Live data from Hacker News

We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

weworkremotely.com

241–250 of 267 posts

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#242
post #90
post #47

I've been searching for a remote job for the last few months. This site comes in really handy. Listing remote jobs isn't new (for example, Authentic Jobs has a clear call-to-action to filter them), but focusing on them is interesting. What I've learned so far is that a remote job is not exactly what I thought it was. Considering the mostly globalized state of the web (and even the internet), I thought "remote" meant…

This, and why this new site might be a little frustrating to use. I search for 100% remote work, no office visits, no timezone restrictions. Not having that info right on the main listing means I need to click each one to read what the restrictions are

The timezone restriction is a much bigger deal than most people probably anticipate. This depends on the company, of course, but unless the work is something that can be performed largely self-sufficiently, it's entirely likely that you'll either end up working overlapping hours at your own inconvenience, or you'll get stuck doing the work no one else in the team/company wants. Even if a large corporation this is a major problem. Speaking personally, I employ about 100 people and the biggest team locations are in Chennai, Guadalajara and Huntsville. Each of these sites has a local senior manager/director and -- with the exception of Chennai -- multiple product owners. I have a few guys working from home remotely (DB supervisor is in New York, architect and one of my senior managers are outside Glasgow, a couple of guys are in SJ, and an architect/lead dev in RTP). I sit in a small sales office in RTP with no one from my team, and I work from home all but a handful of days per year.

I only go into this level of detail because what happens next is potentially of interest. When you have a mix of WFH'ers and office staff, unless they are leaders -- either technical or management -- the WFH'ers get shafted. They are left out of meetings, usually inadvertently and usually ad hoc meetings, but this can have a huge impact on morale and productivity. They are assigned less critical work because the team and leadership often feel less comfortable not having local failover in case of emergency. This may be an organizational failure, but it is a common scenario and one any remote work candidates should be aware of when they interview. By far my highest performing teams are the ones where everyone is co-located, but ymmv.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktop, CentOS, SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu all have worked fine for me the past 15 years. I have fewer problems than when I have to do something on/with Windows. So either all my machines and all my experiences were really lucky or your post is an elegant troll.

nothing trolling about it. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=120003 2011 people having problems with multiple apps trying to use audio at the same time. This is one of the things that drove me away from desktop linux in 2008. 3 years later it still isn't a solved problem. My gut tells me that in 2013, it's still not a solved problem. I've no doubt that some people get it to work for their use cases OK. But t…

Also, they are using ALSA instead of PulseAudio. In my experience, the latter deals with multiple sources much better, to the point that I can even route and combine sources for streaming.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#244
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're trying to build a work space and community for people who do true remote work in Seattle. We hope this model spreads: http://devlocal.io

Didn't you just contradict yourself? "True remote work in..." When I think of "true remote work" I think of a job where location does not matter.

This means for people who work remotely but live in Seattle. So for example, someone who works remotely for a company in NY but lives in Seattle. This would be a spot for all those people to work so they feel like a community.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#246
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with your statement at all. The company I work for (and have been with for about two years) has employees across more timezones than I care to count (I am based in London, my colleagues across the US, Panama, Brazil, Switzerland, Italy, Bulgaria, Russia and probably some others I've forgotten -- with one person soon moving to Australia) and we don't have any real issues. We even manage to have a daily s…

We do this with developers in the US, Canada, Latin America, and western Europe. We use plenty of IRC, Hangouts, and of course, email. A lot of our recruitment has been done through networks of contacts in the open source community, which I think starts us out with a pool of self-motivated people who can communicate well over the internet.

Same here. I work as part of a two-man team that exists within a larger organization which is based in Norway. I live in the US and my colleague lives in Sweden. However, we have developers that we work with in Ukraine, business meetings that he attends in Copenhagen and Norway, and business contacts all over Scandinavia and parts of Europe.

We use Skype primarily for day-to-day communication, and of course email is a big part of the picture. But we also just make plain voice calls (sometimes phone, sometimes skype depending on connectivity).

Then we also use Zendesk to keep our workload visible and organized. So, overall, it's a very smooth process.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#247
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but most industrialized countries are parties to a tax treaty, right? So Table 2 would apply, I think. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p515/ar02.html#en_US_2013_pu...

Possibly. I couldn't get any conclusive answers when researching this originally. It's complicated enough that you'll almost certainly need to find an expert in the subject to help you or do the filings for you. (in my case it wasn't worth the few hundred dollars to follow it up)

Just mark the "tax treaty" checkbox and be done. Been doing it for over 10 years, including with my offshore company.

The offshore bit was pointed out to me recently and so I had to set up a proper European Union company in a hurry. Now all is well.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried plateforms like oDesk?

If he is serious about actually working and making a living, oDesk is not the right place to work. I wrote about it a few days ago - https://medium.com/startup-shenanigans/66896bbf21da - cheap labor and sup-par clients, yeah, oDesk is definitely not the place.

In my opinion the only way to use Odesk (or any other similar site) is to have a trusted client in mind that will post jobs there for you. That makes it easier to get paid internationally and was an option for me when I took my current position. I declined, however, as I like to keep things simple and so I don't want to add an additional step between me and my money ;-)

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nothing trolling about it. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=120003 2011 people having problems with multiple apps trying to use audio at the same time. This is one of the things that drove me away from desktop linux in 2008. 3 years later it still isn't a solved problem. My gut tells me that in 2013, it's still not a solved problem. I've no doubt that some people get it to work for their use cases OK. But t…

> it works the way I expect it to on my macbook What? Not at all? Not working when you unplug headphones? Not working for Flash? Google for "osx sound problem" and you'll get plenty hits. What exactly do you think your link from 2011 demonstrates?

My anecdotal evidence using my MacBooks (3 since 2008) carry as much weight as anyone else's linux anecdotes.

And osx is by no means perfect. I just have had far fewer problems related to hardware and drivers than I ever did on Linux.

In 9 years of desktop linux, audio was a constant problem. It's been an extremely rare issue on my MacBooks.

What it demonstrates is that even in 2011, the base issues of how audio should even work hadn't really been sorted out. oss vs alas vs pulseaudio vs whatever aren't issues I want to be concerning myself with - this is just one reason I left for the macbook world.

Re: We Work Remotely – New Job Board from 37 Signals

#250
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hire people as contractors and it is extremely easy. They send you invoices periodically, you send them money through regular bank wire transfer.

As far as I can tell, the IRS (US tax collecting agency) requires a tax withholding on anything a US company pays an employee/contractor abroad. By default this is 30%, but if the person in question files US tax returns (despite never setting foot in the country) I think it goes down to 10%, and if the employee's country has a double-taxation agreement with the US, the 10% can be offset against the home income tax. S…

Mark the tax treaty checkbox on the W8BEN. This solves all issues, assuming that your company is established in a jurisdiction with a tax treaty.
Post reply on HN