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InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

businessinsider.com

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Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#71

Post by pier25 »

Klathmon wrote: post #25
nicolashahn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the way to get a remote job is to start with a non-remote job and slowly convert it to remote. Haven't pulled it off successfully yet but it seems like a much easier path, so long as you're willing to put in the time.

I want to warn against this. My biggest "issue" with remote working is always when there are differing amounts of remote work within teams. When you have half the engineers in office, and half remote, the 2 sides end up with communication issues. In-office meetings where a few are remoted in are awful unless the company spends the money on a real remote-conference setup, having co-workers that don't like to pick up t…

This is absolutely true.

I lead a dev remote team and I have to actively communicate with people on the office to know about things going on. There is a shitstorm happening and we don't know about it until they need something from us.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#72

Post by toomuchtodo »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #59
pc86 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to run the numbers for everyone, this is $31,200 assuming no vacation all year. So making less money gross as a waiter than you're able to put into a savings account (after taxes and all expenses) as a software developer. I don't think that will be surprising information for anyone here. I've waited tables before and I'd rather be a software developer for half the median software developer salary than a waiter f…

Some points in response to this: I keep nearly all of my gross because of the standard deduction and the nature of cash tips. My rent is $650 a month whereas most people in the bay or in Boston are paying $2200 for equivalent quality. I dont spend 2 hours stuck in traffic or a hot subway every day-- most days I ride my moped which gets 90mpg and uses a hilariously cheap blend of oil and fuel from the hardware store.…

Because you could be making $100k and banking $50k. Every hour you work is an hour you'll never get back.

But, as you said, you feel welcomed by your employer and feel the job is stable. If this is what you prioritize, that's your decision.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#73

Post by madcaptenor »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53
madcaptenor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Also with our tool, it took an average of 30 seconds to get a meeting started." You must have better phone-meeting tools than my company does.

Right; didn't use a phone-meeting tool which sucks. We used Sococo's TeamSpace, because we were a startup and that's what we were creating (dogfooding our own product). When I left it was an app that was always-on, keeping all folks logged into the same 'map' network-connected. We could click in and out of one-on-one meetings, standups and bullpens, or whole-company meetings with audio/video setup times in 100ms or s…

Unfortunately my company uses a product that we got in an acquisition that is not very good. (It's actually end-of-life right now but the new product isn't much better.)

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#74

Post by hbosch »

pier25 wrote: post #67

700 employees? That sounds like an awful lot for a product like InVision. Bohemian Coding, the company behind Sketch, employs a few dozen people. Also, I don't think the web is ready for UI/UX design tools. The ones I've tried feel really slow on my 5K iMac. Maybe in 5-10 years when web assembly is polished and related tool chains...

Do you feel the same way about Figma? I haven’t tried it on a 5K monitor, but I’ve heard good things.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#75

Post by hnaccy »

strittmatter wrote: post #6

I am all for the remote trend. I think InVision is doing a really good thing here and it looks like a lot of other companies are following suit. I hope it influences people to migrate from major tech hubs and help boost the economy in rural areas. I am from the rust belt area and it's been pretty unaffected by all of the tech growth. Most of the locals are still hoping for natural gas or coal to start booming again.…

The rust belt would just get undercut by programmers living in vastly cheaper locations around globe.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#76

Post by Matticus_Rex »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #59
pc86 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to run the numbers for everyone, this is $31,200 assuming no vacation all year. So making less money gross as a waiter than you're able to put into a savings account (after taxes and all expenses) as a software developer. I don't think that will be surprising information for anyone here. I've waited tables before and I'd rather be a software developer for half the median software developer salary than a waiter f…

Some points in response to this: I keep nearly all of my gross because of the standard deduction and the nature of cash tips. My rent is $650 a month whereas most people in the bay or in Boston are paying $2200 for equivalent quality. I dont spend 2 hours stuck in traffic or a hot subway every day-- most days I ride my moped which gets 90mpg and uses a hilariously cheap blend of oil and fuel from the hardware store.…

I think the point is that to frame it as either feeling shitty at a high-paying job or feeling good at a low-paying job is a false dichotomy.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#77

