8 ms·

How I failed to land a remote position

134 points by kostarelo 9y ago

blakesterz 9y ago
>> I took back like 3 offers which lead me to the conclusion that the market of the remote positions is highly competitive and it's really hard to find the job that you would be happy enough. That's interesting, I'd love to hear from others who agree/disagree with that.
- LogicX 9y ago
  I've hired for a few remote positions. The calibur of candidates, and number of applicants is higher than for a position in only one city. Also, typically you get people applying from much lower cost of living areas, so they can be happier with a lower salary.
- Sorreah 9y ago
  I have tried in the past as well and got the same impression. It seems that in order to be hired remotely you need to be a "rockstar" and sell yourself as more than that. Remote workers seem to be held to higher standards, and my impressiom is that there's an emphasis in being comfortable with both the domain and the tech stack so that your only obstacle to be overcome to be productive is getting used to the quirks of being part of a remote team and the processes involved.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dsacco 9y ago
  I disagree with that. I've worked remotely for most of my career (three tech companies + long term consulting). I've worked remotely for so long that when I decide to join another company I'm specifically looking to work in an office :) To preempt the comments regarding survivorship bias or humblebrag: I acknowledge that people absolutely experience higher bars when interviewing fully remote positions. That said, I personally believe (from my own experience and that of friends) that people who typically experience higher competition in seeking remote positions are probably not optimizing their search. There are, broadly speaking, two classes of companies featuring remote positions. The first type is a company built on a foundation of remote-friendly culture - people communicate in Slack for almost everything, at least half the company is remote, positions are headlined with remote work, etc. The second type is a company that offers remote work and has a well-intentioned desire for remote employees, but which ultimately does not favor them. I've worked in both sorts of roles. If you are competing against non-remote candidates for the second type of company, then all things being equal they likely will not proceed with you. This is not only because of the cultural differences in preference but also because the interview process is not optimized to treat remote employees as first class citizens.
phantom_oracle 9y ago
Let me tell you something I learnt myself about remote job positions: - Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use stupid filters like "the right fit" - which most of the time equates to finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1 who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best) - As someone reading your blog post, even I did not make it past your full email text. It's just too long for HR to even bother. A shorter, concise, "get in your face" email sometimes works better - HR filters are the worst way to get remote positions. You said you have friends working for remote-first companies like Github and Automattic - that should have been your first method of entry to go direct to the team itself and not need to get through HR first - if you're a great programmer and your friends know it, they will gladly recommend you
- flyovercow 9y ago
  if
  - mc32 9y ago
    Not really really. It happens in other industries as well. It's not corruption. Corruption would be hiring someone without due diligence interviewing just because you know them. I can't think of one company which refuses referrals. Rather, even the largest of public companies have referral programs.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    > if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections? Two reasons: 1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment). 2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in groups. The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity in your professional capacity. Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work. It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default to it because it works often enough and because it's intuitively an attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction, even if it's technically suboptimal.
zebraflask 9y ago
Not to sound impolite at all, but your cover letter sounds more like a dating site profile than a cover letter for a job. Overly personal, a lot of irrelevant details. Too friendly. Let your resume, portfolio, etc. do the talking.
- smt88 9y ago
  I totally disagree. The resume/portfolio will talk either way, but they usually don't say enough. If a cover letter can give me an idea of what it's like to talk to someone in real life, it helps tremendously. Resumes just blend together, and it becomes impossible to tell anyone apart. Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there.
  - kostarelo 9y ago
    > Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there. Exactly. I know that there are a lot of better developers out there than me. I had to differentiate myself by introducing him in a more fun way just like I would do if I was meeting them in person.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    You stand out in a cover letter by finding a concise and convincing to summarize why they should interview you and the value you bring. Not by telling people your hobbies or how nice the beach near you is. That kind of stuff should come up naturally in a call or in person. The same applies to dating - putting so much info up front is rarely successful.
    - smt88 9y ago
austenallred 9y ago
When we hired for a remote position we received probably 100x the applications as when we hired in San Francisco. The pool of labor is much bigger and much cheaper. Now we're hiring a full-time machine learning instructor, and I can't even imagine trying to find someone in SF. Even remote is difficult, but at least there are applicants.
doggydogs94 9y ago
The phrase "I am obsessed with clean and efficient code" should be rewritten. Most developers will not want to work on the same project as you; they will not want their code picked over for imperfections.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  Wow, that's interesting. I do keep doing comments on PRs on small things but not at the point where I would reject a PR but rather discuss it. Maybe it's a strong phrase though.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    Frankly, I agree with the OP. I dislike people who nitpick during the code review, esp. if it's in a remote setting where communication is less efficient.
rampage101 9y ago
The cover letter should have more direct language and be mostly about your skill-set. You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than going through the official website application.
