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How to find a remote job

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Re: How to find a remote job

#51

Post by adrianN »

morgante wrote: post #38
rpazyaquian wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six months to land the right job holds for any job or field, remote or not. There's a lot of jobs available, but along with that you need to be picky - it can take some time to find a competitive, ideal option.

I don't think 6 months is a typical developer job search, and that has nothing to do with being picky. Almost everyone worth working for is hiring constantly. Hence it's relatively straightforward to run a bunch of interview processes in parallel while still being quite picky about the offer you accept. In most cases, it's highly unlikely that a better option will materialize with additional time (in 99% of cases, it…

It depends on where you live and how comfortable you are with moving to a different city. Not every city is San Francisco.

Re: How to find a remote job

#52

Post by taneltanel »

I've been working remotely for 4-5 years now. Started the remote work thing at my previous workplace.

Tried a 9-5 job last summer, it was the worst.

Now have 2 remote gigs. Found one via Github, other one via a Facebook freelance group.

Re: How to find a remote job

#53

Post by dep_b »

dsego wrote: post #19

Join toptal.

I don't get the down votes, nor the negativity in other threads about TopTal. Working for TopTal for a while now and it has been great. I can better rates elsewhere but I notice that clients are really expecting you to be good so the jobs are more interesting and/or you get more freedom. Also no hassle, every 2 weeks a payment.

It's cheaper to hire me directly while I would still be getting paid more but I guess a lot of people want a trusted intermediate.

Rates are negotiable but they'll naturally prefer to pay you less, like any company. Perhaps it's more interesting for people that live in countries that have relatively low wages, but you'll have to be able to converse fluently in English.

Re: How to find a remote job

#54

Post by dep_b »

I did some freelance jobs on the side while I was still working full-time, all of it being remote even if the client would be in the same city, then I would just drop by for demo's and meetings. My full-time job consisted of working in remote teams for mostly US customers. While I was working for a certain customer through my day job I was the only person in the building working for that particular customer and there was no real necessity to be in the office. I was effectively fully remote from that point.

At a given point I got a new customer that basically wanted to hire me for 20 hours per week, which would mean I could sustain my life with it and I left my day job. Building upon that I landed two customers through LinkedIn, one lead through YouTube (some intelligent comment somewhere...that was pretty weird though!), some more work from local and remote customers I had before and then I rolled into TopTal.

TopTal has a steady stream of really interesting work. I had a pretty sudden drop in work from one customer and I could fill it up in a week or two by taking TopTal work. Now I remain on one TopTal client and for the rest I'm working directly for customers. TopTal pays a bit less but is a lot less headache and most of the work is pretty good. The sites that are recommended in this article didn't do anything useful for me.

I still don't know really how I manage to keep a full roster apart from TopTal but somehow customers know how to find me. Lot of referrals too.

Re: How to find a remote job

#55

Post by RussianCow »

gargarplex wrote: post #5
rpazyaquian wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six months to land the right job holds for any job or field, remote or not. There's a lot of jobs available, but along with that you need to be picky - it can take some time to find a competitive, ideal option.

Let's say you take 6 months to find the competitive, ideal option. And you get an extra $20K in salary, going from say $100K to $120K (remote). So you sacrificed $50K in opportunity cost. End of year 1: job A $100k, job B $60K End of year 2: job A $200k, job B $180K End of year 3: job A $300k, job B $300K Of course if it's a startup, the odds are high that it would fold within three years. So unless it's a BigCo job…

You have a good point, but keep in mind that unemployment benefits help to cut back on the opportunity cost.

Re: How to find a remote job

#56

Post by CoreXtreme »

I hired 100+ senior developers at $50-70K per year for a project, mostly from East Europe/Ukraine/Russia.

We were like, "Holy ! these people are so cheap. If I hire people with same level of experience locally, I would have to pay 3-5x more on average."

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.

And something like 20% of them outsourced part of the projects to developers in South Asia, security risk.

Today, we try to hire onsite as much as possible.

It require very high level of trust to hire someone remote.

Re: How to find a remote job

#58

Post by dsacco »

CoreXtreme wrote: post #56

I hired 100+ senior developers at $50-70K per year for a project, mostly from East Europe/Ukraine/Russia. We were like, "Holy ! these people are so cheap. If I hire people with same level of experience locally, I would have to pay 3-5x more on average." 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. And somet…

> 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).

Re: How to find a remote job

#59

Post by JustSomeNobody »

CoreXtreme wrote: post #56

I hired 100+ senior developers at $50-70K per year for a project, mostly from East Europe/Ukraine/Russia. We were like, "Holy ! these people are so cheap. If I hire people with same level of experience locally, I would have to pay 3-5x more on average." 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. And somet…

Hmmm... so you don't see it at all as you cheaped out and that cheapness bit you?

Edit: I'm not trying to attack you here. Just pointing out an alternative explanation. If you had hired better talent, they would have cost more, but you wouldn't have had them working at several different places.

Re: How to find a remote job

#60

Post by JustSomeNobody »

I work remote now. There's good points and bad points.

Some Good:

No commute. No noise. Fewer distractions. No open office floor plans!

Some Bad:

More distractions. I miss the physical presence of people. Time zones suck! I miss hallway conversations about the current sprint. Nobody makes an 1800 mile serial cable.

[-] Distractions. I don't have people walking by my desk trying to get me to work on their pet project. However, that stack of dishes that needs cleaning is very distracting.

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