9 ms·

How Paul Graham Is Wrong

301 points by kaws 12y ago

tptacek 12y ago
The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purpose whatsoever except to serve as a legal fig leaf). 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee and (b) because it's technically unlawful to classify full-time employees as contractors.
- brogrammer90 12y ago
  Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - rhgraysonii 12y ago
    In my experience I have encountered several firms that use oDesk with VERY healthy hourly pay to make up for healthcare benefits, retirement, etc. Equity becomes a mess, but the folks I talked to were definitely not 'second class citizens' in the company, and were just as respected as any non-remote dev.
  - evansolomon 12y ago
    Automattic "employees" outside of the US and Canada are contractors. (I used to work at Automattic)
    - hew 12y ago
      This is no longer accurate. Some remain "contractors" still officially due to regulatory issues, but we now have employees in multiple locations outside North America. And that list of locations is growing. (I work at Automattic)
      - evansolomon 12y ago
        Figured this was the case but assumed it didn't changed the gist of the answer too much. tl;dr actually employing people in other countries is difficult
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  Remote work isn't a solution to immigration, and I'm not sure that was the point of the article. For me remote is the solution to the so called talent shortage in the Valley. If companies were really interested in hiring the best developers they'd drop their archaic view of remote work and remove location-dicated working.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    In all fairness, it would require a major sea change for, say, Microsoft, to get to where they could make remote workers a significant portion of their development staff.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Part of the talent shortage is the SV is competing with other higher paying and higher social status professions. Its even more pronounced in the UK and Europe.
- photomatt 12y ago
  Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this once we have about 5 people in a given country.) Also remote work doesn't mean overseas, there is amazing talent all over the USA too that doesn't happen to live in the SF area. I really liked this sentence: "The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US." There are about 7 million people in the Bay area, 322M in the US total, so let's say 98% of the great people in the US are born outside of Bay area. There are no visa issues moving between cities or states in the US, but many many other barriers that have nothing to do with visas.
  - wglb 12y ago
    I have done about half my career as a 1099 or equivalent. There is no question that those are treated differently.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - tptacek 12y ago
    How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers. I'm not a lawyer, but I am an employer, and it is not clear to me that the "1099 remote worker" strategy is as clean a solution to the immigration problem as it's being made out to be.
    - wiredfool 12y ago
- YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  Fine distinctions get lost on Twitter, unfortunately. Your points about hiring people in other countries are valid. Remote work is also an alternative to moving everyone in the US to Chicago, NYC, or San Francisco; I understand that PG's essay was about immigration, but PG is an on-going advocate of people working in the same office due to the "great ideas happen in chance meetings, and those are hard to replicate", which means that that only does he want great programmers to move to the USA, he also wants them to move to cities that are tech hubs.
- mbesto 12y ago
  > 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee Care to elaborate why this is so bad? As far as I can tell, most employee (FTE) related laws in the US are suited for, well, people living in the US.
- lukasm 12y ago
  It's spooky to read that while eating dinner and thinking that I cloud get a remote job and go back to Krakow. This is one of my concerns - to be a second class employee. Company has to have remote modus operandi.
- callmeed 12y ago
  Those aren't the options people are referring to on Twitter (at least not in the threads I've seen [0]). It's about hiring US/Canada based people and not forcing them to relocate. Using Slack, Skype, screen-sharing, co-working spaces, etc. to collaborate and stay on top of everything. The kind of companies you see hiring at: https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ I'm doing it at a great startup now and it's awesome. I've got kids and my wife is in college–I'm not relocating to SF. Maybe there are intricacies to being in a heavily-funded, high-growth SF startup that prevent this ... I just don't know what they are and PG & sama aren't elaborating on them. [0] https://twitter.com/sama/status/549053726409768960 https://twitter.com/sama/status/549053726409768960
  - tptacek 12y ago
    Oh, I think I see. The argument isn't that remote-work makes it easy to hire foreigners without dealing with visas. It's that you don't need to source workers from abroad if you can just source them from Tulsa. Totally valid point! Thanks. (We're doing a startup from Chicago, with one very, very remote team member.)
    - callmeed 12y ago
      Exactly. A cursory glance at the HN/YC jobs page shows 1 remote-friendly position out of 20+. Why? I'll admit, people are probably wrongly ascribing bad intentions to PG's essay and sama's related tweets. But that's what happens when you fail to address the other options.
- dennisgorelik 12y ago
  The contract with foreign contractors is NOT "1099". AFAIK you do not have to file 1099 form in order to deduct foreign contractor expense from US business revenue. I'm not a lawyer or CPA, but I run my own business and pay to foreign contractors.
  - tptacek 12y ago
    You're right; it's 1042-S.
    - dennisgorelik 12y ago
      Is filing 1042-S mandatory? It may or may not be the case, but when foreign contractor works as a business entity then "Foreign Person’s U.S. Source Income" seems to be irrelevant.
      - tptacek 12y ago
        Work with a US nexus is subject to withholding. More broadly, this article does a good job of summing up my concerns: http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/ http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/
        dennisgorelik 12y ago
        Thanks - that's an interesting point of view. If I were running a company with hundreds of employees&contractors that would be a point of concern. However from a bootstrapped startup perspective that probably does not even worth investigating further. Everyone is free to sue for anything. That's the cost of doing business. Hiring foreigners directly as employees has many other risks in addition to having inevitable overhead.
        tptacek 12y ago
        This is an example of what I think is a common and very damaging metafallacy in startup entrepreneurship: the basic business safeguards we don't pay attention to because they don't seem to matter until our companies get big. But these are some of the worst problems, because they submarine. You pour the money, sweat, and (most importantly) time into an enterprise, risking its total failure. You stick with it, your company gets its footing, you're poised to see a return. Then bam, disaster: some stupid thing you weren't careful about when you were 4 people explodes, counterfeiting your success. You'd have been better off it exploded when you were just 4 people big. You'd have known you were screwed, and could have saved yourself the time and energy, and used the opportunity to move on to something that had a chance of succeeding. Instead: you lose 90-100% of your outcome to a lawsuit.
ryanSrich 12y ago
Great points. I'm actually working on a longer piece with actual numbers as a follow up to remote working as a solution to the talent "shortage".
smtddr 12y ago
I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I've made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose, Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the "out-of-reach"'ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air is located, and the Persidio... we'd would be having a very different conversation. In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I don't know if I'm one of the great engineers PG and others are talking about but I have no interest in living in the Bay area, whether as it currently exists or with even more people. You can solve the "transportation" issue by avoiding having to transport anyone in the first place, which is exactly what the author is speaking to when they suggest remote working arrangements.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    Or maybe even transporting some of those opportunities to areas closer to you. Starting new VC-backed companies in Detroit, Denver, Boston, Durham, Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville or other regions would give you access to some great talent that simply prefers to live in other areas of the country. For an industry that often derides 'monoculture', the SF tech scene sure resembles one.
StylusEater 12y ago
Spot on! Seems the "shortage" isn't in labor but in deference to employees as people. Wouldn't you want a horde of folks willing to work 80+ hours for Ramen? </cynic>
jfaucett 12y ago
The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a contractor. But how would this work for non us-citizens?
- Vekz 12y ago
  The article didn't say anything explicitly about remote contractors. The two companies it did reference Automattic and Github have remote full time employees.
  - jfaucett 12y ago
    How does github do it then? Wouldn't said company need to be registered in the country where the employee lived full-time and worked? Otherwise how are taxes, insurance, healthcare, etc going to be handled?
  - kylec 12y ago
    Another commenter in this thread said that Automattic workers outside the US and Canada are contractors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183
- rifung 12y ago
  Excuse me for being completely ignorant of this kind of thing, but why does working remotely automatically mean you are a contractor? Is it not possible to work remotely as a normal employee? Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between remote workers elsewhere in the US and international ones as well. I imagine there are many talented developers elsewhere in the US that don't want to live in SV.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Presumably you would have to set up and run a subsidiary in the country
jamiemchale 12y ago
Isn't there a tremendous upside to being physically co-located? Even if the teams are remote, are the founders not usually located in a 'tech hub' city (SF, NY, etc.)? Matt says to let people 'live someplace remarkable', but for most of the world that want to work in technology SF is someplace remarkable. The benefits of using group collaboration tools are still available, but you have other people working on overlapping problems on your doorstep, support and service companies, and access to intelligent finance.
- kenrikm 12y ago
  The Bay Area is pretty awesome however the housing prices are not, I would say it's the single biggest issue here. I've been told my $2000/mo Rent for a 500Sqft 1Br Apartment in San Mateo is a "good deal".. to contrast that the mortgage on my 2000Sqft house back in Miami (not far from the beach) is $650/mo including Taxes and Insurance.
- YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  The downsides of mass immigration are have a tremendous downside, comparable to the upside of being physically co-located. For example, the skyrocketing living costs in US cities. Trying to solve the problems that get in the way of making remote work as seamless as co-location seem to be technical, which are easier than the fundamental problems of economics.