luke3butler 9y ago
I've been searching for a remote position for 6 months, and I can relate to OP on a lot of this post. Methods slightly different. I feel like I'm one of a huge crowd and being ignored completely is very common, even when I surpass all of their requirement check-boxes boxes, then some. I spend a good amount of time on each cover letter, research the company, and email the CEO or a lead developer on the team. I very rarely get a response, but twice I got to the first stage and then it's as if I was forgotten. I'm currently employed in a non-remote position, and I would be able to get a new local job with ease simply because I can walk in and talk to someone. I have gotten offers already, but I have a good list of reasons for wanting a remote position. I'm persisting, but it's getting a bit tiring going this long at it.
- theparanoid 9y ago
  Contracting can be a backdoor to remote work. If you're specialized it's not too difficult to find companies that need help. There's more risk (no benefits, no steady income).
  - briandear 9y ago
    I prefer remote contracting. It’s great. More money, a lot of exposure to different tech and ways of doing things (and ways to not do things.) As far as benefits, there are few benefits that are worth having a lower salary. Pension, retirement, all that nonsense – a waste of money – create your own retirement investments with the increased money you make. I’d rather money go into my pocket directly than to some benefit system that necessarily results in some amount of dead-weight loss. 65 per hour gross as a full timer versus 100 per hour gross as a contractor. 35 per hour is like an additional salary. But, it does take discipline and being extremely organized so it’s not for everyone.
    - luke3butler 9y ago
      Would you say contracting on the side is taking on too much? I think I could handle it. I like having the stability, so easing into contracting might be a viable option for me.
oisino 9y ago
I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely. That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  Can you recall a time where you hired a less qualified person in a remote position for some reason?
  - oisino 9y ago
    Personal referrals that this person was amazing. One huge challenge of remote team members is training is a lot harder. You end up hiring very experienced people due to this and not junior talent. Helpscout another remote team has a bunch of articles on how they have this issue also
late2part 9y ago
I'm on the other side of that coin! Do you know how hard it's been to find someone that is good at SRE/DevOps & wants to manage ESXi/VMWare Boxes and SANs/Storage?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- seorphates 9y ago
  Is that one job or four? I see four distinct engineering disciplines in your post - Site Reliability - DevOps - Compute - Storage. The only two I would reasonably consider combining (in a day-to-day combined way) are the last two and even that's a risk for any largish operation. The first two do not benefit being combined and neither will garner the attention required to succeed. I would not apply unless you were small, generous and good to your community. Buy hey, if you threw in networking and security I'd know you have two boxes and need help and I'd bite out of sheer curiosity, like a shark, testing, tasting.
  - late2part 9y ago
    Your point of view is interesting but surprising. We are a small company and a small group, but I don't view (my definitions) of devops/sre as terribly dissimilar. I think it's very reasonable to have one person responsible for compute storage and virtualization infrastructure. I can see how a big company would specialize though. Mail me if you're the least bit interested in a growing team with little shiny-chasing and lots of pragmatic engineering.
    - seorphates 9y ago
      Yes, you're not wrong. I tend to think of the slightly larger, more complex scopes having multiple programs with many teams when looking at these things lately. This is just a small example of an impetuous reply not adding value and it didn't even reflect any real opinion that I may or may not hold. I'm about a decade removed from any real "two-box shops" (small and/or startup focus etc.) and so sometimes think they can't possibly exist anymore. I see a few of the "we want the world" job postings and experience burnout just reading some of them. "Pragmatic engineering" I like the sound of that but I'd secretly hope it's not meant to rhyme with "best practices" - I like good practices and all but I like and appreciate the actual games much more. :O) That's just a small parting snark - mostly harmless. Best of luck on your search! I'm trying to maintain some focus on data operations at the moment but with any luck my next jump attempt will be into something counter to current trends.
mpetrovich 9y ago
Thanks for sharing, remote job hunting is challenging. Some constructive feedback: TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies unless they're directly relevant to the position. Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others applying to the same position. These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals? Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend less than 30 seconds on yours. Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that stands out. Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  > It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals? Yes that's actually something I didn't pay much attention. Thanks, will definitely keep in mind.
  - nogbit 9y ago
    You should, I did exactly that sometime ago for only the 5 companies at that time who were super interesting to me. For each of their cover letters I told a personal story that was spot on relevant to the position and their mission/values. It demonstrated all the soft skills....each of them called me within a day or two.
- martinald 9y ago
  Agree entirely. The opening email is a lot of waffle - I'm sure the beaches are nice but the person hiring almost certainly doesn't care. I know the idea was to come across like a friendly person but I feel the tone makes you seem naive tbh. I think a couple of a paragraphs about why you want to work for the company and a CV would suffice. Best of luck with stuff though, an interesting post.
was_boring 9y ago
I find this, and many of the comments here interesting. I've been working on a mixed remote/office department for a few years now and lead a team (remotely, with a 3 hour time difference) which is mixed as well. I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate than other teams in the company. I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's experiences with remote managers/team leads.
jondubois 9y ago
To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine and not a human ;p). It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars). It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it. Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.
