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Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations
- wpBenny 10y agoWe're hiring for WordPress support, local or remote :) https://www.wpsitecare.com/jobs/ https://www.wpsitecare.com/jobs/
- c17r 10y agoThe July 2016 "Who is Hiring?" thread is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12016568
- radicalbyte 10y agoAmsterdam is in Europe and in the top 20..
- yeukhon 10y agoMy observation this month happens to be UK/London job availability on "Who is Hiring" is increasing while the jobs for SV (mainly SF) is decreasing.
- bchjam 10y agoLondon is in Europe but Berlin in Germany? seems pretty ironic given recent news
- _ao789 10y agoLondon isn't technically in Europe anymore..
- dragonwriter 10y ago> London isn't technically in Europe anymore.. London is in Europe as much as it has ever been. Geographically, its status hasn't changed -- whether you consider the island off the coast of the European mainland part of Europe or not; politically, its still the capital of the UK, which -- despite having voted that its government should withdraw from the EU -- remains an EU member, and not even formally on the exit path yet.
- Brakenshire 10y agoUK will also remain a member of the Council of Europe, a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, will probably have a Switzerland-ish deal on European trade, and will likely opt-in to a lot of European projects like the ESA and science funding/cooperation.
- themoonbus 10y agoEurope means different things in different contexts... there is still a continent called Europe that the UK is a part of.
- jacquesm 10y agoGeographically it always will be, administratively it is - for now - still part of the EU. Europe is a continent, the EU an organization.
- nraynaud 10y agoTechnically the UK han't done anything with their vote. Not a single official step.
- iwillium 10y agoIf you combine SF with Silicon Valley you really ought to combine Cambridge, MA with Boston, MA
- ef4 10y agoYeah, keeping them apart makes no sense. Definitely a single market. If they belong apart, then so do Manhattan and Brooklyn.
- wtvanhest 10y agoCambridge and Boston should be together, but Silicon Valley and SF shouldn't. I could walk to Cambridge from my house in the city of Boston. There is no way I could walk to Palo Alto from SF.
- nibs 10y agoYes. Big difference between 20 minute walk and 2 hour drive.
- Bahamut 10y agoSilicon Valley is ~ 1 hour train ride from SF...and a faster drive (when there is no traffic).
- marcoperaza 10y ago>when there is no traffic Lol. Good one!
- matthewowen 10y agoI have to question if you've ever done a SF -> Silicon Valley commute. There's always traffic, and the Caltrain station is inconveniently located for most of the city, which means you need to tack on time to get there. Additionally, most SV offices aren't that convenient at the other end.
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- antouank 10y agoBear in mind that HN has mainly US based readers. So those insights are not reflecting the reality IMO.
- xando 10y agoI'm an author. Right. I agree. This why I put a disclaimer at the beginning of the post. Hacker News is just one source among many others.
- ryanSrich 10y agoIf you read the article the author points out, several times, that he does not recommend taking this data as absolute truth throughout tech.
- sytse 10y ago"Fast forward 5 years, now more than 20% of the positions there are open remote work! " At GitLab we think that remote only is the logical conclusion of this http://www.remoteonly.org/ http://www.remoteonly.org/ "High speed Internet." apart from that the tools (video calling, etc.) are also getting better. BTW I think the rise of English is really interesting, I added that https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/commit/4bffb3636ff3d59170c65642fc1062e17fb3927b https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/commit/4bff...
- jxm262 10y agoThanks for sharing that link, as I've never seen this Manifesto before. This puts into words so much better than the explanations I give people for why I prefer remote. It's interesting to see some of these on the list - -written down processes over verbal -async communication -formal communication over informal We often hear alot about enlarging your net of potential talent (#1) and flexible work hours, but there's much more to it than that. At this point, I can't imagine _not_ working remotely anymore. I'm just sooo much more productive and happy this way.
- sytse 10y agoThanks for your kind response. I can't imagine commuting for 2 hours pay day either.
- daxfohl 10y agoSF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs? I figured south bay and the peninsula had much more than SF proper.