- johansch 12y ago
  Most people would think so, but apparently this changes if you work for Yahoo!. Then you are a lot more productive if you work remotely. This is what I learned on Hacker News. ;)
untothebreach 12y ago
So much this. I have pretty much stopped clicking on the HN posts from HN companies looking for employees, because almost none of them offer remote work. Which is too bad, because there are quite a few HN companies that I would love to work for.
- ryanSrich 12y ago
  I highly suspect that it's a consequence of being a YC company. The president of YC has even publicly denounced allowing remote work. > As a side note, avoid remote employees in the early days. As a culture is still gelling, it’s important to have everyone in the same building. [1] 1. http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire
  - bryanh 12y ago
    Actually, I think truly remote teams are just rare regardless of affiliation - we're YC, 20 employees, and only hire remote for all the reasons outlined in this thread and others.
  - lsaferite 12y ago
    Seems like setting yourself up to have an 'everyone is remote' culture at that point in time would make the most sense.
    - ryanSrich 12y ago
      That makes the most sense to me as well. If you're planning on having a distributed team, doing it early on is the best, and perhaps the only, time to do it.
acgourley 12y ago
Paul Graham is deferring to his portfolio founders' words and actions. Does author believe all these smart and highly incentivized founders are wrong, too? I hope he realizes how strong that claim is and that by doing so he should accept the burden of proof.
Tycho 12y ago
I would be interested in reading a PG essay responding to this very point.
photomatt 12y ago
It's worth repeating that I absolutely believe we should improve and dramatically open up immigration in the US, and applaud PG's and other's work there, but in the meantime you don't have to handicap your company because of the current politics around this issue.
jweir 12y ago
Remote workers present challenges. Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea contractors? Managing developers across time zones can be a big problem. If the developer in the Ukraine has a question for a manger asleep in California, he has to wait. There is no casual connection between people - no going to a bar to talk things over, no stepping away from the computer to talk. All communication is filtered down through the pipes.
- YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  The larger point of this discussion is that mass immigration presents other challenges, some much harder to overcome. For example, the nightmare that is the political discussion of immigration in the USA, and for another example, the skyrocketing living costs in US cities that are tech hubs. Trying to solve the problems you outline seem to be technical, which are easier than the fundamental problems of politics or economics.
- nhaehnle 12y ago
  > Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea contractors? This is a false dichotomy. You could have 5 on-site contractors or 5 overseas employed engineers. (However, the rest of your post contains very valid points.)
trustfundbaby 12y ago
> In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes This is the best rebuttal to the more-immigration-so-we-can-haz-programmers I've read in a long time. And its so true. The way the current work visa (h1-b) is setup makes it far more likely that good programmers get tied to stodgy plodding firms and not smaller innovative ones that tech needs them to work for. Remote work and rewriting the current h1-b laws to make it so that h1-bs can more easily transfer their work permits and work for whoever they like, whenever they like ... remotely as well ... just like their American contemporaries would open up lots of supply. but what the big firms really want is more pliant programmers who will work within the rigid confines they set up. Thats why we're not talking more about the mechanics of the work visa and the green card process which is currently set up pretty restrictively.
walshemj 12y ago
Oh dear sorry to rain on your parade experience shows that the way to get the best performance is collocated teams of developers ideally coloacted with the end customer. I know this isn't what a lot of HN readers want to hear but I bet Paul and many other VC's would bear me out.
- trustfundbaby 12y ago
  Do you actually have data on this, or is this completely anecdotal?
  - walshemj 12y ago
    30+ years of experience also read steve McConnell.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  Sounds great, as long as you're only interested in selling to the Bay area I guess.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    No based on experience building the control system for the UK's core TCP/IP network for one example.
drawkbox 12y ago
Programmers, if they have a choice, like remote or at least some remote. Managers + VCs, if they have a choice, prefer all in the office so they can keep power but this actually makes them less competitive and more susceptible to physical disruptions: moving an office, an employee moving, time, office politics, commute, distractions, over meeting and more. The PG essay on this was glaringly overlooking that you can be a US based programmer and be good or great even if you aren't in SF. Tech companies have a responsibility to not be so monoculture and they currently have a single point of failure in Silicon Valley, which from an engineering perspective is poor distributed design and very little redundancy. There are benefits of being in one place, the ability to meet physically and be on the same page but we all know the real work gets done back at our desks in our solitary focused modes when it comes to programming and making products. Then we open up for feedback and iteration, then again back to work. The work part should be setup so programmers perform their best. Just like some of the best scientists, writers, etc, they need their lab/office where they can get somewhere with the problem at hand, not an open office in SF. Glad Ma.tt mentioned this as he is a leader in the right kind of tech leadership we need: spread it around, live better, work hard, deliver solid products, from anywhere...
- ha292 12y ago
  I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims that "mean people fail". The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions. Time to get out of the bubble.
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    Part of the problem is that investors might understand the businesses they invest in from 30,000 feet, but they frequently have no idea how their portfolio companies are actually run. If some of them went undercover and applied for jobs at their own portfolio companies, they'd probably have a different perspective about the "talent shortage."
    - 12y ago
intortus 12y ago
This is where I think Paul Graham gets it wrong: > Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training. This is the old "you're either an exceptional programmer or you're not" myth. This is one reason why diversity in tech has regressed since the 80s. I agree that geopolitical boundaries should matter less in the software business. However, I strongly disagree that this is the solution to programmer scarcity. Expanding your source of resumes to the entire world only delays the inevitable. Why focus on removing the dependency on the passport variable, when we still have such a strong dependency on gender and race?
jasode 12y ago
>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes, they do help mitigate many issues of isolation and they do help collaboration but there's still some "bandwidth loss" when people are not in the same room or even down the hall from each other. I'm not advocating an open floor plan with noise and distractions. Even a set of private offices that share a common corridor to facilitate spontaneous conversation with a side conference room for group brainstorming, is superior to keeping Skype windows open. Yes, there are the common examples of virtual remote workers at basecamp, Automattic, github etc. Those are not billion dollar companies. A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. Small scale modest businesses, yes, but not big ones. Maybe you can hire a 5-person 100% remote team to launch a new web magazine. Journalists and editors by their nature seem to fit the remote work paradigm quite nicely. At first glance, it seems programming also fits, but only for modest projects. Yes, the remote workers themselves will insist "I'm 100% just as effective offsite as onsite -- in fact, I'm more productive because I'm not interrupted by office nonsense." No doubt they feel that way but the whole team isn't more effective. Remote workers even with today's fanciest collaboration technology is not the answer to finding the best talent.
- photomatt 12y ago
  Not that valuations are the end-all be-all, but Automattic was valued above a billion earlier in the year, and has risen since then: http://www.techmeme.com/140505/p14#a140505p14 http://www.techmeme.com/140505/p14#a140505p14
- kareemm 12y ago
  > A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. MySQL was a 1B company and built with a remote team: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former-mysql-ceo-mrten-mickos-talks-about-managing-remote-workers-video http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former...
na85 12y ago
Hey Matt, I'm so glad you felt it necessary to include that DHTML snowstorm. My laptop fan really needed the exercise and I have your ~500-line JavaScript workout to thank for it! Of course, I closed the tab pretty much immediately after noticing it so I didn't read the article. Can't wait for unnecessary js to go out of style.
- wavefunction 12y ago
  You should check out NoScript if JavaScript is SUCH A BIG DEAL for you. enjoy the downvote
- brandon272 12y ago
  As soon as I saw the snowflakes falling, I thought, "Oh jeez, someone on HN is going to be having a meltdown over this!" Sure enough.
digitalwaveride 12y ago
There are companies like teleport http://teleport.org http://teleport.org that try to visualise this potential with data. Also recommend this YCombinator startup school talk by Balaji Srinivasan on this topic: Silicon Valleys Ultimate Exit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
photomatt 12y ago
If you do this right, there's no "remote", there's no "overseas", there's no day-to-day distinction in how someone works between whether that person happens to live in the country the company was founded or not.
fecak 12y ago
It's interesting how many commenters read "remote" as "contract" or even "overseas". There are lots of developers outside of SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. that would relish the opportunity to still live their suburban/rural lifestyle and avoid a lengthy commute. One advantage for companies in big cities is they can usually hire these remote employees at a discount. It can get a bit hairy when two remote employees doing the same job are paid differently, but that is already the case in many situations. The other obvious advantage is that companies that hire remote employees have an almost unlimited candidate pool. Even if a company chose to limit hires to their own country, the only group they cannot hire would be candidates unwilling to work remotely. Based on my discussions with thousands of programmers over the years, I'd suspect this is a very small group.
barce 12y ago
This is a great how to article on remote management. The tools he lists are all there. The author mentions Skype, Slack, G+ Hangouts, and then surprisingly WordPress. Would the author care to discuss how he specifically has used WordPress to remote manage a team? I think the issue is that most managers don't want to remote manage which makes me wonder, "Why?"
- sberkun10 12y ago
