Even so, there trouble is in how well these remote teams work together. And what about team cohesion. Dont mind me, I LOVE remote teams and distributed working, but atleast in the early stage i feel that there needs to be a balance between onsite and REMOTE work.
Remote startups will win the war for top talent
301–310 of 492 posts
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. During my somewhat passive job search, I've only been considering companies that have an office local to me (i.e. Central London). I've been working remotely since the start of the pandemic, and I simply don't like it. Sure, I don't miss having to commute or offices with bad noise pollution controls, but I miss everything else. Most of all, I miss being in town at the end of the day and being able to pop to th…
> yes, this is a me thing, but it's also always been a me thing I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal and valid. Remote work is essentially accepting that the primary way you'll engage with your colleagues and labor is through a screen, and that is an uncomfortable feeling (to some people at least)
The way most of us make friends and find community is school when we’re younger, then work when we’re adults.
It makes sense—wherever you spend the most time around others is where you’re most likely to make friends and feel a sense of belonging.
Remote work upends that. It’s great if you already have an established social circle, but bad for people who want to develop one.
There’s no reason why work has to be the main thing that satisfies these needs, but it’s fulfilled that role for so long that it has sucked up most of the oxygen from alternatives.
I hope that as remote work continues to take off, we’ll see a new wave of third places that can take over this function. There’s a huge opportunity here for anyone who can help socially struggling remote workers feel more connected.
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#303Earlier 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.
> after having dealt with cubicle farms for so many years. Or worse, open floor plans.
Open floor plans can be a double edge sword buddy
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can find this but the tech isn't always the sexiest. Look for manufacturing or infrastructure companies. Be prepared for legacy systems, dated IT practices, and being your own QA or DevOps. Edit: if this doesn't sound great to you, look into robotics; a lot of startups are constantly looking for good engineers willing to work in person. Often times they settle for remote, so stress in any interviews that you're w…
Why do you think there has to be some kind of tradeoff with regards to technology? Aren't there plenty of large and mid-sized companies with modern tech, more stability than a startup, higher pay and offices?
I made one suggestion.
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#305This thread has interesting debate, and makes me think these are the core questions which I wonder how others feel:
- Who believes most work friends are actual friends that by and large want to be there as well?
- Who builds and maintains friends at work for 90% career management, and the other 10% are cool people you enjoy working with and then you stay in touch with 1-2 of them once you leave a job?
- Who views the work socialization as actual socialization versus career management requirements?
My experience with a relatively successful path in tech is that most friends at work aren’t actual friends, that 90/10 split is true, and that work socialization is for career management.
It feels like the remote work debate is partially about if work fiends are actual friends and it’s worth bringing everyone in-office to support that truism, and then if remote work enables the same level of career management abilities IMO it does and it’s easier to do so. For instance, Leading in slack is a lot easier than leading vs the ex-athlete with a MBA in meetings who projects confidence.
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There aren't "hundreds of millions" of developers on this planet. The talent pool is small because just a small fraction of the workforce worldwide has the training, skills and capabilities to work as software engineers.
Sure - let's cut that number down from hundreds, to millions.
For the discussion, let's assume that the whole world of IT candidates is now your pool of potential employees. India alone seems to produce around a million computer science graduates a year. Europe, probably in the same ballpark. Rest of Asia? Who knows. Same for Central and South America. That's each and every year, new candidates that are added to the pool (minus those removed).
Even the absolute outliers would result in a sizeable number.
You are right, not all of these might have the required knowledge (if looking for experience hire), or some other number of factors.
But it would probably be easier to just start poaching top talent from top companies around the world.
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"Finding potential" and "finding someone to build this thing in a quick and useful way in the immediate future, not the far future" are VERY different things.
I've worked with overseas devs who I'm pretty sure were smarter than me (PhDs, ability to go deep on tons of technologies) yet didn't have the skills needed to quickly turn around a request from a business person and build the right feature.
I think salaries will level out to a certain amount inside the US and other countries - but it's going to be a long time before highly competitive companies wouldn't be shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating themselves from consideration by coastal devs, experience-wise - but cross-country language and communication barriers (especially when timezones are involved) will remain very high.
Companies have already been trying to do that sort of outsourcing for 20 years, and yet US salaries have only gone up in that time frame. Solving "working remotely in the US in a few timezones" is a very different problem than solving the persistent, unsolved-for-decades "hiring programmers in a different country" problem.
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> yes, this is a me thing, but it's also always been a me thing I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal and valid. Remote work is essentially accepting that the primary way you'll engage with your colleagues and labor is through a screen, and that is an uncomfortable feeling (to some people at least)
Funny, I have always seen “work as community” to offer an illusory connection at best. At its worst it is exploited by employers. My coworkers are my colleagues. I don’t mind sharing a beer with them once in a while, but apart from “work” we have different interests, values, and experiences. That doesn’t lead to community, it leads to having acquaintances. And if you doubt that, ask yourself how many of your “work fr…
Different Strokes for different folks.
I would say that the majority of my friends and close Social Circle are people who I met and worked with an office at one point. Sure it started with cooler chat and beers after work, but it evolve to going to weddings, backpacking trips, and our partners becoming close with friendships of their own.
I do like workplace community, even if I'm only close with a subset of my colleagues. I find it vastly more fulfilling to work with friends that I enjoy. I don't like turning off my personality and become a faceless COG working with other cogs for 8 hours a day and find it depressing
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"I feel like picking jobs off of a desire to live a social life and feel like part of a community is extremely normal " Been on my own and remote since 2000. I am remote with my clients save for occasional face to face meeting when possible and I am remote with my subcontractors. It feels "extremely normal" to me and the last thing I've ever want is my friends and people I hang out with being supplied by my workplac…
Why can't they both be normal?
I think it is normal to make friends / acquaintances anywhere as we are all different. I just expressed what I feel about it. Does not mean that "there has to be the only one".
Re: Remote startups will win the war for top talent
#310Earlier 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…
The GP to your comment is suggesting that it's intolerant to push for remote work, but you're suggesting that it's simply "inertia" to push for in-office work. This clear double standard frequently shows up in these discussions.