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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 sala

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.
- marcinzm 9y ago
  >if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections? How do you judge someone in a meritocracy? Interviews? Not reflective of actual work. Also trivial to bias in favor of one group due to culture fit elements. Short term projects? Exclude people who have limited free time (generally the more senior/older ones). Resume? Trivial to lie on. References? How do you know the reference is competent? Social connections are merely another, imperfect, attempt to judge someone's merit. Specifically you trust the judgement of someone whose merit you have already proven in an actual job environment.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Because the best way to know if someone has ability in engineering is if you've worked directly with them before. Don't confuse friends and relatives with someone you've worked with before in a professional setting.
rmccue 9y ago
> 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 Agreed. People who apply to us by reaching out directly to someone they know essentially skip our first level of triage (https://handbook.hmn.md/getting-started/hiring-process/ https://handbook.hmn.md/getting-started/hiring-process/), so if you have contacts, use them. I know Automattic is similar (we're a partner of theirs).
dsacco 9y ago
> 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 I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I disagree with this. I've worked remotely for almost all of my career, across three companies and long term consulting. I've also interviewed many candidates for positions that were remote-friendly. For self-awareness, I'm going to acknowledge that there is an element of survivorship bias in play here. That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader. What I believe actually happens is a cultural obstacle: two types of companies offer remote work. The first type has a cultural foundation set up to treat remote employees equally both in the work environment and in the interview process. The second type is well-intentioned, but does not design their work environment or interview process to enable remote employees to succeed as well as onsite candidates and employees. If you are seeking positions at companies that merely offer remote work in a sort of half-hearted, "this is the future and we want to be trendy and 'get the best talent'" way, then yes, it will be competitive - you'll find that even if you do well in interviews onsite candidates will be chosen more often than not. But if you optimize your job search for positions which treat remote employees as first class citizens (especially with regards to on the job communication and the interview pipeline), you'll probably notice that the competitiveness of the process quickly returns to what you'd expect of typical engineering interviews in coastal areas.
- charsifood 9y ago
  Every remote job I've ever posted has received 300-500 applications. For the same role on-site (NYC), I've had to turn to recruiters. > That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader. Actually, how is this even a possible point to argue? The pool of candidates for an on-site job is limited to the population of that city + applicants willing to relocate. The pool of candidates for a remote job is literally everyone in the entire world.
nwatson 9y ago
In the 24 years I've been working for Silicon Valley / SF companies (7 companies, the latest two as remote positions) I've never gone through HR or gone through the regular job-posting-or-board search ... I've gotten all jobs through connections and references, including the very first. Many job transitions involved a significant pay raise, and several involved liquidity events ... none were huge, but I managed to filter the occasional opportunities down to those that "made sense" and had a plausible exit strategy ... I regret not having gone to Splunk. I usually joined companies with between 3 and 25 employees. But I look back and think that maybe I've missed something, and I've just floated down the stream meandering, jumping from one raft to the next. I maybe haven't found the "best" match for my interests and skills since I've never thought too deeply about what exactly I wanted to do. I've just always "had skills and friends doing interesting things", and it's not been bad. The transition to remote happened four years ago. I joined one smaller startup (with a single parent company funding its growth) ... a spinoff of sorts. I stayed for three years and it was the worst professional experience of my life, though I did appreciate California pay while living in the Southeast. There is and continues to be a lot of management churn, and a picture of the company should be in the Wikipedia entry for "Dunning Kruger". A year ago I started working for an already-acquired startup that was part of a larger company (think 5K-15K employees). It's been the best experience in a long time ... I belong to a smaller team within that "startup", work on pretty interesting things. There's no equity, but my effective annual compensation has increased approx 40% (generous bonus plan, and they like my work). I'd say for compensation and (mostly) positive development experiences, working through my network has paid well.
- downrightmike 9y ago
  How did you start that network?
  - raybb 9y ago
    I have no affiliation with them but the Meetup app is also a great way to meet people in tech in your area.
  - fapjacks 9y ago
rsj_hn 9y ago
I would add: 1. Don't try to arbitrage by expecting Silicon Valley wages in remote areas. Companies pay the market wage (or a bit above) in each area, and you will make a lot less money if you work even in Western Europe rather than San Francisco, and of course much less if you are in Greece. There is no reason for them to pay you San Francisco wages if you are living in Colorado or Austin, let alone Greece. 2. There is a coordination failure here. 70 resumes? It's crazy. I've never applied to more than 2 jobs at once and never had more than 3 resumes out there. There is a rough balance between tech workers and tech jobs. So what do you think the steady state job acceptance rate will be if each job seeker sends out 70 resumes? It will be 1 in 70. If each job seeker sends out 3 resumes, it will be 1 in 3. Do you prefer 1 in 3 or 1 in 70? I know what the firms prefer. Having been on both sides of the hiring process, I can tell you that everyone applying to 70 positions has a lot of consequences that make job search suck for everyone: First, it means you are not a good fit for the average position you apply to. And employers know that. People complain about crazy filters and hoops, but what happens when you as a company get 4200 applications for 60 positions because everyone is applying to 70 jobs when they are really a good fit for say, 10 of them. I am not blaming the individual job seeker, as this is a coordination problem. Without penalties for sending out too many resumes, it's in everyone's interest to spam employers, creating a lot of noise in the job search process and causing employers to be even more strict in their screening. Perhaps one solution would be something like a $1000 application fee for each job you apply to after the 5th application, to be paid into a fund for unemployed tech workers. It would also be nice if there was a central clearinghouse of resumes so that you don't have people sending different resumes to different firms, but just different cover letters. That solution also has problems, but this blog is kind of a good example of what is wrong with job search -- you have a job seeker who thinks they will be able to work remotely from Greece and earn SV wages yet who is themselves extremely picky about the kind of job they want, say ruling out all big companies, and then proceeding to spam lots of small companies with an offer of remote Greek employment. Now think about your situation -- you are a small company so you probably don't have a lot of VISA/immigration infrastructure. You probably don't have lawyers on staff who can tell you what Greek labor laws are, nor is this something a small company would want to get into. Small companies are also much less likely to be willing to work with even a domestic remote employee because team communication/cohesion is more important to firms that don't have a lot of engineering processes. Finally, small companies generally don't have a lot of resources to spend on search and so (since every employer is getting spammed) most of the hires come from referrals. Basically this user is going for the exact opposite profile of the employer who would be willing to hire him. This information is available, sending in a job application costs nothing.