  I worked for Mullenweg for a year at WordPress.com to write a book about all of these questions. It documents all the tools I used and what life was like as a remote manager of a development team. http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Future-ebook/dp/B00DVJXI4M http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Futur... You can read a free chapter about culture from the book here: http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excerpt-from-the-year-without-pants/ http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excer...
  - massimosgrelli 12y ago
    Do you recommend this book to understand remote working dynamics at Wordpress ? Learning from companies that succeeded in setting up the remote working practice is definitely the best way to understand if you can put the process in a bottle. Anyway thanks for sharing this title.
- sberkun10 12y ago
  The direct answer is most managers have no experience managing remote workers. Certainly that's not the entire story but it's a new way of working and many organizations reject it for its novelty without understanding it's advantages or what investments have to be made to get them.
btilly 12y ago
Meh. Here is the tradeoff. If everyone is co-located, you have inconvenience and higher productivity. If everyone is remote, you have an inherent overhead, but enormous flexibility. If some people are co-located and others are remote, you naturally tend towards a divide where people who are co-located without thinking about it wind up networking with each other and excluding the remotes. If you are a small startup, the productivity difference really can be the margin between success and failure. Hence the pressure to co-locate. But conversely the availability of better talent in theory can allow for a better workforce which might outweigh the productivity overhead of remote work. But when there are just founders, by definition you can't assume that there are better people available. And the need for close working at the initial stages gives strong pressure to co-locate. Therefore there is a natural tendency for startups to co-locate. And once the seed of the company is co-located, switching to a remote model is going to involve crossing a difficult cultural barrier that not everyone will succeed in. Thus the continuing pressure to co-locate.
- the_arun 12y ago
  Yep, I too think same
- snird 12y ago
  I think you might be mistaken in the assumption that remote working leads to less productivity than co-located. This is purely up to the team. Sometimes being co-located leads to over meeting and lots of time spent on disruptions and chats, while remote working lead you to be more professional and talk to your co-workers only when necessary for the job.
  - btilly 12y ago
    I think my assumption is justified. To address your suggestion, it is safe to say tht early stage startups which are inclined to over meeting are guaranteed failures no matter what.
kartikkumar 12y ago
For argument's sake, if remote work isn't the solution, how about taking the middle ground? I don't see a lot of companies setting up offices in other parts of the world until much later on the growth curve. Is there a fundamental reason for this? Is it simply cost? Seems to me that SV companies can do great things by even opening up 2-3 person shops elsewhere in the world. You then have the compromise situation of having a few people collocated, which should cut down the need to continuous remote meetings, and at the same time provide simultaneous access to new growth markets. In effect, you have remote offices as opposed to remote employees, which seems like a much more efficient organization of resources.
dang 12y ago
The article assumes its conclusion: > amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline That's a huge claim, and it's disputable. For example, I've worked both ways a lot and find remote work to be dramatically less effective. If you accept the claim, then sure, the startups PG was writing about are missing the obvious, and for the most ironic of reasons—technical backwardness. That's possible. But there's also a lot of wishful thinking and saying-makes-it-so on this subject, which comes up on HN all the time. A lot of people just really, really want this to be true. That alone doesn't make it true, and I think it's at least as possible that desire is distorting the analysis. (Which, as someone whose whole career has been plagued by an unsolvable constraint problem of family, work, and geography, I can easily understand.) Fortunately, we're going to find out. If all those startups are doing it wrong, then there's a gigantic market inefficiency and we'll soon see a new wave of smarter, less backward companies doing much better.
- YuriNiyazov 12y ago
  What you say about the article may very well be true, but the surrounding discussion is not as bad as that. I recognize that the problems pointed out by PG ("chance meetings") and others are genuine problems that haven't yet been solved by technology. However, what I object to is that the rallying cry (and a lot of PG's essays are now rallying cries for how the industry should be, even if he just thinks "I'm just a dude that likes to post my thoughts on the internet, I don't know why everyone objects") of the industry is "move more people into open offices in SV and NYC", rather than "improve the remoting process".
  - aredridel 12y ago
    Twitter = chance meetings as a platform.
welshguy 12y ago
If my business pays for a great programmer, I want that programmer's knowledge, experience and attitude to diffuse to the rest of my team (... not that I have a business, just sayin' :-). Much harder to do this if that great programmer isn't in the office.
- cgh 12y ago
  In my eight years' remote working experience, your statement is false.
  - dannyr 12y ago
    What he is saying is that it is harder, not impossible. Are you saying that remote work is as good if not better than being physically-located?
    - cgh 12y ago
      I'm saying that's it's not harder. Thus his statement is false.
  - welshguy 12y ago
    In my thirty years experience in IT, my statement might be right.
    - cgh 12y ago
      How many years working remotely?
- xj9 12y ago
  None of those things actually require physical proximity. It might take a little more effort to get right, but there are a lot of great programmers out there that don't want to relocate (or be tied to an office) and some of the might be worth it.
malisper 12y ago
The next question is what happens to people who want to work in the US?
gaius 12y ago
Let us assume a company where everyone works from home and meetings are held in Starbucks or airport lounges. Such a company would save many thousands of dollars per employee per year, maybe tens of thousands. No real estate, no receptionist, no cleaners, no equipment to buy or IT dept to support it... Such a company would probably pay less than market rates, due to the "perk" of allowing remote work? But where's that money going? If you are an engineer considering remote working, make sure YOU get a slice of the pie.
choppaface 12y ago
I've worked both onsite and remote as a software dev / data engineer. I started out onsite. There are major disadvantages to remote work: * Amount you learn from the office community is orders of magnitude lower than onsite. If you're good at pushing yourself to learn new things, that can help, but your knowledge will almost certainly end up less diversified living remotely. You're just not exposed to the company's tech challenges as deeply, yet that's usually one of the main reasons for working at the company. * You don't necessarily get top projects, but rather perhaps good projects that fit remote work. Taking a remote role almost certainly hurts your career if you want to compete with traditionally onsite roles. * You likely don't get to participate in hiring or shaping the culture in a substantial way. * You'll have a much harder time building the network needed to get access to key resources (e.g. data, people, etc). * Your company better have a nice VPN or you're going to be doing a lot of systems-oriented stuff for yourself. It can be fun but can slow you down. * You're probably more likely to be laid off. The company I worked for started offering remote much more frequently due to recruiting and retention problems. I don't think the net result had a very positive impact on the Eng org. In particular, a lot of junior people were allowed to go remote for retention reasons but they didn't end up doing much in that role-- they would have been much better off just joining a different company (either local to them or one with a much much stronger remote culture). Agree with the poster that PG's essay has some holes; seems orders of magnitude less polished than his older essays.
- choppaface 12y ago
  Downvotes because I insulted pg or because I argued remote was bad??
Mz 12y ago
I was part of a virtual team many years ago, before all these tools existed. I was the only one on the West Coast, not in a position to meet others face to face -- at least not more than once, for a conference I attended -- and was the newest to the group, younger than most of the others, etc. There were several dimensions in which I was an outlier for the group. Ultimately, it ended on something of a sour note. I was basically accused of being a "traitor" for doing my actual job. I and the person at the top had very different ideas about how things should be handled and my domain expertise was not really respected. (After my departure, the project that had benefited the most from my input kind of died back down again.) I spend a lot of my time online and I have taken a lot of online college classes. When I had a job at BigCo, I got in the habit of emailing my questions to my immediate boss, whose role included answering technical questions. For various reasons, I was unable to master the art of catching her at her desk or whatever. Emailing worked better for me. I and some of my teammates got transferred to a new team that initially did not have someone in the technical role she filled. Until the new team got their own technical lead, we were all still assigned to our old lead. Other teammates of mine who were used to having face-time with our lead were incredibly frustrated. My transition was quite smooth. I rarely needed face-time with her to get good results. I just continued emailing my questions as usual. I also was not particularly "likable." I was quite ill at the time and not at my smoothest socially. I also just come from a more formal cultural background than the people I was surrounded by. I was not interested in being too schmoozy. In the short run, this seemed to hurt me a bit. But once I got transferred to a new team, it was to my benefit: Getting my questions answered had been a purely professional function, not something rooted in being friendly or whatever. So I think there are good points on both sides of this argument. I see several really good comments here falling on either side. And I think the disconnect probably has to do with some social thing that can be fostered remotely but many people aren't good at it. As we develop more online/virtual/long distance cultural practices, I think this will become less of a divide for some people.
meritt 12y ago
For entry-level people, I've really found an office helps with mentoring and culture assimilation in a way that fully-remote cannot even remotely reach. I still don't feel there's any reason you need to physically exist in the Bay area though. Open an office somewhere that's both attractive and affordable for people to live and you enable the best of both worlds.
overgard 12y ago
The problem with this argument is that it lumps all versions of "Remote" together, but that's not really true. There's a huge difference between the guy who is remote because he has a long commute, vs the guy who is remote because he lives on the east coast, vs the guy who is remote because he's in china or london. The common theme of all that is: timezones matter a lot. It's hard to collaborate with someone really far away because they'll tend to be asleep when you're awake. Programmers like async communication for a lot of reasons, but real-time is important too.
