15 ms·

We Don’t Simply Get Remote Jobs, We Join Remote Teams

347 points by stockkid 10y ago

cwyers 10y ago
Okay, look. This is easy. I can't pay rent or a mortgage with a team. When my kid asks me what's for dinner, I can't feed her some groceries I got with all the team spirit and esprit de corps that I've picked up. When I need to go to the doctor and he says I need something expensive, all my fellow teammembers aren't going to immediately offer to pitch in and help with those. The author says "I think that we mistakenly put jobs ahead of teams because we choose to ignore the obvious, and sometimes nuanced complications of remote work." No, it's because I've got bills to pay and people to provide for.
- anirudh24seven 10y ago
  I think there are 2 sides and both sides are important. I think that the author was focussing on the half of our awake time that we spend doing our job, while you are focussing on the other half. The author is probably talking about naive remote job seekers who focus on the job but don't consider the team culture. I was one such naive job seeker and used to think in that manner until a few years ago.
  - fsiefken 10y ago
    Can you elaborate on the challenges you encountered with dealing with remote team culture? What realizations or adaptations made you less naive and more realistic and pragmatic in dealing with it?
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      Not OP, but my personal experience, having done some remote work for a big multinational and now for a startup, the reason it worked well for me was because I already knew the people very well. If I were to join a team of people I've never met to work remote there are too many subtle unasked questions in the background. For example, right now I have one guy I work with who I only met - and only briefly - after months of working together. I often was in doubt about Skype chats and emails, did I go too far? Was that humor appropriate? His response seems chilly, and he hasn't responded for 5 minutes now but until I said THAT he always responded right away, did I offend him? You can just brush it off and ignore it, and it may work out - or it may accumulate under the surface until some day it explodes. Or more likely, it's going to fester below the surface and hinder communication: You are less likely to communicate and when you do then only the minimum when you are unsure of the other guy, even if it is just slightly. It really does not need to be a major disagreement, the small and sometimes (when remote, often?) imagined ones are that hurt. It feels much safer to work away from others when you already feel safe about what will happen when you screw up, or when you make a mistake on the project or in the communication, when you understand the other side from experience. Otherwise imagination takes over, your brain fills the parts that are not visible in remote communication, and when it has no data to do so it will just fill in something, and if you don't feel extremely secure in yourself and in your relationship that may very well be small subtle fears.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I'm surprised you made it all the way to the third paragraph if you just weren't going to read the article. The point the article is making (a point I understand really well, as a remote worker and a non-24 sleeper) is that a remote job isn't simply "do your exact same job, except do it at home". To actually have it work, you need to fully account for your remote employees. This affects your company, it affects work management, planning, execution, everything. It affects how the work is assigned, how it's prioritized, how the meetings are held. It completely changes the social aspect of the job, so that needs to be accounted for both from the employees' and employers' perspective. Or you can just ignore all this, interpret the article's title however you feel like, and talk about salary. Whatever.
  - stephengillie 10y ago
    At my employer, it takes 8 dedicated Slack channels, numerous daily, weekly, and monthly meetings, and a dedicated conference room. And continual reminding from the boss - "Call a random team member, and BS for 5 minutes, you have my permission." But my remote coworkers are definitely part of the team. It does help that the office parts of the team are scattered between 2 offices in widely different time zones - people in the other office may as well be working from home. This is for a 24/7/365 support organization.
alex-yo 10y ago
There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people. The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed.
- prawn 10y ago
  If you're looking for a job, put a bit more info in your HN profile about what sort of work you're looking for, and what you specialise in.
  - alex-yo 10y ago
    Good point, thank you.
    - hackits 10y ago
      Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address. cheers.
      - alex-yo 10y ago
        Yep, anonymity is funny. I'm not sure about the recordings, and presentations are not in English, and are made as a background for talking, so reading them would be useless.
- sparrish 10y ago
  This was not our experience. We posted for a full-time remote frontend position in our 100% remote company and only received a few inquiries. Thankfully one of them was the right fit but I'm dubious to your "thousands of people".
archon810 10y ago
If some of the site owners see this. I clicked on a random job by Gitlab. Two of the links at the end looked interesting. Both are dead. https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/ https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/ https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ Whose fail? Gitlab's or RemoteBase's?
- whatusername 10y ago
  Looks like the job text/urls is scraped. These two URL's have the same text: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer So I suspect thats a remotebase.io issue. The links you're after are: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/
- stockkid 10y ago
  It is RemoteBase's issue. I built a scrapper for them to help keep their recruiting effort DRY. While it's being fixed, here are the correct links: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/
jimmywanger 10y ago
I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length) is that you can't just declare a job remote. You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure. If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization. I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team, and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was incredible.
- elcct 10y ago
  Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email... There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.
  - jimmywanger 10y ago
    Did you not read most of my comment? The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago. Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them. What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos? That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if they are all in the same place.
    - ljf 10y ago
      Totally and wholeheartedly agree. You cant just solve a problem with tech, you also have to think about who you will move the people. I'm all for remote work, and would love it to work for me, but the culture needs to be right to support it.
    - aardvark179 10y ago
      I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known people who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a little different, but it was still good enough. I absolutely agree with you though that the culture of making sure everything is done using those tools is the important part. You essentially have to give up most of the benefits you might get from some members being colocated and do everything as though you were all at separate sites.
jkot 10y ago
In my experience it is best to create your own remote job. You can start consulting / freelancing. Or existing job can be made remote. Employer must trust you.
- xufi 10y ago
  Actually, This is a smart approach. A friend of mien made his own team and he's doing quite well v.s the old way where he was paired with people he did not get along with
dasmoth 10y ago
I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly reasonable model, and clearly suits a lot of people well, but I do hope there's still appetite for exploring coarser-grained "trust people to go off on their own to solve problems" models as well.
- ljf 10y ago
  It's hard - when that model (leave people to do the right thing) works well - it is amazing. It needs skilled and engaged people. The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model, and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time. Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great people is hard.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    Agreed. But there doesn't seem to even be much willingness to try the "autonomous people" model.
    - soundwave106 10y ago
      There is unfortunately a bias against introversion in many companies, which explains why some don't bother to try. (Recent article: http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21706490-organisations-have-too-long-been-oriented-towards-extroverts-companies-should-help http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21706490-...) Having said that I agree also that there are also trust issues. Forming trust is a hard thing. It's a shame, because programming (from at least my perspective) is one discipline, where the quality of work is so much higher when you are "in the zone" and can concentrate on a single task without interruptions.
FuNe 10y ago
I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by the same people that keep blabbing about "culture". To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction. PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) . (1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  > RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore I don't think so. Offshore comes with its own challenges.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Tell that to managers.
    - croon 10y ago
      ... before it's too late and they can't backtrack because it already cost too much in the transition and their ego can't handle admitting they were wrong.
