14 ms·

Coinbase will be a remote-first company

261 points by sachitgupta 6y ago

aprao 6y ago
Official statement here: https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-remote-first-company-cdac6e621df7 https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-r... (Although it's annoying that I need to signup for an account to read the statement of a company's CEO) Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed.
- dang 6y ago
  (We merged the comments from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23252720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23252720 to the first thread that submitted that blog post)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sneak 6y ago
  > Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed. Multisig works great across distances. I’ve built coordination apps for multiple distributed parties to propose and approve and sign Bitcoin transactions before. It’s pretty straightforward.
- jakecraige 6y ago
  We (Coinbase) already sign cold storage transactions in a distributed manner so this isn’t an issue :)
throw03172019 6y ago
“remote-first” sounds different than “WFH permanent”. They will still have Offices in their hub cities. WFH is optionally available for “most” roles.
staysaasy 6y ago
Working from home makes great economic sense for companies that can remain productive in that environment. It decreases burn due to real estate, and reduces commute times which can help with employee retention (especially for certain geos or demographics, such as parents). Worries about pandemic liability will also be a blocker for reopening many offices. Covid has forced many companies to run the previously-risky experiment of whether they can thrive while remote, and it's unsurprising that those that can remain productive will use it to evolve + reduce costs.
Cookingboy 6y ago
I'm really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted. If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests. But again, maybe I'm the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I'll likely cross it out from my list of places to work. Also I saw this from the blog post: >There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are. Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don't see how that's possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition. From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway/micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that's already made. The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k/yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.
- tspike 6y ago
  Primary benefit for me is to be able to live somewhere I enjoy (small town near mountains). I like to visit cities, but I loathe living in them.
- toraobo 6y ago
  I like going to the office because it offers a very nice solid separation between "home" and "work" life.
  - Cookingboy 6y ago
sneak 6y ago
Non-signupwall: https://archive.is/GfOUF https://archive.is/GfOUF Aside: Companies, please stop using Medium for your corporate blogs. It’s super unprofessional.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I always feel that Automattic don't get enough credit in these articles. Over 1000 employees in 70 countries and no central office...
OneGuy123 6y ago
I have been working from home for the past 2 years. Pros: I save an insane amount of time due to not having to waste my time commuting. Even a 10 min bike ride takes much longer in reality since you have to properly dress, come in, out, settle down, prepare etc... So I have much more free time. Also no distrations is 10/10. We have an open office and the distractions cause a severe drop in my productivity. All talks can easily be had through Slack. In fact I much prefer Slack since there is not BS time wasting: you have a talk with a VERY SPECIFIC agenda, nothing else. Cons: connections, and I'm not talking about "nice to see a human face" or that kind of mundane-waste-of-my-time-BS-water-cooler-conversionation. I'm talking practical things: new business connections by meeting random people for example can be easily done face-to-face without sending any cold emails, there is no denying that "many businesses/connections get done during the smoking break"
ponker 6y ago
I think a lot of this recent remote trend (Twitter, Square, Coinbase) will eventually reverse itself in most roles outside of IC engineering. The reason is that while remote/WFH works well for people who are largely executing already formed plans, it's the planning of new work that requires the most interpersonal work/subtle communication/high bandwidth communication. So companies are finding that they are executing well right now because they're just working on shipping. But when it comes to making decisions for upcoming iterations, the technology won't support the communication types needed. Yes, fully remote companies can exist, but they're limited in size to those companies where the product vision can come directly from the CEO, so that the strategy, roadmap, and funding allocations just sprout fully realized. I have no doubt that Apple engineers can (and will) design the next generation of Apple Watch while remote. I have a lot of doubt that they could invent the next multibillion dollar technology category, and get the internal political work to physically realize it, while remote.
tummybug 6y ago
Off topic but why would a corporate company use a website for their blog which puts articles behind a paywall? It seems completely at odds with the purpose of a corporate blog.
- pxtail 6y ago
  Probably they are unable to afford infrastructure required for hosting blog site and/or don't have experienced employees needed for building and maintaining such software - thus they are forced to use blogger alternative.
tjbiddle 6y ago
Why does Coinbase have their publicly facing blog on Medium, which has a free article viewing limit?
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  It's crazy, right? Maybe it gets them more viewers from within that ecosystem but I find it hard to believe that it's a net positive.
JSavageOne 6y ago
First Twitter, now Coinbase. Looks like Christmas is coming early this year!
- pb7 6y ago
  Square as well, which is a much bigger deal than Coinbase.
kjakm 6y ago
I've noticed a lot of comments from people who don't like WFH or want a mix of home and office life. I've done both so I understand this. I'm curious though how this attitude will change if a lot more companies (and eventually a majority) move to remote work. Currently (pre-pandemic) when I WFH my friends are all at their offices. So is my partner. I'm alone. Therefore I like going into the office a few days a week for the social aspect, even if it's just a chat at lunch. If more people are WFH though I might be able to meet my local friends at lunch. Or meet specific people at cafés or other locations to work together for a couple of hours. I would be able to invest in a better home office setup too. People see quite divided on this issue (I love WFH/I hate WFH) so maybe it's important to keep in mind that the WFH you are currently experiencing is nothing like a normal WFH (due to the pandemic) and if lots more people start WFH then WFH in general has the possibility to change drastically and be much less solitary.
joelbluminator 6y ago
Any Coinbase employees here? Was wondering what the tech stack is, saw a job description mentioning breaking a Rails monolith into micro services - does that mean Coinbase switches to a different stack?
- jakecraige 6y ago
  The main app powering coinbase.com, the “monorail”, is a Rails app backed by MongoDB. It’s typically what’s being referred to when breaking out microservices. Historically most other services were Rails/Sinatra with Postgres. These days there’s a lot more Golang being used for new services. There’s also some services that are serverless, using Lambda and DynamoDB but these are a minority.
  - joelbluminator 6y ago
    Thanks. But is Ruby considered something deprecated? I'm mainly a Ruby guy and want to keep it that way is why I'm asking.
x775 6y ago
Why do I need to sign up for a Medium account to read a Coinbase company statement..?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ikeyany 6y ago