guelo 12y ago
It's all been tried and people know the tradeoffs, and there are tradeoffs no matter what you might think. The drive and culture that can develop when a small focused team spends every waking hour together can become almost cult-like. This culture is what VCs want to foment. It's also why they like hiring 22 year olds that can be more impressionable.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
rev_bird 12y ago
I would love to have remote work, but I am honestly unsure about whether I'm good enough at my job to enjoy it. My concern isn't with performing my current job, but every promotion/job change I've had has been because of the things I learned in some free time from somebody sitting next to me. It's so nice to be able to wander over to a smart person and ask about some random problem I've been having in an area in which they're an expert. I have no doubt I learn more in an office than I would in my living room. ...then again, that's probably why remote workers say they're more productive.
snowwrestler 12y ago
The topics of remote work and of immigration reform seem unrelated to me. A better immigration system would be better for the U.S., in that it would allow the best programmers to come here if they want to. That is clearly better for the U.S. as a whole, since it would make it easier to raise the national technical talent level relative to other nations. These new Americans would hopefully become citizens, raise families, vote, sit on school boards, run for elected office, start companies, etc.--improving the nation from within over time with their perspectives, talents, desires, and hard work (as past generations of immigrants have). Contracting with foreign workers through the Internet does not achieve any of those long-term national goals. Once new workers are legally within the U.S., I agree that they should have the freedom to choose remote work if they want to, or colocating work if they want to.
geetarista 12y ago
Under jasode's thread, you can see that people are missing Paul's point. He's not saying that working with close proximity is the "best" way of working. Yet most people here are debating which type of work is. Each company, market, vertical, team, etc. will vary in manifold ways. What I believe Paul is asking for is that companies have the option to choose. Right now the option is available to anyone to hire remotely in one way or another. This is not the case with physically hiring into the country. Almost every startup I've worked at has had issues trying to hire exceptional people from another country. In almost every case, we lost those hires to the system and were forced to start the search again. If a small, remote, international startup grows fast enough and they decide that working together under one roof in the U.S. fits their new needs, they should have the freedom and choice to do so.
mcfunley 12y ago
I just finished a remote job search. I'm in Los Angeles, and most of the companies I talked to were in SF. I had previously worked remotely for a company in New York (Etsy), and I was honestly really surprised how hostile SF companies were to the idea. I was mostly going through personal connections, so I assume that I was getting the gigantic break of having a solid recommendation that most people can't get. (I feel bad about this, but it is what it is.) I have been on both sides of remote work, so I totally get that it's not a slam dunk. It works a lot better for companies that have a strong culture established in a home base, and it works a lot better for experienced folks than green college hires. I have shut down the interview process myself when I felt like working remotely wouldn't work out at particular companies. Even given all of that, I was pretty amazed how quickly some of the conversations got shut down. No remotes, we don't care who you are or what your experience is. I didn't talk to any companies outside of SF that were that quick to say no. FWIW I landed at Stripe, which in fairness is probably one of the companies pg had in mind when writing his original article. I agree with the spirit of this, and I also don't really agree with a lot of things in pg's essay. But the particulars here might be totally wrong. At least one company in his network is really remote friendly.
- massimosgrelli 12y ago
  How does remote working get done at Stripe? what tools? What practices are a consolidated standard? It would be really useful to the discussion if you could share something with us.
ownedthx 12y ago
I have completely 180'ed on this topic. I used to think to be a successful startup, you all had to be in the same room, ideally at a big huge desk etc. After working at my current startup, I realize I was wrong. We are an entirely remote operation, and have been since day 1. A few of us are in Austin, and rarely meet for a face-to-face, but it's more of a 'oh yeah, you actually exist' meeting rather than a hash-it-out sort of meeting. I think the reason we have been successful is because being remote has forced us to write things down, in our wiki (in the form of product specs) and in JIRA (in the form of specific features and bug fixes). With just those two forms of written communication, we've solved 95% of our communication needs. We almost never skype or use video conferencing... it's just not needed. The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is enough, but does deserve more explanation. (unfortunately I can't muster the amount of typing atm). IN the end, we can focus on getting work done... without the distraction of office chatter, commuting, long lunches.
- mattm 12y ago
  > The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is enough I've worked remotely for a few years now and think this is the key. I would not advocate hiring junior developers remotely. There's too much risk in it. I was once faced with the task of trying to mentor a junior dev remotely and it just didn't work.
  - samastur 12y ago
    In general I would agree, but I think it also depends on junior developer in question. Every now and then you meet someone whose overflowing intelligence, talent and work ethic will make them an exceptional engineer, but are not there yet. It would be a shame not to support that. I recently mentored such person and she is already one of our most productive developers.
abalone 12y ago
I find this post and many remote-advocacy posts like it are overly optimistic about the problem of timezone differences. A critical flaw is that most of the "solutions" mentioned assume you're all working at the same time. (Skype, G+ Hangouts, chatrooms.) That may be ok for workers living in less expensive parts of America or the western hemisphere, but that certainly doesn't hold true for overseas workers, which is what Paul Graham is mostly talking about with immigration. An 8-12 hour timezone gap is not something easily bridged by chatrooms and videoconferences. To even have a conversation with the remote worker/team, one or both of you need to schedule time at very early or late hours and even then you only get a little bit of overlap. For the most part you are left to collaborate by email or blogs -- which is a significantly degraded way of collaborating, much moreso than just not being face-to-face. Without an easy way to have a realtime conversation, closing the loop on an issue can take 24 hours.. or several days if there is a lot of back and forth. This style of working can be very difficult in a highly dynamic, less structured, fast moving startup environment. It is not magically solved by "modern communication tools" or high-latency asynchronous working styles. The fundamental issue is.. daylight and human sleep schedules. I wish all conversations about remote work would qualify which context they're talking about -- near or far timezones -- instead of just lumping it all together as "remote work from anywhere".
tessierashpool 12y ago
PG ignored current trends and recent history to an absurd degree in his recent blog post. Not factored into the equation: An actual, provable, verifiable history of illegal salary-fixing. The experiential reality that most immigrant programmers get a lot of mistreatment, both from racism and from their own incompetence - and the related experiential fact that a lot of immigrant programmers are utterly incompetent. The rhetoric of these arguments talks about 10x programmers, but companies really seem to prefer importing 0.1x programmers or even -10x programmers. Meanwhile, tons of companies have immense success with remote work, and the wage changes associated with the last ten years are not at all commensurate with the increased value of programming work. (See aforementioned illegal salary-fixing.) Is remote work easy? No. But is PG's business about doing easy things? No. I literally just ran grep -c "table" against a text dump of this comments page. The count was 122. 122 uses of the table tag. Since that includes </table>, 61 tables. This whole argument is as up-to-date as the HTML on this page.
unclebucknasty 12y ago
Meh. Keep the barriers high and the labor market tight for as long as possible. Let companies compete for workers like the good ol' days. Let startups use more of that VC cash on its workers and also help keep rates up for IT workers across the country. I know we Yanks get no sympathy from the rest of the world, but labor here has taken a beaten long enough. And, I say this as a dev-turned-founder who would presumably now want to see low rates and a bigger pool. I guess I just appreciate more a little "economic justice" from time-to-time!
modzilla 12y ago
It is clear various tools can be effective or ineffective for companies and individuals – this is a very subjective topic. However, since many tech companies, who have subjectively decided they want to have all of their employees in the same physical location, have a talent shortage problem, it would seem only beneficial to modify our immigration policy to allow more of these highly skilled individuals to work in the US. There outcomes of making such changes are almost exclusively positive.
mikeleeorg 12y ago
Just to jump on the point of being physically co-located: I've done both. There are pros and cons to each. What I've found is: it all depends on the people in the company. Some work best when they're right next to you, able to share a drink after work to decompress. Others want to run to the beach to go surfing right after a meeting. Both can be equally talented, but vary significantly in their modus operandi.
stevesi 12y ago
My $0.02 all here http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-engineering-is-so-difficult/ http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-eng...
sarperdag 12y ago
I’ve written an article on this issue recently as well. https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-talent-wherever-in-the-world-you-are-6b558ddef519 https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-tal...
datashovel 12y ago
I read the PG article as a "grass is always greener" argument.
- datashovel 12y ago
  I just read the footnote: [1] How much better is a great programmer than an ordinary one? So much better that you can't even measure the difference directly.... You do not get to hire those people. And if you do it's on their terms. Perhaps you get to invest in their ideas if you're lucky.
dvo19 12y ago
As I work remotely, it is the best. I think it is up to the individual. If the individual does not want to work, he or she does not want to work regardless at home or at the work place.
lukasm 12y ago
This is my inspiration to create https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/ https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/
muhannad0147 12y ago
Muhannad0147@hotmail.com
muhannad0147 12y ago
Muhannad0147@hotmail.com

