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

Post by jlisam13 » Wed, May 09, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

gnulinux wrote: post #118

jlisam13 wrote: post #94

I have been working at GitHub for almost a year, which is a remote first company. I would say challenges include: - 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 nee…

> To solve for this, GitHub allows employees to meet each other as long as there is a business need. What do you mean by "allow". Is it, in general, not allowed for employees to meet each other in remote-first companies, but GitHub notably allows it? Or did you say it that way to emphasize they must meet only for business needs and not for anything else. If so, why? Would you be able elaborate on that sentence?

Post by laughfactory » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:12 AM UTC

throwaway2016a wrote: post #48

5. Managing people Personally, I find the toughest part to be actually managing the people. You really need to trust your team to be self-motivating which can be tough for a manager to do, especially new ones, because you need to give up some control. But even though you trust them you need to have a way to measure results. That means being more disciplined and mature in your project planning than you might be if eve…

Post by jamescrowley » Thu, May 10, 2018, 8:26 PM UTC

deyan wrote: post #132

jroper wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company hires engineers wherever they are. We're only incorporated in a few countries, the way we work is to engage a firm whose business it is to be incorporated in many countries so that they can hire people in those countries as full time employees, and contract them to our company. This firm charges a flat fee per person per year, and it's not a lot. I've been told that we'd have to have at least 5 people in a…

Mind sharing the name of the firm?

Post by a13n » Thu, May 17, 2018, 6:18 AM UTC

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…