Oh we're just a small startup with a node.js / react platform hosted on AWS. Due to our small size we have a simple and short hiring process, in which we try to hire smart, experienced people.
As the sibling comment said we're also very open to remote working after a certain period of getting to know each other.
I've refrained from adding the "REMOTE" keyword to our hiring posts because it attracts a lot of remote (non-)"talent", and we're being swamped in mails from people who don't fit the stated profile.
We've been burned hard by remote-only employees in the past because it is very hard to keep the whole team on the same page, even more so with programmers inbetween junior and senior who want a lot of autonomy but end up delivering subpar results.
funny enough we are based in chicago and do the same thing: hire people who work strictly on remote.
almost everyone gets along fine on remote, but sometimes management of remote employees is a serious pain. it's much easier to shop for talent and get the best devs and sysadmins vs people in the area.
We actually decided on remote early on as a way to expand our potential talent pool, when it became a key part of getting our first hire on-board. We've recently made the decision to start doing our major work in Rust after it had a strong showing building an important internal tool and prototyping a small service in it, and our mounting frustration with the current stack (plus some other issues that made it a good time to decide if we wanted to switch). A remote hiring policy has been key to confidence in that decision; we've yet to fully put that into practice with actual Rust hires, but I'd be much more wary with a talent pool restricted to just the local area (Austin, in this case).
I'm not sure why any venture backed startup, in an area that has local talent, would want to deliberately go the remote workforce route. It hampers your ability to scale, hurts your future acquisition chances, creates and will lead to communication redudancy, and culture distractions. It rarely works out positively.
In short, while I am sure that there are some instances where it works well (eg Basecamp / 37signals), I'd expect that they are the exception to the norm.
Note: I did build a remote startup with incredibly talented people and after a lot of soul searching and time required them all to come join us locally (or helped them find a new job elsewhere). Hardest decision we made at the company and certainly the right one.
NOTE 2: the best remote recruiting tool we had was to handpick whole invited to work with us. We hung out on mailing lists and read potential employees blog posts to see what kind of amazing open source projects they were sharing with the world, before trying to individually recruit them.
It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case).
I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board.
COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.
Hiring remote gave my startups access to amazingly talented people where they were, not where we were. It allowed the team to work in a space they felt was productive and comfy and our employee turnover was non-existent.
This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant.
The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You know, if we just had 1) better managers, 2) better specs, 3) better tools"
We have been trying all of this for 30 years or so. At some point a reasonable person would look around and see that most all startups are colocated, physically in the same room having to deal with each other all day long.
There are plenty of theories as to why this is true. Another observation: people not in the office do best at rote work: fix the bugs, align the images on the website, and so on.
If your job could be done by robots -- if it required minimal interaction over electronic tools to get specs and deliver on them in an over-the-wall manner -- it will be done by robots. Creating technology is about people, not technology. You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving.
Best-case scenario: you work on a tightly-knit team for a few weeks/months on a fixed-length job. Everybody gets into sync on the customer, specs, terminology, and solution. The customer's problem is not changing that much. You deliver some stuff as a team that people like. At that point, and not before, who cares where people are? Just get the work done.
You can scale that out to working in BigCorp on a fixed domain, but only so much. And the scary thing is that there are no alarms that go off if you're doing it wrong.
It's not impossible, or bad. But it works under very limited conditions. Understanding that is critical. I know there are a ton of folks who want to work remotely. I am one of them. But wanting something and looking realistically at what works or not are two different things.
"I'm a little surprised at the number of "no remote" in this thread. I've done some great work remotely, and with the right tools I think a team can "gel" and really work well together. Any comments?"
In my experience, remote work is offered to specific individuals who are already known to the people making the offer - through a shared work history, impressive open source contributions, a recommendation by a trusted person, unique knowledge/skillsets etc. You don't generally see ads for these.
People who put out generic ads looking for fairly generic skill sets etc, have plenty of choice locally and/or don't know anyone, remote or otherwise, who could fill that position. They are, in a sense just throwing an ad out there (or a post on HN), hoping to find someone who'll come into the office and work locally. Why go through the hassle of wading through the thousands of resumes you'll get from all over the world (and you will!), 99.99% of which are crap ?
I get approached for remote work all the time. Partly this is because I have a somewhat uncommon skill set and partly because I know/have worked with a lot of ultra sharp people and they remember me when they need someone. Most of the time I have to turn them down because I am already on a project and so not free - which is a common situation. As with "normal" jobs, the people you want often have great jobs/projects already and have no intention of "moving".
Fwiw, I know half a dozen or so people here in Bangalore who are working remotely for companies in the USA. In every case remote work was offered to them (no one ever sent in a CV) because they were known to be very good at what they do and had no intention of moving to San Fransisco (or wherever).
Remote work can be a win-win but a distributed team has a very different feel than a collocated one and not many people want the hassle - and it is a hassle if you aren't willing to change your working style.