301 points by kaws 12y ago

The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I'm not sure I understand it. A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm. Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purpose whatsoever except to serve as a legal fig leaf). 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee and (b) because it's technically unlawful to classify full-time employees as contractors.

brogrammer90 12y ago
Do you know how Automattic, Github, and say Basecamp do it?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- rhgraysonii 12y ago
  In my experience I have encountered several firms that use oDesk with VERY healthy hourly pay to make up for healthcare benefits, retirement, etc. Equity becomes a mess, but the folks I talked to were definitely not 'second class citizens' in the company, and were just as respected as any non-remote dev.
- evansolomon 12y ago
  Automattic "employees" outside of the US and Canada are contractors. (I used to work at Automattic)
  - hew 12y ago
    This is no longer accurate. Some remain "contractors" still officially due to regulatory issues, but we now have employees in multiple locations outside North America. And that list of locations is growing. (I work at Automattic)
    - evansolomon 12y ago
      Figured this was the case but assumed it didn't changed the gist of the answer too much. tl;dr actually employing people in other countries is difficult
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
ryanSrich 12y ago
Remote work isn't a solution to immigration, and I'm not sure that was the point of the article. For me remote is the solution to the so called talent shortage in the Valley. If companies were really interested in hiring the best developers they'd drop their archaic view of remote work and remove location-dicated working.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  In all fairness, it would require a major sea change for, say, Microsoft, to get to where they could make remote workers a significant portion of their development staff.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Part of the talent shortage is the SV is competing with other higher paying and higher social status professions. Its even more pronounced in the UK and Europe.
photomatt 12y ago
Just because someone is on a different kind of contract (say a monthly retainer paid by wire, versus employee of US company paid with direct deposit) doesn't mean you need to treat them differently. Every "Automattician" at Automattic is viewed the same regardless of how their employment contract happens to work, and as you scale larger you can set up subsidiaries overseas to directly employ people. (We look at this once we have about 5 people in a given country.) Also remote work doesn't mean overseas, there is amazing talent all over the USA too that doesn't happen to live in the SF area. I really liked this sentence: "The US has less than 5% of the world's population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US." There are about 7 million people in the Bay area, 322M in the US total, so let's say 98% of the great people in the US are born outside of Bay area. There are no visa issues moving between cities or states in the US, but many many other barriers that have nothing to do with visas.
- wglb 12y ago
  I have done about half my career as a 1099 or equivalent. There is no question that those are treated differently.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- tptacek 12y ago
  How are you handling the tax implications of foreign workers? Are you doing something to withhold FICA/FUTA? I'm doing some research and I don't see the exception that says that workers that would otherwise be classified as full-time employees can instead be 1099 contractors simply because they're foreign; on the contrary, the SSA seems to say that you're required to ensure that foreign employees obtain social security numbers. I'm not a lawyer, but I am an employer, and it is not clear to me that the "1099 remote worker" strategy is as clean a solution to the immigration problem as it's being made out to be.
  - wiredfool 12y ago
YuriNiyazov 12y ago
Fine distinctions get lost on Twitter, unfortunately. Your points about hiring people in other countries are valid. Remote work is also an alternative to moving everyone in the US to Chicago, NYC, or San Francisco; I understand that PG's essay was about immigration, but PG is an on-going advocate of people working in the same office due to the "great ideas happen in chance meetings, and those are hard to replicate", which means that that only does he want great programmers to move to the USA, he also wants them to move to cities that are tech hubs.
mbesto 12y ago
> 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee Care to elaborate why this is so bad? As far as I can tell, most employee (FTE) related laws in the US are suited for, well, people living in the US.
lukasm 12y ago
It's spooky to read that while eating dinner and thinking that I cloud get a remote job and go back to Krakow. This is one of my concerns - to be a second class employee. Company has to have remote modus operandi.
callmeed 12y ago
Those aren't the options people are referring to on Twitter (at least not in the threads I've seen [0]). It's about hiring US/Canada based people and not forcing them to relocate. Using Slack, Skype, screen-sharing, co-working spaces, etc. to collaborate and stay on top of everything. The kind of companies you see hiring at: https://weworkremotely.com/ https://weworkremotely.com/ I'm doing it at a great startup now and it's awesome. I've got kids and my wife is in college–I'm not relocating to SF. Maybe there are intricacies to being in a heavily-funded, high-growth SF startup that prevent this ... I just don't know what they are and PG & sama aren't elaborating on them. [0] https://twitter.com/sama/status/549053726409768960 https://twitter.com/sama/status/549053726409768960
- tptacek 12y ago
  Oh, I think I see. The argument isn't that remote-work makes it easy to hire foreigners without dealing with visas. It's that you don't need to source workers from abroad if you can just source them from Tulsa. Totally valid point! Thanks. (We're doing a startup from Chicago, with one very, very remote team member.)
  - callmeed 12y ago
    Exactly. A cursory glance at the HN/YC jobs page shows 1 remote-friendly position out of 20+. Why? I'll admit, people are probably wrongly ascribing bad intentions to PG's essay and sama's related tweets. But that's what happens when you fail to address the other options.
dennisgorelik 12y ago
The contract with foreign contractors is NOT "1099". AFAIK you do not have to file 1099 form in order to deduct foreign contractor expense from US business revenue. I'm not a lawyer or CPA, but I run my own business and pay to foreign contractors.
- tptacek 12y ago
  You're right; it's 1042-S.
  - dennisgorelik 12y ago
    Is filing 1042-S mandatory? It may or may not be the case, but when foreign contractor works as a business entity then "Foreign Person’s U.S. Source Income" seems to be irrelevant.
    - tptacek 12y ago
      Work with a US nexus is subject to withholding. More broadly, this article does a good job of summing up my concerns: http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/ http://www.whitecase.com/hrhottopic-0711/
      - dennisgorelik 12y ago
        Thanks - that's an interesting point of view. If I were running a company with hundreds of employees&contractors that would be a point of concern. However from a bootstrapped startup perspective that probably does not even worth investigating further. Everyone is free to sue for anything. That's the cost of doing business. Hiring foreigners directly as employees has many other risks in addition to having inevitable overhead.
        tptacek 12y ago
        This is an example of what I think is a common and very damaging metafallacy in startup entrepreneurship: the basic business safeguards we don't pay attention to because they don't seem to matter until our companies get big. But these are some of the worst problems, because they submarine. You pour the money, sweat, and (most importantly) time into an enterprise, risking its total failure. You stick with it, your company gets its footing, you're poised to see a return. Then bam, disaster: some stupid thing you weren't careful about when you were 4 people explodes, counterfeiting your success. You'd have been better off it exploded when you were just 4 people big. You'd have known you were screwed, and could have saved yourself the time and energy, and used the opportunity to move on to something that had a chance of succeeding. Instead: you lose 90-100% of your outcome to a lawsuit.

ryanSrich 12y ago

Great points. I'm actually working on a longer piece with actual numbers as a follow up to remote working as a solution to the talent "shortage".

smtddr 12y ago

I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I've made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose, Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the "out-of-reach"'ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air is located, and the Persidio... we'd would be having a very different conversation. In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.

wavefunction 12y ago
I don't know if I'm one of the great engineers PG and others are talking about but I have no interest in living in the Bay area, whether as it currently exists or with even more people. You can solve the "transportation" issue by avoiding having to transport anyone in the first place, which is exactly what the author is speaking to when they suggest remote working arrangements.
- mgkimsal 12y ago
  Or maybe even transporting some of those opportunities to areas closer to you. Starting new VC-backed companies in Detroit, Denver, Boston, Durham, Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville or other regions would give you access to some great talent that simply prefers to live in other areas of the country. For an industry that often derides 'monoculture', the SF tech scene sure resembles one.

StylusEater 12y ago

Spot on! Seems the "shortage" isn't in labor but in deference to employees as people. Wouldn't you want a horde of folks willing to work 80+ hours for Ramen? </cynic>

jfaucett 12y ago

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you'd lose these benefits by becoming a contractor. EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn't make you a contractor. But how would this work for non us-citizens?

Vekz 12y ago
The article didn't say anything explicitly about remote contractors. The two companies it did reference Automattic and Github have remote full time employees.
- jfaucett 12y ago
  How does github do it then? Wouldn't said company need to be registered in the country where the employee lived full-time and worked? Otherwise how are taxes, insurance, healthcare, etc going to be handled?
- kylec 12y ago
  Another commenter in this thread said that Automattic workers outside the US and Canada are contractors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8811183
rifung 12y ago
Excuse me for being completely ignorant of this kind of thing, but why does working remotely automatically mean you are a contractor? Is it not possible to work remotely as a normal employee? Perhaps there needs to be a distinction between remote workers elsewhere in the US and international ones as well. I imagine there are many talented developers elsewhere in the US that don't want to live in SV.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Presumably you would have to set up and run a subsidiary in the country

jamiemchale 12y ago

Isn't there a tremendous upside to being physically co-located? Even if the teams are remote, are the founders not usually located in a 'tech hub' city (SF, NY, etc.)? Matt says to let people 'live someplace remarkable', but for most of the world that want to work in technology SF is someplace remarkable. The benefits of using group collaboration tools are still available, but you have other people working on overlapping problems on your doorstep, support and service companies, and access to intelligent finance.