  Owning up channels of communication and then making them monetized walled gardens has been proven to work, unfortunately.
baxtr 6y ago
I really like WFH. And I’m fortunate to work for a tech company that has been allowing this for years now. But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Let’s just accept that the world is complex and people are different. I don’t think it’s necessary to convince the other side everyone should work from home from now on.
- eloisant 6y ago
  No, however it's a good thing to convince managers and executives that they should allow anyone who wants to (and has a job that allows it), to work from home.
- Cookingboy 6y ago
  >But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Thank you for that nuanced view. Many comments here want to drive home the point about how all office offers is "bullshit" and "distraction and toxic culture", and anyone who enjoys working at an office with coworkers don't care about actual productivity and only want to do it because they want have someone to gossip with during the day... There was literally a top comment here that implies someone isn't even living the life of a "real human being" if he's not WFH. That is such a ridiculous stance to take. People have different personalties and value different things in life and are in different situations in life, there is no one solution that would make everyone happy.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    I think yours and the parent's issue is in misunderstanding the difference between WFH and "remote work". Remote work is not WFH. It is not a discussion about the home vs office environments. This is largely irrelevant. The fundamental shift that Remote Work will bring is that it will allow people to separate physically where people live from their work activity. This means that people will no longer have to live close to their jobs - for whatever definition of "close" you have. It's one degree of freedom that everyone can get when choosing where to live. And it is a very important degree of freedom. When choosing a place to live, one has many things to consider: is this a good environment for my growing family, will I be surrounded by like-minded people, can I find good schools, is the weather good for the kind of activities I enjoy doing the most, etc, etc... but none of that will matter in a location if the jobs are not there. In the current situation, people flock to where the jobs are because they can't afford to choose a nicer place with no jobs. If you prefer the office environment, you can and will be able to have that even when Remote Work becomes the norm. The key point is in understanding that your office can now be in SV, Texas, Croatia, some city in South America, South East Asia or the Ukraine and you will (should) not be missing out in any professional opportunity.
btcinfo 6y ago
This is good since no one at Coinbase does anything important anyway. Just wait until the next price drop when the "technical difficulties" begin again.
mrfusion 6y ago
If I did a start up I feel like being remote first almost isn’t even a choice especially if I’m not in a tech hub. Hire anyone in the world at reasonable salaries.
goblin89 6y ago
Additional remote positions do not make a company remote-first any more than additional @media queries make a desktop website mobile-first. To understand what real “remote first” might mean, let’s define the status quo: “in-person first”. To me, in-person-first companies are those in which being a remote employee means hampered career potential, and mingling with the right people at the headquarters is sooner or later required to advance. By that logic, remote-first companies either flip that on its head, or at least make personal presence not a factor while encouraging remote participation. Becoming X-first implies a fundamental shift. Improving X does make you more X, though.
- jakecraige 6y ago
  Brian calls this out and describes how Coinbase plans to do this in the “This will require a huge shift in how we do things. How will we get there?“ section. > To address all of these, we will form a cross-functional team to oversee this transition. This group will identify the changes we must make to become a remote-first company (e.g., around people management, recruiting/talent, culture and connection, and documentation and async work…), host open design sessions with all of you to surface ideas, considerations, dependencies, and concerns, and partner with internal experts to redesign how all of this works for a remote-first Coinbase.
  - goblin89 6y ago
    This would work for a different definition of “remote-first”. In the definition I believe makes sense there is just one defining trait, and the author manages to tiptoe around it. It’s unclear whether the changes promised are cosmetic (to convince remote workers they aren’t disadvantaged) or fundamental (actually making remote staff equivalent or even prioritized first before on-location staff).
realbarack 6y ago
I'm keeping an index of company remote-work announcements here: https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7 https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7 If you know of companies that have made changes like Coinbase, please help me build the list by sharing anonymously here: https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0 https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0
yalogin 6y ago
This is inevitable. There are too many advantages for companies to encourage WFH. Reduce the entry level salaries for employees, save on building leases, no need to offer free food and more. The productivity will probably even increase too. I am sure they are all going over numbers to see how productivity changes. For the employee though it’s going to be tough in the long run. Building relationships at work is one great way to get things done not just in the team but also across teams. So code might get written but the overarching dynamics about how things happen in a workplace are changing big time. We don’t see the effects of them until sometime.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
buboard 6y ago
SV companies coming out as remote-friendly is odd in one way. Outside SV there are tons of companies that are remote, and they make no big fuss about it. With corona, so many more people started working remotely, even in companies that you 'd never expect they would. And they made no big deal of it. Seems like SV has been particularly reluctant to go remote (despite making the tools for it!) , for reasons that are not really well undestood. Perhaps they don't want capital to be decentralized or they somehow think there's something magical about the place.
xoxoy 6y ago
I have trouble scheduling meetings between colleagues on the west coast and east coast as is. With a “remote first” company where some choose to move abroad potentially (though suspect most would stay in the US) scheduling meetings sounds like a complete nightmare. There’s no advantage to that at all.
- KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  Actually I think WFH would improve this. If both the west and east coast colleagues have to commute to their respective offices, there is a lot of wasted time during the beginning & end of the day. A person may arrive at the office on the east coast just as the west coast is waking up. If both locations were simply WFH, there would be more useful overlapping daylight hours to use because neither side has to commute. Additionally, one office could have modified hours such that they more overlapped with the other office either as a standard or simply as needed.
  - xoxoy 6y ago
    Main problem is a blurring between work life. With one office no one would dare schedule meetings too early or too late in the day. With different time zones you might have to have a 7am meeting on the west coast or 7pm on east coast. There needs to be strict calendar blocking to maintain sanity.
booleandilemma 6y ago
Don't forget - if you can do your job from your home, someone else can do your job from their home.
wildchild 6y ago
Stop giving platform for shitcoiners.

