71–80 of 137 posts
I've found the most difficult type of remote work is highly collaborative. Iterating on designs, on software, or ideas in general.
Anything that can aid in that type of remote work would be a boon
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…
A very important contributor to good call quality is good audio hardware.
Doing it more seriously you might even want to use a separate older machine as a skype drone (ie only runs skype) and feed your audio out from your main machines sound card into that.
I had an initial phone call with a firm and it was obvious that they where clustered round a mac laptop - inaudible and very low quality sound.
We are a pure remote company but Tax/employment-law is for us the biggest issue. Or to be more precise, it's the biggest issue for potential co-workers. We find that people are super interested in us, but when we tell them they have to do their own tax and basically act as freelancers, most say no to us. The majority simply wants a standard legal employment. Which I understand and I would like to have that too.
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…
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…
> First, we can't offer options/stock to contractors Can you elaborate on what is keeping you from offering options to contractors? Sure, incentive stock options can only be given to employees but what about nonqualified stock options? They can be given to anyone.
Whilst you can offer on approved schemes - you might have to offer people in the uk more options to cover this which might make local (US employees) jealous
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But, then the marketing/sales part of my experience chimes in and I think of all the various times in my career that having physical space added to my credibility. I think of the sectors (government tech and financial tech instantly come to mind) where decisions makers are heavily moved by AAA office space. And, I think of how many times I've seen spending an obscene amount on rent actually convert into paying customers.
My inner developer is saying "right on" but my inner marketer/sales type is thinking of all these times when physical space has a positive ROI from a sales/marketing point of view.
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.
One of the most useful parts of it was timing http requests and tracking response times. We solved some very complicated technical support issues using this tool. Do you think it would be useful to adapt something like this to remote workers? It's weird because I've struggled with internet connections when I've worked with remote workers, but never thought of actually testing it until I read this comment...
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…
We're a remote team but much smaller and certainly unable to pay a full time employee to create companies.
Do you have, or know where to find, a list of countries that can work without setting up a legal entity? We've lost a lot of time trying to recruit candidates where we've not been to find a workable solution due to local laws and our limited resources (e.g. in France!)
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
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…
Instead of just a requirements document, give them a requirements document but also define a set of red/green tests to show whether the requirements were met. It's hard to do this with front end, where feel is often very important, but in my experience, it works well provided that the remote team's manager is qualified to make the types of architectural decisions necessary to pull this off.
You can even start tying compensation into passing red/green tests!