- xando 10y agoCould you elaborate more?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pchristensen 10y ago"SF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs" ...that post on HN Who's Hiring. Big difference (biased towards newer companies) compared the the Bay Area tech industry as a whole. For instance, I'd bet that Google (Mtn View) + Facebook have more job postings any given month than the whole HN Who's Hiring post. And that's not counting eBay, Cisco, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, etc etc etc.
- daxfohl 10y agoYeah, plenty of listings likely paraphrased per Jim Gaffigan: It’s like, ‘Hey, where’re you from?’ ‘Me, I’m from San Francisco.’ ‘Oh really? Where in San Francisco?’ ‘Uhhh, outside San Francisco.’ ‘Where outside San Francisco?’ ‘Gilroy.’
- TrickzOnU 10y agoI loved this line from the article "With unsolved US VISA problems for STEM workers, IT companies might have to get creative to hire potential employees." -- Yeah, creative...like paying a living wage for the location. Pay salaries that will allow someone to rent their own 1B (not bunking) and the "shortage" will magically disappear.
- ryandrake 10y agoYep, the tired old "Shortage of Engineers" meme is bound to come up in any discussion about tech hiring that ignores compensation. Saying there is a shortage of something in a market only makes sense given a price. Sure, there is probably a shortage of Bay Area engineers if you're paying $70K, but I bet there is no shortage if you're paying $400K.
- wrong_variable 10y agoI think its a lot more complex than that. If the cost of beef was increased 4x for whatever reason, then most people would just switch their preference for meat. There are ofcourse a lot of greedy companies. But a lot of the time the consumer demands a price point for software product, many startups cannot afford to pay 400K to developers. I think its not a reflection of how difficult it might be to create software but stagnant wages for the average person.
- vonmoltke 10y agoI agree with everything you say about the economics of the situation, but ours is the omly industry I know of where inability to make enough money to pay for a sufficient workforce translates into a workforce shortage. A cattle rancher isn't going to compalain about a "ranchhand shortage" if she can't afford to pay enough to attract them.
- TrickzOnU 10y agoIt is not. The rancher would just hire an illegal immigrant often and it happens all the time on farms and restaurants. It doesn't fly in office environments and in positions where the salary cant just disappear in the books. Secondly, only the technology industry has a massive pipeline of overseas workers available...so naturally there is constantly a "shortage" as a means to increase the pipeline of overseas workers. I'm not saying NOT to hire overseas workers. I'm saying to be honest about it. Say -- we refuse to pay market wages and would rather that new graduates not find work than pay them a living wage for the Bay Area, instead we'll hire offshore workers desperate to flee their countries and willing to shack up 3 to a studio apartment.
- deepGem 10y agoI hope some policy makers in the government keep a watch on such threads. They will get an idea about the loss of taxes, that these remote would otherwise pay if they were to be employed in the US. Not to mention the social security and the indirect economic contributions. In fact all the anti-immigration camps should get a reality check at this point. In 5-10 years, most of the US tech jobs will be remote and not a dime of the remote worker's income will reach american shores.
- morgante 10y agoAny American citizens working remotely still have to pay US taxes.
- dasil003 10y agoThere are tax treaties with most (all?) countries whereby you receive a US tax credit. In the case of the UK I believe even National Insurance contributions can be counted towards Social Security.
- morgante 10y agoYou receive some credits and deductions but the statement that "not a dime of the remote worker's income will reach american shores" is objectively and supremely false. The IRS brings in huge sums of money from Americans living abroad every year.
- dasil003 10y agoI lived in London for 3 years and did not pay a dime to the IRS. That aside, your indignation over the quoted remark is misplaced since the GP was presumably talking about foreign nationals. So you're conflating two different points and then getting all self righteous about it.
- lukasm 10y agoIsn't it above 1mln? (US citizen working in London told me he has to make the tax return, but he is not tax for anything below 1 000 000 $)
- danielsamuels 10y agoI wonder if this is conflating Cambridge, UK with Cambridge in the US?
- dccoolgai 10y agoSurprised not to see DC in the list of cities... usually shows up a lot in the hiring threads...
- ryanSrich 10y agoI'm surprised as well. When I moved from DC to Portland I saw a massive decrease in recruiter spam. Even two years later I still get 10 emails per week about jobs in DC. Portland on the other hand? Pretty much zero.
