Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#141

Post by krallja » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:08 AM UTC

spoiledtechie wrote: post #82

I 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 intens…

Hi Scott,

I know we talked about this already once before, but my team is looking for remote C# developers.

http://jobs.cheezburger.com

Jacob Cheezburger Inc.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#142

Post by joelrunyon » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:24 AM UTC

johnbacon wrote: post #139

Timely article, comsidering 37Signals is relocating their entire team to Chicago. Apparently they are freaked out, not about their employees, but about people in their homes who might break in to their stuff. Aka ex spouses et al. So David H said they will all work from the Chicago office, with iMacs Chained to their desks and wear uniforms. No more working from home or laptops unless it's on open source projects. I'…

I'm on an iPhone but I did anyways.

Here's the link - http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2838-were-relocating-everyone...

Look at the date - April 1st.

Context.Context. Context.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#143

Post by daemin » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:25 AM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #51

I 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…

I think this is because some people run on "manager time" and they like being able to poke in every hour or so just to check up, or bug you with something different that's so urgent it just popped up.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#144

Post by dman » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:34 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #140

igorgue wrote: post #55

My 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…

You say you refuse to learn them. If you're not going to learn their technology what use can you possibly be?

While interviewing recently I realized that I was spending ~20 hours per interview picking up pieces of the software stack that I haven't worked with before. The cognitive burden that a candidate has to bear is very real.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#145

Post by cookiecaper » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:37 AM UTC

bconway wrote: post #89

jasonkester wrote: post #75

I'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.

My policy on billing is, "Would I be doing this if I wasn't on this project?" If no, I bill, if yes, I don't. So, would I be sitting in a client's office, potentially (usually) (relatively) far away from my home, dressed in nice clothes, unavailable to other clients for that time, if the client hadn't put me on the project, even if I drift on to Hacker News for a few minutes? All office hours are billable.

That said, since I spend such a small proportion of my time in a client's office, I do try to stay focused. I typically don't look at Hacker News or anything like that. I got sick of setting everything to use SOCKS proxy so I set up a VPN, but I didn't bill the client for this (30 min or so) despite my normal policy. My real billing policy is "bill fairly".

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#146

Post by daemin » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 5:42 AM UTC

scythe wrote: post #140

igorgue wrote: post #55

My 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…

You say you refuse to learn them. If you're not going to learn their technology what use can you possibly be?

I think he means that he's not going to learn it himself independently because he doesn't use it for work, and he's learning/using other technologies for his personal projects. And all technologies are more useful to him currently than the one's for building billion visitors/month sites.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#147

Post by spaceman6 » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:16 AM UTC

keithba wrote: post #29

atacrawl wrote: post #2

With an unemployment rate of just 4% among tech professionals, and shortages in specific fields, flexibility shouldn't be a last resort. I would have guessed that tech unemployment would be lower than the national average, but 4% is really low.

Keep in mind that there's a natural unemployment rate in any economy. The natural unemployment rate is typically made up of two components: people in-between jobs and people with out-dated skills. In programming, we'll always have (in any month) some % of workers moving from one job to another (either because they quit, the company they worked for went out of business, or they were laid off - because the company perf…

The natural rate of unemployment is 6%.

Inflation is 3-4%.

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#148

Post by dpritchett » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 6:58 AM UTC

crenelle wrote: post #18

I have telecommuted for several gigs and positions. The most difficult situation to deal with is when most of the rest of the company doesn't telecommute, so everyone is not in the habit of cluing you in to what's going on. You may have all the tools required to establish and maintain decent communications, but they often don't bother to adopt any of it for their end. I even remote-developed for a large networking co…

Thanks for bringing up that bit about being left out by coworkers. It reminded me of a passage from "Being Geek". Luckily the book is largely compiled from blog posts and here's the relevant post by Rands on the inadvertent exclusion faced by lone telecommuters attached to onsite teams: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/04/15/the_pond.ht...

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#149

Post by donaq » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 7:26 AM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #41

In 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."

That sounds awesome. Any advice for getting in on this?

Re: Want to attract top tech talent? Offer telecommuting

#150

Post by bruce511 » Wed, Apr 20, 2011, 7:31 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #114

droz wrote: post #103

I think I may be in the minority, but I don't think people are thinking of the consequences of this telecommuting push. I like the fact that there is a place where I do work and where I live. I do not want these two places to be the same. Much for the same reason people don't put a television in the bedroom. The bedroom is for sleeping, the living room is for TV. I find that with the remote people I need to work with…

> If everyone starts becoming remote, then what's the point of having an office? If enough companies come to the same conclusion, what's the point in owning a building (from the eyes of a real estate guy). And ultimately, what's the point of having big office parks and so on and on. That's a lot of land and lot of capital at stake if this ever actually took off. It'll be put to other uses. That's how capitalism works…

yes. And more to the point what happened to the people who used to _work_ in them? 'Cause those jobs are now being done outside the US by people prepared to work for far less. If decentralizing is an option then the US border certainly isn't a barrier.

Understand that a telecomuting job is the easiest job to offshore. At the end of the day if you never come in to the office you might as well be living in India. Cause then we'd have to pay you less. Oh wait, there's some super-keen, super bright chap in India who'll do your work for a tenth of the price? hmm let me think about that for a while.