Things seem to be changing though. A really strong dev can get (great) remote work with some effort these days. The very best, say Lars Bak, have never had any problems working from wherever they choose to. As with many things, demand and supply determines everything.
Fwiw, my advice to folks seeking remote work is Be very good, and be known to be very good (iow focus on what you know and who you know) and you will never lack for work, remote or otherwise.
> Later, my friend took over this team of developers for his startup. What he found is that 30% developers in his team were working for two or more employers.
That sounds like something inherent to the sort of candidates you hired, not remote employment in of itself. I can't imagine a remote employee having enough time to work for two different companies unless they have no requirements for being immediately available at any time (like meetings, or debrief after a deadline).
I'm not sure it's a question of having top talent. What I see happening is that any given organization has a minimum acceptable level of skill and experience for developers in order to be acceptable for hire. There's no concept of "well we'll hire this kind of crappy person for the open job because that's all we can get". What remote work has done is to make the pool of available candidates that exceed the competence bar massively bigger. I have seen this play out in a medium sized SV tech start up -- they were able to staff up during the pandemic at a much higher rate because nobody cared where the candidates were located. This seems like a Rubicon that can't be un-crossed -- once you have a ton of people in Seattle and San Diego and on the east coast, and people who decided to move back to their home town in Kentucky, there's no going back to on-site folks who rode the bus in from Gilroy.
I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.
I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live.
I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures.
That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?
This is a classic problem in start ups, and I would strongly recommend against doing remote if you can avoid it. I only know a few people who have ever pulled it off successfully, and they are really good. Statistical outliers.
You cannot replace having an entire team in the same spot where people can grab a white board and clearly talk about what something means. Just the energy alone is probably enough to keep everyone active on the project. It's difficult when you don't see others contributing to a project. You start to think you're putting in more work than the rest.
I've worked for two start ups. The first one didn't do remote work, and while the leadership initially was poor, the execution was actually insane. The second start up had mostly remote workers, a few PhDs in the same city, and me and another guy doing the front end and servers, and it was a little slow. I tried to recruit some people who had worked at Google and YouTube (as undergrads), and they turned the offer down simply because most of our team was remote. A lot of people join a start up because they want to meet other smart people, not just work on a cool product.
I'm a bit assumed to see the company running a "platform where tech startups hire the best remote engineers and designers. This is why I decided to create a product for remote community" doesn't have experience with remote teams.
In my opinion, and without going into too much detail, I feel like the reluctance of hiring remote workers comes down to not wanting to put in the effort to keep up communication. I.E. the managers don't want to have to bother emailing and calling versus just walking up and talking. A lot of this comes from poor project management.
I agree that a lot of the 'lack of engineers' is somewhat of a farce. If a company wanted to hire 20 people so bad they'd open a midwest office and hire 10 experienced people and 10 new grads from smaller universities and have the whole thing done in a couple months. Have people fly back and forth a couple times a year, get a couple good conference rooms with video conferencing and you're 90% as good as being there, just with a fraction of the cost.
For what it's worth, I suspect there are better opportunities to work remote outside of the start up world, and outside of the technology focused business world in general. I work for a smaller consulting company and about 1/3-1/2 of the 100 or so people (and the bulk of the consultants and PMs) are remote. Other companies in our industry seem similar.
I would say there aren't so many examples of companies with heavily remote workforces thriving. As a founder, this was the subject of a lot of internal debate. I largely came to the same conclusion as a lot of companies: remote slows down execution, and execution is probably the single most important thing for a small company.
Also, this article discussed something different than building a remote team, and more in line with what most customers want: hire a mostly pre-made remote team all at once. The desired advantage is less cost savings and more speed. Building a remote team yourself is much more likely to work, but also probably slow enough that it's not worth it. You have to find a remote teach lead + hiring manager, work with him or her enough to trust him or her, and then empower that person to run hiring cycles.
Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.
Hiring remotely makes this harder.
(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:
I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining confidence.
Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)
I'm a recent hire for one of the companies on that list. It seems to me that by allowing your company to hire from a much larger pool of candidates allows you to be more selective for talent. The amount of talent that I'm exposed to is incredible, something I'd never be able to experience in my own city.
There's a whole slew of unfamiliar problems that come with remote work - and I believe that these companies are pioneering something that will become the norm one day. Work life balance is a serious problem, as well as relationship building. It seems to me that distributed companies have a hard cap on size before the disadvantages of remote become too cumbersome. These problems require creative solutions, and it's awesome to be able to contribute to it. However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company itself.
As the sibling comment said we're also very open to remote working after a certain period of getting to know each other.
I've refrained from adding the "REMOTE" keyword to our hiring posts because it attracts a lot of remote (non-)"talent", and we're being swamped in mails from people who don't fit the stated profile.
We've been burned hard by remote-only employees in the past because it is very hard to keep the whole team on the same page, even more so with programmers inbetween junior and senior who want a lot of autonomy but end up delivering subpar results.
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