Post by billyggruff »

ryandrake wrote: post #68
denimnerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in that situation now. Well kind of. I am in the only team member not colocated with the rest of the team. At the start it was really hard. They would all be in a room together and I could barely even hear them over the phone, much less speak up and say something over their rapid fire conversations. It's gotten better since I've brought these concerns up I'm only on week 4. We've setup twice a week cisco telepres…

At a lot of companies, teleconferencing systems are astonishingly bad. Like, “why did they even consider buying this” bad. Often the first 10 minutes of a meeting will be spent figuring out how to use the conf system or rebooting it because it’s not working. Then figuring out which cable to plug into in order to project remotely. Then asking if everyone is here. Then telling Karen to mute her microphone because she’s…

Teleconferencing systems with a 'communal' screen and camera do not make much sense to me nowadays.

Most employees have at least 2 devices with built-in cameras and a screen that can be utilized for videoconferencing.

Give everybody a headset. Done.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#78

Post by BoysenberryPi »

buboard wrote: post #48

I wonder if there are startups working on this space, helping setup remote companies. People seem to use a basket of various tools, none of which was explicitly made for remote work. My ideal setup would be a virtual space, like a game, where employees can virtually interact. Most communication is written, complemented by voice chat when needed. It gives an understanding that "there are other people out there" and no…

Isn't this essentially Discord? I mean it's not a game but it's a space you login where communication is largely text with voice and video when needed.

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#79

Post by pixelmonkey »

Perhaps more interesting is that Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, just IPO'ed on NYSE, and they, too, have a fully distributed team of over 700 -- might even be trending toward 1000 by now. Zapier is another one at multi-hundred-person scale, and is a YC company. A couple other scaled-up ones on this model include Automattic (company behind Wordpress), DataStax (company behind Cassandra).

There is also Wikimedia, Canonical, and Mozilla -- perhaps those 3 are less interesting since they have a non-profit mission tied to the internet-as-community and FOSS.

It's worth mentioning that when I started my startup back in 2009 as a fully distributed team, VCs viewed that as a major -1 strike against the company. So much so that we chose not to mention it during initial pitches. We ended up finding Series A/B financing, and these days, those investors ask us to advise companies on how fully distributed teams work, so new portfolio companies can decide for themselves. They were early believers in the model, but they tell me they have noticed a major change in attitude among fellow VCs toward distributed teams. That is, they understand the tradeoffs (finally), and believe the model can scale.

We now have a fully distributed staff of 70, over 400 customers, and millions in revenue. So 1/10 InVision scale, but it works well (and nicely!) at this scale. These days we also have an NYC office, but we refer to it as "the Internet cafe", about 20 of our 70 people "so happen" to work out of there regularly, with everyone else in home offices or co-working spaces. Our NYC office is also used for team gatherings, client events/visits, and board meetings.

I wrote my initial views on the different scaling models for teams here in 2012:

https://amontalenti.com/2012/05/14/distributed-teams

Also wrote a little about how the fully distributed team needs to be complemented, from time to time, with f2f interaction. This was in 2016 after several years of experience scaling hiring and organizing team retreats -- "Fully Remote, But Here For Each Other":

https://blog.parse.ly/post/4736/mission/

Re: InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely

#80

Post by ryandrake »

eganist wrote: post #9
klohto wrote: post #4

While this is no doubt great I don't really believe a statement "But most importantly, Frein said, it helps InVision build a better product". Under what metric? I don't believe that people who are forced to cooperate with video and screen sharing options can deliver a better product than these, who can walk up to a colleague and ask them in person or use a whiteboard to explain their problem. In the end, remote worke…

[meta] Hey, all of HN? I'll risk a bit of karma on this question: Why are any of you downvoting klohto's comment? klohto's requesting specific information and providing one's own impression of (or perhaps anecdotal experience in) a remote environment. I can't think of a single good reason to downvote, and it's really irritating seeing good discourse being suppressed in this manner. [/meta] As for the question about r…

Don’t sweat downvotes. It’s unpredictable. Anything you say can and will be downvoted on HN. They’re just internet points!
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