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I've been working from home of the past four years. About once or twice a month I get an email from a recruiter from the Bay Area. I in turn reply that I'd be i

by joeax 11y ago

I've been working from home of the past four years. About once or twice a month I get an email from a recruiter from the Bay Area. I in turn reply that I'd be interested if I didn't have to relocate and can continue working from home, to which they usually reply no. At what point in this tech worker shortage/drastic expensive economy do I convince one of these companies that I'd be a better value working remotely, even willing to work for less salary? The tooling is so good now it almost seems like I'm in an office anyway. And the irony is many of these companies already have distributed teams that use these tools. What am I missing?

selmat 11y ago
I am from Europe and all European companies/offices have same attitude. Even you have global customer/projects and nobody (from customer side) cares if your are sitting here or 500 kilometers over there. They still expect the same service. From my point of view there are issues like "knowledge sharing", team spirit, group problem solving, reporting, etc. All of these "important" reasons are raised to be on-site, even you have project specific position where you are the only one who has required knowledge (nobody for sharing), you are the only one working on project (like migrations).
tedmiston 11y ago
It seems like we have some fully remote startups (Buffer) and SMBs (Basecamp) that embrace this culture. But I think the problem is that you're being contacted by recruiters in the bay at big tech cos. The small cos. might not have a recruiter, and the big cos. grew big without a remote-first culture.
- joeax 11y ago
  Those companies are definitely on the bleeding edge of remote work culture, but there seem to be many others who would hire someone remote if it were the right fit (my company for example). I've been contacted by outside recruiters and corporate recruiters big and small, but when in comes to bay area they always seem to be hellbent on you being on site. Then again, maybe it's because I'm not really looking, and I'm being contacted by those who are just grasping at straws at that point.
  - tedmiston 11y ago
    That's a good point -- not willing to relocate can certainly be interpreted ambiguously. My company is a mid-stage startup of ~30 distributed across Cincinnati (75%), NYC (20%), and SF (5%). I would say we're semi-remote: most of our tech team works from home 1-4 days per week. I've personally done a few trips working remotely in another U.S. city one week at a time. In our case the culture isn't quite ready to accommodate a person being fully remote, though I'm hoping to be the guinea pig. For anyone reading this and looking for fully remote, there's a nice "database" of remote jobs in this GitHub repo. https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs

by joeax 11y ago

selmat 11y ago

I am from Europe and all European companies/offices have same attitude. Even you have global customer/projects and nobody (from customer side) cares if your are sitting here or 500 kilometers over there. They still expect the same service. From my point of view there are issues like "knowledge sharing", team spirit, group problem solving, reporting, etc. All of these "important" reasons are raised to be on-site, even you have project specific position where you are the only one who has required knowledge (nobody for sharing), you are the only one working on project (like migrations).

tedmiston 11y ago

It seems like we have some fully remote startups (Buffer) and SMBs (Basecamp) that embrace this culture. But I think the problem is that you're being contacted by recruiters in the bay at big tech cos. The small cos. might not have a recruiter, and the big cos. grew big without a remote-first culture.

joeax 11y ago
Those companies are definitely on the bleeding edge of remote work culture, but there seem to be many others who would hire someone remote if it were the right fit (my company for example). I've been contacted by outside recruiters and corporate recruiters big and small, but when in comes to bay area they always seem to be hellbent on you being on site. Then again, maybe it's because I'm not really looking, and I'm being contacted by those who are just grasping at straws at that point.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  That's a good point -- not willing to relocate can certainly be interpreted ambiguously. My company is a mid-stage startup of ~30 distributed across Cincinnati (75%), NYC (20%), and SF (5%). I would say we're semi-remote: most of our tech team works from home 1-4 days per week. I've personally done a few trips working remotely in another U.S. city one week at a time. In our case the culture isn't quite ready to accommodate a person being fully remote, though I'm hoping to be the guinea pig. For anyone reading this and looking for fully remote, there's a nice "database" of remote jobs in this GitHub repo. https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs https://github.com/jessicard/remote-jobs