91–100 of 137 posts
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.
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…
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 offic…
- Solitude (at first it's not an issue) - Asynchronous communication. Learning to read and write effectively. - Team collaboration work (designing/brainstorming). It's very difficult to explain ideas through . To solve for this, GitHub allows employees to meet each other as long as there is a business need. On top of this, we hold summits very often, where the team gets to meet each other in a location for a week. - Internet and great conferencing hardware (GitHub provides a great budget for both Internet costs and hardware).
But I would say the most challenging part is Trust. Trust in your manager, trust in your organization, trust in your company, and trust in your peers. Without Trust, there is no way to build a remote friendly company. How are you going to micro manage someone who is working in EU while you are sleeping in the US? Obviously GitHub is not a perfect place, but I would say that there is a mutual understanding among employees to trust each other and to communicate effectively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very important contributor to good call quality is good audio hardware.
Yes relying on the cheap 5-10$ pos mic built into a lap top wont work you need a proper soundcard and better microphones and turn off the auto level/compression on skype. 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 t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red Hat v. Debian. Arguably, one of Ubuntu / Canonical's failings.
Huh? Canonical is excellent for remote work, and I know many people who work at Red Hat who say the same about it.
The Debian - Canonical distinction is milder, though the latter has at least some centralisation. Nowhere near as much RH's.
If you go international, then you are probably dealing with a legal system that is stacked against you. The government probably even intends to divert your trade secrets to fully domestic (relative to them) companies, and will apply pressure to "your" employees (who may even be government agents) to make it so.
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'm interested in this, as a person who does remote work, and has experienced some of these issues.
So, what are some good remote-first companies? I know of a few that may be: Automattic, Scrapinghub. What others? Asking all here, not just the parent commenter.
Maybe this should become a separate thread. Note: Obvious, but: "remote-first companies" is not necessarily the same as "companies that are hiring for remote positions".