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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?

#41

Post by Analemma_ »

I can't remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but someone once made a really good point: that the incentives are strongly skewed against hiring remotely.

Think about it: the benefits of remote work go mainly to the employee, but the drawbacks (harder to communicate, harder to evaluate productivity) fall disproportionately on the manager. Since the manager is the one making the hiring decision, they don't hire remotes.

So to give a really broad answer, my suggestion would be "change the incentives so managers will hire more remote workers". That could mean internalizing costs of on-site workers, better communication tools, etc.

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

#42

Post by deweller »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #30

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 techn…

Anecdotally I can say that Zoom has worked the best for us.

But no software can fix variances in bandwidth or latency. I wish there was a way to test a remote hire's internet connection quality. Lack of access to a good internet connection would be a deal breaker for a remote hire for us.

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

#43

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

From the comments so far, I'm hearing that your prospective clients would benefit from knowledgable consulting to help them navigate multiple issues:

- Which payroll companies, if any, will be the best solution for handling international (or even just inter-state within the U.S.) payroll / tax issues?

- What communications technologies and practices work best for various team geographies / network-connection-quality / local-hardware setups?

- What's the optimal frequency, duration, structure, etc. of whole-team face-to-face meetings for teams that are typically distributed?

- What management training is most helpful for managers of all-remote teams, or of teams where only some members are remote?

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

#44

Post by fairpx »

For us (http://fairpixels.pro) it’s actually the off-work connectivity. Slack, email, todo lists and all of the other tools make us pretty effecient and productive. But I’d love to see how I can boost social connectivity outside of ‘work’.

PS. We are hiring

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

#45

Post by DisruptiveDave »

Young founders with zero or near-zero management experience in person, never mind remote. To a lesser degree - and strictly for small team, early stage startups - part of the journey is living it together. The whole vibe loses something when you're staying late and eating ramen together over Skype.

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

#46

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

deweller wrote: post #42
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #30

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 techn…

Anecdotally I can say that Zoom has worked the best for us. But no software can fix variances in bandwidth or latency. I wish there was a way to test a remote hire's internet connection quality. Lack of access to a good internet connection would be a deal breaker for a remote hire for us.

I believe you about Zoom. Unfortunately that's the only kind of information I'm ever able to get on the topic: anecdotal.

I suspect the reality is that, amongst the best-performing services, which one works best depends on network QoS details, network topology, particular client hardware / OS, etc.

For example: some conferencing software seems to have a real problem with echo cancelation, so either (a) everyone needs mic/speaker hardware that sidesteps the issue, or (b) you accept that everyone will go insane.

Similarly, difference conferencing software has different solutions to people talking over each other accidentally due to latency. One product (Cisco's maybe?) has an icon for metaphorically raising one's hand to request a turn speaking.

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

#47

Post by joshpadnick »

codegeek wrote: post #37

As a few others have said as well, the biggest challenge personally has been Payroll and Taxes. A lot of good candidates want to feel part of the company which means they need to be hired as employees. But legally, a US company hiring in a different country can at best hire them as a consultant/freelancer for tax purposes unless they open a local office in that country which is a major PITA. I have a US company and t…

We[1] are a fully distributed team and also ran into this problem when we hired our first team member outside the US. There are lots of players[2][3] in the "Global PEO" market that have corporate entities in multiple countries and will handle payroll and benefits for you, but caveat emptor, these solutions are shockingly expensive. The average cost was 18% of the remote worker's salary (!), which I personally considered insane.

We ultimately went with a company[4] that had a different model where they connect you with a local PEO in each market and present a common UI on top of all the disparate local PEOs so that you get a company that specializes in just that country, but a common UX no matter how many countries you work with.

I liked the model, and more importantly, it was a fixed fee and much less expensive, and they published pricing. Disclosure: We made the decision to go with them, but haven't started working with them yet.

[1] https://gruntwork.io

[2] https://www.globalization-partners.com

[3] http://globalpeoservices.com

[4] https://papayaglobal.com

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

#48

Post by throwaway2016a »

5. Managing people

Personally, I find the toughest part to be actually managing the people. You really need to trust your team to be self-motivating which can be tough for a manager to do, especially new ones, because you need to give up some control.

But even though you trust them you need to have a way to measure results. That means being more disciplined and mature in your project planning than you might be if everyone is co-located.

For a startup that is key. Startups often skimp on disciplined project management.

I also find it tougher to do things like say, identify when someone is having a rough time (personal or professional) and take steps to correct or accommodate for that. If a co-located employee starts underperforming but I can see they are clearly checked out (like their head is somewhere else) I might suspect there is something going on at home and adjust my management style with that person. If they are remote it is harder to tell those things. Communication becomes extremely important when body language / behavioral clues are lacking.

So to pile on a lot of the other answers here... communication, communication, communication.

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

#49

Post by redundo_twa »

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.

You also need to maintain the culture. A phenomenon I just went through is a company that started remote-first, then someone had the brilliant idea to get an office for this or that geographical cluster of people, and slowly but inexorably remote workers were marginalized.

Some people feel really insecure without an office, deep inside they think it isn't a "serious business" unless you own real estate in a "serious" postcode. I don't know if it's just an European thing but it's definitely an attitude I've encountered.

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

#50

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #43

From the comments so far, I'm hearing that your prospective clients would benefit from knowledgable consulting to help them navigate multiple issues: - Which payroll companies, if any, will be the best solution for handling international (or even just inter-state within the U.S.) payroll / tax issues? - What communications technologies and practices work best for various team geographies / network-connection-quality…

Another comment about consulting services: Client executives might really benefit from a clear (and accurate) presentation of the different levels of remote-team-collaboration quality that are available at different per-employee price points.

For example: At ($10k initially + $3k/year) per employee, you're likely to avoid problems A, B, and C, but still run into D and E occasionally, depending on team size, using recipe $FOO.

At ($20k initially + $10k/year) per employee, you avoid problems A-D, using recipe $BAR.

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