flyovercow 9y ago

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.
marcinzm 9y ago
>if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections? How do you judge someone in a meritocracy? Interviews? Not reflective of actual work. Also trivial to bias in favor of one group due to culture fit elements. Short term projects? Exclude people who have limited free time (generally the more senior/older ones). Resume? Trivial to lie on. References? How do you know the reference is competent? Social connections are merely another, imperfect, attempt to judge someone's merit. Specifically you trust the judgement of someone whose merit you have already proven in an actual job environment.
pmorici 9y ago
Because the best way to know if someone has ability in engineering is if you've worked directly with them before. Don't confuse friends and relatives with someone you've worked with before in a professional setting.

rmccue 9y ago

> 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 Agreed. People who apply to us by reaching out directly to someone they know essentially skip our first level of triage (https://handbook.hmn.md/getting-started/hiring-process/ https://handbook.hmn.md/getting-started/hiring-process/), so if you have contacts, use them. I know Automattic is similar (we're a partner of theirs).

dsacco 9y ago

> 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 I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I disagree with this. I've worked remotely for almost all of my career, across three companies and long term consulting. I've also interviewed many candidates for positions that were remote-friendly. For self-awareness, I'm going to acknowledge that there is an element of survivorship bias in play here. That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader. What I believe actually happens is a cultural obstacle: two types of companies offer remote work. The first type has a cultural foundation set up to treat remote employees equally both in the work environment and in the interview process. The second type is well-intentioned, but does not design their work environment or interview process to enable remote employees to succeed as well as onsite candidates and employees. If you are seeking positions at companies that merely offer remote work in a sort of half-hearted, "this is the future and we want to be trendy and 'get the best talent'" way, then yes, it will be competitive - you'll find that even if you do well in interviews onsite candidates will be chosen more often than not. But if you optimize your job search for positions which treat remote employees as first class citizens (especially with regards to on the job communication and the interview pipeline), you'll probably notice that the competitiveness of the process quickly returns to what you'd expect of typical engineering interviews in coastal areas.

