InVision has no physical headquarters and all 700 employees work remotely • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by toomuchtodo » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

roystonvassey wrote: post #149

pixelmonkey wrote: post #79

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 Wiki…

Sounds like the perfect working model but how do you handle the multitude of labour laws, payroll, taxation etc?

You pay someone like Trinet [1]. You wire them funds, they distribute to employees in all 50 states and handle payroll, taxation, etc. They act as the employer as record, show up on employee W2s, etc. There are other companies out there that perform the same service, but Trinet is the company I'm familiar with having worked at a fully remote startup.

If you have international employers, there's more complexity besides wiring them funds; you have to ensure you're not violating local labor law as it relates to employee vs contractor classification. Talk to an attorney!

[1] https://www.trinet.com/

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

#152

Post by matwood » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

lookingsideways wrote: post #24

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…

It's subjective but I believe it. If remote work is set up well then there is much less emphasis on meetings and much more focus on good written communication. With remote teams distributed across timezones with their own work schedules, async communication is key and systems get developed to allow that. When it's part of daily work to ensure everything is designed and specced properly, communicated well, and there's…

> much more focus on good written communication

IMO, this is such an underrated benefit of remote work. Pushing people towards chat tools, email, and digital drawing tools automatically documents everything. No more wondering what did Joe say in the meeting 3 weeks ago, now I just search my email and/or chat.

Next on my list to look for is a video chat plugin that will transcribe the entire meeting and email everyone afterwards.

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

#153

Post by matchbok » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

philip1209 wrote: post #150

The average age of developers is increasing. A generation is leaving SF to start families in other cities. Fewer people want to come to SF due to costs and low quality of living, and startups are no longer expected to be in the Bay. Coding schools are graduating new developers all over the country (and the world). The future is remote. I have a contrarian viewpoint: I think employment doesn't work with remote work at…

Thanks but no thanks. Contract work overwhelming benefits the employer.

Also, spam.

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

#154

Post by Draiken » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 6:54 PM UTC

ParanoidShroom wrote: post #13

kowdermeister wrote: post #2

I underestimated how high the competition is for remote work. All my attempts failed so far despite having well customized application materials. I didn't submit to hundreds maybe around 20. Most of the time I never even reached a technical test at these companies which I thought would be the hardest part.

Why is remote such highly requested? I work remote but, not cause I HAVE to. My team is just all fully remote.

Honestly, saving 1-4 hours of commute every single day equates to an absurd amount of extra time.

People underestimate how long commuting takes away from your day. Just the time you take getting ready, waking up early to get breakfast first or even getting out to eat lunch. Normally people don't add those times to the commute total and count only the actual car/bus/metro time.

No matter small those are, they add up and you don't ever get that back. Even if you only take 1 hour a day commuting (rare in my experience) you will get at least 5 hours extra in a week that you can use to... live.

Be it learning time, family time or even just relaxing time, it's 5 hours that seemingly come from out of thin air.

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

#155

Post by Draiken » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

djrogers wrote: post #26

Found it interesting, and likely a very good idea, that they have set ‘office hours’ which are the same for everyone globally. That might be very inconvenient if you’re in a locale where you wind up working nights, but it does give a level of predictability and ensures that everyone is available at a given time.

I call these companies not "really" remote.

If you can't hire someone from Japan, your company is probably not 100% remote.

It's very easy to take things normally done in an office and move them to a hangout (or w/e tool you use) but still rely on all the office constraints. A lot of companies still expect everyone to be 100% responsive at all times, add live video feeds to ensure everyone is "working", have the same working hours (as this one) and all the company's processes are tied up to specific hours and people being online.

I'm not saying this can't work. It clearly does. But I don't think it's optimal and doesn't take full advantage of actually being a fully remote company.

As a side note: not all companies can do that. But specially in our field I believe it's doable and personally seen it work before.

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

#156

Post by lazyasciiart » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #21

dubya123 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this any different than a job at Big Tech in SF or NYC?

Because there, you're _only_ competing with local SF/NYC applicants, within like 1h drive radius or whatever.

Everyone I know who lives in SF moved there when they got offered a job there.

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

#157

Post by pixelmonkey » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:09 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #148

pixelmonkey wrote: post #79

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 Wiki…

GitLab being all remote has been a problem during fundraises. We mentioned it since we're transparent and inevitably investors will want to visit your office. During our latest D round it was a smaller problem since later rounds are more based on financial metrics and comparables (GitHub, Atlassian, Jfrog). But I wouldn't say that it is no longer a problem with VCs, many still have scaling concerns. As one of the bes…

That’s disappointing to hear. Hopefully with the Elastic IPO and other public successes, the pattern matching algorithm will change. If you don’t mind the question, how many people is Gitlab now?

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

#158

Post by RickS » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:18 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #117

saudioger wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing they're mostly sales/service related employees. When you get on their enterprise plan the service is fairly personal. Invision also has a wider breadth of tools than what Sketch does (though Sketch does what they do in a much deeper way). Sketch doesn't do personalized enterprise-level service plans (or Basecamp, for a similar example)... so they can be a lot leaner.

Still, do you think enterprise custom plans add enough value to pay for, let's say, 500 employees? I don't know, it still sounds like a lot of people to sustain. Edit: apparently InVision's revenue is about 10M, so yeah, still running on VC fuel.

I've been involved in the invision enterprise purchase process.

1) They're very high touch. Rep-with-a-name, etc. So they definitely employ staff for this.

2) The markup compared to regular invision is huge.

Their tiers go from "we're very small" (5 people on a team) to "pay us for enterprise" way too soon IMO. There exists a design team size (The teams that tire of, or never play, the shared accounts game bring in a lot of revenue. Big seat costs for very nearly the same thing.

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

#159

Post by anoncoward111 » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:30 PM UTC

jdhn wrote: post #111

anoncoward111 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for your questions. My high year in sales was 110k W2, 70k post tax, and 35k post expenses like food rent and car. My low year was 45k, aka just plain old base salary, and after taxes and expenses I broke even. I was living in a pretty expensive part of Boston. I'm sure I could have found a really nasty bedroom for like $650 if I wanted to haha. Right now as a waiter I'm making about $600 a week pre…

The fact that you're in Eastern Long Island along with talking about the $400 weekend makes me think you're near the Hamptons. What are you going to do once the summer crowd winds down and it's only the locals frequenting your restaurant?

Not the Hamptons :) I would probably be doing $1000 weekends if I was on Dune Rd lol!

The town specifically is Head of the Harbor. We've got a year round retiree crowd that comes out even on Mondays and Wednesdays to hear an 85 year old woman sing Sinatra ahha

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

#160

Post by TylerE » Mon, Oct 08, 2018, 7:36 PM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #49

okmokmz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of a hit did you take on salary, and how much did your cost of living decrease? Would you do it again? I've thought about leaving my career to do something that wouldn't require a commute, and would allow me to live in a very remote area, but I'm not brave enough to take the plunge

Thank you so much for your questions. My high year in sales was 110k W2, 70k post tax, and 35k post expenses like food rent and car. My low year was 45k, aka just plain old base salary, and after taxes and expenses I broke even. I was living in a pretty expensive part of Boston. I'm sure I could have found a really nasty bedroom for like $650 if I wanted to haha. Right now as a waiter I'm making about $600 a week pre…

Can I suggest that experience is a bit atypical? Eastern Long Island is rural, but it is also very very much old money.