Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?

Plenty of businesses are interested in hiring only onsite staff. I want to explain the viewpoints behind such policies – and then, ideally, address what it would take for those organizations to hire telecommuters or remote workers.

So I’d like to hear from two types of respondents:

* Someone who has been in a hiring role at an organization where the job requisitions typically say, “Local candidates only, please.” (Whether or not you’re in agreement with the policy.)

* Someone who’s applied to a job that says, “on site only” and gotten a remote job despite that requirement.

If you applied to an “on-site only” job ad and got the gig anyway, there’s just one question: How’d you make that happen?

My questions are primarily for the people on the hiring side:

* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site? Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.

* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?

* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?

* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?

* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position? For example, “If a rock star in my field applied for the job, we’d do anything to get him to say Yes – including letting him work remotely.” But there can be many other answers, and I’d very much like to hear yours.

A while back I was in a dead end job and working on a side project that was an image search engine that had nearly perfect relevance in a time when both Google Image Search and Bing Image Search were both embarrassingly bad -- at least at the time I started.

It took about a year to get the product really ready populate the database, and by that time the big guys had come a long way.

This got the attention of a company in LA that had ambitious ideas for an intelligent social media aggregator and they had explored several dead ends in terms of building the brains of the product so they brought me in. They were hoping I would relocate but they had to start getting traction.

It lasted about a year. A prototype of what I built was picked up by the team and developed into a "MVP" that didn't really get product market fit.

I moved on to another company that was based in Rochester, NY that hired remotes, but that is another story.

1) Spontaneous meetings become impossible, scribbling something on a whiteboard becomes much more difficult, the barrier to communication is too high.

2) We've had bad experiences with people who work in other studios/HQ. They tend to shirk responsibility, and it's very frustrating to get them to actually acknowledge your issue as high priority. Managers assume this would carry into remote work if it were offered.

3) We work in R&D, all internet access is monitored/blocked and we use internal systems for communications only, so while we can VPN in sometimes it's discouraged because I have liberties at home that I don't have in my offices internal network.

They do their best to make a good office environment, but it's still open plan (much to my dismay, I can't ever focus in that environment for some reason) but try to strongly discourage remote working.