      - pault 10y ago
        I've lost track of the number of times I've been hired to fix an outsourced project disaster. I feel like this has burned enough people that I'm not nearly as worried about it as I was 10 years ago. If you make your living doing wordpress sites, though, it's time to retool.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away. I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem. Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  Very few issues that are easily resolved f2f can't be resolved on the phone. It just takes people who are really great at communicating to make it work. f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.
- FuNe 10y ago
  Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    This is probably a personal thing. I'm definitely an e-mail editor, but plenty of people prefer real-time or near-real-time communication to the precision of a carefully considered e-mail. At least Slack allows editing of messages...
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I don't think the author is claiming that more expressive or rewarding friendships form as much as he's claiming that remote really makes you focus on the meat and the content of the colleague's output. That's actually something I LOVE about working remotely. There are far fewer politics because instead of saying "Oh man, Jimmy looked at me cross-eyed last week, I don't want to do anything with him anymore", you just say "Oh, Jimmy needs help on this issue. I'll send him a reply in a minute." I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data. This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning. I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.
Domenic_S 10y ago
My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room. I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is just phenomenal.
- prawn 10y ago
  I've long assumed that prior to HMDs taking off, we'd see people work with a video screen at the side extreme of their desk, showing a view of someone not physically adjacent to them, and the reverse for that colleague. So, you'd have a representation of a teammate beside you. Large LCDs are cheap. Connectivity is getting to the point that this wouldn't tax some office connections. Has anyone tried it? Obviously people could switch off the screen or the feed if they needed to make a private call, or if they were taking a lunch break. People talk about Hangout windows and so on, but I think having something you can glance at but not have right in front of you would be a better representation of current offices.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    This solves some peoples' problems at the expense of others. A big attraction of remote work to me is that I don't have the feeling of being overlooked while "in the zone" (which tends to mean that "the zone" never really happens). Video might actually be worse in practise than an open office. Could turn it off, of course, but it's the kind of thing that could easily end up as a "not a team player" flag in the modern software world. There are things like PukkaTeam[1] which go for snapshots rather than video. Less bandwidth and perhaps marginally less intrusive, but still means people are looking at you... [1] https://www.pukkateam.com/features https://www.pukkateam.com/features
    - prawn 10y ago
      Have you ever worked at a desk beside a colleague? From what I see in my office and that of clients, it's fairly common.
MarkMc 10y ago
I love working remotely because it has allowed me to run my business while travelling around India. But I still feel my work would be more efficient if I was sitting next to my co-workers. There's some intangible quality involving instant feedback, body language and social interaction that would make our communication more direct and engaging. Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the rule.
- rdm42116 10y ago
  I do a mix. Some days I like working remotely. Others I will go into the office. I think more than anything I just want freedom. I don't want to be locked into 8-5. Some days I want to work late and do stuff during the day (yardwork, appointments). I just want flexibility.
Randgalt 10y ago
This is great. The Digital Nomad future is upon us. I've been doing it for 3 years and it's wonderful. Live where you want. Get out of the Silicon Valley rat race.
NumberCruncher 10y ago
It is somehow ironic that not so long ago we could send ships on a 4 month trip around the word, could manage the construction of amazing buildings or sent armies to fight wars on the end of the word without being able to communicate with the people doing their job/duty. Nowdays we can barely let change the font size of a button on a webpage without having a stand up meeting or a conference call.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure that, if Queen Izabella could have daily standups with Chris Columbus, she would.
  - gotrecruit 10y ago
    lol thank you! what a ridiculous notion that just because people in the past COULD NOT communicate efficiently, that it was a preferred or better way to do things. any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly, or at least maintain access to information.
    - mhurron 10y ago
      > any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly Of course they want to, that's how they justify their existence. The question is do they need to have that constant ability to look over your shoulder for work to be done.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    That's not the point. The question is if Columbus would have done his job better if he had the ability to do daily stand-ups with the Queen? I don't think so, because the Queen probably didn't have the skills of an explorer. Great leaders have always delegated ;-)
    - dcole2929 10y ago
      In all fairness Columbus was pretty terrible at his job. The only reason he was even working for the queen in the first place is because pretty much no one else would hire him because of his track record of being terrible at his job. He tried sailing to India the long way around, almost ran out of supplies and got lucky that the Americas happened to exist.
collyw 10y ago
"Communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation." Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.
- wccrawford 10y ago
  A recent high-priority project allowed me to tell people they couldn't bother me for 6 of my 8 hours in the office. It's been awesome for my morale and my productivity both. I love helping others, but being interrupted constantly is incredibly frustrating. It can wait until tomorrow.
  - dasmoth 10y ago
    Are you able to keep this going once $high_prio_project is over?
    - wccrawford 10y ago
      I have no idea, but I'm hoping so.
blubb-fish 10y ago
Remote work is going to be the future - aided by VR technology collaboration in teams will become much easier. I already look forward to living in a little house on cheap ground somewhere in the nowhere and do my fork from there :)
MrPatan 10y ago
> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512379. I'm sorry, but these sorts of comments don't belong on HN. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
agibsonccc 10y ago
I've thought a lot about this. I am posting this in an attempt to give an example of what's worked for 1 company, not as a "guide" or "best practices". I post this in an attempt to give people ideas on what may work for them. I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe. We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote. From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel. We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote. We've more than doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million. A few notes on what's worked for us: Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members. Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well. Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home. We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people, but has worked for us. I won't claim this scales long term, but there have been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine. We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication. Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must. We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup. For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching. Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.
- random42 10y ago
  > Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well. Can you please elaborate on that?
  - agibsonccc 10y ago
    It happens impromptu. I see a pull request or an interesting project someone built with us. If they stick around and seem interested in the project, I reach out via direct message and see what their goals are. I half heartedly ask them if they'd like to do this full time. If they seem interested, we setup a minor call and we talk about current projects they're working on, and what we're working on at the company. We compare notes and see if interests line up. From there it's negotiations. I've already seen their code and interacted with them for a few weeks by this point, so the interviews are painless and obvious. One thing I make sure to do is be very clear/direct that we're a business. Here's how we make money, here's who our customers tend to be.
catuskoti 10y ago
When practically doing it, remote work has its pluses and its cons. At the same time, for the organization, it still multiplies the pool of candidates by at least 50. So, you could certainly get better talent. I live across the globe in a country that is much cheaper than back home while my effective tax rate is zero. I work from coffee shops and from my flat. I don't see why I would ever go back to sitting in an office ...
fitzwatermellow 10y ago
I believe the real dichotomy is "async/sync" rather than "remote/local". There are individuals who require constant micro-coordination on every decision and others who get the big picture immediately and can implement details without specific instruction. My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated "community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend ;)
DrNuke 10y ago
