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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?

#61

Post by jamie_ca »

redundo_twa wrote: post #49
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"…

It also depends on the business somewhat, but actually having an office you can invite outsiders to (investors, prospective clients) can be an indicator of success. Truthful or not, it's the perception that counts.

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

#62

Post by BasHamer »

Pay late stage startup employees & new-hires to keep a time diary, and see where they spend time with coworkers. Then do the same w/ people not working at startups. I guess that startups have more "non-work" time spend together.

Joining a startup is different than a 9-5 commitment, it means joining a tribe/family. So if the office people leave for a 2-hour lunch before spending a late night in the office, how does a remote person "join" that? Being part of the family means you are there for the leisure as well as the work.

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

#63

Post by eloff »

ecwilson wrote: post #57

Others have mentioned this to some extent, but what I've found the most challenging is when a company tries to do both local and remote, but was not remote-first . People who are remote are de-facto second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that they aren't included in hallway conversations or casual meetings. It's incredibly hard to overcome that. Teams that started remote-first are already well-practiced in inclu…

As a remote worker my entire career, I can't more strongly emphasize this point. This is the biggest single factor between whether it works for a company or not. I'd argue it's even more important than hiring the best people. A remote first company with B engineers will likely be more effective than a company with A engineers that gets that wrong, especially at larger team sizes.

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

#64

Post by redundo_twa »

jamie_ca wrote: post #61
redundo_twa wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

It also depends on the business somewhat, but actually having an office you can invite outsiders to (investors, prospective clients) can be an indicator of success. Truthful or not, it's the perception that counts.

I understand, but that's such an "old world" style. It's like building a datacentre, in the age of cloud computing, simply because owning big iron is an indicator of success (all the big boys have datacentres, right?).

In IT, tbh, I think we should just own it. There are more productive and creative ways to send out that sort of signal.

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

#65

Post by jedberg »

jvalencia wrote: post #5

The biggest challenge with remote is coordination. I've now managed 4 remote teams. The turn-around time between communication cycles with people on the other side of the globe can drastically increase the time it takes to get consensus on issues that locally might take 10 minutes. I can recall several times where clearly (or so we thought) laid out plans were given over to have them come back a week later with some…

I don't have the studies handy, but the general consensus is that you're gonna have a bad time if your team spans more than nine time zones.

In practice what this means is if you're based in the US, you can either focus on having teams in Europe or Asia, but not both.

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

#66

Post by brianwawok »

atupis wrote: post #34
jaimebuelta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with taxes and with contracts in different jurisdictions. Sure, some people may be ok with working self-employed and handle all of that themselves, but not everyone will do.

Somebody should build startup which would solve payroll issues with remote employees.

Is it profitable / worth the effort?

The US has 300 some million people. India has a billion some.

If you can't find an employee in those two countries, it seems you have other problems? (or add 1 or 2 more if you want to spread it around).

Not that there are not great people in all countries. But opening your resume pool from say 1.5 billion people to 3 billion people is unlikely to have a huge benefit to hiring.

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

#67

Post by fernandotakai »

epynonymous wrote: post #24
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.

totally agree with you on zoom -- also, zoom's slack plugin makes starting meetings quite easy.

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

#68

Post by jedberg »

#4 is the most pressing. I have a fully remote team, and we try to make sure as much communication is asynchronous as possible. But sometimes, you just need a few people to work together in real time.

And right now that means dealing with a terrible video conferencing experience and not having a good shared whiteboard solution.

If you could figure out a way to realistically replicate "a bunch of people around a whiteboard", then I will pay you money for your product.

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

#69

Post by davidrupp »

mitchellh wrote: post #39

I'm the founder of a company that is ~250 people, remote first, and still fully remote. We do have an office in SF, but ~10% of our employees are present, almost no full teams are centralized, and all our processes revolve around remote work. Important to note that we're a US-founded company (this comes along later). I'm going to use this comment as a way to talk about remote hiring generally, rather than respond dir…

My (former) company's experience report: https://medium.com/@davidrupp/we-actually-built-a-remote-tea.... Less about HR/Legal, more about culture and approach.

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

#70

Post by Benjammer »

ecwilson wrote: post #57

Others have mentioned this to some extent, but what I've found the most challenging is when a company tries to do both local and remote, but was not remote-first . People who are remote are de-facto second-class citizens by virtue of the fact that they aren't included in hallway conversations or casual meetings. It's incredibly hard to overcome that. Teams that started remote-first are already well-practiced in inclu…

>I'd add that this culture-setting rolls down from management -- if they aren't setting a good example, others will falter and the remote-supporting culture will fall apart.

As someone who works at HQ for a local-first company with a significant contingent of remote workers in two satellite offices, it's _exhausting_ to be the developer in the corning who has to say "can we make sure the remote guys can hear OK" or "got a ping from Dan, remote guys aren't getting sound" in every single meeting.

Our office infra guy got a microphone with a padded box around it that you can toss around during the full company meetings so remote people can hear audience questions. The execs talking at these meetings have never once said "hey make sure we pass around the mic," it is always someone sending a text onto the big presentation hangout screen from a remote office saying "can you repeat the questions too please?" while the mic sits there on the little table right fucking next to the main speaker every single time.

When the managers and leadership don't care enough to prioritize it, it's almost impossible to change the culture around supporting remote team members.

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