9 ms·

List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies

71 points by amursft 7y ago

notus 7y ago
I was not a fan of Zapier's interview process. You're actually timed on your project and you have exactly 2 hours to do it. I was ultimately turned down after doing it because they said there were linting errors and they said I was using hooks incorrectly. My usage of react hooks was straight from the documentation and I showed my solution to several other people in the industry and they saw no issue with it. I was under the impression the purpose of those coding assignments is to deliver something imperfect but functioning and talk about how to improve it. The main problem I see with a lot of remote companies is that they seem to be overloaded with applications to the point they are making strange decisions about how to filter applicants. They also almost always require you to do some type of project which is a big commitment if you're applying to a lot of places. My best application experience apart from the one that hired me was Duck Duck Go. They pay you to do the project and I feel that is a far better approach. That way they don't have to feel bad about turning you down because hey you get paid, and you don't feel so bad about not getting it because hey you got paid. I ultimately got a much better position at a fully remote company than I would have gotten at Zapier so it wasn't a matter of me overestimating my worth either. I also found that a lot of the well known fully remote companies take forever to respond to you, gitlab, zapier, and DDG were the most responsive and communicative during the process, but I have some that I applied to 2 months ago that are just now emailing me to set up video screens. Startup companies tend to be the most responsive, I would get video screen invites sometimes within minutes after sending an email out.
- bentona 7y ago
  Would a 2-hour time-boxed interview feel better? Not @ zapier but thinking about optimizing remote interviews.
  - notus 7y ago
    My main gripe was with the hard 2 hour requirement and the immediate dismissal of it based on what I felt were either trivial or inaccurate concerns. Additionally if you created a PR for the project any point past the 2 hour mark you were not considered anymore. Having a project is fine, but if the applicant takes the time to do the project and it's at least 80% of the way there I think interviewers are doing themselves a disservice by dismissing projects that are not perfect. There is no way to accurately determine whether that person is a good fit or not based on that little information. You might find that they spent more time planning for example and wrote something that would scale better if more time was spent on it. IMO people who plan more than they code are better assets. In essence, if you require a project to be done for an interview regardless of the time limits and the applicant makes a reasonable effort and demonstrates adequate competency then IMO you should always give them an interview. If you're looking for something perfect then pay them. If you put hard time requirements on the project and expect it to be flawless you give off the impression that people are required to work under pressure. That being said, I think it might be worth considering giving people the option of a take home project or a long interview. I know one guy who refuses to do take home projects and rather just sit in an interview all day and other friends who are the exact opposite.
- abcpassword 7y ago
  Salesforce wanted a THREE hour assignment before even discussing the role. What a joke!
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    I don’t know about Salesforce specifically, but this type of thing is surprisingly common. If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process. You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing. Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    I said f that and still continued my assignment 5 hours later. When they asked me about it I told them the truth, my family came home and I Had to stop. But before I did I left documentation, tests to show my goal, and accepted failure but I personally wanted to solve the problem. Instant hire, even though the interviewers of that round sounded angry that I didn’t finish per the instructions
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      That’s super rare. Most places won’t even look at your submission at all if it’s one minute past the timed deadline. I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next room from where I was coding the interview. I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone else, take it or leave it). No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.
- ossworkerrights 7y ago
  Generally speaking all companies that gave users such tests have been quite mediocre imo. Code is only a part of a developer’s work.
- brendanw 7y ago
  I think most companies I've worked at opportunistically looked for standout candidates by always having job postings even when there were no openings. This creates a feedback loop.
  - notus 7y ago
    Yeah definitely a possibility. In this case they told me it was to fill a position on a specific team, but they could have just been saying that.
- amursft 7y ago