I would be very happy to join a remote team as a data analyst / scientist but, whatever reason (skills, fit, pay, age, time zone), I am falling short. For what I see, many still consider employing remotely as a way to assemble a cheap sweatshop, preferably drones.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  Those are mostly first-timers with remote. If they've tried that they know that the only way for it to save money is to throw a boatload of management at it and in the end it costs the same or more. People who can reliably work remotely are worth attracting because there are many more of them than there are good employees in your local commute range.
  - DrNuke 10y ago
    Main problem is micromanaging time instead of targets and milestones. No trust, remotely? Fine, just don't fake it.
cephaslr 10y ago
I love this topic. On one hand, many tech giants spent an exorbitant amount of money hiring and bringing their technical talent to one location. Easy examples such as Google and especially Amazon come to mind. On the other hand, any studies on the subject strongly imply anyone farther than 50 feet rarely speaks anyway so you are better off with remote teams as they are setup with better tooling (slack, et tal). https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ As a single data point my experience as a hiring manager and allowing remote candidates allowed for a much higher level of talent to draw upon. Furthermore, I have had remote teams develop a great culture merely by turning on their cameras during the daily standup. Finally, I also question the productivity of team building 'dinners' and other one-off activities. Having been part of teams with lots of corporate dinners and teams without its hard for me to really call out any specific value. I truly do want to be convinced otherwise, but the strongest argument I have seen here so far is a vague 'Face to face is superior' when I have had great remote teams with cameras on. Anyone have a more data driven argument? Even if its a few data points?
- beachstartup 10y ago
  of course, all you're saying is right. we are 100% remote, have been for about 2 years. the only thing i'd add/modify is i do like to meet up with everyone at least once every 12-24 months, usually in a town where a convention is happening. note we don't actually go to the convention, which i think are largely pointless, but it's good to take advantage of when a bunch of colleagues are in town. that's when we bring the new hires in to meet the team and network with the industry at large.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  I'm all for being remote (been working from home for about 8 years now for 3 different companies). Two scenarios where face-to-face wins: 1. "Onboarding + noob training". Sure, this can be done remotely but it's vastly more effective face-to-face especially when the tech isn't limited to the computer and there are "real life" gadgets involved in getting set up for development. 2. If the team isn't 100% remote it takes extra effort for those in the office to be "inclusive" so that remote folks are 100% up to speed. Just like with any extra effort in an already busy environment this doesn't always happen. Can't really blame them either - if a decision is made on the fly between two busy devs hacking their asses off and they rely on you seeing their PR to derive what they decided on that's just how things go sometimes.
whamlastxmas 10y ago
If only applying to a remote job didn't feel like putting my resume into a digital paper shredder.
JohnnyConatus 10y ago
Clearly getting rid of RW fixed Yahoo /s
bad_user 10y ago
I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack connection. Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat something. And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder. And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of course, but we make it work.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  That is generally not compatible with the American way of working - especially in the startup scene - where ever second you're not working is considered a second that your competitor companies have over you.
  - hashkb 10y ago
    ...but we also all know how untrue and unhealthy that attitude is. 'murica.
  - ctrl-j 10y ago
    And that's just one of the many problems with the SF startup scene. Many other corps in many other parts of the US are perfectly compatible with what was described.
  - legitster 10y ago
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I recommend SococoRS for this issue (making remote work seem more like teamwork). It allows you to actually go up to a coworker's desk and say Hi. Unless their door is closed of course. Does screen share/vid conferencing and chat rooms, all in a simulation of a virtual office. { I own stock in Sococo }
robinhowlett 10y ago
Does anyone work in a remote team with an always-on video conference? I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone, sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times. The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?
- fernandotakai 10y ago
  we don't do always-on video conferencing where i work, but with slack + zoom, you can really easily start a conference call on the DM chat (/zoom -> works)
ArtDev 10y ago
I don't see any valid reason why anyone vaguely technical should commute to an office. I think this is really overvalued: "communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation". Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother. Communicating by text is also better because you never have to say/type the same thing twice. You never forget what a teammate told you because you can look up the conversation. Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or friends. Personally, I don't get it. I have worked remotely for 3+ years as a contractor. The last office I worked at involved a long commute even though I mostly communicated by Hipchat. I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space. Remote work is the future!
- dasmoth 10y ago
  >>> Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. >>> This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother. I probably fall into this category (actually, for a lot of "serious" things I prefer e-mail to Slack/Hipchat/whatever), but I'm not at all sure this applies to "anyone technical": there does seem to be another culture of technical folks who genuinely do thrive on open offices or "team spaces" and lots of discussion. I don't think there's any environment that will keep everyone happy. I wonder if we'll eventually see people sorting into distinct introvert-oriented and extrovert-oriented organisations?
vonnik 10y ago
To follow up on what @agibsonccc has been saying: Remote, open-source hiring is one of the best ways to match companies and candidates. I used to have to recruit for a closed-source company, and it was really hard to get good information - for the company and for the applicants. Wrote about it here, if anyone's curious. Recruiting is a trail of tears: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tXlm?trk=prof-sm https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tX... In open-source, you have nearly perfect information: the contributors see the company's code and how they operate as a team; the company see the contributor's code, persistence, reliability and friendliness. And anyway, it's open-source, so everyone is solving their own problems for their own reasons, so they get something out of it in the end no matter what.
abysmallyideal 10y ago
At this one trench of a large corp where I had a minor contract, they had an office in multiple locations. The idea was, to avoid traffic jams people would work from the satellite offices until the traffic cleared. They opened these up in areas where a large number of their employees commuted from. It was pretty slick, with private sound proof rooms, open spaces for team meetups where they would work then carpool to the main offices, cubicles, lounges, super nice kitchens, etc... In fact it was a shitton nicer than the places they called their main office. They ended up selling some of it, or downgrading because teams just stayed at the nicer satellites and some ended up getting poached by cunning recruiters and other internal teams. Edit: The floorplan was pretty far out there and I think they were emulating some European layout. It was super dynamic, so people and teams could migrate between conference rooms, private enclosures, private shared offices, lounges, etc... as they needed or desired and remote conference to the main office. Though after some super important team that had the floor above us lost several key developers and admins to a local company , and people from the main offices were commuting to the satellite offices instead, they started selling off floors or closing off access.
aioprisan 10y ago
It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some remote workers.
oxide 10y ago
I have almost no marketable skills to speak of, how can I work remotely? I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do. Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work remotely in an actual, skill-required job? I'm not incompetent: I'm proficient in plenty of basic office software, I can troubleshoot/fix a computer, and I can type 90wpm. You know, the fundamentals. Thank you in advance.
sakopov 10y ago
I am the only employee in a company of about 60/70 who is completely remote. I was actually working from the headquarters and then ended up relocating to a new city. While I enjoy the peace and quite and get 3 times more stuff done, I cannot shake the feeling of isolation. Some days I feel like i'm going fucking insane not having somebody to just walk up and talk to or go to lunch with. Yeah there are coffee shops. But really how much time are you going to spend working out of a busy coffee shop? Maybe 3 or 4 hours before you realize that you can't hear anybody on a conference call or you're irritating someone next to you who's studying for an exam. There are also co-working spaces, which cost on average about 25% of what I pay for my apartment. Seriously, if you're thinking about working remote REALLY consider what you're getting into. Being stuck in 4 walls 8 hours a day does amazing things to productivity but is ultimately a fucking mental torture.

