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I've been searching for a remote job for the last few months. This site comes in really handy. Listing remote jobs isn't new (for example, Authentic Jobs has a

by bbx 13y ago

I've been searching for a remote job for the last few months. This site comes in really handy. Listing remote jobs isn't new (for example, Authentic Jobs has a clear call-to-action to filter them), but focusing on them is interesting. What I've learned so far is that a remote job is not exactly what I thought it was. Considering the mostly globalized state of the web (and even the internet), I thought "remote" meant you could work for anyone from anywhere. As a French web designer planning on moving to a foreign country, I thought I could apply for any remote job quite easily. But most remote jobs actually mean remote but within the US. Or, work from home 3 days per week, and 2 days at the office. Or even, work mostly from home but come to the office once per month. It was probably naive from my part to believe I could get a remote job easily. I thought working in a field as connected and open as the web would provide me lots of opportunities. Anyway, I ended up forgetting about remote jobs and settled for a job in either New York (very difficult btw) or London (more likely to happen).

grey-area 13y ago
Another approach to this is to stop looking for a job with a salary and strike out on your own as a contractor/company. If you have contacts in the industry already, this isn't as hard as it might seem, and makes it far easier to truly work remotely without being tied to one specific office. Having said that from experience (I did Paris-London for a while) I think you'd find it hard to telecommute or work remotely between countries for a long period - the time differences, travel time for meetings etc and the lack of physical presence in the city make it more difficult to keep in touch. It is much easier to work for and get work from people in the same physical location. I was surprised just how important physical presence is in order to maintain the contacts which keep work coming in, and reassure clients that you will be available.
- wrboyce 13y ago
  I don't agree with your statement at all. The company I work for (and have been with for about two years) has employees across more timezones than I care to count (I am based in London, my colleagues across the US, Panama, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia and probably some others I've forgotten -- with one person soon moving to Australia) and we don't have any real issues. We even manage to have a daily standup; some of the team may be having their standup right at the start of their day and some will be having it at the end, but it works. There are plenty of tools available (Skype, Hipchat and Google Hangouts to name an obvious three) which make maintaining lines of communication between telecommuting teams possible.
  - joshavant 13y ago
    If you don't mind, please drop me a line about which company you work for (or post up here). I'm not on the job market now (necessarily), but am keeping an eye out for your kind of companies and would love to keep yours on my radar, if possible. EDIT - My email and all contact info are in my profile.
  - paulhauggis 13y ago
    It can work..but rarely does it work well unless you have a really good manager and a really good team. Even then, there are tons of mis-communications along the way. I have experienced this working on remote teams.
  - bjt 13y ago
    We do this with developers in the US, Canada, Latin America, and western Europe. We use plenty of IRC, Hangouts, and of course, email. A lot of our recruitment has been done through networks of contacts in the open source community, which I think starts us out with a pool of self-motivated people who can communicate well over the internet.
    - zacinbusiness 13y ago
      Same here. I work as part of a two-man team that exists within a larger organization which is based in Norway. I live in the US and my colleague lives in Sweden. However, we have developers that we work with in Ukraine, business meetings that he attends in Copenhagen and Norway, and business contacts all over Scandinavia and parts of Europe. We use Skype primarily for day-to-day communication, and of course email is a big part of the picture. But we also just make plain voice calls (sometimes phone, sometimes skype depending on connectivity). Then we also use Zendesk to keep our workload visible and organized. So, overall, it's a very smooth process.
  - grey-area 13y ago
    Thanks for the informative counter-example - it's certainly possible, and congratulations on your company's success. I agree communication is key to keeping things going, and perhaps in tech companies this is easier (my work was in publishing at the time, quite an old-fashioned industry). The managers I was interacting with were not technically minded, so that might make a difference, email was the main medium. But the problems I saw as a small company were more related to staying in touch with disparate clients and cultivating work over the long term than working day to day - the people making subcontracting decisions tended to forget you were there if you were never in the client office. This might depend on size and industry as well as communication - smaller companies probably depend on networking more than larger ones.
pa5tabear 13y ago
What's so difficult about New York? What job level are you searching for?
- mhurron 13y ago
  > What's so difficult about New York? He's going to need a work visa for one.
- ezequiel-garzon 13y ago
  Probably work permits. Working in London for a EU citizen presents no hurdles at all. (Well, for French citizens, anyway. As of 2013, anyway.)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
house9-2 13y ago
> Or, work from home 3 days per week, and 2 days at the office I always considered that to be "Tele-Commuting", and remote to mean "never in the office"