- SmellTheGlove 10y agoOut of curiosity, what's generating the job spam in DC? Profile on LinkedIn, or other sites? I have the same thing going on.
- ryanSrich 10y agoNo idea. I get random emails from shady "meetups" and networking events too. I can't report the spam and unsub fast enough. The recruiter spam has transcended LinkedIn too. It's mostly direct emails from recruiters. I wouldn't mind if the jobs were even slightly related to what I do. It's pretty clear I'm a designer and frontend dev, but I get spam for Java and PHP gigs all the time...
- dschiptsov 10y agoRemote is still rare, it seems, because usual sweatshops are traditional habitat for pointy haired bosses and other parasitic "management". For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically switch to remote? More seriously, there is no market for code - otherwise people would just pay per commit (passed all the tests) nice and easy. The problem is people with money doesn't need a mere good code, they need their positions, their bonuses, their status. They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code. This is why, perhaps, remote works fine for "nonprofits", like FreeBSD, but for corporations it is still a heresy. Again, there, it seems, is no demand for mere good quality code. This, by the way, is connected with hiring. Almost no one hire for abilities, everyone is hiring for good school diplomas. (Which diploma Mike Pall has? Igor Sysoev was a college dropout). If I am wrong, and there is a market for code - solved problem, pushed a commit, all tests passed, money transferred - please tell me, I would participate gladly.
- riskable 10y ago> They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports them, not for your good code. This is absolutely true but remote workers can still be FTEs that extend a manager's umbrella of influence. So really, working remotely is orthogonal to managerial pyramids of power. If anything, hiring remote workers may allow managers to get more employees working for them because they can get more bodies for the same amount of budget.
- nicobn 10y agoNot always. A friend of mine works remotely for a financial institution. His manager wanted to revoke his work from home agreement because he wanted to hit a target metric of number of man-days worked in a physical office to justify a corner office with upper management. Sad but true.
- dagss 10y agoMuch (most?) code is trivial to write, the work is figuring out what code to write -- posing the problem correctly is half the job. Then inevitably as you work on solving the problem you will (if, and only if, you know the business domain well enough) discover that the problem description needs refining as the code is refined. If there was a market for code I would not participate since it takes me less time to just write the code than to write a spec you could use to deliver something good. Non-programmers cannot do that, but if they are in the people you wanted to avoid, they would likely make a spec that would create a mess, regardless of how good the code driving the mess is. I don't see how remote vs not has anything to do with managers or not...how would you get the "orders for code" written in the pure-code marketplace? The trick about open source is mainly that the programmers ARE the end-users too and very well able to understand the problem domain and also are often scratching their own itch. So the problem of making good problem descriptions and make the code match it disappears. That is much more important than remote vs non-remote.
- jballanc 10y agoOne additional reason that I've observed to add to the list: * Declining dominance of the Microsoft/Oracle hegemony in secondary markets During the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were particularly effective at entering emerging markets and pushing their solutions to such a degree that "computer programmer" became synonymous with "Microsoft/Oracle developer". Thus, if you wanted to become a software developer in one of these markets, it meant learning C#/Java, along with all the ecosystem, tooling, and inevitably...lock-in. Fast-forward 20 or so years, and the Open Source movement is finally beginning to crack that shell of lock-in. Anecdotally, when I first moved to Turkey 4 years ago, technology job sites almost exclusively listed C#/Java positions. Today, I know many Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, etc. developers living and working in Turkey, and there's been an explosion of related conferences, trainings, events, etc. The one last hurdle I see that needs to be overcome in these places is the notion that developer education is as much a concern for those that employ developers as for the developers themselves. Pretty much all of the conferences/trainings have to be held over weekends because it is still difficult for developers to get time off during the week to attend. Once that bit of cultural shift happens, I only foresee this trend accelerating.
- spraak 10y agoIs there anywhere (e.g. blog) you've shared about your move and experience living in Turkey? Like, do you speak Turkish for your job?
- jballanc 10y agoUnfortunately I'm woefully behind on blogging, and there's a number of programming topics that are higher on the list than anything like that. In short, though, Turkey is a great place with friendly people, breathtakingly-amazing food, and lots to see and do. I work remotely, and English is the lingua franca of everyone I work with, though I have managed to learn enough Turkish to get around at home.
