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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

#181

Post by BlargMcLarg »

km3r wrote: post #163
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if those personality differences get considered when they throw everyone into a single room with a few low cubicle walls. I wonder if the market gives a shit about being fair to those who have personalities that thrive in said cubicles. Thirdly, I wonder if those who thrive in remote give a shit about being fair after having dealt with cubicle farms for so many years.

That's entirely unfair. The ability to do most of these jobs remote wasn't even really possible until a decade ago, and interia of in office work kept it that way for most existing enterprises. Yet still, plenty of startups in 2019 chose to be remote, and plenty chose to be in person. Also I would bet that the amount of people who prefer remote has gone up drastically since 2019, both due to exposure to it, and due t…

It's not unfair when knowledge on the effects of these practices were public several decades ago and companies still insisted on optimizing for employee per square foot while giving their executives private offices.

All remote work did was showcase people can in fact rebel against the status quo when the inertia associated is entirely self-inflicted.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#182

Post by Cwizard »

duxup wrote: post #129
redleggedfrog wrote: post #66

"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 m…

I work a sort of hybrid model. We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things. I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on…

I think this is a great model, only downside is that you still have to live close to the office which in my opinion is less of a problem in Europe than it is in the US.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#183

Post by TrackerFF »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #101
mooreds wrote: post #31

The $1M question in my mind is: Will wages in, say, Lagos or Buenos Aires rise to SF/NYC levels? Or will the reverse happen? Economics says that it depends on the value of the labor, but cost of living matters too (or at least, has in the past within say, the USA). I think this essay https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala... shows evidence that says the answer is "yes", that we'll see a weird fr…

There are virtually no engineers in Lagos and very few in Buenos Aires who compete with engineers in SF/NYC (the one getting SF/NYC salary) in terms of skill set. One thing that many people overestimate is number of competent engineers outside of well known tech hubs. I know that it was big surprise for FB and other big tier 1 companies when they started to hire remotely was that it was not actually easier to hire re…

I'm simply not buying it. If you can't find potential in a candidate pool that's practically in the tens to hundreds of millions, it's more likely your search methods aren't cutting it.

EDIT: But let me specify - the original premise to this was that there are already two comparable candidates in SF and somewhere else in the world.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#185

Post by Terretta »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #66

"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 m…

Pretty strong chance the “noticers” are on-prem, not remote, and may be (literally) prejudiced.*

Also, bit of indication in “hard numbers out of project mgmt system” and “all the little asides, ahas…” coupled with “unless they have their headsets on the whole time” that your company may have optimized for local ideas and local capture.

Consider (a) ensuring project and idea capture tools are “remote first” oriented (tools that work remotely work just fine in office, inverse is not true), such as dropping whiteboards and using digital collaborative tools for whiteboarding even locally, e.g. …

    - Excalidraw+
    - Microsoft Whiteboard
    - Samsung Flip2
    - Microsoft Surface Hub
… and (b) experimenting with elevated telepresence beyond just the green/yellow/red dot:

    - https://www.remotion.com/
You have to be radical about this: “If it didn’t happen in [remote-first tool], it didn’t happen.”

This was the single most important contributor to the culture change at firms I’ve helped go fully remote since the 90s. The nanosecond something elevates from chit chat into an action, everyone in the company needs to gate-keep: “Could you please share/ask/direct that in [the digital place]?”

The second most important was ensuring [the digital place] is frictionless, using social media habit apps as benchmarks, not, say, Jira.

In my experience, after initial chaos, then learning, then crossing a tipping point, productivity went through the roof, and following that, these firms absolutely spanked on-prem only firms at caliber of talent and pace of delivery of outcomes into client hands.

> I think a lot of people who want to work at home aren’t interested in their success

* There it is.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#186

Post by skwirl »

ghettoCoder wrote: post #107
rngname22 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that those of your view and those espousing that remote is more difficult might have different personalities, levels of need of social interaction, or lifestyles? Have you considered that your company is self-selecting for those who flourish in remote, but that those whose personalities differ are self-selecting for working in an office environment? It's OK for there to not be a one size fits all…

Throughout my career it's been my experience that the type of people you describe are never the top performers, and seldom average performers. The ones craving social interactions often are just looking for distractions (like spending too long at the water cooler chatting) cause either they hate their job, hate the work, can't do the actual work or view work (exchange of labour/time for money) as a predominantly soci…

"It only takes me 4 hours to complete my work" is a sign that you are a ticket drone and not an engineer with agency. This by definition means you are not a top performer. You also seem toxic to boot.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#187

Post by vocram »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #66

"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 m…

> Those are hard numbers right out of our project management system

the kind of work those systems track is assembly line tasks. They can’t measure alone the strategic impact employees have on a company.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#188

Post by duxup »

Cwizard wrote: post #182
duxup wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work a sort of hybrid model. We've seen issues and topics that we decide "Let's work this one out when we're in the office." We schedule it, and what might take several video conferences and endless chats ... suddenly takes one meeting and the solution solves a bunch of other things. I agree everyone should find their best way, but for us sometimes there's more of a free flow of information, everyone is engaged on…

I think this is a great model, only downside is that you still have to live close to the office which in my opinion is less of a problem in Europe than it is in the US.

Yeah it's really a catch there that requires folks be there.

It does make it sorta an event when everyone is all in, exciting, and such.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#189

Post by chrisfosterelli »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #66

"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 m…

Whenever I see this sort of comment I feel bad for the remote workers because it's always an indicator that the company doesn't properly involve or support their remote workforce. If the in-person members are vastly more productive, it's because the team has processes and culture that makes it harder for the remote employees to be productive.

Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent

#190

Post by ghaff »

km3r wrote: post #163
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if those personality differences get considered when they throw everyone into a single room with a few low cubicle walls. I wonder if the market gives a shit about being fair to those who have personalities that thrive in said cubicles. Thirdly, I wonder if those who thrive in remote give a shit about being fair after having dealt with cubicle farms for so many years.

That's entirely unfair. The ability to do most of these jobs remote wasn't even really possible until a decade ago, and interia of in office work kept it that way for most existing enterprises. Yet still, plenty of startups in 2019 chose to be remote, and plenty chose to be in person. Also I would bet that the amount of people who prefer remote has gone up drastically since 2019, both due to exposure to it, and due t…

>wasn't even really possible until a decade ago

I think that's an overstatement. I've been more remote than not for close to 20 years and 90%+ remote for close to 10.

That said, there is some point in time before which companies would have had to largely shrug and tell people that they had to stay in the office pandemic or not. (Which of course many jobs and professions basically had to anyway.)

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