261 points by sachitgupta 6y ago

Official statement here: https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-remote-first-company-cdac6e621df7 https://blog.coinbase.com/post-covid-19-coinbase-will-be-a-r... (Although it's annoying that I need to signup for an account to read the statement of a company's CEO) Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed.

dang 6y ago
(We merged the comments from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23252720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23252720 to the first thread that submitted that blog post)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sneak 6y ago
> Wonder how they are going to handle the complexities around crypto custody (esp. cold storage), given it's hard to sign transactions with multiple signatures when your workforce is distributed. Multisig works great across distances. I’ve built coordination apps for multiple distributed parties to propose and approve and sign Bitcoin transactions before. It’s pretty straightforward.
jakecraige 6y ago
We (Coinbase) already sign cold storage transactions in a distributed manner so this isn’t an issue :)

throw03172019 6y ago

“remote-first” sounds different than “WFH permanent”. They will still have Offices in their hub cities. WFH is optionally available for “most” roles.

staysaasy 6y ago

Working from home makes great economic sense for companies that can remain productive in that environment. It decreases burn due to real estate, and reduces commute times which can help with employee retention (especially for certain geos or demographics, such as parents). Worries about pandemic liability will also be a blocker for reopening many offices. Covid has forced many companies to run the previously-risky experiment of whether they can thrive while remote, and it's unsurprising that those that can remain productive will use it to evolve + reduce costs.