347 points by stockkid 10y ago

Okay, look. This is easy. I can't pay rent or a mortgage with a team. When my kid asks me what's for dinner, I can't feed her some groceries I got with all the team spirit and esprit de corps that I've picked up. When I need to go to the doctor and he says I need something expensive, all my fellow teammembers aren't going to immediately offer to pitch in and help with those. The author says "I think that we mistakenly put jobs ahead of teams because we choose to ignore the obvious, and sometimes nuanced complications of remote work." No, it's because I've got bills to pay and people to provide for.

anirudh24seven 10y ago
I think there are 2 sides and both sides are important. I think that the author was focussing on the half of our awake time that we spend doing our job, while you are focussing on the other half. The author is probably talking about naive remote job seekers who focus on the job but don't consider the team culture. I was one such naive job seeker and used to think in that manner until a few years ago.
- fsiefken 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on the challenges you encountered with dealing with remote team culture? What realizations or adaptations made you less naive and more realistic and pragmatic in dealing with it?
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Not OP, but my personal experience, having done some remote work for a big multinational and now for a startup, the reason it worked well for me was because I already knew the people very well. If I were to join a team of people I've never met to work remote there are too many subtle unasked questions in the background. For example, right now I have one guy I work with who I only met - and only briefly - after months of working together. I often was in doubt about Skype chats and emails, did I go too far? Was that humor appropriate? His response seems chilly, and he hasn't responded for 5 minutes now but until I said THAT he always responded right away, did I offend him? You can just brush it off and ignore it, and it may work out - or it may accumulate under the surface until some day it explodes. Or more likely, it's going to fester below the surface and hinder communication: You are less likely to communicate and when you do then only the minimum when you are unsure of the other guy, even if it is just slightly. It really does not need to be a major disagreement, the small and sometimes (when remote, often?) imagined ones are that hurt. It feels much safer to work away from others when you already feel safe about what will happen when you screw up, or when you make a mistake on the project or in the communication, when you understand the other side from experience. Otherwise imagination takes over, your brain fills the parts that are not visible in remote communication, and when it has no data to do so it will just fill in something, and if you don't feel extremely secure in yourself and in your relationship that may very well be small subtle fears.
scrollaway 10y ago
I'm surprised you made it all the way to the third paragraph if you just weren't going to read the article. The point the article is making (a point I understand really well, as a remote worker and a non-24 sleeper) is that a remote job isn't simply "do your exact same job, except do it at home". To actually have it work, you need to fully account for your remote employees. This affects your company, it affects work management, planning, execution, everything. It affects how the work is assigned, how it's prioritized, how the meetings are held. It completely changes the social aspect of the job, so that needs to be accounted for both from the employees' and employers' perspective. Or you can just ignore all this, interpret the article's title however you feel like, and talk about salary. Whatever.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  At my employer, it takes 8 dedicated Slack channels, numerous daily, weekly, and monthly meetings, and a dedicated conference room. And continual reminding from the boss - "Call a random team member, and BS for 5 minutes, you have my permission." But my remote coworkers are definitely part of the team. It does help that the office parts of the team are scattered between 2 offices in widely different time zones - people in the other office may as well be working from home. This is for a 24/7/365 support organization.

alex-yo 10y ago

There is no shortage of remote job boards and job aggregators That's true, there is just a shortage of the job offers. I'm looking for a remote job now. All the job boards have between 2 to 5 job offers per day. To each of them answer thousands of people. The aggregators are even worse. They are automated. That's why they contain an ad even when it has no remote allowed.

