11 ms·

Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts

191 points by shinkim0914 6y ago

brdd 6y ago
During a pandemic, the only roles that you can hire for are ones that are remote (by definition, more or less). So this is not really charting a "shift". The question is, post-pandemic, will new roles continue to be permanent remote or will they gravitate back towards office roles? As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.
- shinkim0914 6y ago
  In the data, I've seen companies marking jobs that are remote only during the pandemic as "onsite", "COVID remote", "remote until COVID is over". I've classified those type of posts as NOT remote in this analysis. For example, I'd assume if you are a NYC based company, and want everyone to be onsite after the pandemic, you wouldn't hire someone from Alaska without sharing the onsite expectation upfront (i.e. marking your job post as "onsite").
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    That's not what the GP is saying though. You won't even bother posting to fill a job that can't e done remote, so you need to consider the volume of postings as well as the composition.
    - shinkim0914 6y ago
      That's a fair point that the overall volume needs to be considered. And during Apr–Jul it was true that hiring volumes were subdued, and it is likely that onsite-centric companies simply weren't able to hire at all. However, job post volumes exceeded pre-pandemic volumes from August and onwards. This suggests that there was actually a change in behavior. The job post volume charts didn't make it into the article but can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlLJkZJz3NBeyjylzTYAH-jTUog18Wqr_wi-OytK7EA/edit#gid=354935704 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlLJkZJz3NBeyjylzTYA...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pieterhg 6y ago
  "A recent IBM survey found that 61% of workers want to continue working from home permanently even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over." https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-remote-work/ https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-r... Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same. I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open https://remoteok.io/open
  - eli 6y ago
    That's funny coming from IBM https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/ https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)
- Rapzid 6y ago
  Friend works in finance at a major alcohol/wine company not too far from SF(I'm guessing people can guess). Said prior to the pandemic there was no way they would have hired full time remote workers for their department. Now, they have no plans to go back after the pandemic due to how it has worked out and the fact they can get talent from all over the country and from cheaper COL areas.
austincheney 6y ago
From looking at various HN comments working from home is appealing due to only one factor: personality. It appears economics, commute, child care issues, martial status, and other personal indicators are largely irrelevant. People that can handle being away from social interactions appear to love working from home while people who need social interaction do not regardless of whether all other personal indicators are stressors.
- wobbly_bush 6y ago
  Or perhaps those are the most vocal people. The other people might just be trying to wait things out instead of being particularly vocal about it.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  It seems like a lot of people try to boil this down to one thing, but I don't think there is a dominant reason for wanting to WFH. I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.
parentheses 6y ago
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is still correct
parentheses 6y ago
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is likely correct
- shinkim0914 6y ago
  I agree that the directional trend is more important than absolute numbers. Though I will say there are a fair number of traditional employers hiring on HN (e.g. Disney, NASA, Oracle, USDS).
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
Very interesting take. Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.
- shinkim0914 6y ago
  Indeed! :)
stakkur 6y ago
This would seem to be a lagging indicator, not a predictor.
offtop5 6y ago
I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years. I definitely could see the government creating incentives to get people back to work. The big issue of people no longer commuting, is millions of people working auxiliary industries which are getting screwed right now. The guy who works at the cafe next to your office, the landlords who own buildings, even car mechanics. I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.
- izacus 6y ago
  > I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years. As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation. There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Okay, cheaper American city !
    - thatfrenchguy 6y ago
      Sadly most american cities are cheap for a reason, unless you're into suburban life obviously.
      - dudul 6y ago
        One of these reasons is often the lack of jobs. Suburbs are actually often fairly expensive since they try to bring the good of the country (individual houses, bigger lots) closer to the city where good jobs are located.
      - 6y ago
908B64B197 6y ago
The best thing we did was bite the bullet and stop hiring remote folks using some CoL metric invented by HR. The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.
- shinkim0914 6y ago
  To clarify, your company didn't stop hiring remote, it just stopped making a cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates? Did management also increase salary for existing employees who lived in ow CoL areas?
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    We stopped making cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates. Wasn't a company-wide move however.
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  Did the salaries drop or rise?
dang 6y ago
A related ongoing thread that was pretty good earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397
azhenley 6y ago
Are the FAANG companies hiring for remote positions though? I've been told they are remote currently, but as soon as they say it is "safe" then you have to show up to the office.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Maybe that might become a plus point against them when smaller companies want to hire good talent.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
abinaya_rl 6y ago
This is really nice. I've been hand-curating Remote jobs from Hackernews for a while. It's carefully curated by hard and tagged properly, everything listed on the page is 100% remote jobs. I was also planned on writing a report to see how remote jobs % is increased over the period of time and what tech trend is growing. But not finding time. This is an interesting report. If would like the data, I'm happy to share the last 12 months of data. Feel free to ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl)
- greatgoat420 6y ago
  My sister/brother if you have a nice high quality hand tagged consistent data set, do a show HN and get every data scientist a chance at your data. That is 99% of the struggle.
  - jader201 6y ago
    And/or drop it at http://kaggle.com/datasets http://kaggle.com/datasets for others to do analysis/visualizations on. Disclosure: I work there.
    - abinaya_rl 6y ago
      This is really nice. I'll definitely check it out.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- abinaya_rl 6y ago
  For whoever interested, I'm talking about my product https://remoteleaf.com https://remoteleaf.com
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dheera 6y ago
Let's still remember that "Who Is Hiring" posts are a very small fraction of jobs in the world and the vast majority of jobs in the world cannot possibly be remote. I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't. That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.
cccc4all 6y ago
Remote has been an option for many people in tech, even before the covid situation. Most people regularly took work from home days or had regularly scheduled work from home days, at least once or twice a week. Some people spent months in remote situations, working from second homes during ski season or vacation spots. But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business. Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities. Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote. This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.