Cookingboy 6y ago

I'm really curious, how many people actually prefer WFH permanently vs. just having the flexibility to WFH when wanted. If I wanted to stay home forever I'd have just taken a remote consulting job a long time ago, but I enjoy going to office and there is a lot of benefits that you don't get from being remote 100%. I've also made very good friends at work and I see my coworkers as much more than just another GitHub account that reviews my Pull Requests. But again, maybe I'm the exception to the rule and most engineers just want to stay focused on their immediate work and not leave the house and minimize human interaction. But knowing my own personality, if I know a company is mostly remote work culture I'll likely cross it out from my list of places to work. Also I saw this from the blog post: >There are no explicit or implicit disadvantages to working from any location: all employees have the same experience regardless of where they are. Unless Coinbase somehow figured out a way to discard factors caused by human psychology from millions of years of evolution, I just don't see how that's possible for anything other than low to mid-tier ICs with minimal no career ambition. From my personal experiences most high level decisions are made, or at least started from countless hallway/micro-kitchen conversations or informal coffee walks, and meetings are just a way to present to people of decisions that's already made. The cynical part of me thinks all this "WFH Permanently" initiative is just a disguise for companies to start lowering cost for entry to mid-level IC positions by hiring from areas with much cheaper CoL. Which makes sense, there is nothing special about an entry level JS frontend dev in SF that warrants you paying them $150k/yr when you can hire the same talent from another state for half that much or from a different country for a quarter that much.

tspike 6y ago
Primary benefit for me is to be able to live somewhere I enjoy (small town near mountains). I like to visit cities, but I loathe living in them.
toraobo 6y ago
I like going to the office because it offers a very nice solid separation between "home" and "work" life.
- Cookingboy 6y ago

sneak 6y ago

Non-signupwall: https://archive.is/GfOUF https://archive.is/GfOUF Aside: Companies, please stop using Medium for your corporate blogs. It’s super unprofessional.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I always feel that Automattic don't get enough credit in these articles. Over 1000 employees in 70 countries and no central office...

OneGuy123 6y ago

I have been working from home for the past 2 years. Pros: I save an insane amount of time due to not having to waste my time commuting. Even a 10 min bike ride takes much longer in reality since you have to properly dress, come in, out, settle down, prepare etc... So I have much more free time. Also no distrations is 10/10. We have an open office and the distractions cause a severe drop in my productivity. All talks can easily be had through Slack. In fact I much prefer Slack since there is not BS time wasting: you have a talk with a VERY SPECIFIC agenda, nothing else. Cons: connections, and I'm not talking about "nice to see a human face" or that kind of mundane-waste-of-my-time-BS-water-cooler-conversionation. I'm talking practical things: new business connections by meeting random people for example can be easily done face-to-face without sending any cold emails, there is no denying that "many businesses/connections get done during the smoking break"

ponker 6y ago

I think a lot of this recent remote trend (Twitter, Square, Coinbase) will eventually reverse itself in most roles outside of IC engineering. The reason is that while remote/WFH works well for people who are largely executing already formed plans, it's the planning of new work that requires the most interpersonal work/subtle communication/high bandwidth communication. So companies are finding that they are executing well right now because they're just working on shipping. But when it comes to making decisions for upcoming iterations, the technology won't support the communication types needed. Yes, fully remote companies can exist, but they're limited in size to those companies where the product vision can come directly from the CEO, so that the strategy, roadmap, and funding allocations just sprout fully realized. I have no doubt that Apple engineers can (and will) design the next generation of Apple Watch while remote. I have a lot of doubt that they could invent the next multibillion dollar technology category, and get the internal political work to physically realize it, while remote.

tummybug 6y ago

Off topic but why would a corporate company use a website for their blog which puts articles behind a paywall? It seems completely at odds with the purpose of a corporate blog.

pxtail 6y ago
Probably they are unable to afford infrastructure required for hosting blog site and/or don't have experienced employees needed for building and maintaining such software - thus they are forced to use blogger alternative.

tjbiddle 6y ago

Why does Coinbase have their publicly facing blog on Medium, which has a free article viewing limit?