kenrikm 12y ago
The Bay Area is pretty awesome however the housing prices are not, I would say it's the single biggest issue here. I've been told my $2000/mo Rent for a 500Sqft 1Br Apartment in San Mateo is a "good deal".. to contrast that the mortgage on my 2000Sqft house back in Miami (not far from the beach) is $650/mo including Taxes and Insurance.
YuriNiyazov 12y ago
The downsides of mass immigration are have a tremendous downside, comparable to the upside of being physically co-located. For example, the skyrocketing living costs in US cities. Trying to solve the problems that get in the way of making remote work as seamless as co-location seem to be technical, which are easier than the fundamental problems of economics.
johansch 12y ago
Most people would think so, but apparently this changes if you work for Yahoo!. Then you are a lot more productive if you work remotely. This is what I learned on Hacker News. ;)

untothebreach 12y ago

So much this. I have pretty much stopped clicking on the HN posts from HN companies looking for employees, because almost none of them offer remote work. Which is too bad, because there are quite a few HN companies that I would love to work for.

ryanSrich 12y ago
I highly suspect that it's a consequence of being a YC company. The president of YC has even publicly denounced allowing remote work. > As a side note, avoid remote employees in the early days. As a culture is still gelling, it’s important to have everyone in the same building. [1] 1. http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire
- bryanh 12y ago
  Actually, I think truly remote teams are just rare regardless of affiliation - we're YC, 20 employees, and only hire remote for all the reasons outlined in this thread and others.
- lsaferite 12y ago
  Seems like setting yourself up to have an 'everyone is remote' culture at that point in time would make the most sense.
  - ryanSrich 12y ago
    That makes the most sense to me as well. If you're planning on having a distributed team, doing it early on is the best, and perhaps the only, time to do it.

acgourley 12y ago

Paul Graham is deferring to his portfolio founders' words and actions. Does author believe all these smart and highly incentivized founders are wrong, too? I hope he realizes how strong that claim is and that by doing so he should accept the burden of proof.

Tycho 12y ago

I would be interested in reading a PG essay responding to this very point.

photomatt 12y ago

It's worth repeating that I absolutely believe we should improve and dramatically open up immigration in the US, and applaud PG's and other's work there, but in the meantime you don't have to handicap your company because of the current politics around this issue.

jweir 12y ago

Remote workers present challenges. Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea contractors? Managing developers across time zones can be a big problem. If the developer in the Ukraine has a question for a manger asleep in California, he has to wait. There is no casual connection between people - no going to a bar to talk things over, no stepping away from the computer to talk. All communication is filtered down through the pipes.

YuriNiyazov 12y ago
The larger point of this discussion is that mass immigration presents other challenges, some much harder to overcome. For example, the nightmare that is the political discussion of immigration in the USA, and for another example, the skyrocketing living costs in US cities that are tech hubs. Trying to solve the problems you outline seem to be technical, which are easier than the fundamental problems of politics or economics.
nhaehnle 12y ago
> Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea contractors? This is a false dichotomy. You could have 5 on-site contractors or 5 overseas employed engineers. (However, the rest of your post contains very valid points.)

trustfundbaby 12y ago

> In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes This is the best rebuttal to the more-immigration-so-we-can-haz-programmers I've read in a long time. And its so true. The way the current work visa (h1-b) is setup makes it far more likely that good programmers get tied to stodgy plodding firms and not smaller innovative ones that tech needs them to work for. Remote work and rewriting the current h1-b laws to make it so that h1-bs can more easily transfer their work permits and work for whoever they like, whenever they like ... remotely as well ... just like their American contemporaries would open up lots of supply. but what the big firms really want is more pliant programmers who will work within the rigid confines they set up. Thats why we're not talking more about the mechanics of the work visa and the green card process which is currently set up pretty restrictively.

walshemj 12y ago

Oh dear sorry to rain on your parade experience shows that the way to get the best performance is collocated teams of developers ideally coloacted with the end customer. I know this isn't what a lot of HN readers want to hear but I bet Paul and many other VC's would bear me out.

trustfundbaby 12y ago
Do you actually have data on this, or is this completely anecdotal?
- walshemj 12y ago
  30+ years of experience also read steve McConnell.
wavefunction 12y ago
Sounds great, as long as you're only interested in selling to the Bay area I guess.
- walshemj 12y ago
  No based on experience building the control system for the UK's core TCP/IP network for one example.

drawkbox 12y ago

Programmers, if they have a choice, like remote or at least some remote. Managers + VCs, if they have a choice, prefer all in the office so they can keep power but this actually makes them less competitive and more susceptible to physical disruptions: moving an office, an employee moving, time, office politics, commute, distractions, over meeting and more. The PG essay on this was glaringly overlooking that you can be a US based programmer and be good or great even if you aren't in SF. Tech companies have a responsibility to not be so monoculture and they currently have a single point of failure in Silicon Valley, which from an engineering perspective is poor distributed design and very little redundancy. There are benefits of being in one place, the ability to meet physically and be on the same page but we all know the real work gets done back at our desks in our solitary focused modes when it comes to programming and making products. Then we open up for feedback and iteration, then again back to work. The work part should be setup so programmers perform their best. Just like some of the best scientists, writers, etc, they need their lab/office where they can get somewhere with the problem at hand, not an open office in SF. Glad Ma.tt mentioned this as he is a leader in the right kind of tech leadership we need: spread it around, live better, work hard, deliver solid products, from anywhere...

ha292 12y ago
I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims that "mean people fail". The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions. Time to get out of the bubble.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  Part of the problem is that investors might understand the businesses they invest in from 30,000 feet, but they frequently have no idea how their portfolio companies are actually run. If some of them went undercover and applied for jobs at their own portfolio companies, they'd probably have a different perspective about the "talent shortage."
  - 12y ago

intortus 12y ago

This is where I think Paul Graham gets it wrong: > Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training. This is the old "you're either an exceptional programmer or you're not" myth. This is one reason why diversity in tech has regressed since the 80s. I agree that geopolitical boundaries should matter less in the software business. However, I strongly disagree that this is the solution to programmer scarcity. Expanding your source of resumes to the entire world only delays the inevitable. Why focus on removing the dependency on the passport variable, when we still have such a strong dependency on gender and race?

jasode 12y ago

>Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. I've been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing/videoconferencing/virtualwhiteboards/etc are not as effective as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes, they do help mitigate many issues of isolation and they do help collaboration but there's still some "bandwidth loss" when people are not in the same room or even down the hall from each other. I'm not advocating an open floor plan with noise and distractions. Even a set of private offices that share a common corridor to facilitate spontaneous conversation with a side conference room for group brainstorming, is superior to keeping Skype windows open. Yes, there are the common examples of virtual remote workers at basecamp, Automattic, github etc. Those are not billion dollar companies. A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. Small scale modest businesses, yes, but not big ones. Maybe you can hire a 5-person 100% remote team to launch a new web magazine. Journalists and editors by their nature seem to fit the remote work paradigm quite nicely. At first glance, it seems programming also fits, but only for modest projects. Yes, the remote workers themselves will insist "I'm 100% just as effective offsite as onsite -- in fact, I'm more productive because I'm not interrupted by office nonsense." No doubt they feel that way but the whole team isn't more effective. Remote workers even with today's fanciest collaboration technology is not the answer to finding the best talent.

photomatt 12y ago
Not that valuations are the end-all be-all, but Automattic was valued above a billion earlier in the year, and has risen since then: http://www.techmeme.com/140505/p14#a140505p14 http://www.techmeme.com/140505/p14#a140505p14
kareemm 12y ago
> A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can't compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. MySQL was a 1B company and built with a remote team: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former-mysql-ceo-mrten-mickos-talks-about-managing-remote-workers-video http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1826212/former...

na85 12y ago

Hey Matt, I'm so glad you felt it necessary to include that DHTML snowstorm. My laptop fan really needed the exercise and I have your ~500-line JavaScript workout to thank for it! Of course, I closed the tab pretty much immediately after noticing it so I didn't read the article. Can't wait for unnecessary js to go out of style.

wavefunction 12y ago
You should check out NoScript if JavaScript is SUCH A BIG DEAL for you. enjoy the downvote
brandon272 12y ago
As soon as I saw the snowflakes falling, I thought, "Oh jeez, someone on HN is going to be having a meltdown over this!" Sure enough.

digitalwaveride 12y ago

There are companies like teleport http://teleport.org http://teleport.org that try to visualise this potential with data. Also recommend this YCombinator startup school talk by Balaji Srinivasan on this topic: Silicon Valleys Ultimate Exit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

photomatt 12y ago

If you do this right, there's no "remote", there's no "overseas", there's no day-to-day distinction in how someone works between whether that person happens to live in the country the company was founded or not.

fecak 12y ago

It's interesting how many commenters read "remote" as "contract" or even "overseas". There are lots of developers outside of SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. that would relish the opportunity to still live their suburban/rural lifestyle and avoid a lengthy commute. One advantage for companies in big cities is they can usually hire these remote employees at a discount. It can get a bit hairy when two remote employees doing the same job are paid differently, but that is already the case in many situations. The other obvious advantage is that companies that hire remote employees have an almost unlimited candidate pool. Even if a company chose to limit hires to their own country, the only group they cannot hire would be candidates unwilling to work remotely. Based on my discussions with thousands of programmers over the years, I'd suspect this is a very small group.