  To me most of this is basically a sign that more companies who are hiring should try to shift to remote asap, because of the talent pool you get. Also, taking 2 months on a reply to schedule an interview is crazy.
kache_ 7y ago
I'm a recent hire for one of the companies on that list. It seems to me that by allowing your company to hire from a much larger pool of candidates allows you to be more selective for talent. The amount of talent that I'm exposed to is incredible, something I'd never be able to experience in my own city. There's a whole slew of unfamiliar problems that come with remote work - and I believe that these companies are pioneering something that will become the norm one day. Work life balance is a serious problem, as well as relationship building. It seems to me that distributed companies have a hard cap on size before the disadvantages of remote become too cumbersome. These problems require creative solutions, and it's awesome to be able to contribute to it. However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself.
- ttoinou 7y ago
  Work life balance is a serious problem Do you feel more compelled to work all the time compared to a regular office job ?
  - kache_ 7y ago
    Yes, but again, I'm not sure if this is due to the company I work for vs me being remote. I used to work at a mega conglomerate - if I worked at 30% capacity there I got 10s across the board on my perf review. Now the expectations are different
- amursft 7y ago
  > However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself. This really resonates with my experience. What is my mindset vs what is inherent in the company/remote-work in general?
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I really think remote-first still hurts workers over all, and is just taking advantage of offering relief from atrocious open-plan offices. For example, Gitlab’s “compensation principles” [0] are horrifying to me. I could absolutely never work for an employer who openly acknowledges people who provide the same value to the company are explicitly paid less because of location, in a situation (unlike with physical offices in different locations) where there is no excuse for it. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compensation/#compensation-principles https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compen... Notably it’s not just about paying different rates to different locales. They also actively adjust your salary if you move, even though it has no effect on them at that point (they are already paying you a certain rate at that point and don’t depend on your location). And they control the definition of multiplicative factors that determine pay between locations (instead of it being a negotiation), and those multiples are often ludicrously wrong (e.g. NYC & London compared to SF).
- amursft 7y ago
  If not Gitlabs, what do you think is a good policy for setting salary rates? Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb. Maybe companies should choose a salary that's competitive in any mid-tier cost of living American city and leave it at that? I'm genuinely not sure.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb.” Interesting! SF & NY based companies do it all the time.
- raihansaputra 7y ago
  This is a big point of contention. I recently had a conversation on this with someone in Marketing/Creative industry. He lives in SEA while being contracted with a Big Brand in USA. The Big Brand employs people all over the world, and they pay disparately according to location. I asked him about fairness and he thinks it's fine. He finds that CoL should be paid according to area. When the company has a regional meet-up, he knows that people from around the region have the same capability to buy "tertiary" things, and that's a signal of fairness to him. I'm not saying this is the right approach; just maybe a thought that companies have done this for longer than software companies. For example, if I put in my own level on the compensation calculator of GitLab [0](Junior level, Learning The Role, FE Engineer, 0-2 years experience, living in Jakarta, Indonesia), I get $48k/year. That is pretty much the top 5% income bracket, not considering level. Entry level programmers here are paid $500-$1500 here, amounting to $18k/year at the most. That is a really large gap, and the vast majority would take it. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compensation/calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compen...
bnt 7y ago
Toptal is < 700 people. If they are looking at Linkedin for data, then it’s probably freelancers (misleadingly) listing Toptal as their employer.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Yeah they say this: > It’s a bit hard to tell whether 3,000 employees are a part of the TopTal freelance workforce or actually working on the core software platform of the company, but we’ll give them credit and say that they’re three thousand strong and a fully-remote, distributed company.
deepsun 7y ago
Percona as well https://www.percona.com/about-percona/careers https://www.percona.com/about-percona/careers
- amursft 7y ago
  thanks for mentioning! Added.
IshKebab 7y ago
Wow how do Automattic have 1140 employees?
- notus 7y ago
  Automattic is valued at 3 billion and just bought tumblr.

