1)

We're extremely solicitous of there being advancement opportunities for everyone in every office. This is something that we're looking at over time. Companies that can't manage this will lose to ones who can, as their seasoned talent moves to places where it is valued appropriately.

Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to be senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people reporting to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

2)

Like most employers, we craft compensation to be competitive with what we perceive as the market. We expect that geography will continue to influence who the “marginal buyer” is for most engineering talent, which will in turn influence prevailing compensation. That said, we expect that the importance of geography in determining compensation will continue to shrink, and data suggest that candidates outside of major tech epicenters have found our offers to be very competitive.

While a lot is said and written about how geographic compensation “should” be done, tech company hiring is at root a highly competitive and vibrant market. If our (or any other company’s) strategy is wrong, the market will quickly tell us.

Are there enough remote employees who are a part of senior management (Director, VP etc)? What fraction of overall senior management do they constitute?

Great, thank you for the insight! Glad to see there’s some thought and articulation on these topics. Especially point 1 around opportunities for advancement. I’ve seen that be a problem at some companies and, as you pointed out, it caused me to unfortunately seek those opportunities elsewhere.

The compensation one is interesting. It’s absolutely an evolving space and I’m always interested in how different companies are thinking about it.

> Promotion isn't co-extensive with moving into management; we have senior IC tracks, too, including in engineering, and many remote engineers happen to be senior ICs. (IC = "individual contributor", meaning "has no people reporting to them." I am an IC at Stripe.)

This sounds great, and I wish more organisations did this - for most, it seems there is an absolute limit at which your career path stops dead.

Unfortunately, this is largely a fundamental issue. It is outrageously hard for an IC to have impact that is orders of magnitude more than their peers. Volume maybe. But in terms of impact? Really hard.

Managers get to cheat, to some degree. They instead are tasked with organizing a whole bunch of people - who can achieve things that a single person never could. So a manager has a much easier "I made the company 10% more money" story than an IC.

Some organizations try to fight this bias, but it is hard and takes a clear framework for promotion guidelines and constant vigilance.

High-level IC roles (in the companies that have them) are still leadership roles. They are just technical leadership roles instead of people management roles. They may not have direct reports, but they are still responsible for getting big projects done, usually by organizing a large number of engineers.

is your team hiring? ;)