jmadsen 13y ago
This, and why this new site might be a little frustrating to use. I search for 100% remote work, no office visits, no timezone restrictions. Not having that info right on the main listing means I need to click each one to read what the restrictions are
- mgl 13y ago
  Yes, this was my impression too. I was looking for new potential gigs for us - http://codedose.com http://codedose.com (shameless plug: if you want to build a nice web app at near half of the Bay area rates drop me a line at mglomba@codedose.com) to discover that the actual pool of really remote offers is limited. Hopefully this is only a temporary state as they have just started!
- poissonpie 13y ago
  maybe there's an idea for an MVP?
- eitally 13y ago
  The timezone restriction is a much bigger deal than most people probably anticipate. This depends on the company, of course, but unless the work is something that can be performed largely self-sufficiently, it's entirely likely that you'll either end up working overlapping hours at your own inconvenience, or you'll get stuck doing the work no one else in the team/company wants. Even if a large corporation this is a major problem. Speaking personally, I employ about 100 people and the biggest team locations are in Chennai, Guadalajara and Huntsville. Each of these sites has a local senior manager/director and -- with the exception of Chennai -- multiple product owners. I have a few guys working from home remotely (DB supervisor is in New York, architect and one of my senior managers are outside Glasgow, a couple of guys are in SJ, and an architect/lead dev in RTP). I sit in a small sales office in RTP with no one from my team, and I work from home all but a handful of days per year. I only go into this level of detail because what happens next is potentially of interest. When you have a mix of WFH'ers and office staff, unless they are leaders -- either technical or management -- the WFH'ers get shafted. They are left out of meetings, usually inadvertently and usually ad hoc meetings, but this can have a huge impact on morale and productivity. They are assigned less critical work because the team and leadership often feel less comfortable not having local failover in case of emergency. This may be an organizational failure, but it is a common scenario and one any remote work candidates should be aware of when they interview. By far my highest performing teams are the ones where everyone is co-located, but ymmv.
httpteapot 13y ago
Have you tried plateforms like oDesk?
- kirillzubovsky 13y ago
  If he is serious about actually working and making a living, oDesk is not the right place to work. I wrote about it a few days ago - https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da - cheap labor and sup-par clients, yeah, oDesk is definitely not the place.
  - zacinbusiness 13y ago
    In my opinion the only way to use Odesk (or any other similar site) is to have a trusted client in mind that will post jobs there for you. That makes it easier to get paid internationally and was an option for me when I took my current position. I declined, however, as I like to keep things simple and so I don't want to add an additional step between me and my money ;-)
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    Not to mention that a good portion (I'd say about 20-30%) are asking for blatantly illegal or unethical activities (e.g., scraping proprietary data, building spyware, etc.)
    - chc 13y ago
      My experience: I signed up there out of curiosity a few years ago and I believe within a day received a request to build a tool for comment spamming.
  - podviaznikov 13y ago
    I would disagree here. You actually can find well paid mid-term and long-term contracts on oDesk. Classification obviously depends on your expenses but I would say it's quite possible to get more money on oDesk than in most IT companies in EU.
kirillzubovsky 13y ago
Actually, that's not naive at all. If you don't mind working on multiple projects throughout a year, you're welcome to create a profile on https://Scoutzie.com https://Scoutzie.com and you could work with any number of clients you want. The beauty, you can quite literally work from home in your underwear, at whatever hours you choose. As long as you make it clear to the clients how you work on the projects, you get all the flexibility you want. I understand that won't give you a 100% security of having a full-time job, but part-time you could actually make more money than if you were to take on a full-time gig. The harder you work, the more money you make, it's that simple.
- nollidge 13y ago
  Er, except Scoutzie is only for designers, and We Work Remotely is more for programmers.
  - kirillzubovsky 13y ago
    Actually, some of Scoutzie designers also to front and back-end development (example: https://scoutzie.com/samvj https://scoutzie.com/samvj) . We are working on making them easier to find. Likewise, freelancers who can do all of the above can list themselves and their skills.
crabasa 13y ago
We're trying to build a work space and community for people who do true remote work in Seattle. We hope this model spreads: http://devlocal.io http://devlocal.io
- hadem 13y ago
  Didn't you just contradict yourself? "True remote work in..." When I think of "true remote work" I think of a job where location does not matter.
  - k__ 13y ago
    He's probably a scotsman :) But I like the idea of open office-spaces. I like to work from home, but sometimes I need a different place to get new ideas.
  - kgosser 13y ago
    This means for people who work remotely but live in Seattle. So for example, someone who works remotely for a company in NY but lives in Seattle. This would be a spot for all those people to work so they feel like a community.
workoglobe 13y ago
www.workoglobe.com is a nice place with a lot of remote jobs