71 points by amursft 7y ago

I was not a fan of Zapier's interview process. You're actually timed on your project and you have exactly 2 hours to do it. I was ultimately turned down after doing it because they said there were linting errors and they said I was using hooks incorrectly. My usage of react hooks was straight from the documentation and I showed my solution to several other people in the industry and they saw no issue with it. I was under the impression the purpose of those coding assignments is to deliver something imperfect but functioning and talk about how to improve it. The main problem I see with a lot of remote companies is that they seem to be overloaded with applications to the point they are making strange decisions about how to filter applicants. They also almost always require you to do some type of project which is a big commitment if you're applying to a lot of places. My best application experience apart from the one that hired me was Duck Duck Go. They pay you to do the project and I feel that is a far better approach. That way they don't have to feel bad about turning you down because hey you get paid, and you don't feel so bad about not getting it because hey you got paid. I ultimately got a much better position at a fully remote company than I would have gotten at Zapier so it wasn't a matter of me overestimating my worth either. I also found that a lot of the well known fully remote companies take forever to respond to you, gitlab, zapier, and DDG were the most responsive and communicative during the process, but I have some that I applied to 2 months ago that are just now emailing me to set up video screens. Startup companies tend to be the most responsive, I would get video screen invites sometimes within minutes after sending an email out.

bentona 7y ago
Would a 2-hour time-boxed interview feel better? Not @ zapier but thinking about optimizing remote interviews.
- notus 7y ago
  My main gripe was with the hard 2 hour requirement and the immediate dismissal of it based on what I felt were either trivial or inaccurate concerns. Additionally if you created a PR for the project any point past the 2 hour mark you were not considered anymore. Having a project is fine, but if the applicant takes the time to do the project and it's at least 80% of the way there I think interviewers are doing themselves a disservice by dismissing projects that are not perfect. There is no way to accurately determine whether that person is a good fit or not based on that little information. You might find that they spent more time planning for example and wrote something that would scale better if more time was spent on it. IMO people who plan more than they code are better assets. In essence, if you require a project to be done for an interview regardless of the time limits and the applicant makes a reasonable effort and demonstrates adequate competency then IMO you should always give them an interview. If you're looking for something perfect then pay them. If you put hard time requirements on the project and expect it to be flawless you give off the impression that people are required to work under pressure. That being said, I think it might be worth considering giving people the option of a take home project or a long interview. I know one guy who refuses to do take home projects and rather just sit in an interview all day and other friends who are the exact opposite.
abcpassword 7y ago
Salesforce wanted a THREE hour assignment before even discussing the role. What a joke!
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I don’t know about Salesforce specifically, but this type of thing is surprisingly common. If your first interaction with candidates, even from a huge, huge open pipeline of applications, is an automatic request for a time-intensive project or skills assessment, something is very broken with that hiring process. You simply have to pay the (high & difficult) cost of evaluating & filtering applications and then having a detailed conversation with the small number of applicants you choose to move forward with. You need to understand their technical interests and match to the role, and let them ask lots of questions to even know if they are interested enough to invest time in the rest of the interviewing. Personally one major change I’ve instituted over a few years in the ML & data science pipeline at my company is that we only do a technical conversational interview, no shared screen coding or take home project at all, it just doesn’t tell you anything, and counterintuitively you end up wasting more time and money administering it than if you just bring people onsite sooner and bite the bullet to evaluate them in a full interview day.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  I said f that and still continued my assignment 5 hours later. When they asked me about it I told them the truth, my family came home and I Had to stop. But before I did I left documentation, tests to show my goal, and accepted failure but I personally wanted to solve the problem. Instant hire, even though the interviewers of that round sounded angry that I didn’t finish per the instructions
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    That’s super rare. Most places won’t even look at your submission at all if it’s one minute past the timed deadline. I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next room from where I was coding the interview. I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone else, take it or leave it). No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.
ossworkerrights 7y ago
Generally speaking all companies that gave users such tests have been quite mediocre imo. Code is only a part of a developer’s work.
brendanw 7y ago
I think most companies I've worked at opportunistically looked for standout candidates by always having job postings even when there were no openings. This creates a feedback loop.
- notus 7y ago
  Yeah definitely a possibility. In this case they told me it was to fill a position on a specific team, but they could have just been saying that.
amursft 7y ago
To me most of this is basically a sign that more companies who are hiring should try to shift to remote asap, because of the talent pool you get. Also, taking 2 months on a reply to schedule an interview is crazy.

