-2/average/ My point wasn't to say that Stripe should do one thing or the other regarding location-adjusted alaries. I was asking the previous commenter why he indignant that the question be asked of Stripe at all, as if it were irrelevant.

throwaway4721 7y ago

They are compensated according to locale. Our Google sheet of offer anecdata contains a few entries for Stripe, some remote and some SF. I’ve seen a salary difference of 30%. I don’t know the people who entered them personally so I can’t speak to how well they performed during the interview, so take that with a grain of salt.

robocat 7y ago
I just don't understand this. If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? USD200k is a good carrot where I live, so you would be able to attract the best engineers living here (with far less competition and far less churn). I get it that SF has network effects, but good remote engineers also tap into the same network.
- rifung 7y ago
  > If a company knows how to get choose a USD200k engineer in SF and get a good return for the company off that engineer, then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? If they can get those other people to join paying 100k, why wouldn't they want to save 100k per engineer? Companies pay you what they need to in order to get you to join and unfortunately, market rates are still largely decided by location.
- kossae 7y ago
  > then why wouldn't you pay USD200k in all areas? Because they don't have to. Peoples' expectations of salary are likely in line with their local job markets, so even great developers living in a rural area will likely either accept the average base salary for their locale, or move to SF for the larger payday (and all of the expenses that come with it).
  - 0xDEFC0DE 7y ago
    This should be reversing because the internet grants us easy access to this data, so market signals should be forming, but it isn't reversing, which is suspicious. Getting the data is harder, but we do already have data sets to compare to (and can apply inflation, CoL, other adjustments as time goes on). The only real reason for zip-code adjustments would be some labor-related, CONUS, or state laws that I'd be unfamiliar with. If I deliver the same business value as a Silicon Valley engineer, and you're paying me less, I'm getting arbitrage'd.

ngngngng 7y ago

Walmart Labs hires for my skillset pretty often. When they first started they hired remote at Silicon Valley salaries. They've now moved to a scale based on zip code. I'll always regret not jumping on that job before they made that switch.

ebg13 7y ago

What stops a person from lying (within a reasonable time difference) about where they live?

perlgeek 7y ago
Ethics? Fear of voiding the employment contract if based on false information? I also don't think it's practical. Here in Germany at least, the address of residency is used in so many contexts (health insurance, pension schemes, tax things etc.) that I doubt this would go unnoticed very long. For example the city you live in determines which regional tax office handles your income tax, and I'm pretty sure it's easy to notice for a company if some of the income tax goes to an address that doesn't match the employee's city.
- def_true_false 7y ago
  It's not like people always keep their residence up to date though. If you are still able to receive official correspondence at your previous address (e.g. parents' home), why would you bother changing it? Even more so across a border -- it's trivial to have multiple residences at the same time and they are not guaranteed to be unique, nor are they necessarily considered tax residences. That is, you can be tax resident in a country where you don't have permanent residence even if you have permanent residence in another country.
hbosch 7y ago
Their W-2.

balfirevic 7y ago

Salary scales are based on equilibrium between several forces: 1) Value that employee brings to the company 2) Value that company brings to the employee (mostly, but not exclusively, salary) 3) Alternatives available for both the company and employee I don't see a good reason to expect this (admittedly simplified) model to change with remote work arrangement.

austenallred 7y ago
3) is pretty drastically different in a remote environment
- balfirevic 7y ago
  Yes, of course. I wanted to emphasize that the underlying forces are the same even if the results end up different. That's why Bay Area companies don't usually offer Bay Area salaries for remote workers around the world. And also why Croatian companies don't hire remote workers in San Francisco :)
goobynight 7y ago
"Having to live in the bay area" could be seen as negative value that the company was formerly "providing". Is it equivalent to a 30% pay cut? Probably not. Is it worth at least 15k a year (post tax, so more like 20k minimum) at the absolute minimum? Yes.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  Median US 1 bedroom rent: $1,209 / mo [1] Median SF 1 bedroom rent: $3,690 / mo [2] That's a difference of $29,772 / yr. Post-tax. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/rental-prices-are-soaring-around-the-us-2018-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/rental-prices-are-soaring-ar... [2]: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroom-rent-sf-3690-month-zumper/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/03/05/median-1-bedroo...

drited 7y ago

What's wrong with targeting equal disposable incomes (after covering essentials like housing/schools/childcare etc)? I see this in my field where I work remote and most people in my field work in NYC or London. My gross income is way lower than my former classmates who settled in NYC. However I have a bigger house, equally good school and childcare for 1/10th the annual cost etc. Don't see why I should get a salary that reflects the massively inflated cost of living in a city that I don't live in. Instead I think it should be about targeting a quality of life commensurate with the contribution made & scarceness of the skillset. The cost of providing that quality of life will vary dramatically between someone living in a rural area vs San Francisco and so should the pay imo.