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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?

#81

Post by JTbane »

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…

>Two areas in particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality.

Amen to that. I recently was interviewed remotely, and the voice call quality was unacceptably low- I could barely even understand the questions being asked!

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

#82

Post by mitchellh »

paddymann wrote: post #78
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…

Thanks for the all the details here — really useful! 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…

I don't have such a list, sorry.

Learning about this stuff basically requires a huge time sink per country in reading local laws, as well as a cost of paying a lawyer to verify your assumptions. It is unfortunate. A "tldrlegal" site for entity creation and employment laws would be amazing.

Also re: France... yeah, that is a tough one. We're just about ready to hire there. The whole process was very difficult, on the harder end of the spectrum that we've experienced so far. :)

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

#83

Post by ethanjdiamond »

Can I ask a question? I personally have never been in a relationship with remote workers that has been more than 70-80% as effective as having everyone co-located.

What are some examples of companies that have been successful using primarily remote workers? I don't mean companies that Hacker News considers do remote work "correctly". I mean companies who have grown to around the nine figure mark without a co-located team?

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

#84

Post by socalnate1 »

ethanjdiamond wrote: post #83

Can I ask a question? I personally have never been in a relationship with remote workers that has been more than 70-80% as effective as having everyone co-located. What are some examples of companies that have been successful using primarily remote workers? I don't mean companies that Hacker News considers do remote work "correctly". I mean companies who have grown to around the nine figure mark without a co-located…

Zapier maybe?

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

#85

Post by bwb »

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…

Ya I tend to think you need to run entirely remote, or entirely in offices. Or... you have your remote team running entire projects with an entirely sep organization, although that is hard and I am not aware of any organizations doing it well.

Biggest challenges?

Communications - I think every company has this problem but if you don't solve it when you are remote it will crush the company eventually. Whereas an office company can be shitty at communications and still do ok.

Execution... - LOL, I feel silly saying this but if your devs are split all over it is hard to collaborate, esp depending on speed and size. You need really great organization, focus, and just the right amount of meetings. You also need to do that in a way that gives them the ability to write code without checking in with someone every 10 min or stepping on toes. Esp if you are crossing big time zones, you have to really think and plan who is working on what, and it might even affect the entire design of the app...

quick background - grew a 100% company to ~135 people in 18 countries. Mix of software and dev ops and customer service.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Benjammer wrote: post #70
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 "…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by eloff »

hluska wrote: post #80
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've found a middle ground between micromanaging the team and giving them enough autonomy to work independently. It works best on definable tasks when the remote team's manager is technical enough to do their job on her/his own. 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…

That's not likely to be a good idea re the compensation. There are a lot of studies showing knowledge workers perform more poorly at the task with financial incentives.

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

#88

Post by st1ck »

legohorizons wrote: post #3

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

It's only a problem if you actually want to hire them as employees. Otherwise paying workers should be as easy as just wiring money to their bank accounts. It's worker's problem to figure out the laws in their country: do they need to incorporate, how to pay taxes etc.

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

#89

Post by hluska »

eloff wrote: post #87
hluska wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found a middle ground between micromanaging the team and giving them enough autonomy to work independently. It works best on definable tasks when the remote team's manager is technical enough to do their job on her/his own. 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…

That's not likely to be a good idea re the compensation. There are a lot of studies showing knowledge workers perform more poorly at the task with financial incentives.

This is either an unfortunate reality or a limitation of my experience, but I've only had to resort to writing red/green tests when my remote teammates have been at a level where poor performance would be something of an improvement. It's more useful for me when I see tons of commits, yet no forward progress on a measurable goal.

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

#90

Post by jlisam13 »

ethanjdiamond wrote: post #83

Can I ask a question? I personally have never been in a relationship with remote workers that has been more than 70-80% as effective as having everyone co-located. What are some examples of companies that have been successful using primarily remote workers? I don't mean companies that Hacker News considers do remote work "correctly". I mean companies who have grown to around the nine figure mark without a co-located…

GitHub has ~800 employees, almost 70% is remote
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