191 points by shinkim0914 6y ago

brdd 6y ago

During a pandemic, the only roles that you can hire for are ones that are remote (by definition, more or less). So this is not really charting a "shift". The question is, post-pandemic, will new roles continue to be permanent remote or will they gravitate back towards office roles? As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.

shinkim0914 6y ago
In the data, I've seen companies marking jobs that are remote only during the pandemic as "onsite", "COVID remote", "remote until COVID is over". I've classified those type of posts as NOT remote in this analysis. For example, I'd assume if you are a NYC based company, and want everyone to be onsite after the pandemic, you wouldn't hire someone from Alaska without sharing the onsite expectation upfront (i.e. marking your job post as "onsite").
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  That's not what the GP is saying though. You won't even bother posting to fill a job that can't e done remote, so you need to consider the volume of postings as well as the composition.
  - shinkim0914 6y ago
    That's a fair point that the overall volume needs to be considered. And during Apr–Jul it was true that hiring volumes were subdued, and it is likely that onsite-centric companies simply weren't able to hire at all. However, job post volumes exceeded pre-pandemic volumes from August and onwards. This suggests that there was actually a change in behavior. The job post volume charts didn't make it into the article but can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlLJkZJz3NBeyjylzTYAH-jTUog18Wqr_wi-OytK7EA/edit#gid=354935704 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlLJkZJz3NBeyjylzTYA...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pieterhg 6y ago
"A recent IBM survey found that 61% of workers want to continue working from home permanently even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over." https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-remote-work/ https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-r... Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same. I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open https://remoteok.io/open
- eli 6y ago
  That's funny coming from IBM https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-thousands-of-employees-back-to-the-office/ https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)
Rapzid 6y ago
Friend works in finance at a major alcohol/wine company not too far from SF(I'm guessing people can guess). Said prior to the pandemic there was no way they would have hired full time remote workers for their department. Now, they have no plans to go back after the pandemic due to how it has worked out and the fact they can get talent from all over the country and from cheaper COL areas.