- briandear 9y ago
  Trust? If the features are being shipped there really isn’t much trust required. You know after a week of that employee is delivering. Being in the office does not guarantee a single minute of additional productivity. In fact, I get more done in 2 hours working remote than I do at a typical day on-site. Making people work on site for roles that don’t actually need to be – that’s just nonsense. The only thing I care about is shipping. I don’t care about eating lunch with the team, I don’t care about the idle chit chat. I certainly don’t need to be sitting in a conference room looking a a computer projector during sprint planning when I could just as easily be seeing that same screen and listening to the same conversation sitting in my office at home. When I work with the team, RARELY does it require interpretive dance to get a point across. Even white boarding can be just as easy remotely. If you don’t trust employees enough to be remote, then you shouldn’t hire them to work in the office either. Hardware engineering or other physical product-based businesses, I get it, remote usually doesn’t work. But for writing code, sales, marketing? Not a single reason not to be remote except if are working on something that requires a triple-lockdown environment and is highly secret. Very few companies have that level of absolute secrecy as a requirement – but even then, there have been known to be remote people even on those types of teams.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    It's easy to ship poorly designed features quickly. Shipping well designed features is a different matter. As a developer, if you want to take extra time to implement something because you want to put more thought into it, your employer has to trust that the extra time that you're using will translate into a superior, better designed product. If the employer is trying to squeeze efficiency out of employees by giving them ridiculous deadlines based on optimistic assumptions about how long x should take to build, the result will be poor quality software and it will cost more in the long run.
pzduniak 9y ago
I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer something I always wanted to do. The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks. Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that. Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.
wallflower 9y ago
To me, there is one extremely insightful comment on the original post. The commenter asked what the timezone of the remote positions were and if that had an effect on the applications and hiring team. As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the world (8-12 hours difference). Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or GMT-7, depending. I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are not (all) coding robots yet.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  Absolutely. FYI, I was targeting specifically timezones that I could be comfortable working with. There are a few outliers in the spreadsheet but were mostly close to my timezone so we would work the same hours. Unfortunately, I forgot to reply to the commenter.
  - wallflower 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply with the information about timezones. Best of luck with finding your remote job! Perhaps one will come out of the attention your blog post has joined. Since people at your current employer may well know about this, perhaps put a small text 'ad' at the top of your blog advertising that you are always interested in the appropriate remote opportunities in Node.js?
CydeWeys 9y ago
Greece and California are ten timezones apart. I just don't see how you're ever going to get past that unless you're willing to be nocturnal (and you tell the companies you're applying to you're willing to work during their daytime). You're competing for the job with hundreds of people in the same or adjacent timezones.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Agreed. I would only hire remote workers who either are in a close timezone or will guarantee a few hours of overlap each day. 10 hours is too much.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  Aw no I wasn't targeting California at all. I was mostly targeting timezones that I would be working the same hours with theirs. The spreadsheet has some outliers but those must be a few exceptions that I would be happy to stay late at night to work with.
nnd 9y ago
I’ve been working remotely for the last 3 years, including for one of the top rememoré-only companies. I’ve also did freelancing sourcing clients on my own and working through a recruiter. One thing which is surprisingly not as oftenly discussed here are other criteria besides pay taken into account when making a choice between remote and non-remote. I’d like to make an argument that remote work works only for a particular use case: when you need to execute on a particular vision with some strict framework of action. You’d need employees who are highly senior (therefore autonomious) and have great communication skills. Probably the main reason why I’m considering to move away from working remotely is the lack of challenging projects. Even though I definitely improved my engineering skills by working on projects and reading up blogs/books, I’d learn much more if I had direct interaction with other engineers which is impossible due to constraints of communication medium in remote context.
jxm262 9y ago
hey @kostarelo! Recognize you from the Node.js slack group as you were one of the first one's to join (i'm justin :wave:) Anyway, IMO alot of other commenters here have given some really good feedback, so I won't elaborate on any constructive criticism. But if you'd like to chat sometime about potential opportunities, send me a message sometime (email is in my profile, or as you know I'm always on that Slack group). I have a few decent people in my network I can probably send your way. I appreciate the post, was a good read :)
soyiuz 9y ago
The pitch is way too long and fluffy. The first paragraph is basically about how nice the beaches are. That immediately puts me off (I am not currently at the beach, and neither are my colleagues). It is always better to open with facts instead of phrases that sound like marketing talk ("amazing beaches," "passionate doer," "great fit," "really love," "personal playground.") None of these are meaningful to your job performance.
wheresvic1 9y ago
The spreadsheet was totally useless. The most interesting information was missing :(
hollaur 9y ago
I'm not a developer, but I've worked remotely for a long time as a freelancer and full-time, remote employee. Here's my two cents (I edited your email): https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lARgp1zybe6sIAAmx9QUs/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lA...