- phantom_oracle 10y agoMy own assumption is that even though remote work will increase, it will remain marginal and not consume most of the IT jobs out there. The simple reason being that the biggest IT/tech companies have invested heavily in land & buildings (think about how Apple and Facebook have built huge "campuses" - why they call the offices/building a campus, I don't know, but anyways ...) and they need to utilize those assets in order to avoid the "white elephant" problem. Also, unlike "agile" software-development or on-demand hosting, they can't merely downscale their land & buildings as they would for their AWS clusters and they also can't sell these buildings, as they seem geared specifically towards the needs of their owners (it isn't just a regular old office-block). So while some startups of the future will embrace a remote-first culture, the big tech companies and many other regular startups will continue along with the concept of a fixed-location and fixed-office well into the future.
- k__ 10y agomaybe not having land/building investments puts companies in a better position? To apply changes faster etc.
- yuvadam 10y agoI find it very surprising that Tel Aviv, Israel (supposed "startup nation") is nowhere in those charts.
- xando 10y agoPlease keep in mind that this only Hacker News Who is hiring, maybe other sources are more popular there. Also, nearly every big city was already announced as next Silicon Valley by the press by now. The press is creating huge illusion here.
- ryanSrich 10y agoRemote work is not a silver bullet for solving the faux work shortage. Aside from the fact that there is no shortage in the first place [1], remote work is still very new. Without proper operations in place and a solid, tested, management structure you'll end up with a hodgepodge of culture and unhappy employees. I used to be bullish on remote work until I actually started doing it. It can certainly work, and I still encourage companies to explore it, but it's not a one size fits all approach, or a replacement for proper organizational management. 1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-the-tech-tale_b_9349542.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-...
- devonkim 10y agoThose of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular with large companies include: 1. Mandatory all-hands meeting times 2. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype 3. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone instead of letting workers self-organize 4. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not actually measure productivity but presence
- im_down_w_otp 10y agoYou left out: 5. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.
- pat_space 10y agoIt was a sad day when my old company shuttered the web-based VPN portal, which allowed us to access the company intranet through a browser window. Closing it down required us remote workers to connect and send all of our traffic through AnyConnect, killing our connection speeds. Come to think of it, we were still running Windows XP on all of our laptops when I left in mid-2015 (laboratory information systems).
- lxfontes 10y agohonest question: Any idea why Toronto (and Canada in general) is not higher in this list?
- wrong_variable 10y agoPer capita Toronto/Vancouver is a lot higher than London, its just that London is 8 million people while Toronto is barely 3 million.
- Apocryphon 10y agoI'm always amazed that Montreal hasn't taken off yet as an alternative to the two.
- xxpor 10y agoThe language laws are a huge impediment, both for operations and hiring international people.
- legohead 10y agoI happened to be in Russia when the Who's Hiring thread showed up. I have family there, so I was entertaining the thought of possibly moving there, or maybe staying for a year or two. However, I noticed most of the remote locations were "US-only", and even the ones in other countries were usually local to that country -- "germany only", etc. I was wondering how many of the "US-only" ones would accept me, since I am a US Citizen, just not living in the US. Or is there some kind of tax reason they have to be US-only?
- johnward 10y agoI'm in the US and find that even within the country many of those jobs are listed as "remote" but then I will hear something like "we're not looking for people in your area". Do they understand what remote means?
- pbnjay 10y agoI assume it's for legal reasons. It's very hard/expensive to deal with international legal issues. Much simpler to stay within your own country.
- skrebbel 10y agoI think a combination of simpler tax/administration and timezones. Working with a distributed team across the world's time zones (f.ex. Bay Area and much of Europe are 9 hours apart) is an entirely different game from working with a distributed team in roughly the same time zone. The latter allows you to organise as a digital version of a colocated office, eg you can you standups, easily plan meetings without negotiating against half the team's evening plans. The first makes most sense if you manage to be mostly meeting-less. That's more challenging in my book, but maybe also more rewarding - and not only for hiring reasons (after all, meetings easily become a waste of time).
- nraynaud 10y agono, because that's forgetting the entire Latin America that has timezones similar to the US.