by bbx 13y ago

grey-area 13y ago

Another approach to this is to stop looking for a job with a salary and strike out on your own as a contractor/company. If you have contacts in the industry already, this isn't as hard as it might seem, and makes it far easier to truly work remotely without being tied to one specific office. Having said that from experience (I did Paris-London for a while) I think you'd find it hard to telecommute or work remotely between countries for a long period - the time differences, travel time for meetings etc and the lack of physical presence in the city make it more difficult to keep in touch. It is much easier to work for and get work from people in the same physical location. I was surprised just how important physical presence is in order to maintain the contacts which keep work coming in, and reassure clients that you will be available.

wrboyce 13y ago
I don't agree with your statement at all. The company I work for (and have been with for about two years) has employees across more timezones than I care to count (I am based in London, my colleagues across the US, Panama, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia and probably some others I've forgotten -- with one person soon moving to Australia) and we don't have any real issues. We even manage to have a daily standup; some of the team may be having their standup right at the start of their day and some will be having it at the end, but it works. There are plenty of tools available (Skype, Hipchat and Google Hangouts to name an obvious three) which make maintaining lines of communication between telecommuting teams possible.
- joshavant 13y ago
  If you don't mind, please drop me a line about which company you work for (or post up here). I'm not on the job market now (necessarily), but am keeping an eye out for your kind of companies and would love to keep yours on my radar, if possible. EDIT - My email and all contact info are in my profile.
- paulhauggis 13y ago
  It can work..but rarely does it work well unless you have a really good manager and a really good team. Even then, there are tons of mis-communications along the way. I have experienced this working on remote teams.
- bjt 13y ago
  We do this with developers in the US, Canada, Latin America, and western Europe. We use plenty of IRC, Hangouts, and of course, email. A lot of our recruitment has been done through networks of contacts in the open source community, which I think starts us out with a pool of self-motivated people who can communicate well over the internet.
  - zacinbusiness 13y ago
    Same here. I work as part of a two-man team that exists within a larger organization which is based in Norway. I live in the US and my colleague lives in Sweden. However, we have developers that we work with in Ukraine, business meetings that he attends in Copenhagen and Norway, and business contacts all over Scandinavia and parts of Europe. We use Skype primarily for day-to-day communication, and of course email is a big part of the picture. But we also just make plain voice calls (sometimes phone, sometimes skype depending on connectivity). Then we also use Zendesk to keep our workload visible and organized. So, overall, it's a very smooth process.
- grey-area 13y ago
  Thanks for the informative counter-example - it's certainly possible, and congratulations on your company's success. I agree communication is key to keeping things going, and perhaps in tech companies this is easier (my work was in publishing at the time, quite an old-fashioned industry). The managers I was interacting with were not technically minded, so that might make a difference, email was the main medium. But the problems I saw as a small company were more related to staying in touch with disparate clients and cultivating work over the long term than working day to day - the people making subcontracting decisions tended to forget you were there if you were never in the client office. This might depend on size and industry as well as communication - smaller companies probably depend on networking more than larger ones.

pa5tabear 13y ago

What's so difficult about New York? What job level are you searching for?

mhurron 13y ago
> What's so difficult about New York? He's going to need a work visa for one.
ezequiel-garzon 13y ago
Probably work permits. Working in London for a EU citizen presents no hurdles at all. (Well, for French citizens, anyway. As of 2013, anyway.)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

house9-2 13y ago

> Or, work from home 3 days per week, and 2 days at the office I always considered that to be "Tele-Commuting", and remote to mean "never in the office"

jmadsen 13y ago

This, and why this new site might be a little frustrating to use. I search for 100% remote work, no office visits, no timezone restrictions. Not having that info right on the main listing means I need to click each one to read what the restrictions are