prawn 10y ago
If you're looking for a job, put a bit more info in your HN profile about what sort of work you're looking for, and what you specialise in.
- alex-yo 10y ago
  Good point, thank you.
  - hackits 10y ago
    Interested in your `conference talks about databases` is there any online links to your talks? also your email address strikes me as being a bit odd. I guess you don't want the bots finding your real email address. cheers.
    - alex-yo 10y ago
      Yep, anonymity is funny. I'm not sure about the recordings, and presentations are not in English, and are made as a background for talking, so reading them would be useless.
sparrish 10y ago
This was not our experience. We posted for a full-time remote frontend position in our 100% remote company and only received a few inquiries. Thankfully one of them was the right fit but I'm dubious to your "thousands of people".

archon810 10y ago

If some of the site owners see this. I clicked on a random job by Gitlab. Two of the links at the end looked interesting. Both are dead. https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/ https://remotebase.io/handbook/hiring/ https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://remotebase.io/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ Whose fail? Gitlab's or RemoteBase's?

whatusername 10y ago
Looks like the job text/urls is scraped. These two URL's have the same text: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer https://remotebase.io/company/gitlab/jobs/developer So I suspect thats a remotebase.io issue. The links you're after are: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/
stockkid 10y ago
It is RemoteBase's issue. I built a scrapper for them to help keep their recruiting effort DRY. While it's being fixed, here are the correct links: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/

jimmywanger 10y ago

I think the main point of this article (which could have been half the length) is that you can't just declare a job remote. You have to have a culture and technology that supports it, or else if you take that remote job, you're getting set up for failure. If everybody else is having water cooler conversations, and making binding decisions based on them without email or chat, any remote employee is going to be constantly blindsided, and not rewarded by the organization. I worked on one (and am currently working on another) highly distributed team, and the amount of whip-cracking that my manager had to do to make sure everything was documented and accessible to everybody on the team was incredible.

elcct 10y ago
Technology is there - Jira, Slack, Skype, GitHub, email... There is absolutely no excuse to not have remote jobs.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  Did you not read most of my comment? The technology is there, it wasn't ten years ago. Now, it comes down to management setting strict guidelines and enforcing them. What good is it to pay for Jira accounts when nobody uses them? Or what good is it to have Github and everybody ends up hosting their own private repos? That is definitely a management mandate, and logistically, it's a lot easier to manage a group if they are all in the same place.
  - ljf 10y ago
    Totally and wholeheartedly agree. You cant just solve a problem with tech, you also have to think about who you will move the people. I'm all for remote work, and would love it to work for me, but the culture needs to be right to support it.
  - aardvark179 10y ago
    I'd say the tech has been there a lot longer than you think, I've known people who've worked in distributed teams 20 years ago. Yes, the tech was a little different, but it was still good enough. I absolutely agree with you though that the culture of making sure everything is done using those tools is the important part. You essentially have to give up most of the benefits you might get from some members being colocated and do everything as though you were all at separate sites.

jkot 10y ago

In my experience it is best to create your own remote job. You can start consulting / freelancing. Or existing job can be made remote. Employer must trust you.

xufi 10y ago
Actually, This is a smart approach. A friend of mien made his own team and he's doing quite well v.s the old way where he was paired with people he did not get along with

dasmoth 10y ago

I get what this is saying, but there does seem to be a nearly-unspoken assumption here that the "perfect" working environment involves high-frequency communication, including regular synchronous communication -- i.e. replicating the open-plan/daily standups/short iterations model of programming that seems to be the current thing for in-office programming jobs. That's a perfectly reasonable model, and clearly suits a lot of people well, but I do hope there's still appetite for exploring coarser-grained "trust people to go off on their own to solve problems" models as well.

ljf 10y ago
It's hard - when that model (leave people to do the right thing) works well - it is amazing. It needs skilled and engaged people. The problem comes when you have people that don't work well under that model, and who need continual check points to ensure they really are doing the right thing, and that you haven't just wasted a bunch of time. Getting these two groups to work together is hard, when sadly, getting great people is hard.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Agreed. But there doesn't seem to even be much willingness to try the "autonomous people" model.
  - soundwave106 10y ago
    There is unfortunately a bias against introversion in many companies, which explains why some don't bother to try. (Recent article: http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21706490-organisations-have-too-long-been-oriented-towards-extroverts-companies-should-help http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21706490-...) Having said that I agree also that there are also trust issues. Forming trust is a hard thing. It's a shame, because programming (from at least my perspective) is one discipline, where the quality of work is so much higher when you are "in the zone" and can concentrate on a single task without interruptions.

FuNe 10y ago

I'm partially remote working (RW) at an organization that is slowly rolling back its RW culture(1). The motto for this goes like 'teams work better if they are collocated, yada, yada'. The real reason is that managers want to feel in control (plus they want to drive away a lot of people by taking RW away). "Culture" is used as a smoke screen for more sinister incentives. (I can say that with confidence because I can see that RW is working fine while what hinders productivity is mammoth bureaucracy and politics put forward by the same people that keep blabbing about "culture". To me it's clear that remote working is (should be) the way to go (why on earth tech jobs and consequently tech workers should cluster in small geographic areas, spend hours in commuting and feed our salaries to landlord rentiers is beyond my understanding). Then again other things in the past were a no-brainer future (e.g. less working hours - see experiments in Kellogs) but the world spinned to a different direction. PS: Of course RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore which makes the whole thing more of a mixed bag of blessings and curses - like everything else in life :) . (1) I think the trend started off by M.Mayer's move to roll back RW in yahoo (<cynic>leading to the spectacular yahoo growth we all know of</cynic>) but I'm not sure.