kache_ 7y ago

I'm a recent hire for one of the companies on that list. It seems to me that by allowing your company to hire from a much larger pool of candidates allows you to be more selective for talent. The amount of talent that I'm exposed to is incredible, something I'd never be able to experience in my own city. There's a whole slew of unfamiliar problems that come with remote work - and I believe that these companies are pioneering something that will become the norm one day. Work life balance is a serious problem, as well as relationship building. It seems to me that distributed companies have a hard cap on size before the disadvantages of remote become too cumbersome. These problems require creative solutions, and it's awesome to be able to contribute to it. However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself.

ttoinou 7y ago
Work life balance is a serious problem Do you feel more compelled to work all the time compared to a regular office job ?
- kache_ 7y ago
  Yes, but again, I'm not sure if this is due to the company I work for vs me being remote. I used to work at a mega conglomerate - if I worked at 30% capacity there I got 10s across the board on my perf review. Now the expectations are different
amursft 7y ago
> However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself. This really resonates with my experience. What is my mindset vs what is inherent in the company/remote-work in general?

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I really think remote-first still hurts workers over all, and is just taking advantage of offering relief from atrocious open-plan offices. For example, Gitlab’s “compensation principles” [0] are horrifying to me. I could absolutely never work for an employer who openly acknowledges people who provide the same value to the company are explicitly paid less because of location, in a situation (unlike with physical offices in different locations) where there is no excuse for it. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compensation/#compensation-principles https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compen... Notably it’s not just about paying different rates to different locales. They also actively adjust your salary if you move, even though it has no effect on them at that point (they are already paying you a certain rate at that point and don’t depend on your location). And they control the definition of multiplicative factors that determine pay between locations (instead of it being a negotiation), and those multiples are often ludicrously wrong (e.g. NYC & London compared to SF).

amursft 7y ago
If not Gitlabs, what do you think is a good policy for setting salary rates? Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb. Maybe companies should choose a salary that's competitive in any mid-tier cost of living American city and leave it at that? I'm genuinely not sure.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb.” Interesting! SF & NY based companies do it all the time.
raihansaputra 7y ago
This is a big point of contention. I recently had a conversation on this with someone in Marketing/Creative industry. He lives in SEA while being contracted with a Big Brand in USA. The Big Brand employs people all over the world, and they pay disparately according to location. I asked him about fairness and he thinks it's fine. He finds that CoL should be paid according to area. When the company has a regional meet-up, he knows that people from around the region have the same capability to buy "tertiary" things, and that's a signal of fairness to him. I'm not saying this is the right approach; just maybe a thought that companies have done this for longer than software companies. For example, if I put in my own level on the compensation calculator of GitLab [0](Junior level, Learning The Role, FE Engineer, 0-2 years experience, living in Jakarta, Indonesia), I get $48k/year. That is pretty much the top 5% income bracket, not considering level. Entry level programmers here are paid $500-$1500 here, amounting to $18k/year at the most. That is a really large gap, and the vast majority would take it. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compensation/calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-compen...

bnt 7y ago

Toptal is < 700 people. If they are looking at Linkedin for data, then it’s probably freelancers (misleadingly) listing Toptal as their employer.

IshKebab 7y ago
Yeah they say this: > It’s a bit hard to tell whether 3,000 employees are a part of the TopTal freelance workforce or actually working on the core software platform of the company, but we’ll give them credit and say that they’re three thousand strong and a fully-remote, distributed company.

deepsun 7y ago

Percona as well https://www.percona.com/about-percona/careers https://www.percona.com/about-percona/careers

amursft 7y ago
thanks for mentioning! Added.

IshKebab 7y ago

Wow how do Automattic have 1140 employees?

notus 7y ago
Automattic is valued at 3 billion and just bought tumblr.