Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 137 posts

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

#101

Post by x0x0 »

purplezooey wrote: post #52

They must be big, because it seems like every startup has to put their HQ in the most miserable places like Mountain View or Menlo Park.

We're a new b2b saas company. We just made this exact decision (to locate in sfbay) and the decision not to hire remotely. Reasons to be here are basically we have a deep engineering network for hires, we raised $300k from local angels, most VCs we want to work with are local, and most of our desired customers have their hqs here.

Reasons not to be here are the absolutely ludicrous cost of housing and what that does to salary requirements.

But as a tiny company, execution speed is our single most important attribute and we couldn't work out how to work remotely without damaging that. I'm glad github and others have managed, but you have to wonder if they succeeded despite being remote.

ps -- I've worked remotely before. It's really nice not to start every goddamn meeting screwing with hangouts doesn't connect / lifesize hardware works great but doesn't connect well to mixed hardware + laptop calls / multiple zoom invites with different meeting rooms / go2meeting clients are shitty / etc.

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

#103

Post by itronitron »

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…

asking for a friend... what if you hire someone 'Alex', a resident of Washington State and then they move to Germany because their spouse is relocated for employment to Germany, where they both receive benefits but are required to remain US Citizens (and return to the US each year)... in that case are you paying Alex as if they are a Washington State resident or are you legally required to pay them as if they are a German resident?

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

#104

Post by j45 »

Startups often don't know how to hire let alone hire and manage remote, and quite often, remote workers aren't always the best at it too.

What could work quite well often is more challenging... Some things that have made it easier for me:

- Dedicated PeopleOps person - this person's job is only to make all the tools work together better for everyone. Jira, Slack, integrations, notifications. People should be able to open requests to remove remote friction of using multiple tools, etc.

- Start with real-time remote (everyone who works is awake at the same time) has gone a long way. Plus or minus 2-3 time zones, no more. That way, especially in the beginning, everyone is available to work at the same time.

- International payments, in the beginning, is easier to start as a contractor via a service that takes care of it like Upwork. Once you know you have a winning candidate, it's worth figuring out that new jurisdiction.

- Onboarding - should be collaborative, hanging out on slack. Make candidates join your infrastructure during the trial period to confirm that in fact, they can use your tools.

- Read - there are lots of companies building healthy online cultures. STudy and follow them.

- Weekly WOS video call - 1/2 hour every week for everyone to have 1-2 to minutes to share what they're working on.

- Run all meetings as if they were remote. Everything gets scheduled on hangout, etc, in case someone needs to hop on.

There's some good handbooks out there for remote working too that have been a treasure trove. If I can find a link I'll update this post.

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

#105

Post by j45 »

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…

Super insightful, thanks for sharing. Wondering if it's easier to be a remote-first company from other countries.

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

#106

Post by mitchellh »

itronitron wrote: post #103
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…

asking for a friend... what if you hire someone 'Alex', a resident of Washington State and then they move to Germany because their spouse is relocated for employment to Germany, where they both receive benefits but are required to remain US Citizens (and return to the US each year)... in that case are you paying Alex as if they are a Washington State resident or are you legally required to pay them as if they are a G…

Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, consult a real lawyer.

I don't know for the specific case you've posed, but we've had similar things happen. If an employee moves into a state/country we can't employ them in, it causes a bit of a panic. We either have to 1.) establish the correct legal/financial entities to employ them or 2.) let them go. In theory, you can convert the employee into a contractor, but this has ramifications on options vesting and benefits and so on and is a huge mess. I'm sure there are a lot more caveats to this that are under consideration (again, I'm now a lawyer) that may affect this, so I wouldn't generalize this too far.

I don't think we've ever let someone go for this though, we have once to memory panicked and rushed to establish the entity (potentially paying fines along the way). I may be mistaken, I just don't recall exactly. In any case, we kindly ask our employees to notify us of any change of location, since it almost certainly changes payroll tax even if you are moving to a location we CAN employ in (i.e. even between US states). Also, the panicking is not fun for anyone (including the employee, whose job status is suddenly uncertain).

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

#107

Post by ecwilson »

vram22 wrote: post #100
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…

>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. 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 comme…

Look into Jason Friend -- he literally wrote the book on remote work.

https://basecamp.com/books/remote

As for your actual question, I don't yet know of a great resource for understanding which companies are truly remote-first, but would love it if someone had one to share.

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

#108

Post by jamestimmins »

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.

I don't understand why companies don't build specific teams that are 100% remote, with perhaps an onsite project manager (or something like that). Then the team could develop its own norms and culture, and while it would be isolated from the rest of the company, it collectively gives the remote workers much more of a voice than if they were each on different teams.

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

#109

Post by scrollaway »

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…

What a fantastic post. Thank you Mitchell.

Would you be able to share the actual countries in question? In which country was it required to open a bank account in the local currency? Which one has taken 10 months to complete opening an entity in?

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

#110

Post by anitil »

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.

We've been trying Zoom lately. Seems pretty good, though we always seem to have issues with everyone logging in to a call. Inevitably we have everyone slacking/texting/skyping out the call ID to just get up and running. After we're up though it all works smoothly
Post reply on HN