austincheney 6y ago

From looking at various HN comments working from home is appealing due to only one factor: personality. It appears economics, commute, child care issues, martial status, and other personal indicators are largely irrelevant. People that can handle being away from social interactions appear to love working from home while people who need social interaction do not regardless of whether all other personal indicators are stressors.

wobbly_bush 6y ago
Or perhaps those are the most vocal people. The other people might just be trying to wait things out instead of being particularly vocal about it.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
It seems like a lot of people try to boil this down to one thing, but I don't think there is a dominant reason for wanting to WFH. I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.

parentheses 6y ago

HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is still correct

parentheses 6y ago

HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is likely correct

shinkim0914 6y ago
I agree that the directional trend is more important than absolute numbers. Though I will say there are a fair number of traditional employers hiring on HN (e.g. Disney, NASA, Oracle, USDS).

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

Very interesting take. Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.

shinkim0914 6y ago
Indeed! :)

stakkur 6y ago

This would seem to be a lagging indicator, not a predictor.

offtop5 6y ago

I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years. I definitely could see the government creating incentives to get people back to work. The big issue of people no longer commuting, is millions of people working auxiliary industries which are getting screwed right now. The guy who works at the cafe next to your office, the landlords who own buildings, even car mechanics. I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.

izacus 6y ago
> I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years. As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation. There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.
- offtop5 6y ago
  Okay, cheaper American city !
  - thatfrenchguy 6y ago
    Sadly most american cities are cheap for a reason, unless you're into suburban life obviously.
    - dudul 6y ago
      One of these reasons is often the lack of jobs. Suburbs are actually often fairly expensive since they try to bring the good of the country (individual houses, bigger lots) closer to the city where good jobs are located.
    - 6y ago

908B64B197 6y ago

The best thing we did was bite the bullet and stop hiring remote folks using some CoL metric invented by HR. The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.

shinkim0914 6y ago
To clarify, your company didn't stop hiring remote, it just stopped making a cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates? Did management also increase salary for existing employees who lived in ow CoL areas?
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  We stopped making cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates. Wasn't a company-wide move however.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Did the salaries drop or rise?

dang 6y ago

A related ongoing thread that was pretty good earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397

azhenley 6y ago

Are the FAANG companies hiring for remote positions though? I've been told they are remote currently, but as soon as they say it is "safe" then you have to show up to the office.

fakedang 6y ago
Maybe that might become a plus point against them when smaller companies want to hire good talent.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

abinaya_rl 6y ago

This is really nice. I've been hand-curating Remote jobs from Hackernews for a while. It's carefully curated by hard and tagged properly, everything listed on the page is 100% remote jobs. I was also planned on writing a report to see how remote jobs % is increased over the period of time and what tech trend is growing. But not finding time. This is an interesting report. If would like the data, I'm happy to share the last 12 months of data. Feel free to ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl)

greatgoat420 6y ago
My sister/brother if you have a nice high quality hand tagged consistent data set, do a show HN and get every data scientist a chance at your data. That is 99% of the struggle.
- jader201 6y ago
  And/or drop it at http://kaggle.com/datasets http://kaggle.com/datasets for others to do analysis/visualizations on. Disclosure: I work there.
  - abinaya_rl 6y ago
    This is really nice. I'll definitely check it out.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
abinaya_rl 6y ago
For whoever interested, I'm talking about my product https://remoteleaf.com https://remoteleaf.com

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dheera 6y ago

Let's still remember that "Who Is Hiring" posts are a very small fraction of jobs in the world and the vast majority of jobs in the world cannot possibly be remote. I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't. That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.

cccc4all 6y ago

Remote has been an option for many people in tech, even before the covid situation. Most people regularly took work from home days or had regularly scheduled work from home days, at least once or twice a week. Some people spent months in remote situations, working from second homes during ski season or vacation spots. But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business. Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities. Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote. This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.