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Remote startups will win the war for top talent

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Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#61

Post by upupandup »

In Vancouver I used to spend anywhere rom 80 to 120 minutes commuting one way to downtown core from the suburbs. It was brutal. You then get to the office, have to make quick small chat, settle down, get coffee, go to the bathroom, and another hour has passed before you are reading emails. meetings and then its lunch time. come back and you settle down again, go to the bathroom, meeting. 4 hours remain to get work done but you can't leave at 5 because of traffic. so you stay behind.

Those times I save I directly deliver in value working remote. I can work more hours and I can be more efficient since I'm not tired. not to mention the ridiculous tax and rent costs due to property prices that do not reflect local wages adding to the stress.

yeah, NO THANK YOU. I get local recruiters hitting me up and not only is the salary here ridiculously low, they are either hybrid or require showing up at the office. Vancouver recruiters are a special breed: they won't list salary ranges, and get angry when you ask for it, require 2~3x the work experience for the same position elsewhere, and 40~50% haircut when we have the highest living cost in the region. There's a reason why most of its workforce in tech do not speak English at the office, they rather have new immigrants who can put up with this toxicity, and the management exploits them. Modern day colonialism.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#62

Post by cube2222 »

lm28469 wrote: post #53
bearjaws wrote: post #16

I never really understood why people say productivity and socializing is difficult remote. It's difficult because people aren't putting thought into it. At my last big-co job the leadership just kept waiting for 'covid to be over' and not improving our remote work culture. Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do. My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model…

> Meanwhile we have had no problem sourcing candidates since we can pull from anywhere in the world, we have some incredible people all over the world that we would not have gotten otherwise. How do you handle taxes ? For example in Europe a German company can't hire a French dev if the german company doesn't have a legal entity in France, it quickly gets out of control both in term of paperwork and cost. The dev can…

> The dev can't be a freelancer because a freelancer with a full time, fixed hours, single customer is illegal in many places.

In many countries where that's the case, it's fine if the company you're freelancing for is foreign (IANAL). Because as you say, there's no other simple way to do it. Though you can also use services like remote.com.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#63

Post by arijo »

lm28469 wrote: post #53
bearjaws wrote: post #16

I never really understood why people say productivity and socializing is difficult remote. It's difficult because people aren't putting thought into it. At my last big-co job the leadership just kept waiting for 'covid to be over' and not improving our remote work culture. Hybrid models will always struggle and 1/3/1 is going to be probably the best you can do. My company is fully remote, we embraced the GitLab model…

> Meanwhile we have had no problem sourcing candidates since we can pull from anywhere in the world, we have some incredible people all over the world that we would not have gotten otherwise. How do you handle taxes ? For example in Europe a German company can't hire a French dev if the german company doesn't have a legal entity in France, it quickly gets out of control both in term of paperwork and cost. The dev can…

I thought services like remote.com would help solve those problems ..

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#65

Post by icedchai »

fjabre wrote: post #46
TOMDM wrote: post #22

Okay, how about a tad more nuance though. The better headline would be "Remote Startups will win the war for top talent among employees who prefer to work remotely" Not quite so sexy. Sure some; probably even most software devs prefer remote/hybrid work, but there are still plenty of incredibly talented people out there who prefer being in the office every day.

Polio, Monkey Pox, Covid variant x, environmental concerns, inflation. The office isn't coming back unless we fall into some dystopia where they force people back in. People had a taste of life WFH during the pandemic. Overwhelmingly they loved working from home even though there were a minority who wanted a return to the office. The hybrid model or remote work will be the only real possibilities going forward. Top t…

After 2.5 years of remote work, I feel like I'm living in a dystopia already.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#66

Post by redleggedfrog »

"Your remote team is my company's opportunity."

Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, but at my company we have some people who work in an office and lots more that work remotely. The in office staff contribute more ideas, work, fixes, and functional software than the remote teams by a factor of 4 or 5, or sometimes, depending on the in office worker, 10 times. Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system. It's simply easier to hash out hard problems in person that it is on a remote team, and the context is key. You have all the little asides, ah ha's! and comments collected up that provide a better picture than any remote team can get unless they have their headsets on the whole time.

Not that you couldn't have a good remote team - I just think the methods of communication available are not best suited to our monkey brains. We're social animal, and we work best socially.

What this has allowed us to do is beat out other development teams, both inside and outside the company. Hasn't gone unnoticed - we also get the most important projects and are paid the most. When it matters, the in-house people get the work.

YMMV, of course, this is just one place, but I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren't interested in their success as making their work life easier.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#67

Post by cbdumas »

ghaff wrote: post #26

"A study conducted on the main campus of a Fortune 500 company found that just 10 percent of all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than 500 meters apart. This suggests that once companies span multiple floors, buildings, or campuses, they’ve already lost much of the collaborative value of being “in the office” together." This point often seems to get missed. If you're at a large company,…

This cuts both ways though. Working from home my "circle of communication" has gotten much smaller than it ever was before, because I don't run in to people.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#69

Post by time_to_smile »

spamizbad wrote: post #20
nathanaldensr wrote: post #4

Remote startups with what cheap money? That era is coming to an end. They won't win anything, with cheap or expensive labor.

Is the thinking that VCs will stop funding remote companies? Because one advantage a fully remote org will have a slightly extended runway not spending money on rent, office furniture, and other costs associated with operating in-person operations. To me, an office sounds like something a tech company should only obtain after a strong and established revenue stream.

The thinking is that VCs will stop funding startups period.

In the post dotcom bust startups were exceedingly rare, and what's happening right now is much larger than the dotcom burst.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#70

Post by frankfrank13 »

Idk why but I can't help but think remote-first feels so dystopian. I joined and left a job that was 100% remote, and tbh I barely remember working there. I can barely remember names or anything I did. It was like Severance. Now I'm hybrid, and feel way more "connected" (whatever that means).
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