barce 12y ago

This is a great how to article on remote management. The tools he lists are all there. The author mentions Skype, Slack, G+ Hangouts, and then surprisingly WordPress. Would the author care to discuss how he specifically has used WordPress to remote manage a team? I think the issue is that most managers don't want to remote manage which makes me wonder, "Why?"

sberkun10 12y ago
I worked for Mullenweg for a year at WordPress.com to write a book about all of these questions. It documents all the tools I used and what life was like as a remote manager of a development team. http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Future-ebook/dp/B00DVJXI4M http://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Pants-WordPress-com-Futur... You can read a free chapter about culture from the book here: http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excerpt-from-the-year-without-pants/ http://scottberkun.com/2014/why-culture-always-wins-an-excer...
- massimosgrelli 12y ago
  Do you recommend this book to understand remote working dynamics at Wordpress ? Learning from companies that succeeded in setting up the remote working practice is definitely the best way to understand if you can put the process in a bottle. Anyway thanks for sharing this title.
sberkun10 12y ago
The direct answer is most managers have no experience managing remote workers. Certainly that's not the entire story but it's a new way of working and many organizations reject it for its novelty without understanding it's advantages or what investments have to be made to get them.

btilly 12y ago

Meh. Here is the tradeoff. If everyone is co-located, you have inconvenience and higher productivity. If everyone is remote, you have an inherent overhead, but enormous flexibility. If some people are co-located and others are remote, you naturally tend towards a divide where people who are co-located without thinking about it wind up networking with each other and excluding the remotes. If you are a small startup, the productivity difference really can be the margin between success and failure. Hence the pressure to co-locate. But conversely the availability of better talent in theory can allow for a better workforce which might outweigh the productivity overhead of remote work. But when there are just founders, by definition you can't assume that there are better people available. And the need for close working at the initial stages gives strong pressure to co-locate. Therefore there is a natural tendency for startups to co-locate. And once the seed of the company is co-located, switching to a remote model is going to involve crossing a difficult cultural barrier that not everyone will succeed in. Thus the continuing pressure to co-locate.

the_arun 12y ago
Yep, I too think same
snird 12y ago
I think you might be mistaken in the assumption that remote working leads to less productivity than co-located. This is purely up to the team. Sometimes being co-located leads to over meeting and lots of time spent on disruptions and chats, while remote working lead you to be more professional and talk to your co-workers only when necessary for the job.
- btilly 12y ago
  I think my assumption is justified. To address your suggestion, it is safe to say tht early stage startups which are inclined to over meeting are guaranteed failures no matter what.

kartikkumar 12y ago

For argument's sake, if remote work isn't the solution, how about taking the middle ground? I don't see a lot of companies setting up offices in other parts of the world until much later on the growth curve. Is there a fundamental reason for this? Is it simply cost? Seems to me that SV companies can do great things by even opening up 2-3 person shops elsewhere in the world. You then have the compromise situation of having a few people collocated, which should cut down the need to continuous remote meetings, and at the same time provide simultaneous access to new growth markets. In effect, you have remote offices as opposed to remote employees, which seems like a much more efficient organization of resources.

dang 12y ago

The article assumes its conclusion: > amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline That's a huge claim, and it's disputable. For example, I've worked both ways a lot and find remote work to be dramatically less effective. If you accept the claim, then sure, the startups PG was writing about are missing the obvious, and for the most ironic of reasons—technical backwardness. That's possible. But there's also a lot of wishful thinking and saying-makes-it-so on this subject, which comes up on HN all the time. A lot of people just really, really want this to be true. That alone doesn't make it true, and I think it's at least as possible that desire is distorting the analysis. (Which, as someone whose whole career has been plagued by an unsolvable constraint problem of family, work, and geography, I can easily understand.) Fortunately, we're going to find out. If all those startups are doing it wrong, then there's a gigantic market inefficiency and we'll soon see a new wave of smarter, less backward companies doing much better.

YuriNiyazov 12y ago
What you say about the article may very well be true, but the surrounding discussion is not as bad as that. I recognize that the problems pointed out by PG ("chance meetings") and others are genuine problems that haven't yet been solved by technology. However, what I object to is that the rallying cry (and a lot of PG's essays are now rallying cries for how the industry should be, even if he just thinks "I'm just a dude that likes to post my thoughts on the internet, I don't know why everyone objects") of the industry is "move more people into open offices in SV and NYC", rather than "improve the remoting process".
- aredridel 12y ago
  Twitter = chance meetings as a platform.

welshguy 12y ago

If my business pays for a great programmer, I want that programmer's knowledge, experience and attitude to diffuse to the rest of my team (... not that I have a business, just sayin' :-). Much harder to do this if that great programmer isn't in the office.

cgh 12y ago
In my eight years' remote working experience, your statement is false.
- dannyr 12y ago
  What he is saying is that it is harder, not impossible. Are you saying that remote work is as good if not better than being physically-located?
  - cgh 12y ago
    I'm saying that's it's not harder. Thus his statement is false.
- welshguy 12y ago
  In my thirty years experience in IT, my statement might be right.
  - cgh 12y ago
    How many years working remotely?
xj9 12y ago
None of those things actually require physical proximity. It might take a little more effort to get right, but there are a lot of great programmers out there that don't want to relocate (or be tied to an office) and some of the might be worth it.

malisper 12y ago

The next question is what happens to people who want to work in the US?

gaius 12y ago

Let us assume a company where everyone works from home and meetings are held in Starbucks or airport lounges. Such a company would save many thousands of dollars per employee per year, maybe tens of thousands. No real estate, no receptionist, no cleaners, no equipment to buy or IT dept to support it... Such a company would probably pay less than market rates, due to the "perk" of allowing remote work? But where's that money going? If you are an engineer considering remote working, make sure YOU get a slice of the pie.

choppaface 12y ago

I've worked both onsite and remote as a software dev / data engineer. I started out onsite. There are major disadvantages to remote work: * Amount you learn from the office community is orders of magnitude lower than onsite. If you're good at pushing yourself to learn new things, that can help, but your knowledge will almost certainly end up less diversified living remotely. You're just not exposed to the company's tech challenges as deeply, yet that's usually one of the main reasons for working at the company. * You don't necessarily get top projects, but rather perhaps good projects that fit remote work. Taking a remote role almost certainly hurts your career if you want to compete with traditionally onsite roles. * You likely don't get to participate in hiring or shaping the culture in a substantial way. * You'll have a much harder time building the network needed to get access to key resources (e.g. data, people, etc). * Your company better have a nice VPN or you're going to be doing a lot of systems-oriented stuff for yourself. It can be fun but can slow you down. * You're probably more likely to be laid off. The company I worked for started offering remote much more frequently due to recruiting and retention problems. I don't think the net result had a very positive impact on the Eng org. In particular, a lot of junior people were allowed to go remote for retention reasons but they didn't end up doing much in that role-- they would have been much better off just joining a different company (either local to them or one with a much much stronger remote culture). Agree with the poster that PG's essay has some holes; seems orders of magnitude less polished than his older essays.

choppaface 12y ago
Downvotes because I insulted pg or because I argued remote was bad??

Mz 12y ago

I was part of a virtual team many years ago, before all these tools existed. I was the only one on the West Coast, not in a position to meet others face to face -- at least not more than once, for a conference I attended -- and was the newest to the group, younger than most of the others, etc. There were several dimensions in which I was an outlier for the group. Ultimately, it ended on something of a sour note. I was basically accused of being a "traitor" for doing my actual job. I and the person at the top had very different ideas about how things should be handled and my domain expertise was not really respected. (After my departure, the project that had benefited the most from my input kind of died back down again.) I spend a lot of my time online and I have taken a lot of online college classes. When I had a job at BigCo, I got in the habit of emailing my questions to my immediate boss, whose role included answering technical questions. For various reasons, I was unable to master the art of catching her at her desk or whatever. Emailing worked better for me. I and some of my teammates got transferred to a new team that initially did not have someone in the technical role she filled. Until the new team got their own technical lead, we were all still assigned to our old lead. Other teammates of mine who were used to having face-time with our lead were incredibly frustrated. My transition was quite smooth. I rarely needed face-time with her to get good results. I just continued emailing my questions as usual. I also was not particularly "likable." I was quite ill at the time and not at my smoothest socially. I also just come from a more formal cultural background than the people I was surrounded by. I was not interested in being too schmoozy. In the short run, this seemed to hurt me a bit. But once I got transferred to a new team, it was to my benefit: Getting my questions answered had been a purely professional function, not something rooted in being friendly or whatever. So I think there are good points on both sides of this argument. I see several really good comments here falling on either side. And I think the disconnect probably has to do with some social thing that can be fostered remotely but many people aren't good at it. As we develop more online/virtual/long distance cultural practices, I think this will become less of a divide for some people.

meritt 12y ago

For entry-level people, I've really found an office helps with mentoring and culture assimilation in a way that fully-remote cannot even remotely reach. I still don't feel there's any reason you need to physically exist in the Bay area though. Open an office somewhere that's both attractive and affordable for people to live and you enable the best of both worlds.

