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It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much
by giantandroids 6y ago
It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).
I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.
COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.
- busrf 6y agoUnfortunately the CEO of the large streaming company based in Los Gatos has strongly negative feelings about remote work even after COVID: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-remote-work-a-pure-negative-11599487219 https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-re...
- NeverFade 6y agoNetflix having employee-unfriendly policies is nothing new: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174 https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency... This is very much in line with their traditional approach.
- giantandroids 6y agoIronic in how it has parallels to physical rental stores (aka blockbusters) being a necessity.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoNetflix and FAANGs in general can get away with employee unfriendly practices due to the obscene compensation they offer which provides them with an endless stream of talented candidates knocking on their door. The problem is, I see these practices slowly creeping in European tech companies, but without the glorious compensation to make up for them: i.e. companies wanting to put you through 3-6 rounds of interviews, full-day on-site interviews, leet-coding, long un-paid take home tests, and all this for 40k/year?! How about no thanks and GTFO!
- NeverFade 6y agoI wouldn't consider FAANG comp to be "obscene", in fact many of the lower-paying FAANGs - Amazon, and recently also Google - are not paying much above market pay. Facebook has already committed to supporting more remote work, as has Microsoft.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoOk, but you missed my point, my point wasn't that FAANG pays best in SV, my point was that employee-unfriendly practices from SV, which pays best in the world, make their way outside but without the compensation.
- NeverFade 6y agoThen resist this trend by publicly posting about it in your location, and refusing to work for companies that follow this trend.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoYeah, easy to say but unless you're in the top percentile of highly sought-after specialists in a hot area, you're not making a dent. The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no problem as they have 99 more candidates waiting in the pipeline and some will. When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.
- novok 6y agoEven in a remote world, it's still pretty painful to deal with large timezone differences. I don't want to work with people in india if I'm in the america timezone set, and if they could choose, people working for american companies in india would probably feel the same. Similar with european offices. NYC, Brazil and SF can all interact with each other well enough. So even if the software world was remote, I still think you'd probably have to move to an american timezone somewhere.
- r_c_a_d 6y agoI agree. When I worked in London for Nokia I tried to keep to Finland time where possible, as it made things a lot easier. Then they added teams in India and China and it became a nightmare.
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoTry organizing a meeting with attendees from Beijing, Redmond, and Cambridge. Ya...it doesn’t work. India is the absolute worst for the USA because they are almost 12 hours off.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoFrom my experience working with global teams, as soon as you have Asia & EMEA, you need to go to two meetings if you actually want to retain said staff. This is annoying, but it's much better than people taking meetings at midnight, which is what happens otherwise.
- novok 6y ago2 meetings work fine for large company / departmental scope presentations, because only %1-5 of the people in the meeting have to do the midnight thing, but break at the 5-10 person level unfortunately. Someone is forced into a midnight meeting somewhere as part of syncing up planning between teams at the very least.