- slantedview 10y agoWe embrace technology for every stupid purpose imaginable, yet remote work facilitated by technology is generally viewed with disdain. It makes no sense, which is why remote work will continue to rise into the future. The dramatic centralization of our industry into a few locations also doesn't help with the crush of housing costs.
- happyslobro 10y agoPutting a laptop on a cart, keeping it at just the right position relative to the whiteboard wall, and jotting down notes and diagrams for the guys on the other end, is frustrating. Repeating ~10% of the statements in a meeting because of audio issues is frustrating. There are a lot more technologies that need to be brought to market, or improved, in order to eliminate the drawbacks of remote work. Right now, I find that working with the remote people is fine when there is some separation between our work, like an API, and it is excellent when I can get work to pay for me to travel. But debugging or pair programming over a call, where we can only share one screen, is just painful.
- slantedview 10y agoAll of your points are 100% true. There are workarounds, but generally I think we need to embrace these challenges as perfect use cases for our own work as technologists. If you were to project our current technical culture many years into the future, flying cars, free energy, clean water, etc., would we still have to herd ourselves into a central location every day so we can sit in a chair that is positioned next to a bunch of other people in order to accomplish the most basic communicative/collaborative tasks? With all that we've accomplished and all that we will accomplish, it seems to me that's not the way of the future, that's the way of the past. TL;DR; It's not that remote work is easy, it's just that we smell of hypocrisy when we try to apply technology to every possible problem while rejecting it for our own.
- devdas 10y agoHave you thought about working in a shared screen session for code editing, with a parallel chat client for interactivity. Voice is just too low SNR for code.
- Artlav 10y agoI wonder how meaningful the "remote work" is, considering the legal issues of hiring workers from another country? What if there weren't any? Time zones aren't always the problem, high-speed internet is often common, lots of IT jobs are location-agnostic. It could have a serious impact on the job market - what is poor in USA is upper 1% income worldwide, so an ability to get a remote job at USA prices can make local jobs uncompetitive by huge factors. What sort of effects would this have on the world? Or is it meaningless speculation anyway, since the legal restrictions aren't going away in any plausible futures?
- kowdermeister 10y agoHow does hiring remotely work financially? Should I set up a company and invoice the company that hired me? Does it make to go off-shore? Any info would be helpful, thanks.
- Const-me 10y agoDepends on your jurisdiction + citizenship. In some places, you may work without setting up a company, e.g. being a sole entrepreneur.
- carlob 10y agoGreat post! A couple of nitpicks on the data presentation for the sake of making it even better: 1. You don't have enough data to warrant 5 significant digits in the percentages, and even if you did, is it really relevant? 2. The points in your plot are interpolated using some sort of spline, why? If the answer is: because it looks better than jagged edges, then you should probably remove the spline, because you're effectively adding extraneous information. On the other hand a linear trend line could be nice here.
- xando 10y agoHey, thanks for the comments. And I agree. I will keep that in mind writing the next part. (I'm an author)
- jkempe11 10y agoShocked not to see LA in the post at all. Santa Monica (an LA suburb, more or less) appears once.
- rwhitman 10y agoI'm increasingly curious about what kinds of trends there are in tech hiring outside of the English speaking world. Wouldn't the HN "Who's Hiring" thread being in English make it inherently biased in terms of global trends, especially when looking for the "next Silicon Valley" as the end goal? Would a city like Beijing or Taipei be adequately represented here at all?
- xando 10y agoI've just run the query and it's 6 (not this month, all time) with Beijing as a location. My best guess for China is: they have to have something similar, although obviously not in English. They have a huge market with limited reasons to cooperate with English-speaking Internet. Also, Chinese Internet is isolated you won't see many services that are available in US or EU. Fun fact there was an attempt to implement (copy) whoishiring.io http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945# http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945# the reason they like it but no google maps in china. (I'm an author of this blog post)
- rwhitman 10y agoMakes sense. I couldn't help thinking about this post from a few months back, in the context of tracking geographic shifts in startup hiring: http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-tech-economy-silicon-valley http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-tech-... I wonder if China's tech startups would impact the data if they had a presence on HN. Kind of an interesting puzzle