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Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#21

Post by hashkb »

allday wrote: post #8

The biggest challenge to making remote workers successful is the existing company culture. If the organization has not been built with a conscious "remote-first" mindset, new remote collaborators will inevitably be excluded from necessary communications and decisions. Making a remote worker a true part of the team requires a massive culture shift if your company does not already (successfully) do distributed work.

This takes extraordinary discipline on the part of the in-office team. Fortunately, everything that's good for a remote-first culture is also just good for communication in general. A culture of documenting everything, living in public, and over-communicating is good for any company; and burning those habits into teammates levels them up for life.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#22

Post by deedubaya »

allday wrote: post #8

The biggest challenge to making remote workers successful is the existing company culture. If the organization has not been built with a conscious "remote-first" mindset, new remote collaborators will inevitably be excluded from necessary communications and decisions. Making a remote worker a true part of the team requires a massive culture shift if your company does not already (successfully) do distributed work.

This is the best answer.

It is really hard for established companies, full of many different humans with their habits, to shift from shouting across the room to some sort of distributed, async, communication.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#24

Post by epynonymous »

jasonlotito wrote: post #7

We hire remote. None of these are big problems. The biggest problem we have is communicating effectively with people in various time zones, and making them feel apart of the team. Video conferencing is still an area that is lacking in this area. I've yet to find a service that meets all our needs. Right now we are using LifeSize because it's the best we've found, and still fairly annoying. The problem really isn't on…

i do not work for zoom, but lately our company switched to zoom after using webex, skype, skype for business, polycom, cisco. hands down zoom has been the best solution for video conferencing, works really well.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#26

Post by Kiro »

krallja wrote: post #20
celestialcheese wrote: post #12

Payroll 100%. When we started hiring people remote it was the biggest surprise, and most headache. Trying to figure it out on your own is irresponsible at best, so it boils down to hiring a local CPA or tax attorney in each state/city you hire in to go over the implications of bringing someone on in that city. If the person is right, it's worth the cost, but it's a large, unexpected time-suck.

This problem is already fairly well solved by professional employer organizations like Justworks, Paychex, Extensis HR, etc.

And if you're hiring someone in another country?

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#28

Post by Kiro »

legohorizons wrote: post #3

What exactly is the pain with international payrolls? I don’t quite understand..

So tell me, how do you employ someone who is in Germany if you are based in the US? Germany wants its taxes so you can't just put them as a regular US employee and you don't have any presence in Germany so you can't hire them locally.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#29

Post by ejcx »

I think the hardest part is the planning process and communicating rapid change.

Startups and fast growing companies grow quickly and changes happen rapidly. If priorities are constantly changing and communication/the planning process isn't really robust you won't have remote people who are successful.

Re: Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote?

#30

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

IMO one of the least-solved problems is communication. Two areas in particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality.

These are two areas where good solutions may exist at reasonable price-points, but if so that information isn't widely known.

Not sure if it fits with your business model, but it would be extremely helpful for someone to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of various technologies / products / services for those areas, and provide recipes for known-good setups.

I.e., if one of your clients can tell you their current and upcoming team sizes, network connectivities, etc., you can tell them what products and services give them good video / whiteboard quality at various price points.

IME companies with remote workers tend to be "penny wise, pound foolish" regarding these things.

EDIT: To be more specific: For call quality, having good data on what setups result in good call quality in Skype vs. Slack vs. Google Hangouts etc. And for shared whiteboards, having good information on how effective / sufficient teams find various approaches such as (some website + iPads), (some website + a particular Wacom tablet), (everyone on the team having a particular model of interactive whiteboard such as this one [0]), etc.

[0] https://www.cdwg.com/product/SMART-Board-6075-75in-LED-displ...

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