Thinking back to the recent post about Performable paying a $12,000 referral bonus: I consider myself a perfect candidate for the Performable job, with the exception of location and willingness to pick up my family and move them across the country. For a competitive salary (by midwest standards, which would be a lot less than what you'd pay in Boston) I'd tell them to keep that $12,000 and use it to fly me out to boston twice a month for a few days at a time, and let me work from home the rest of the time. I work hard when I'm at home. Shoot, I built AppRabbit from the ground up evenings and weekends from the recliner in my home office. Plus, I spend more than an hour a day commuting right now, so you can have that time too :-)
Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
81–90 of 182 posts
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#82I know im a bit late to the game.
I have been looking for a telecommuting job for the past 6 months with no such luck. I am a solid programmer and I get the job done. I hobby code at home and have an awesome work ethic. I have several years experience and have been everything for GIS software to coding directly on the GPU.
I have worked on all three types of mobile devices for my current job, and have a pretty intense background of C#.
If anyone has a job that they would love to fill with a telecommuter. Please look my direction.
my blog at spoiledtechie.com my email spoiledtechie with gmail.
Thanks for the look see!
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#83My advice would be, talent /= experience. I'm sick and tired of companies being super picky because I don't know their technology stack or maybe just one element, they don't even offer a technical test these days. I wont learn Cassandra or Scala because they are popular on super-webscale sites, I did, though, learn Haskell, Node, MongoDB, Redis, Python, Ruby, not because they teach that in college. I think that tells…
One less to compete against... :) I know Scala, Cassandra and Hadoop, execute across all of the SDLC, as well as just flat out code, and available I might add. Telecommute only.
And here I was thinking I'd heard the term SDLC for the last time...
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#84Posting another thought here. I have a suspicion that there's enough people in the SF area (and a couple of the the other "big" markets) that will actively fight against telecommuting, specifically because it will lower wages in those areas. As someone else posted, yes, I understand the value of a team being in the same room. But that value comes at a premium price, and it's one which may not always be worth paying.…
how does that work? the people paying the salaries would surely love to get someone who can do the same work for less, and the people receiving the salaries aren't the ones who make the decision as to whether a new hire can telecommute or not.
the people receiving the salaries aren't the ones who make the decision as to whether a new hire can telecommute or not.
True, but they can whisper into the right ears every day, 9 - 5. And it's quite easy to negatively impact a coworker's productivity, if you so wish.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#85I routinely have people begging me to work for them, but probably 4 in 5 clam up when I specify that -- while I'm happy to spend as much time with them as necessary to get the specs and make everyone comfortable -- I will not sit in their office to do the programming. I can not, for the life of me, understand why that is such a sticking point with so many people. Fortunately I have enough people who are willing to wo…
also, they can't keep an eye on you to see that you're not slacking off on company time (the horror of it all!)
Communication is just more awkward compared to face to face time.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
how does that work? the people paying the salaries would surely love to get someone who can do the same work for less, and the people receiving the salaries aren't the ones who make the decision as to whether a new hire can telecommute or not.
the people receiving the salaries aren't the ones who make the decision as to whether a new hire can telecommute or not. True, but they can whisper into the right ears every day, 9 - 5. And it's quite easy to negatively impact a coworker's productivity, if you so wish.
i think you're attributing far too much cunning and big-picture thinking to developers. specifically, the logic chain here would have to run "this dude is telecommuting, which means that he can live somewhere cheaper than sf, which means that he can accept a lower salary, which means that salaries across the board will tend to drop, which means that my salary will be affected, which means i'd better shaft him". i'm not saying that a malicious developer can't whisper into the right ears and get someone into trouble, but it's usually because of some more directly personal dislike or jealousy.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#87At MetaOptimize, I am competing with Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and a host of other companies to recruit top ML + NLP talent.
But, the benefit of my recruiting model is that I hire people remote and part-time. A lot of strong strong people are in academia, but love their academic post and don't want to move. They just want build cool stuff on the side and make some extra money.
The fact that Google + Facebook + LinkedIn + friends must own you full time, asses in seats, creates a unique hiring opportunity for me.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#88In the past 4 hours I have exchanged ones and zeros with people and computers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, California, Germany, Singapore, and India. And got 3 "office days" worth of work done. And I haven't even brushed my teeth yet. :-) You know what telecommuters say, "Once you've deployed a killer app in your pajamas, you can never go back."
I only recently started telecommuting and I'm blown away by how much more productive I am. I actually attribute this to the fact that I do NOT work crazy hours. I take pretty frequent, but real breaks. I browse HN a lot less now and sit in the sun a lot more and when I do sit down to work I can pump out code amazingly fast because I'm gasp actually refreshed. If I'm exhausted I can take a nap, in an office I'd have to just push through and get nothing done rather than actually getting refreshed. Additionally the reward for getting work done faster is much greater, if I can get what I need to get done completed early in the afternoon then the day is mine, but in the office it simply means it's time to "look busy". I think the long term effect of this reward system is to be as productive as possible, the only person's time you're wasting is your own.
Also I've found that communication is better. In an office I find people often assume that proximity equates communication, but with distance you know you have to make an effort.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#89I've been working a remote contract these last 6 month, and one thing that surprises me is how I bill a lot less hours than I would if I were on site. If I boot up in the morning, spend 30 minutes trying to get into something, fail and end up back here on HN, I don't bill any time. If I did the same thing sitting in a cube, I'd get paid for it. The end result is that the client gets a much better deal by having me of…
If I did the same thing sitting in a cube, I'd get paid for it.
Why? I bill for work done regardless of my location, I never thought it might be out of the ordinary.
Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
also, they can't keep an eye on you to see that you're not slacking off on company time (the horror of it all!)
But they rarely are able to tell if I'm slacking off in the office either. They can't tell the difference between me working on their code or my own fun side projects.
That isn't how their minds work though.