Domenic_S 10y ago
> RW makes your tech job even easier to offshore I don't think so. Offshore comes with its own challenges.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Tell that to managers.
  - croon 10y ago
    ... before it's too late and they can't backtrack because it already cost too much in the transition and their ego can't handle admitting they were wrong.
    - pault 10y ago
      I've lost track of the number of times I've been hired to fix an outsourced project disaster. I feel like this has burned enough people that I'm not nearly as worried about it as I was 10 years ago. If you make your living doing wordpress sites, though, it's time to retool.

matt_wulfeck 10y ago

> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. There is no catered lunch or a hip office with table tennis table. Everything artificial is stripped away. I totally disagree with this. The most naked form of communication is (and IMHO always will be) face to face. I can't tell how many countless times many emails were exchanged before simply speaking face to face solved the problem. Working remotely is awesome. All power to remote workers, but no amount of collaborative tools replaces the value of face-to-face communication.

Domenic_S 10y ago
Very few issues that are easily resolved f2f can't be resolved on the phone. It just takes people who are really great at communicating to make it work. f2f is way better for teambuilding though. Hard to go out to dinner together over Slack.
FuNe 10y ago
Not sure if I agree with that. Lots of times I catch myself editing my messages again and again thus making them up to the point. You have to be a very good communicator in talking and have very good listeners to get the same amount of accuracy. Communication throughput is less though and what goes missing for sure is context (facial expressions, posture, etc) but for some people that is not a bad thing per se.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  This is probably a personal thing. I'm definitely an e-mail editor, but plenty of people prefer real-time or near-real-time communication to the precision of a carefully considered e-mail. At least Slack allows editing of messages...
cookiecaper 10y ago
I don't think the author is claiming that more expressive or rewarding friendships form as much as he's claiming that remote really makes you focus on the meat and the content of the colleague's output. That's actually something I LOVE about working remotely. There are far fewer politics because instead of saying "Oh man, Jimmy looked at me cross-eyed last week, I don't want to do anything with him anymore", you just say "Oh, Jimmy needs help on this issue. I'll send him a reply in a minute." I have literally had colleagues complain that they were offended by the way I sat in my chair (and, I've since learned that at least one of my friends has been subjected to this same criticism at a separate workplace). Remote work strips away all of that inconsequential crap and leaves you to focus on the data. This is one of the major unsung benefits of remote work: it removes a huge amount of office politics and allows employees to concentrate on working and think less about campaigning. I've had colleagues resent me for not bringing enough free snacks into the office when I was in a supervisory role. Yes, really. Anything that can help mitigate that kind of thing is great.

Domenic_S 10y ago

My team just started a large project; a few of us work remotely and a few are in an office. For the project, we opened a Zoom video channel, and all sit there with video chat running on our second monitors. It's working out great. We very much have the be-able-to-pop-in-for-a-question thing going on like you would in a project war room. I'm thinking of making it a standing thing one day weekly to work this way. There's certainly a distraction tradeoff, but the communication bandwidth is just phenomenal.

prawn 10y ago
I've long assumed that prior to HMDs taking off, we'd see people work with a video screen at the side extreme of their desk, showing a view of someone not physically adjacent to them, and the reverse for that colleague. So, you'd have a representation of a teammate beside you. Large LCDs are cheap. Connectivity is getting to the point that this wouldn't tax some office connections. Has anyone tried it? Obviously people could switch off the screen or the feed if they needed to make a private call, or if they were taking a lunch break. People talk about Hangout windows and so on, but I think having something you can glance at but not have right in front of you would be a better representation of current offices.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  This solves some peoples' problems at the expense of others. A big attraction of remote work to me is that I don't have the feeling of being overlooked while "in the zone" (which tends to mean that "the zone" never really happens). Video might actually be worse in practise than an open office. Could turn it off, of course, but it's the kind of thing that could easily end up as a "not a team player" flag in the modern software world. There are things like PukkaTeam[1] which go for snapshots rather than video. Less bandwidth and perhaps marginally less intrusive, but still means people are looking at you... [1] https://www.pukkateam.com/features https://www.pukkateam.com/features
  - prawn 10y ago
    Have you ever worked at a desk beside a colleague? From what I see in my office and that of clients, it's fairly common.

MarkMc 10y ago

I love working remotely because it has allowed me to run my business while travelling around India. But I still feel my work would be more efficient if I was sitting next to my co-workers. There's some intangible quality involving instant feedback, body language and social interaction that would make our communication more direct and engaging. Despite all the advances in technology for working remotely, face-to-face remains the best even for digital businesses. Facebook and Google are evidence of this: working remotely for these companies is the exception rather than the rule.

rdm42116 10y ago
I do a mix. Some days I like working remotely. Others I will go into the office. I think more than anything I just want freedom. I don't want to be locked into 8-5. Some days I want to work late and do stuff during the day (yardwork, appointments). I just want flexibility.

Randgalt 10y ago

This is great. The Digital Nomad future is upon us. I've been doing it for 3 years and it's wonderful. Live where you want. Get out of the Silicon Valley rat race.

NumberCruncher 10y ago

It is somehow ironic that not so long ago we could send ships on a 4 month trip around the word, could manage the construction of amazing buildings or sent armies to fight wars on the end of the word without being able to communicate with the people doing their job/duty. Nowdays we can barely let change the font size of a button on a webpage without having a stand up meeting or a conference call.

StavrosK 10y ago
I'm pretty sure that, if Queen Izabella could have daily standups with Chris Columbus, she would.
- gotrecruit 10y ago
  lol thank you! what a ridiculous notion that just because people in the past COULD NOT communicate efficiently, that it was a preferred or better way to do things. any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly, or at least maintain access to information.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    > any good manager/boss/supervisor/leader/etc will want to be updated regularly Of course they want to, that's how they justify their existence. The question is do they need to have that constant ability to look over your shoulder for work to be done.
- bad_user 10y ago
  That's not the point. The question is if Columbus would have done his job better if he had the ability to do daily stand-ups with the Queen? I don't think so, because the Queen probably didn't have the skills of an explorer. Great leaders have always delegated ;-)
  - dcole2929 10y ago
    In all fairness Columbus was pretty terrible at his job. The only reason he was even working for the queen in the first place is because pretty much no one else would hire him because of his track record of being terrible at his job. He tried sailing to India the long way around, almost ran out of supplies and got lucky that the Americas happened to exist.

collyw 10y ago

"Communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation." Probably the main reason I want to get a remote job. Constant disruptions.