134 points by kostarelo 9y ago

>> I took back like 3 offers which lead me to the conclusion that the market of the remote positions is highly competitive and it's really hard to find the job that you would be happy enough. That's interesting, I'd love to hear from others who agree/disagree with that.

LogicX 9y ago
I've hired for a few remote positions. The calibur of candidates, and number of applicants is higher than for a position in only one city. Also, typically you get people applying from much lower cost of living areas, so they can be happier with a lower salary.
Sorreah 9y ago
I have tried in the past as well and got the same impression. It seems that in order to be hired remotely you need to be a "rockstar" and sell yourself as more than that. Remote workers seem to be held to higher standards, and my impressiom is that there's an emphasis in being comfortable with both the domain and the tech stack so that your only obstacle to be overcome to be productive is getting used to the quirks of being part of a remote team and the processes involved.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dsacco 9y ago
I disagree with that. I've worked remotely for most of my career (three tech companies + long term consulting). I've worked remotely for so long that when I decide to join another company I'm specifically looking to work in an office :) To preempt the comments regarding survivorship bias or humblebrag: I acknowledge that people absolutely experience higher bars when interviewing fully remote positions. That said, I personally believe (from my own experience and that of friends) that people who typically experience higher competition in seeking remote positions are probably not optimizing their search. There are, broadly speaking, two classes of companies featuring remote positions. The first type is a company built on a foundation of remote-friendly culture - people communicate in Slack for almost everything, at least half the company is remote, positions are headlined with remote work, etc. The second type is a company that offers remote work and has a well-intentioned desire for remote employees, but which ultimately does not favor them. I've worked in both sorts of roles. If you are competing against non-remote candidates for the second type of company, then all things being equal they likely will not proceed with you. This is not only because of the cultural differences in preference but also because the interview process is not optimized to treat remote employees as first class citizens.

