Remote Engineering at Coinbase
In 2016 we doubled down on growing the presence of remote engineers at Coinbase and after a year of growth we recently took an objective look at the remote engineering and how it integrated with our onsite team. For what initially began as an experiment, remote work is now growing into an important part of our culture and something we’ve committed to making great as a team.
When we began to prioritize growing remote engineering we laid out several success factors that we thought would correlate well with remote success including a self-starting personality and high-bandwidth communication. With this in mind we were able to quadruple our hiring rate and with the recent explosive growth in digital assets we’d be in rough shape without these engineers in mission critical positions. By and large our approach here has worked well, though we have shifted to prioritize more experienced engineers in these remote roles.
The Remote Experience
Today, 20% of our engineering organization is remote and all of the remote full time engineers hired during this experiment are still with the team. Coinbase has a long history with remote staff, with 36% of our company currently remote and our very first contracting employee still a core part of our team in Germany. We’ve been fortunate to scale several other teams remotely in our early days and have benefited from their global coverage and diverse perspectives in our work. Recently, we asked these remote engineers a few questions about their experience including:
Have you worked from home before?
70% of the remote engineers we’ve hired have worked from home before. This correlates with experience since a “Yes” answer suggests this isn’t your first job. We began this experiment pursuing engineers with work experience that would be better able to help themselves through early problems, so this result makes sense. We encourage our remote engineers to visit HQ at least once per quarter to ensure they have ample time to interact with their team in person. We’ve found timing these visits along with our quarterly planning exercise provides valuable overlap to make sure all voices are a part of our long term plans.
Do you prefer working from home?
Another 70% of our staff preferred working remote over at HQ. Though we have a strong track record helping full time engineers through visas and relocating from around the world to Coinbase, many engineers prefer working from another location. This can be for a variety of reasons and we try to support what works best for each individual.
Are you having a first-class experience as a remote engineer?
Finally, we asked our staff to evaluate whether they felt like they were having a first-class experience as a remote engineer. On a scale of 5, the average response was 4.1 with a low score of 3/5. Positive feedback cited strong communication & responsiveness, the ease with which staff can conference into events/meetings, and quarterly trips to HQ. Negative feedback frequently cited the inability to participate in after-hours events. We have an active culture and communicate widely about frequent outside events which aren’t as fun or accessible over hangouts. We’re working on improving this through both more tailored communication and scheduling more events while remote staff are visiting onsite.
Remote Tools
Next, we asked our staff to evaluate the IT & productivity tooling we were providing to help them interact with the rest of our organization. We broke this up across several of our most used tools:
How helpful is our documentation from unusable to always helpful?
Our average response here was a 4.1 / 5. As our teams have grown it’s become increasingly likely that anything not written down will be lost in time or across timezones. We value good documentation that helps empower engineers to work without needing to ask for help — though we’re always happy to give it.
How easily are you able to access all tooling from slow and cumbersome to fast and easy?
From slow and cumbersome to fast and easy, the average response was 4.3 / 5. Today we route all remote traffic through a traditional VPN to our cloud servers on the east coast of the US (us-east-1). This unfortunately adds often noticeable latency to staff abroad and we’re working on optimizing this while exploring a rethought beyond-corp solution that meets our security bar.
How inclusively do we communicate with remote staff?
This is an important topic for us that we’re still improving on. Our average score was 4 / 5. We’ve learned that it’s simply harder for remote staff to break into the rhythm of a fast paced discussion over video conference. We’re making a concerted effort to help meeting leaders proactively include all participants in discussion, which includes outside coaching and office norms that are reviewed with all new hires and include best practices for inclusive discussions.
One benefit of growing our team with remote engineers has been increasing the diversity of perspectives brought into our team. Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world and a single team situated in San Francisco is going to have a hard time meeting that for the world. Instead, our team includes engineers in or from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and across North America that broaden our understanding of the world’s monetary systems. We’re proud of the diversity on our remote team and excited to continue broadening the perspective of Coinbase.
Next Steps
Moving forward, we’re committed to providing remote engineers a first class experience at Coinbase. We’ll be following up on much of this feedback and are continuing to grow our remote engineering staff. Every engineering team at Coinbase currently has at least one remote staffer and we’re looking forward to increasing that this year. we’re well on our way to connecting the world with an open financial system and are keen to big refactors that help us achieve that goal.