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
It's crazy, right? Maybe it gets them more viewers from within that ecosystem but I find it hard to believe that it's a net positive.

JSavageOne 6y ago

First Twitter, now Coinbase. Looks like Christmas is coming early this year!

pb7 6y ago
Square as well, which is a much bigger deal than Coinbase.

kjakm 6y ago

I've noticed a lot of comments from people who don't like WFH or want a mix of home and office life. I've done both so I understand this. I'm curious though how this attitude will change if a lot more companies (and eventually a majority) move to remote work. Currently (pre-pandemic) when I WFH my friends are all at their offices. So is my partner. I'm alone. Therefore I like going into the office a few days a week for the social aspect, even if it's just a chat at lunch. If more people are WFH though I might be able to meet my local friends at lunch. Or meet specific people at cafés or other locations to work together for a couple of hours. I would be able to invest in a better home office setup too. People see quite divided on this issue (I love WFH/I hate WFH) so maybe it's important to keep in mind that the WFH you are currently experiencing is nothing like a normal WFH (due to the pandemic) and if lots more people start WFH then WFH in general has the possibility to change drastically and be much less solitary.

joelbluminator 6y ago

Any Coinbase employees here? Was wondering what the tech stack is, saw a job description mentioning breaking a Rails monolith into micro services - does that mean Coinbase switches to a different stack?

jakecraige 6y ago
The main app powering coinbase.com, the “monorail”, is a Rails app backed by MongoDB. It’s typically what’s being referred to when breaking out microservices. Historically most other services were Rails/Sinatra with Postgres. These days there’s a lot more Golang being used for new services. There’s also some services that are serverless, using Lambda and DynamoDB but these are a minority.
- joelbluminator 6y ago
  Thanks. But is Ruby considered something deprecated? I'm mainly a Ruby guy and want to keep it that way is why I'm asking.

x775 6y ago

Why do I need to sign up for a Medium account to read a Coinbase company statement..?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ikeyany 6y ago
Owning up channels of communication and then making them monetized walled gardens has been proven to work, unfortunately.

baxtr 6y ago

I really like WFH. And I’m fortunate to work for a tech company that has been allowing this for years now. But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Let’s just accept that the world is complex and people are different. I don’t think it’s necessary to convince the other side everyone should work from home from now on.

eloisant 6y ago
No, however it's a good thing to convince managers and executives that they should allow anyone who wants to (and has a job that allows it), to work from home.
Cookingboy 6y ago
>But recently in discussions about this topic it feels like WFH fans want to “convert” Office fans to their preferred model. I don’t think that’s the right approach. Thank you for that nuanced view. Many comments here want to drive home the point about how all office offers is "bullshit" and "distraction and toxic culture", and anyone who enjoys working at an office with coworkers don't care about actual productivity and only want to do it because they want have someone to gossip with during the day... There was literally a top comment here that implies someone isn't even living the life of a "real human being" if he's not WFH. That is such a ridiculous stance to take. People have different personalties and value different things in life and are in different situations in life, there is no one solution that would make everyone happy.
- rglullis 6y ago
  I think yours and the parent's issue is in misunderstanding the difference between WFH and "remote work". Remote work is not WFH. It is not a discussion about the home vs office environments. This is largely irrelevant. The fundamental shift that Remote Work will bring is that it will allow people to separate physically where people live from their work activity. This means that people will no longer have to live close to their jobs - for whatever definition of "close" you have. It's one degree of freedom that everyone can get when choosing where to live. And it is a very important degree of freedom. When choosing a place to live, one has many things to consider: is this a good environment for my growing family, will I be surrounded by like-minded people, can I find good schools, is the weather good for the kind of activities I enjoy doing the most, etc, etc... but none of that will matter in a location if the jobs are not there. In the current situation, people flock to where the jobs are because they can't afford to choose a nicer place with no jobs. If you prefer the office environment, you can and will be able to have that even when Remote Work becomes the norm. The key point is in understanding that your office can now be in SV, Texas, Croatia, some city in South America, South East Asia or the Ukraine and you will (should) not be missing out in any professional opportunity.

