The challenge with this is further career advancement. Even if you stick with Stripe, the most important and innovative work tends to stay close to headquarters, if only because the executives like to keep tabs on it. And it forecloses on the possibility of jumping ship to another company if they're doing more interesting work, or hopping aboard the next startup wave before the rest of the country knows about it.

I could see it making a lot of sense for the rank & file engineer who just wants to close their JIRA tickets and go home to their family, though. And that's really the economically rational part about this: it doesn't make sense for those jobs to stay in the Bay Area when they can be done from anywhere, by anyone with baseline software engineering prowess. Over the last decade SV tech companies have grown more and more of these roles, and it's good for both the company and the worker if they can do them from areas where housing and CoL isn't so ridiculous as the Bay Area. (Not as good for the worker when the company discovers that folks in Pakistan, Thailand, and Czech Republic can do these jobs just as effectively for $30K/year, though.)