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

#221

Post by manigandham » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

beambot wrote: post #220

manigandham wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use https://www.notion.so/ for notes, tasks, wiki and project management. Google Docs for quick stuff or formal writeups. Occasionally we'll use OneNote online or https://awwapp.com/ which has more freeform drawing if we need it, but otherwise it's usually just typing stuff out in lists. This is all on peoples computers, no fancy video-conferencing setups. Those are almost always a waste of money and never work we…

Hrm. None of these really seem like whiteboarding though.

I'm not sure what you mean then, what is whiteboarding exactly?

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

#222

Post by anon4lol » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 6:30 PM UTC

I had an idea for a business idea that never got off the ground. However, before it flamed out, I wanted to hire some overseas people that I personally knew to help. However, I got conflicting advice about how to actually pay them. I wanted to do it the legit/legal way, so they would have taxable income and pay their withholding. I got advice from just pay them with PayPal to bank-to-bank-transfers to forming a back office in the foreign country.

I strongly suspect these distributed teams are taking shortcuts.

With contingent employees in the U.S., you can just 1099 them at the end of the year; W2 employees will require reporting and withholding depending on the state they live in. But what about foreign employees? I'd love to hear from anyone who has done this.

How would this actually work in practice? Do bank to bank transfers, or are all of the workers simply contingent employees that invoice and paid in USD or local currency? I suspect they are avoiding paying payroll taxes and not reporting to the foreign taxing authorities.

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

#223

Post by anon4lol » Tue, Oct 09, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

anon4lol wrote: post #222

I had an idea for a business idea that never got off the ground. However, before it flamed out, I wanted to hire some overseas people that I personally knew to help. However, I got conflicting advice about how to actually pay them. I wanted to do it the legit/legal way, so they would have taxable income and pay their withholding. I got advice from just pay them with PayPal to bank-to-bank-transfers to forming a back…

Never mind. I found the answer. The prevailing advice now is: call them valued employees, but pay them as contingent/contract workers. Some companies have "perks" that include reimbursement for accounting/tax preparation in the "employee's" host country -- they deal with the income reporting, health care, and tax issues.

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

#224

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 12:37 AM UTC

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #201

thaumasiotes wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buy up the local infrastructure (housing, office space, coffee shops, etc), and turn around and rent / sell to the startups that you just funded. This would pad the ROI, so even a company that crashes and burns after 5 years would still be profitable on the basis of the rents paid. You can never turn a profit on rent paid out of money you gave to someone, just like it's impossible to turn a profit on purchases your…

It's someone else's money. - VC raises money to invest - VC or the individual partners buy the infrastructure (or already owns it through different channels) - VC instructs companies it funds to use infrastructure it owns $$ Now, of course there's interest in successes in the fund, but even when a bet doesn't pan out the VC firm can profit

That does not "pad the ROI". It lowers the ROI of the fund. It may launder some money from the fund into a VC's personal pockets, but that's not the same thing.

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

#225

Post by notoriousjpg » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

krupan wrote: post #114

dubya123 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF and NYC attract the top talent from around the world.

Not all of it, just the top talent that doesn't mind the living conditions in SF and NYC

Exactly, not all talent is prepared to up and move country. Age and family all factor into it.

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

#226

Post by sulam » Wed, Oct 10, 2018, 1:13 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #204

sulam wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, full disclosure, I helped create and ran the developer tools group at a large, well-known tech company. This is a space I'm intimately familiar with. The idea seems pretty straightforward to me and not particularly insightful. Calling it an OS is different from calling it a platform, but effectively it's the same thing. Perhaps more interesting are the implications of that analogy -- do you ship APIs and have a l…

In my view everyone has open APIs and the difference is: 1. GitHub focusses on a marketplace ecosystem (although I hear they will be adding CI soon) 2. Atlassian has a suite of applications that work well together and you can buy as a bundle 3. GitLab is a single application for the whole DevOps lifecycle, one codebase with everything from planning to monitoring, one UI, reliable upgrades, everyone on the same page

Okay, then to take the OS analogy:

    GitHub: Windows
    Atlassian: MacOS
    GitLab: ???

You could try on Linux for size, but I don't think it fits.

So either as an analogy it doesn't work, or this idea doesn't scale. :) BeOS is the only OS I've used that I both liked and that had a single design vision behind it. I think that this is most likely an artifact of it not being successful, though. If it had been widely adopted, it would have gone the way of MacOS or Windows.

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

#227

Post by Draiken » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 12:04 PM UTC

closeparen wrote: post #215

Draiken wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Your experience is atypical. The median commute time in the United States is 25.4 minutes each way. The HN zeitgeist's insistence on living in major cities and taking public transit has a drastic cost in terms of commute time as well as money, one that most Americans do not pay.

The US is only one country in the world. I imagine this median goes up if we include more countries.

Regardless, my point stands. with that median we'd have 50 minutes every day which would total to ~4h/week literally wasted moving around.

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

#228

Post by konschubert » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

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…

Hey, may I ask why you decided to leave the company eventually? My email is mail@konstantinschubert.com

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

#229

Post by konschubert » Fri, Oct 12, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

dkersten wrote: post #192

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You wanted to talk to Bob, you click into Bob's 'office' and say "hey Bob!" and he says "Hi, what's up?" I wouldn’t like it if people distracted me like that. Part of what I like about working remotely is that it forces asynchronous communication on people. Send me a message on slack and I can ignore it if I’m deep in thought. If you need to talk to me over voice chat, send me a message on slack asking me to join y…

But that's also what makes remote working less effective in many cases.

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

#230

Post by JoeAltmaier » Fri, Oct 19, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

konschubert wrote: post #228

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hey, may I ask why you decided to leave the company eventually? My email is mail@konstantinschubert.com

Sure! New financing meant the old leadership was out and a new group. They were all open-source and WebRTC. First meeting they were "Hey we can use open source and save a lot of effort!" and I instantly replied "We didn't write it ourselves because we weren't 'smart enough' to use open source. We did it because we needed performance guarantees. If we switch to open source, you'll have to tell us what we can give up".

Silence from them. Then a managed exit for me!