mgl 13y ago
Yes, this was my impression too. I was looking for new potential gigs for us - http://codedose.com http://codedose.com (shameless plug: if you want to build a nice web app at near half of the Bay area rates drop me a line at mglomba@codedose.com) to discover that the actual pool of really remote offers is limited. Hopefully this is only a temporary state as they have just started!
poissonpie 13y ago
maybe there's an idea for an MVP?
eitally 13y ago
The timezone restriction is a much bigger deal than most people probably anticipate. This depends on the company, of course, but unless the work is something that can be performed largely self-sufficiently, it's entirely likely that you'll either end up working overlapping hours at your own inconvenience, or you'll get stuck doing the work no one else in the team/company wants. Even if a large corporation this is a major problem. Speaking personally, I employ about 100 people and the biggest team locations are in Chennai, Guadalajara and Huntsville. Each of these sites has a local senior manager/director and -- with the exception of Chennai -- multiple product owners. I have a few guys working from home remotely (DB supervisor is in New York, architect and one of my senior managers are outside Glasgow, a couple of guys are in SJ, and an architect/lead dev in RTP). I sit in a small sales office in RTP with no one from my team, and I work from home all but a handful of days per year. I only go into this level of detail because what happens next is potentially of interest. When you have a mix of WFH'ers and office staff, unless they are leaders -- either technical or management -- the WFH'ers get shafted. They are left out of meetings, usually inadvertently and usually ad hoc meetings, but this can have a huge impact on morale and productivity. They are assigned less critical work because the team and leadership often feel less comfortable not having local failover in case of emergency. This may be an organizational failure, but it is a common scenario and one any remote work candidates should be aware of when they interview. By far my highest performing teams are the ones where everyone is co-located, but ymmv.

httpteapot 13y ago

Have you tried plateforms like oDesk?

kirillzubovsky 13y ago
If he is serious about actually working and making a living, oDesk is not the right place to work. I wrote about it a few days ago - https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da - cheap labor and sup-par clients, yeah, oDesk is definitely not the place.
- zacinbusiness 13y ago
  In my opinion the only way to use Odesk (or any other similar site) is to have a trusted client in mind that will post jobs there for you. That makes it easier to get paid internationally and was an option for me when I took my current position. I declined, however, as I like to keep things simple and so I don't want to add an additional step between me and my money ;-)
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Not to mention that a good portion (I'd say about 20-30%) are asking for blatantly illegal or unethical activities (e.g., scraping proprietary data, building spyware, etc.)
  - chc 13y ago
    My experience: I signed up there out of curiosity a few years ago and I believe within a day received a request to build a tool for comment spamming.
- podviaznikov 13y ago
  I would disagree here. You actually can find well paid mid-term and long-term contracts on oDesk. Classification obviously depends on your expenses but I would say it's quite possible to get more money on oDesk than in most IT companies in EU.

kirillzubovsky 13y ago

Actually, that's not naive at all. If you don't mind working on multiple projects throughout a year, you're welcome to create a profile on https://Scoutzie.com https://Scoutzie.com and you could work with any number of clients you want. The beauty, you can quite literally work from home in your underwear, at whatever hours you choose. As long as you make it clear to the clients how you work on the projects, you get all the flexibility you want. I understand that won't give you a 100% security of having a full-time job, but part-time you could actually make more money than if you were to take on a full-time gig. The harder you work, the more money you make, it's that simple.

nollidge 13y ago
Er, except Scoutzie is only for designers, and We Work Remotely is more for programmers.
- kirillzubovsky 13y ago
  Actually, some of Scoutzie designers also to front and back-end development (example: https://scoutzie.com/samvj https://scoutzie.com/samvj) . We are working on making them easier to find. Likewise, freelancers who can do all of the above can list themselves and their skills.

crabasa 13y ago

We're trying to build a work space and community for people who do true remote work in Seattle. We hope this model spreads: http://devlocal.io http://devlocal.io

hadem 13y ago
Didn't you just contradict yourself? "True remote work in..." When I think of "true remote work" I think of a job where location does not matter.
- k__ 13y ago
  He's probably a scotsman :) But I like the idea of open office-spaces. I like to work from home, but sometimes I need a different place to get new ideas.
- kgosser 13y ago
  This means for people who work remotely but live in Seattle. So for example, someone who works remotely for a company in NY but lives in Seattle. This would be a spot for all those people to work so they feel like a community.

workoglobe 13y ago