Their CEO has been pretty vocal about not having an office for a while now. I'd be surprised if opening a new office is their interpretation of remote-first.
It's interesting they announced this only after the IPO. I wonder if they planned to do it even before but didn't want to scare some more conservative investors.
Most crypto companies are fully remote ("decentralized"). Kraken is an example of a major exchange that has been remote for many years.
If you are interested in free-thinking, open-minded workplaces solving very interesting problems, go to coingecko.com and scan down the lists of major coins and exchanges. There is an enormous need for engineers and the pay is very high for remote work.
In terms of startups, basically every engineer I know who stuck with crypto through the post-2017 bear market made a huge amount of money as their tokens appreciated. One benefit of working in crypto is you are liquid very quickly - you might get equity, but you almost always get tokens.
Regardless of what the HN know-it-all crypto-haters say, in 2021 you are far more likely to make appreciable wealth in crypto as an individual contributor than you will in your average SaaS (excluding founders and high-level management).
Of course, I think the problems being solved in decentralized platforms are extremely interesting compared to adtech or whatever AI-nonsense. But even barring the extremely interesting work, the renumeration, ethos, and company structure are very amenable to software engineers.
This is very accurate, I know a lot of people that are dreaming of their future “remote” or “digital nomad” life and they keep looking for companies and job boards that explicitly offer that
And I’m confused by that and continually tell them that basically all “tech” companies and especially crypto companies already do what they are looking for and just don’t have messaging like that
I would suggest that engineers looking to make huge amounts of money think carefully about potential liability and whether they'd like to be able to keep living in whatever country they're looking to work remotely from.
“Citizens of a particular country who make money are required to pay taxes. News at 11”
Really though are you implying that these employees are all unscrupulously avoiding taxes and trying to use remote work and cryptocurrency to relive their tax burden?
Maybe some people enjoy the space as it’s bleeding edge, fully remote supported and well funded.
Title of linked article "U.S. court authorizes IRS to seek identities of taxpayers who have used cryptocurrency".
This is puzzling. The IRS didn't have that right before? It seems obvious. Any large transfer from any external entity to your bank triggers money laundering flag here in France and I have to declare and give my Kraken (and other exchanges) user ID to the local IRS.
Really impressed with how forward thinking Coinbase is. First with banning distracting and unproductive politics at work, and now embracing full remote work. They will do well in attracting talent while big tech companies linger on with their archaic commitment to physical workspaces and tiresome commutes in expensive places.
Binance was fully remote from the start and growing vary fast last year, also Bitcoin and Ethereum development is fully remote (I'm not sure about Uniswap though for example).
Basecamp got cancelled for doing the exact same thing. Apparently, people who build fluff products are bored and just want to talk about politics and DEI all day at work.
Its likely they are referring to [0] where Coinbase announced that they were going to be discouraging internal focus on "broader societal issues" and "political causes".
I did indeed. The only headline I had seen here on HN was about ~~Coin~~Basecamp and I have been thoroughly reprimanded. It really adds new perspective to Basecamp's announcement though because I thought some of their changes seemed unrelated or out of proportion to the "Best Names" list.
Given that tons of tech companies have just given up on customer service, I wonder if they have all done the math and found that customers who need help are just not worth keeping.
They're in a bit different situation. If some SaaS breaks for someone that's one thing worth a few $. Coinbase issues requiring support are in thousands and could be reasonably chased in court. Support is cheaper than lawyers.
There was a period in PayPal's early history where there was no support. Nobody checking email, no support tickets, no phone number. They took the phones in their office off the hook after customers start figuring out their numbers. They hired security once customers started showing up in person. This was the period when they were growing exponentially, too fast for their staff to keep up with the support needs, but before their first inbound call center was up and running.
To be fair, what passes for customer support at PayPal nowadays is a joke. PayPal is far from being the only one but yeah... Still better than “community forums run by volunteers” but not much.
I also wonder what drives all these volunteers to answer on the companies community forums. They can’t do much because they have no access to any of the internal systems, they aren’t getting paid... what’s the point? Is the customer service industry so competitive that you need “side projects” there as well in the form of volunteering to be an unpaid CSA?
That implies that customers who do not get support can leave. My understanding is a lot of them have their money locked up in Coinbase and can’t get it out. Not really sure why anyone would need support from them otherwise.
Coinbase is kind of like the money hole at a blackjack table in Vegas. Putting money in to get chips is never really an issue.
Your mileage may vary, but I always get quick answers and had all my problems solved fairly efficiently. Though I'm not surprised that with 56 million users, there will definitely be people who will receive bad customer service I guess.
