Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#61

Post by netcan » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:14 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #55

netcan wrote: post #30

I think any answer to this question will be speculative and opinionated. People have their experience and they have their preferences. The interpretation of one is based on the other. It's like the open plan vs offices debate that springs up on HN every so often. Mostly what we have is personal preferences justified with "facts." In reality I don't think we have that kind of understanding of what makes people work we…

"Remote work is strange in the same way that" Don't forget non-strange remote business relationships like remote retail (buy from amazon), remote entertainment (Hollywood movie not a stage show or play, or recorded music not a live band), or remote manufacturing (imported from China not the now abandoned factory down the road), or remote software (believe it or not, companies used to write their own OS 50 years ago i…

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not saying that remote work is impossible, or undesrable. I'm saying that it is a big change. Big changes take time. Time for the culture to change and time for the structure of organizations to change. If the advantages are big enough, that change can happen forcefully and quickly.

Online commerce is not a bad analogy. Barnes & Noble didn't become Amazon, Amazon did. IE, the advantages of online commerce where big enough to invent a new kind of company to do it. Remote working might be a bigger challenge than that on the kind of scale proponents seem to hope for.

Maybe we will see large companies go all, part or mostly remote. I don't really know. It's clear that remote collaboration can work (plenty of examples), but whether or not it works with existing structures is hard to know.

Face to face interaction between people is different from remote interaction in ways that are fairly fundamental to how we worked. Communication & collaboration is really our speciality as a species, and we have a lot of inbuilt faculties to help. Some need physical presence. I think the internet is full of examples of remote communication failing in ways it wouldn't have in person. We may even be demonstrating this now.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#62

Post by gizi » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #46

gii2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the communication should be easy part. We are living in digital world, where you talk to your friends online more than you see them face-2-face. The communication between colleagues is pretty much the same. Europe does not have so many timezones, but if you decided to go farther east, that's different issue. I don't think everyone in the team should be involved in the architectural decisions of your product. Th…

Most anyone in sales will tell you there is absolutely no substitute for in-person, face-to-face (not face-to-face-on-screen) meetings. It establishes trust. There is more to conversation than words (and our brains are built to pick up on it). Not everyone is an architect, but even sharing knowledge, code review reviews, and so on - all better in person in general. Remote isn't bad, per-se, but having worked remote,…

The less the product matters, the more the salesman does. So, yes, in order to sell something that the other side has no interest in buying, you should go face-to-face. Google, on the other hand, has never sent out even a single salesman to talk people into using their search engine or to bid for ads on it.

Therefore, for me, it works the other way around. If a company has salesmen, their product must be totally unimportant. They are probably competing on cost with China, and busy going under, because anybody who could innovate their way out of that trouble, has left already, or never came over in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#63

Post by StavrosK » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:16 PM UTC

gizi wrote: post #56

magiconair wrote: post #19

I am one of these managers in Amsterdam with an international team of 10 people from 8 different countries who still writes code. My desire is to have a team that gets the job done. The most effective way for them to do this IMO is to have them sit together so that they can discuss issues they have immediately. We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart. Remote work…

I have been doing remote work for 10 years now. Github and Gitlab (if you want to host privately) are the answers for me. Concerning communication and sitting together, my question remains: What exactly is it that you are able to say but incapable of writing? Over the years, I have become suspicious of someone who cannot write something but insists that he wants to say it, because when he is finally sitting there, gu…

I'm of this opinion as well. I've had to design some complex architectures, and there was nothing that an (admittedly long) phonecall couldn't iron out.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#64

Post by binxbolling » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:18 PM UTC

lordbusiness wrote: post #20

You're most likely looking in the wrong place. The usual customary recruiting channels are setup to be usual and customary. You need to find the remote job boards. Oh, and networking, networking, networking.

Are there similar job boards for international relocation? E.g. companies that will sponsor your visa at minimum, and maybe even help pay for the move.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#65

Post by soneca » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

gizi wrote: post #56

magiconair wrote: post #19

I am one of these managers in Amsterdam with an international team of 10 people from 8 different countries who still writes code. My desire is to have a team that gets the job done. The most effective way for them to do this IMO is to have them sit together so that they can discuss issues they have immediately. We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart. Remote work…

I have been doing remote work for 10 years now. Github and Gitlab (if you want to host privately) are the answers for me. Concerning communication and sitting together, my question remains: What exactly is it that you are able to say but incapable of writing? Over the years, I have become suspicious of someone who cannot write something but insists that he wants to say it, because when he is finally sitting there, gu…

But then you can help him put in words what is worrying him, even if he is incapable of saying. That's communication, dialogue. It is interaction in different levels, not just exchange of sequential, defined messages.