wccrawford 10y ago
A recent high-priority project allowed me to tell people they couldn't bother me for 6 of my 8 hours in the office. It's been awesome for my morale and my productivity both. I love helping others, but being interrupted constantly is incredibly frustrating. It can wait until tomorrow.
- dasmoth 10y ago
  Are you able to keep this going once $high_prio_project is over?
  - wccrawford 10y ago
    I have no idea, but I'm hoping so.

blubb-fish 10y ago

Remote work is going to be the future - aided by VR technology collaboration in teams will become much easier. I already look forward to living in a little house on cheap ground somewhere in the nowhere and do my fork from there :)

MrPatan 10y ago

> In remote team, we get to experience the culture at its most naked form. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

sctb 10y ago
We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12512379. I'm sorry, but these sorts of comments don't belong on HN. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

agibsonccc 10y ago

I've thought a lot about this. I am posting this in an attempt to give an example of what's worked for 1 company, not as a "guide" or "best practices". I post this in an attempt to give people ideas on what may work for them. I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe. We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote. From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel. We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote. We've more than doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million. A few notes on what's worked for us: Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use https://gitter.im/ https://gitter.im/ to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members. Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well. Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home. We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people, but has worked for us. I won't claim this scales long term, but there have been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine. We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication. Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must. We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup. For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching. Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.

random42 10y ago
> Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well. Can you please elaborate on that?
- agibsonccc 10y ago
  It happens impromptu. I see a pull request or an interesting project someone built with us. If they stick around and seem interested in the project, I reach out via direct message and see what their goals are. I half heartedly ask them if they'd like to do this full time. If they seem interested, we setup a minor call and we talk about current projects they're working on, and what we're working on at the company. We compare notes and see if interests line up. From there it's negotiations. I've already seen their code and interacted with them for a few weeks by this point, so the interviews are painless and obvious. One thing I make sure to do is be very clear/direct that we're a business. Here's how we make money, here's who our customers tend to be.

catuskoti 10y ago

When practically doing it, remote work has its pluses and its cons. At the same time, for the organization, it still multiplies the pool of candidates by at least 50. So, you could certainly get better talent. I live across the globe in a country that is much cheaper than back home while my effective tax rate is zero. I work from coffee shops and from my flat. I don't see why I would ever go back to sitting in an office ...

fitzwatermellow 10y ago

I believe the real dichotomy is "async/sync" rather than "remote/local". There are individuals who require constant micro-coordination on every decision and others who get the big picture immediately and can implement details without specific instruction. My best decision was probably offloading team coordination to a dedicated "community manager". Even an undergrad working part-time and using mobile Slack / GMail can be trained in an afternoon and be 110% effective. The amount of bandwidth it frees up so you can focus on strategy and product is a Godsend ;)

DrNuke 10y ago

I would be very happy to join a remote team as a data analyst / scientist but, whatever reason (skills, fit, pay, age, time zone), I am falling short. For what I see, many still consider employing remotely as a way to assemble a cheap sweatshop, preferably drones.

dexterdog 10y ago
Those are mostly first-timers with remote. If they've tried that they know that the only way for it to save money is to throw a boatload of management at it and in the end it costs the same or more. People who can reliably work remotely are worth attracting because there are many more of them than there are good employees in your local commute range.
- DrNuke 10y ago
  Main problem is micromanaging time instead of targets and milestones. No trust, remotely? Fine, just don't fake it.

cephaslr 10y ago

I love this topic. On one hand, many tech giants spent an exorbitant amount of money hiring and bringing their technical talent to one location. Easy examples such as Google and especially Amazon come to mind. On the other hand, any studies on the subject strongly imply anyone farther than 50 feet rarely speaks anyway so you are better off with remote teams as they are setup with better tooling (slack, et tal). https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ https://goo.gl/bvNXHQ As a single data point my experience as a hiring manager and allowing remote candidates allowed for a much higher level of talent to draw upon. Furthermore, I have had remote teams develop a great culture merely by turning on their cameras during the daily standup. Finally, I also question the productivity of team building 'dinners' and other one-off activities. Having been part of teams with lots of corporate dinners and teams without its hard for me to really call out any specific value. I truly do want to be convinced otherwise, but the strongest argument I have seen here so far is a vague 'Face to face is superior' when I have had great remote teams with cameras on. Anyone have a more data driven argument? Even if its a few data points?

beachstartup 10y ago
of course, all you're saying is right. we are 100% remote, have been for about 2 years. the only thing i'd add/modify is i do like to meet up with everyone at least once every 12-24 months, usually in a town where a convention is happening. note we don't actually go to the convention, which i think are largely pointless, but it's good to take advantage of when a bunch of colleagues are in town. that's when we bring the new hires in to meet the team and network with the industry at large.
ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
I'm all for being remote (been working from home for about 8 years now for 3 different companies). Two scenarios where face-to-face wins: 1. "Onboarding + noob training". Sure, this can be done remotely but it's vastly more effective face-to-face especially when the tech isn't limited to the computer and there are "real life" gadgets involved in getting set up for development. 2. If the team isn't 100% remote it takes extra effort for those in the office to be "inclusive" so that remote folks are 100% up to speed. Just like with any extra effort in an already busy environment this doesn't always happen. Can't really blame them either - if a decision is made on the fly between two busy devs hacking their asses off and they rely on you seeing their PR to derive what they decided on that's just how things go sometimes.

whamlastxmas 10y ago

If only applying to a remote job didn't feel like putting my resume into a digital paper shredder.