overgard 12y ago

The problem with this argument is that it lumps all versions of "Remote" together, but that's not really true. There's a huge difference between the guy who is remote because he has a long commute, vs the guy who is remote because he lives on the east coast, vs the guy who is remote because he's in china or london. The common theme of all that is: timezones matter a lot. It's hard to collaborate with someone really far away because they'll tend to be asleep when you're awake. Programmers like async communication for a lot of reasons, but real-time is important too.

guelo 12y ago

It's all been tried and people know the tradeoffs, and there are tradeoffs no matter what you might think. The drive and culture that can develop when a small focused team spends every waking hour together can become almost cult-like. This culture is what VCs want to foment. It's also why they like hiring 22 year olds that can be more impressionable.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

rev_bird 12y ago

I would love to have remote work, but I am honestly unsure about whether I'm good enough at my job to enjoy it. My concern isn't with performing my current job, but every promotion/job change I've had has been because of the things I learned in some free time from somebody sitting next to me. It's so nice to be able to wander over to a smart person and ask about some random problem I've been having in an area in which they're an expert. I have no doubt I learn more in an office than I would in my living room. ...then again, that's probably why remote workers say they're more productive.

snowwrestler 12y ago

The topics of remote work and of immigration reform seem unrelated to me. A better immigration system would be better for the U.S., in that it would allow the best programmers to come here if they want to. That is clearly better for the U.S. as a whole, since it would make it easier to raise the national technical talent level relative to other nations. These new Americans would hopefully become citizens, raise families, vote, sit on school boards, run for elected office, start companies, etc.--improving the nation from within over time with their perspectives, talents, desires, and hard work (as past generations of immigrants have). Contracting with foreign workers through the Internet does not achieve any of those long-term national goals. Once new workers are legally within the U.S., I agree that they should have the freedom to choose remote work if they want to, or colocating work if they want to.

geetarista 12y ago

Under jasode's thread, you can see that people are missing Paul's point. He's not saying that working with close proximity is the "best" way of working. Yet most people here are debating which type of work is. Each company, market, vertical, team, etc. will vary in manifold ways. What I believe Paul is asking for is that companies have the option to choose. Right now the option is available to anyone to hire remotely in one way or another. This is not the case with physically hiring into the country. Almost every startup I've worked at has had issues trying to hire exceptional people from another country. In almost every case, we lost those hires to the system and were forced to start the search again. If a small, remote, international startup grows fast enough and they decide that working together under one roof in the U.S. fits their new needs, they should have the freedom and choice to do so.

mcfunley 12y ago

I just finished a remote job search. I'm in Los Angeles, and most of the companies I talked to were in SF. I had previously worked remotely for a company in New York (Etsy), and I was honestly really surprised how hostile SF companies were to the idea. I was mostly going through personal connections, so I assume that I was getting the gigantic break of having a solid recommendation that most people can't get. (I feel bad about this, but it is what it is.) I have been on both sides of remote work, so I totally get that it's not a slam dunk. It works a lot better for companies that have a strong culture established in a home base, and it works a lot better for experienced folks than green college hires. I have shut down the interview process myself when I felt like working remotely wouldn't work out at particular companies. Even given all of that, I was pretty amazed how quickly some of the conversations got shut down. No remotes, we don't care who you are or what your experience is. I didn't talk to any companies outside of SF that were that quick to say no. FWIW I landed at Stripe, which in fairness is probably one of the companies pg had in mind when writing his original article. I agree with the spirit of this, and I also don't really agree with a lot of things in pg's essay. But the particulars here might be totally wrong. At least one company in his network is really remote friendly.

massimosgrelli 12y ago
How does remote working get done at Stripe? what tools? What practices are a consolidated standard? It would be really useful to the discussion if you could share something with us.

ownedthx 12y ago

I have completely 180'ed on this topic. I used to think to be a successful startup, you all had to be in the same room, ideally at a big huge desk etc. After working at my current startup, I realize I was wrong. We are an entirely remote operation, and have been since day 1. A few of us are in Austin, and rarely meet for a face-to-face, but it's more of a 'oh yeah, you actually exist' meeting rather than a hash-it-out sort of meeting. I think the reason we have been successful is because being remote has forced us to write things down, in our wiki (in the form of product specs) and in JIRA (in the form of specific features and bug fixes). With just those two forms of written communication, we've solved 95% of our communication needs. We almost never skype or use video conferencing... it's just not needed. The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is enough, but does deserve more explanation. (unfortunately I can't muster the amount of typing atm). IN the end, we can focus on getting work done... without the distraction of office chatter, commuting, long lunches.

mattm 12y ago
> The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We've all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can't emphasis how important this is enough I've worked remotely for a few years now and think this is the key. I would not advocate hiring junior developers remotely. There's too much risk in it. I was once faced with the task of trying to mentor a junior dev remotely and it just didn't work.
- samastur 12y ago
  In general I would agree, but I think it also depends on junior developer in question. Every now and then you meet someone whose overflowing intelligence, talent and work ethic will make them an exceptional engineer, but are not there yet. It would be a shame not to support that. I recently mentored such person and she is already one of our most productive developers.

abalone 12y ago

I find this post and many remote-advocacy posts like it are overly optimistic about the problem of timezone differences. A critical flaw is that most of the "solutions" mentioned assume you're all working at the same time. (Skype, G+ Hangouts, chatrooms.) That may be ok for workers living in less expensive parts of America or the western hemisphere, but that certainly doesn't hold true for overseas workers, which is what Paul Graham is mostly talking about with immigration. An 8-12 hour timezone gap is not something easily bridged by chatrooms and videoconferences. To even have a conversation with the remote worker/team, one or both of you need to schedule time at very early or late hours and even then you only get a little bit of overlap. For the most part you are left to collaborate by email or blogs -- which is a significantly degraded way of collaborating, much moreso than just not being face-to-face. Without an easy way to have a realtime conversation, closing the loop on an issue can take 24 hours.. or several days if there is a lot of back and forth. This style of working can be very difficult in a highly dynamic, less structured, fast moving startup environment. It is not magically solved by "modern communication tools" or high-latency asynchronous working styles. The fundamental issue is.. daylight and human sleep schedules. I wish all conversations about remote work would qualify which context they're talking about -- near or far timezones -- instead of just lumping it all together as "remote work from anywhere".

tessierashpool 12y ago

PG ignored current trends and recent history to an absurd degree in his recent blog post. Not factored into the equation: An actual, provable, verifiable history of illegal salary-fixing. The experiential reality that most immigrant programmers get a lot of mistreatment, both from racism and from their own incompetence - and the related experiential fact that a lot of immigrant programmers are utterly incompetent. The rhetoric of these arguments talks about 10x programmers, but companies really seem to prefer importing 0.1x programmers or even -10x programmers. Meanwhile, tons of companies have immense success with remote work, and the wage changes associated with the last ten years are not at all commensurate with the increased value of programming work. (See aforementioned illegal salary-fixing.) Is remote work easy? No. But is PG's business about doing easy things? No. I literally just ran grep -c "table" against a text dump of this comments page. The count was 122. 122 uses of the table tag. Since that includes </table>, 61 tables. This whole argument is as up-to-date as the HTML on this page.

unclebucknasty 12y ago

Meh. Keep the barriers high and the labor market tight for as long as possible. Let companies compete for workers like the good ol' days. Let startups use more of that VC cash on its workers and also help keep rates up for IT workers across the country. I know we Yanks get no sympathy from the rest of the world, but labor here has taken a beaten long enough. And, I say this as a dev-turned-founder who would presumably now want to see low rates and a bigger pool. I guess I just appreciate more a little "economic justice" from time-to-time!

modzilla 12y ago

It is clear various tools can be effective or ineffective for companies and individuals – this is a very subjective topic. However, since many tech companies, who have subjectively decided they want to have all of their employees in the same physical location, have a talent shortage problem, it would seem only beneficial to modify our immigration policy to allow more of these highly skilled individuals to work in the US. There outcomes of making such changes are almost exclusively positive.

mikeleeorg 12y ago

Just to jump on the point of being physically co-located: I've done both. There are pros and cons to each. What I've found is: it all depends on the people in the company. Some work best when they're right next to you, able to share a drink after work to decompress. Others want to run to the beach to go surfing right after a meeting. Both can be equally talented, but vary significantly in their modus operandi.

stevesi 12y ago

My $0.02 all here http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-engineering-is-so-difficult/ http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-eng...

sarperdag 12y ago

I’ve written an article on this issue recently as well. https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-talent-wherever-in-the-world-you-are-6b558ddef519 https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-tal...

datashovel 12y ago

I read the PG article as a "grass is always greener" argument.

datashovel 12y ago
I just read the footnote: [1] How much better is a great programmer than an ordinary one? So much better that you can't even measure the difference directly.... You do not get to hire those people. And if you do it's on their terms. Perhaps you get to invest in their ideas if you're lucky.

dvo19 12y ago

As I work remotely, it is the best. I think it is up to the individual. If the individual does not want to work, he or she does not want to work regardless at home or at the work place.

lukasm 12y ago

This is my inspiration to create https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/ https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/

muhannad0147 12y ago

Muhannad0147@hotmail.com

muhannad0147 12y ago

Muhannad0147@hotmail.com