When you limit the dimensions of a face-to-face communication to the dimenions of a written communication, it is tautological to say the are the same. But the advantage of face-to-face is exactly having more communication dimensions.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#66

Post by gizi » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

ar0 wrote: post #50

throwaway12309 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really true. Most countries have a residency rule (for personal income) that if you live more than 165 days (or something to that effect) you will be taxed as a resident of that country. Even if you register a company in another country within the EU, you may still be liable to pay corporate tax on your residence country as some countries also have conditions on that (if you own more than X (usually around 70%) o…

But be aware that many European countries know laws against quasi-self-employment ("Scheinselbständigkeit" in German) to avoid people becoming self-employed to avoid social security taxes. So, even if you set-up your own company but this company only serves one client (your de-facto "employer"), you and/or your employer might be liable for social security payments neither of you did expect. So even such a set-up migh…

In Germany itself, that would indeed be a major issue. Imagine, however, a company from Canada employing a German in France? Which country would manage to get in a position that they could collect social security payments? Germany would not see any part of that situation under its eyes. Canada just sees invoices coming in from abroad. France has no clue as to what that German does or with whom. This situation could last for decades and no government would be able to even ask relevant questions. You see, that German is not a resident of Germany. I cannot imagine the German administration sending questionnaires overseas. The French may want to collect local taxes, but they would have no serious basis, or even information, for collecting income tax or social security contributions. Where exactly would they be verifying anything? In other words, if you confuse the situation sufficiently, not one of those slow and bureaucratic government administrations could ever deal with it. Not in our lifetime.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#67

Post by lucaspiller » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

lordbusiness wrote: post #20

You're most likely looking in the wrong place. The usual customary recruiting channels are setup to be usual and customary. You need to find the remote job boards. Oh, and networking, networking, networking.

Recruiters too (they aren't all evil!). I spoke to one about this and he said remote contracts in London usually get filled in hours vs weeks for onsite.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#68

Post by 4ad » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

magiconair wrote: post #19

I am one of these managers in Amsterdam with an international team of 10 people from 8 different countries who still writes code. My desire is to have a team that gets the job done. The most effective way for them to do this IMO is to have them sit together so that they can discuss issues they have immediately. We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart. Remote work…

Linux is built by tens of thousands of people, usually around 1,000 of them contributing to each minor release, with hundreds of maintainers of individual subsystem. These people are all over the world, and talk to each other by nothing more than e-mail, and "get the job done"; quite successfully I would say.

I've only worked remotely the past 12 years, people communicate in writing just fine, as long as they care about the job.

All the companies I've worked for remotely, insisted that occasionally we get together to have some face-to-face time. I've never complained because I know these meetings makes management happy, and I also got to travel around the world, but purely from the perspective of doing work, all of these have been a waste of time and money. The only purpose of these meetings is social.

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#69

Post by wnm » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

armones wrote: post #26

lordbusiness wrote: post #20

You're most likely looking in the wrong place. The usual customary recruiting channels are setup to be usual and customary. You need to find the remote job boards. Oh, and networking, networking, networking.

https://remoteok.io/ http://jobs.remotive.io/ Please add others.

I compiled a list a few month a ago on my blog: http://blog.remoteworknewsletter.com/2015/03/23/best-sources...

Re: Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

#70

Post by LBarret » Mon, May 25, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

magiconair wrote: post #19

I am one of these managers in Amsterdam with an international team of 10 people from 8 different countries who still writes code. My desire is to have a team that gets the job done. The most effective way for them to do this IMO is to have them sit together so that they can discuss issues they have immediately. We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart. Remote work…

I agree with you about the need to an efficient communcation, but the tools are there to enable it in a remote scenario :

- slack . - skype / hangout, - shared screen, shared editing sessions - code review.

add regular meetups and you're ok.

At this level, other aspect of the project management are likely better target for optimisation.