JohnnyConatus 10y ago

Clearly getting rid of RW fixed Yahoo /s

bad_user 10y ago

I work remotely. I'm from Romania and we have a team that's distributed across the country, with some members from other European countries as well. We do have a small office where I live, but it is provided just as a place to come to in case you don't like working from home and I do go to our office almost daily, but most of the team is on the other end of a Gmail/Skype/Slack connection. Today I got tired at 1 PM, got up from my desk, got my bike and went for a ride in the park nearby. Once in a while I would take the phone out of my pocket and give quick answers on Slack, but most of my time I enjoyed what is the beginning of autumn. You can feel it in the air, it's more chilly, the light gets warmer and the color of the trees start changing. It's by far the most beautiful time of the year for walking in parks. And it felt great. Now I'm back home and I'm thinking of finishing my work, but after I eat something. And I do this all the time, while managing to get shit done. Many times I work late to finish this or that. But I'm a responsible software developer, I care about the project and I can work without somebody watching over my shoulder. And surely there are those times where you need to do design sessions with the rest of the team. But we do those over Skype and every once in a while we travel in order to meet face to face. There are challenges in communication of course, but we make it work.

vertex-four 10y ago
That is generally not compatible with the American way of working - especially in the startup scene - where ever second you're not working is considered a second that your competitor companies have over you.
- hashkb 10y ago
  ...but we also all know how untrue and unhealthy that attitude is. 'murica.
- ctrl-j 10y ago
  And that's just one of the many problems with the SF startup scene. Many other corps in many other parts of the US are perfectly compatible with what was described.
- legitster 10y ago

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

I recommend SococoRS for this issue (making remote work seem more like teamwork). It allows you to actually go up to a coworker's desk and say Hi. Unless their door is closed of course. Does screen share/vid conferencing and chat rooms, all in a simulation of a virtual office. { I own stock in Sococo }

robinhowlett 10y ago

Does anyone work in a remote team with an always-on video conference? I really, really prefer being able to shout out a quick question but the friction costs (and fear of interrupting deep thought) about calling someone, sometimes even a Slack message, prevents communication at times. The times where I've been pairing or on a long call "in the background" have been great I thought. Any downsides for those who do this regularly?

fernandotakai 10y ago
we don't do always-on video conferencing where i work, but with slack + zoom, you can really easily start a conference call on the DM chat (/zoom -> works)

ArtDev 10y ago

I don't see any valid reason why anyone vaguely technical should commute to an office. I think this is really overvalued: "communicating with co-workers while working remotely is not as simple as going up to their desk and starting a conversation". Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother. Communicating by text is also better because you never have to say/type the same thing twice. You never forget what a teammate told you because you can look up the conversation. Company "culture" must be something for people who don't have families or friends. Personally, I don't get it. I have worked remotely for 3+ years as a contractor. The last office I worked at involved a long commute even though I mostly communicated by Hipchat. I don't ever see going into an office again unless it my my own leased space. Remote work is the future!

dasmoth 10y ago
>>> Anyone technical despises being interrupted when working. >>> This is why Hipchat/Slack/irc is the best way to communicate, even when sitting right next to eachother. I probably fall into this category (actually, for a lot of "serious" things I prefer e-mail to Slack/Hipchat/whatever), but I'm not at all sure this applies to "anyone technical": there does seem to be another culture of technical folks who genuinely do thrive on open offices or "team spaces" and lots of discussion. I don't think there's any environment that will keep everyone happy. I wonder if we'll eventually see people sorting into distinct introvert-oriented and extrovert-oriented organisations?

vonnik 10y ago

To follow up on what @agibsonccc has been saying: Remote, open-source hiring is one of the best ways to match companies and candidates. I used to have to recruit for a closed-source company, and it was really hard to get good information - for the company and for the applicants. Wrote about it here, if anyone's curious. Recruiting is a trail of tears: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tXlm?trk=prof-sm https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/0_03COrPtojnK4VxI2N1tX... In open-source, you have nearly perfect information: the contributors see the company's code and how they operate as a team; the company see the contributor's code, persistence, reliability and friendliness. And anyway, it's open-source, so everyone is solving their own problems for their own reasons, so they get something out of it in the end no matter what.

abysmallyideal 10y ago

At this one trench of a large corp where I had a minor contract, they had an office in multiple locations. The idea was, to avoid traffic jams people would work from the satellite offices until the traffic cleared. They opened these up in areas where a large number of their employees commuted from. It was pretty slick, with private sound proof rooms, open spaces for team meetups where they would work then carpool to the main offices, cubicles, lounges, super nice kitchens, etc... In fact it was a shitton nicer than the places they called their main office. They ended up selling some of it, or downgrading because teams just stayed at the nicer satellites and some ended up getting poached by cunning recruiters and other internal teams. Edit: The floorplan was pretty far out there and I think they were emulating some European layout. It was super dynamic, so people and teams could migrate between conference rooms, private enclosures, private shared offices, lounges, etc... as they needed or desired and remote conference to the main office. Though after some super important team that had the floor above us lost several key developers and admins to a local company , and people from the main offices were commuting to the satellite offices instead, they started selling off floors or closing off access.

aioprisan 10y ago

It really depends on the type of work that you're doing. If the work requires a lot of communication and details that need to be hashes out with people from various disciplines (i.e. PM, UX, Eng), you need to be colocated to get the job done quickly. Doing this part remote will only lead to frustrations and missed deadlines. But if everything is fully spec'd out and split into bite-size pieces for engineers to simply fill in the wholes with code and follow the spec, then a remote team can work really well. I've seen this many times at past consulting companies and now a product company where we do have some remote workers.

oxide 10y ago

I have almost no marketable skills to speak of, how can I work remotely? I'll take phone calls, answer questions from a script, whatever I have to do. Also, what marketable skills should I focus on developing if I want to work remotely in an actual, skill-required job? I'm not incompetent: I'm proficient in plenty of basic office software, I can troubleshoot/fix a computer, and I can type 90wpm. You know, the fundamentals. Thank you in advance.

sakopov 10y ago

I am the only employee in a company of about 60/70 who is completely remote. I was actually working from the headquarters and then ended up relocating to a new city. While I enjoy the peace and quite and get 3 times more stuff done, I cannot shake the feeling of isolation. Some days I feel like i'm going fucking insane not having somebody to just walk up and talk to or go to lunch with. Yeah there are coffee shops. But really how much time are you going to spend working out of a busy coffee shop? Maybe 3 or 4 hours before you realize that you can't hear anybody on a conference call or you're irritating someone next to you who's studying for an exam. There are also co-working spaces, which cost on average about 25% of what I pay for my apartment. Seriously, if you're thinking about working remote REALLY consider what you're getting into. Being stuck in 4 walls 8 hours a day does amazing things to productivity but is ultimately a fucking mental torture.