charsifood 9y ago
Every remote job I've ever posted has received 300-500 applications. For the same role on-site (NYC), I've had to turn to recruiters. > That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader. Actually, how is this even a possible point to argue? The pool of candidates for an on-site job is limited to the population of that city + applicants willing to relocate. The pool of candidates for a remote job is literally everyone in the entire world.

nwatson 9y ago

In the 24 years I've been working for Silicon Valley / SF companies (7 companies, the latest two as remote positions) I've never gone through HR or gone through the regular job-posting-or-board search ... I've gotten all jobs through connections and references, including the very first. Many job transitions involved a significant pay raise, and several involved liquidity events ... none were huge, but I managed to filter the occasional opportunities down to those that "made sense" and had a plausible exit strategy ... I regret not having gone to Splunk. I usually joined companies with between 3 and 25 employees. But I look back and think that maybe I've missed something, and I've just floated down the stream meandering, jumping from one raft to the next. I maybe haven't found the "best" match for my interests and skills since I've never thought too deeply about what exactly I wanted to do. I've just always "had skills and friends doing interesting things", and it's not been bad. The transition to remote happened four years ago. I joined one smaller startup (with a single parent company funding its growth) ... a spinoff of sorts. I stayed for three years and it was the worst professional experience of my life, though I did appreciate California pay while living in the Southeast. There is and continues to be a lot of management churn, and a picture of the company should be in the Wikipedia entry for "Dunning Kruger". A year ago I started working for an already-acquired startup that was part of a larger company (think 5K-15K employees). It's been the best experience in a long time ... I belong to a smaller team within that "startup", work on pretty interesting things. There's no equity, but my effective annual compensation has increased approx 40% (generous bonus plan, and they like my work). I'd say for compensation and (mostly) positive development experiences, working through my network has paid well.

downrightmike 9y ago
How did you start that network?
- raybb 9y ago
  I have no affiliation with them but the Meetup app is also a great way to meet people in tech in your area.
- fapjacks 9y ago

rsj_hn 9y ago

I would add: 1. Don't try to arbitrage by expecting Silicon Valley wages in remote areas. Companies pay the market wage (or a bit above) in each area, and you will make a lot less money if you work even in Western Europe rather than San Francisco, and of course much less if you are in Greece. There is no reason for them to pay you San Francisco wages if you are living in Colorado or Austin, let alone Greece. 2. There is a coordination failure here. 70 resumes? It's crazy. I've never applied to more than 2 jobs at once and never had more than 3 resumes out there. There is a rough balance between tech workers and tech jobs. So what do you think the steady state job acceptance rate will be if each job seeker sends out 70 resumes? It will be 1 in 70. If each job seeker sends out 3 resumes, it will be 1 in 3. Do you prefer 1 in 3 or 1 in 70? I know what the firms prefer. Having been on both sides of the hiring process, I can tell you that everyone applying to 70 positions has a lot of consequences that make job search suck for everyone: First, it means you are not a good fit for the average position you apply to. And employers know that. People complain about crazy filters and hoops, but what happens when you as a company get 4200 applications for 60 positions because everyone is applying to 70 jobs when they are really a good fit for say, 10 of them. I am not blaming the individual job seeker, as this is a coordination problem. Without penalties for sending out too many resumes, it's in everyone's interest to spam employers, creating a lot of noise in the job search process and causing employers to be even more strict in their screening. Perhaps one solution would be something like a $1000 application fee for each job you apply to after the 5th application, to be paid into a fund for unemployed tech workers. It would also be nice if there was a central clearinghouse of resumes so that you don't have people sending different resumes to different firms, but just different cover letters. That solution also has problems, but this blog is kind of a good example of what is wrong with job search -- you have a job seeker who thinks they will be able to work remotely from Greece and earn SV wages yet who is themselves extremely picky about the kind of job they want, say ruling out all big companies, and then proceeding to spam lots of small companies with an offer of remote Greek employment. Now think about your situation -- you are a small company so you probably don't have a lot of VISA/immigration infrastructure. You probably don't have lawyers on staff who can tell you what Greek labor laws are, nor is this something a small company would want to get into. Small companies are also much less likely to be willing to work with even a domestic remote employee because team communication/cohesion is more important to firms that don't have a lot of engineering processes. Finally, small companies generally don't have a lot of resources to spend on search and so (since every employer is getting spammed) most of the hires come from referrals. Basically this user is going for the exact opposite profile of the employer who would be willing to hire him. This information is available, sending in a job application costs nothing.