phantom_oracle 9y ago

Let me tell you something I learnt myself about remote job positions: - Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use stupid filters like "the right fit" - which most of the time equates to finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1 who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best) - As someone reading your blog post, even I did not make it past your full email text. It's just too long for HR to even bother. A shorter, concise, "get in your face" email sometimes works better - HR filters are the worst way to get remote positions. You said you have friends working for remote-first companies like Github and Automattic - that should have been your first method of entry to go direct to the team itself and not need to get through HR first - if you're a great programmer and your friends know it, they will gladly recommend you

flyovercow 9y ago
if
- mc32 9y ago
  Not really really. It happens in other industries as well. It's not corruption. Corruption would be hiring someone without due diligence interviewing just because you know them. I can't think of one company which refuses referrals. Rather, even the largest of public companies have referral programs.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections? Two reasons: 1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment). 2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in groups. The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity in your professional capacity. Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work. It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default to it because it works often enough and because it's intuitively an attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction, even if it's technically suboptimal.

zebraflask 9y ago

Not to sound impolite at all, but your cover letter sounds more like a dating site profile than a cover letter for a job. Overly personal, a lot of irrelevant details. Too friendly. Let your resume, portfolio, etc. do the talking.

smt88 9y ago
I totally disagree. The resume/portfolio will talk either way, but they usually don't say enough. If a cover letter can give me an idea of what it's like to talk to someone in real life, it helps tremendously. Resumes just blend together, and it becomes impossible to tell anyone apart. Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there.
- kostarelo 9y ago
  > Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there. Exactly. I know that there are a lot of better developers out there than me. I had to differentiate myself by introducing him in a more fun way just like I would do if I was meeting them in person.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  You stand out in a cover letter by finding a concise and convincing to summarize why they should interview you and the value you bring. Not by telling people your hobbies or how nice the beach near you is. That kind of stuff should come up naturally in a call or in person. The same applies to dating - putting so much info up front is rarely successful.
  - smt88 9y ago

austenallred 9y ago

When we hired for a remote position we received probably 100x the applications as when we hired in San Francisco. The pool of labor is much bigger and much cheaper. Now we're hiring a full-time machine learning instructor, and I can't even imagine trying to find someone in SF. Even remote is difficult, but at least there are applicants.

doggydogs94 9y ago

The phrase "I am obsessed with clean and efficient code" should be rewritten. Most developers will not want to work on the same project as you; they will not want their code picked over for imperfections.

kostarelo 9y ago
Wow, that's interesting. I do keep doing comments on PRs on small things but not at the point where I would reject a PR but rather discuss it. Maybe it's a strong phrase though.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  Frankly, I agree with the OP. I dislike people who nitpick during the code review, esp. if it's in a remote setting where communication is less efficient.

rampage101 9y ago

The cover letter should have more direct language and be mostly about your skill-set. You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than going through the official website application.

luke3butler 9y ago

I've been searching for a remote position for 6 months, and I can relate to OP on a lot of this post. Methods slightly different. I feel like I'm one of a huge crowd and being ignored completely is very common, even when I surpass all of their requirement check-boxes boxes, then some. I spend a good amount of time on each cover letter, research the company, and email the CEO or a lead developer on the team. I very rarely get a response, but twice I got to the first stage and then it's as if I was forgotten. I'm currently employed in a non-remote position, and I would be able to get a new local job with ease simply because I can walk in and talk to someone. I have gotten offers already, but I have a good list of reasons for wanting a remote position. I'm persisting, but it's getting a bit tiring going this long at it.

theparanoid 9y ago
Contracting can be a backdoor to remote work. If you're specialized it's not too difficult to find companies that need help. There's more risk (no benefits, no steady income).
- briandear 9y ago
  I prefer remote contracting. It’s great. More money, a lot of exposure to different tech and ways of doing things (and ways to not do things.) As far as benefits, there are few benefits that are worth having a lower salary. Pension, retirement, all that nonsense – a waste of money – create your own retirement investments with the increased money you make. I’d rather money go into my pocket directly than to some benefit system that necessarily results in some amount of dead-weight loss. 65 per hour gross as a full timer versus 100 per hour gross as a contractor. 35 per hour is like an additional salary. But, it does take discipline and being extremely organized so it’s not for everyone.
  - luke3butler 9y ago
    Would you say contracting on the side is taking on too much? I think I could handle it. I like having the stability, so easing into contracting might be a viable option for me.

oisino 9y ago

I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely. That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.

kostarelo 9y ago
Can you recall a time where you hired a less qualified person in a remote position for some reason?
- oisino 9y ago
  Personal referrals that this person was amazing. One huge challenge of remote team members is training is a lot harder. You end up hiring very experienced people due to this and not junior talent. Helpscout another remote team has a bunch of articles on how they have this issue also

late2part 9y ago

I'm on the other side of that coin! Do you know how hard it's been to find someone that is good at SRE/DevOps & wants to manage ESXi/VMWare Boxes and SANs/Storage?