btcinfo 6y ago

This is good since no one at Coinbase does anything important anyway. Just wait until the next price drop when the "technical difficulties" begin again.

mrfusion 6y ago

If I did a start up I feel like being remote first almost isn’t even a choice especially if I’m not in a tech hub. Hire anyone in the world at reasonable salaries.

goblin89 6y ago

Additional remote positions do not make a company remote-first any more than additional @media queries make a desktop website mobile-first. To understand what real “remote first” might mean, let’s define the status quo: “in-person first”. To me, in-person-first companies are those in which being a remote employee means hampered career potential, and mingling with the right people at the headquarters is sooner or later required to advance. By that logic, remote-first companies either flip that on its head, or at least make personal presence not a factor while encouraging remote participation. Becoming X-first implies a fundamental shift. Improving X does make you more X, though.

jakecraige 6y ago
Brian calls this out and describes how Coinbase plans to do this in the “This will require a huge shift in how we do things. How will we get there?“ section. > To address all of these, we will form a cross-functional team to oversee this transition. This group will identify the changes we must make to become a remote-first company (e.g., around people management, recruiting/talent, culture and connection, and documentation and async work…), host open design sessions with all of you to surface ideas, considerations, dependencies, and concerns, and partner with internal experts to redesign how all of this works for a remote-first Coinbase.
- goblin89 6y ago
  This would work for a different definition of “remote-first”. In the definition I believe makes sense there is just one defining trait, and the author manages to tiptoe around it. It’s unclear whether the changes promised are cosmetic (to convince remote workers they aren’t disadvantaged) or fundamental (actually making remote staff equivalent or even prioritized first before on-location staff).

realbarack 6y ago

I'm keeping an index of company remote-work announcements here: https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7 https://airtable.com/shrC1mvKjwntaqocO/tbl73UY1jDmReLge7 If you know of companies that have made changes like Coinbase, please help me build the list by sharing anonymously here: https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0 https://airtable.com/shriP4XRx0ewbBWM0

yalogin 6y ago

This is inevitable. There are too many advantages for companies to encourage WFH. Reduce the entry level salaries for employees, save on building leases, no need to offer free food and more. The productivity will probably even increase too. I am sure they are all going over numbers to see how productivity changes. For the employee though it’s going to be tough in the long run. Building relationships at work is one great way to get things done not just in the team but also across teams. So code might get written but the overarching dynamics about how things happen in a workplace are changing big time. We don’t see the effects of them until sometime.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

buboard 6y ago

SV companies coming out as remote-friendly is odd in one way. Outside SV there are tons of companies that are remote, and they make no big fuss about it. With corona, so many more people started working remotely, even in companies that you 'd never expect they would. And they made no big deal of it. Seems like SV has been particularly reluctant to go remote (despite making the tools for it!) , for reasons that are not really well undestood. Perhaps they don't want capital to be decentralized or they somehow think there's something magical about the place.

xoxoy 6y ago

I have trouble scheduling meetings between colleagues on the west coast and east coast as is. With a “remote first” company where some choose to move abroad potentially (though suspect most would stay in the US) scheduling meetings sounds like a complete nightmare. There’s no advantage to that at all.

KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Actually I think WFH would improve this. If both the west and east coast colleagues have to commute to their respective offices, there is a lot of wasted time during the beginning & end of the day. A person may arrive at the office on the east coast just as the west coast is waking up. If both locations were simply WFH, there would be more useful overlapping daylight hours to use because neither side has to commute. Additionally, one office could have modified hours such that they more overlapped with the other office either as a standard or simply as needed.
- xoxoy 6y ago
  Main problem is a blurring between work life. With one office no one would dare schedule meetings too early or too late in the day. With different time zones you might have to have a 7am meeting on the west coast or 7pm on east coast. There needs to be strict calendar blocking to maintain sanity.

booleandilemma 6y ago

Don't forget - if you can do your job from your home, someone else can do your job from their home.

wildchild 6y ago

Stop giving platform for shitcoiners.