from Hacker News

Coinbase will be a remote-first company

by sachitgupta on 5/20/20, 7:25 PM with 145 comments

• by Cookingboy on 5/21/20, 7:14 AM

  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.

• by kjakm on 5/21/20, 8:49 AM

  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.

• by aprao on 5/21/20, 4:42 AM

  Official statement here: 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.

• by baxtr on 5/21/20, 9:42 AM

  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.

• by realbarack on 5/21/20, 1:14 PM

  I'm keeping an index of company remote-work announcements here: 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

• by sneak on 5/21/20, 7:20 AM

  Non-signupwall: https://archive.is/GfOUF

  Aside: Companies, please stop using Medium for your corporate blogs. It’s super unprofessional.

• by OneGuy123 on 5/21/20, 7:22 AM

  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"

• by x775 on 5/21/20, 9:27 AM

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

• by tjbiddle on 5/21/20, 8:11 AM

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

• by goblin89 on 5/21/20, 1:13 PM

  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.

• by staysaasy on 5/21/20, 5:29 AM

  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.

• by throw03172019 on 5/21/20, 4:51 AM

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

• by JSavageOne on 5/21/20, 8:39 AM

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

• by xoxoy on 5/21/20, 3:07 PM

  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.

• by buboard on 5/21/20, 2:34 PM

  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.

• by joelbluminator on 5/21/20, 9:25 AM

  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?

• by LatteLazy on 5/21/20, 7:22 AM

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

• by yalogin on 5/21/20, 1:42 PM

  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.

• by mrfusion on 5/21/20, 12:41 PM

  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.

• by booleandilemma on 5/21/20, 3:29 PM

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

• by btcinfo on 5/21/20, 11:47 AM

  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.

• by tummybug on 5/21/20, 7:58 AM

  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.