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seorphates 9y ago
Is that one job or four? I see four distinct engineering disciplines in your post - Site Reliability - DevOps - Compute - Storage. The only two I would reasonably consider combining (in a day-to-day combined way) are the last two and even that's a risk for any largish operation. The first two do not benefit being combined and neither will garner the attention required to succeed. I would not apply unless you were small, generous and good to your community. Buy hey, if you threw in networking and security I'd know you have two boxes and need help and I'd bite out of sheer curiosity, like a shark, testing, tasting.
- late2part 9y ago
  Your point of view is interesting but surprising. We are a small company and a small group, but I don't view (my definitions) of devops/sre as terribly dissimilar. I think it's very reasonable to have one person responsible for compute storage and virtualization infrastructure. I can see how a big company would specialize though. Mail me if you're the least bit interested in a growing team with little shiny-chasing and lots of pragmatic engineering.
  - seorphates 9y ago
    Yes, you're not wrong. I tend to think of the slightly larger, more complex scopes having multiple programs with many teams when looking at these things lately. This is just a small example of an impetuous reply not adding value and it didn't even reflect any real opinion that I may or may not hold. I'm about a decade removed from any real "two-box shops" (small and/or startup focus etc.) and so sometimes think they can't possibly exist anymore. I see a few of the "we want the world" job postings and experience burnout just reading some of them. "Pragmatic engineering" I like the sound of that but I'd secretly hope it's not meant to rhyme with "best practices" - I like good practices and all but I like and appreciate the actual games much more. :O) That's just a small parting snark - mostly harmless. Best of luck on your search! I'm trying to maintain some focus on data operations at the moment but with any luck my next jump attempt will be into something counter to current trends.

mpetrovich 9y ago

Thanks for sharing, remote job hunting is challenging. Some constructive feedback: TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies unless they're directly relevant to the position. Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others applying to the same position. These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals? Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend less than 30 seconds on yours. Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that stands out. Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.

kostarelo 9y ago
> It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals? Yes that's actually something I didn't pay much attention. Thanks, will definitely keep in mind.
- nogbit 9y ago
  You should, I did exactly that sometime ago for only the 5 companies at that time who were super interesting to me. For each of their cover letters I told a personal story that was spot on relevant to the position and their mission/values. It demonstrated all the soft skills....each of them called me within a day or two.
martinald 9y ago
Agree entirely. The opening email is a lot of waffle - I'm sure the beaches are nice but the person hiring almost certainly doesn't care. I know the idea was to come across like a friendly person but I feel the tone makes you seem naive tbh. I think a couple of a paragraphs about why you want to work for the company and a CV would suffice. Best of luck with stuff though, an interesting post.

was_boring 9y ago

I find this, and many of the comments here interesting. I've been working on a mixed remote/office department for a few years now and lead a team (remotely, with a 3 hour time difference) which is mixed as well. I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate than other teams in the company. I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's experiences with remote managers/team leads.

jondubois 9y ago

To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine and not a human ;p). It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars). It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it. Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.

briandear 9y ago
Trust? If the features are being shipped there really isn’t much trust required. You know after a week of that employee is delivering. Being in the office does not guarantee a single minute of additional productivity. In fact, I get more done in 2 hours working remote than I do at a typical day on-site. Making people work on site for roles that don’t actually need to be – that’s just nonsense. The only thing I care about is shipping. I don’t care about eating lunch with the team, I don’t care about the idle chit chat. I certainly don’t need to be sitting in a conference room looking a a computer projector during sprint planning when I could just as easily be seeing that same screen and listening to the same conversation sitting in my office at home. When I work with the team, RARELY does it require interpretive dance to get a point across. Even white boarding can be just as easy remotely. If you don’t trust employees enough to be remote, then you shouldn’t hire them to work in the office either. Hardware engineering or other physical product-based businesses, I get it, remote usually doesn’t work. But for writing code, sales, marketing? Not a single reason not to be remote except if are working on something that requires a triple-lockdown environment and is highly secret. Very few companies have that level of absolute secrecy as a requirement – but even then, there have been known to be remote people even on those types of teams.
- jondubois 9y ago
  It's easy to ship poorly designed features quickly. Shipping well designed features is a different matter. As a developer, if you want to take extra time to implement something because you want to put more thought into it, your employer has to trust that the extra time that you're using will translate into a superior, better designed product. If the employer is trying to squeeze efficiency out of employees by giving them ridiculous deadlines based on optimistic assumptions about how long x should take to build, the result will be poor quality software and it will cost more in the long run.

pzduniak 9y ago

I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer something I always wanted to do. The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks. Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that. Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.

wallflower 9y ago

To me, there is one extremely insightful comment on the original post. The commenter asked what the timezone of the remote positions were and if that had an effect on the applications and hiring team. As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the world (8-12 hours difference). Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or GMT-7, depending. I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are not (all) coding robots yet.

kostarelo 9y ago
Absolutely. FYI, I was targeting specifically timezones that I could be comfortable working with. There are a few outliers in the spreadsheet but were mostly close to my timezone so we would work the same hours. Unfortunately, I forgot to reply to the commenter.
- wallflower 9y ago
  Thanks for the reply with the information about timezones. Best of luck with finding your remote job! Perhaps one will come out of the attention your blog post has joined. Since people at your current employer may well know about this, perhaps put a small text 'ad' at the top of your blog advertising that you are always interested in the appropriate remote opportunities in Node.js?

CydeWeys 9y ago

Greece and California are ten timezones apart. I just don't see how you're ever going to get past that unless you're willing to be nocturnal (and you tell the companies you're applying to you're willing to work during their daytime). You're competing for the job with hundreds of people in the same or adjacent timezones.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Agreed. I would only hire remote workers who either are in a close timezone or will guarantee a few hours of overlap each day. 10 hours is too much.
kostarelo 9y ago
Aw no I wasn't targeting California at all. I was mostly targeting timezones that I would be working the same hours with theirs. The spreadsheet has some outliers but those must be a few exceptions that I would be happy to stay late at night to work with.

nnd 9y ago

I’ve been working remotely for the last 3 years, including for one of the top rememoré-only companies. I’ve also did freelancing sourcing clients on my own and working through a recruiter. One thing which is surprisingly not as oftenly discussed here are other criteria besides pay taken into account when making a choice between remote and non-remote. I’d like to make an argument that remote work works only for a particular use case: when you need to execute on a particular vision with some strict framework of action. You’d need employees who are highly senior (therefore autonomious) and have great communication skills. Probably the main reason why I’m considering to move away from working remotely is the lack of challenging projects. Even though I definitely improved my engineering skills by working on projects and reading up blogs/books, I’d learn much more if I had direct interaction with other engineers which is impossible due to constraints of communication medium in remote context.

jxm262 9y ago

hey @kostarelo! Recognize you from the Node.js slack group as you were one of the first one's to join (i'm justin :wave:) Anyway, IMO alot of other commenters here have given some really good feedback, so I won't elaborate on any constructive criticism. But if you'd like to chat sometime about potential opportunities, send me a message sometime (email is in my profile, or as you know I'm always on that Slack group). I have a few decent people in my network I can probably send your way. I appreciate the post, was a good read :)

soyiuz 9y ago

The pitch is way too long and fluffy. The first paragraph is basically about how nice the beaches are. That immediately puts me off (I am not currently at the beach, and neither are my colleagues). It is always better to open with facts instead of phrases that sound like marketing talk ("amazing beaches," "passionate doer," "great fit," "really love," "personal playground.") None of these are meaningful to your job performance.

wheresvic1 9y ago

The spreadsheet was totally useless. The most interesting information was missing :(

hollaur 9y ago

I'm not a developer, but I've worked remotely for a long time as a freelancer and full-time, remote employee. Here's my two cents (I edited your email): https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lARgp1zybe6sIAAmx9QUs/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lA...