Ask HN: Best place to look for remote jobs?

I got tired of the part-time contract work. It was frustrating to me that I had to spend about half my time on overhead instead of just working. I had to find jobs, negotiate jobs, manage scope, manage expectations, manage clients, time tracking and billing. It was kinda fun to bill $125/hr, but with all that overhead and taxes it worked out to less than a $125k/yr salary.

In the end I took a regular salaried job that paid better and I got to spend more time doing what I loved: programming.

There's older threads about them, the interview process is better described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10109036

The good things are you don't have to chase down clients for payment or constantly hustle for gigs like other freelancer sites, it's like a temp agency they do all that for you, and you work for established companies (AirBnB ect) so hopefully the person telling you what to do has an idea of what they're doing instead of constantly asking for the impossible. You can also easily set own hours, so check in and out whenever you want.

The bad of course is wages unless you're living in a country with a very low cost of living or you just want to use toptal to gain remote work experience and don't mind not being payed Silicon Valley standard then it's probably not worth it to you to work there being there's dozens of jobs on hnhiring threads and other sites that will pay at least 2-3x as much.

Also:

* http://automattic.com/work-with-us/ (all remote company) * https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer (another curated list)

Many I know with remote positions had worked at the company previously and then went to move or quit, and was given permission to work remotely. Obviously one needs to be an effective employee for that to be the case, and not mind occasionally traveling.

Otherwise you could seek employment at a place known for having primarily remote workers.

Contract work and freelance is also easy to remote.

I've gotten two remote jobs off the HN "Who's hiring?" thread. It can be a bit frustrating. I applied to every single remote posting on the thread for 2 months in a row. So I guess that's one job per month (maybe I was lucky or unlucky who knows).

Following are some of my impressions but they are subjective and perhaps a bit speculative.

Generally I've found that the attitude of most US companies is that if they are willing to hire remote, they are usually only interested in hiring candidates inside the US - even if they are a native English speaker (I was an American living in Vietnam). This is very different than the attitude that I've gotten talking to a companies in say ... Singapore or Germany.

Another thing that seems to happen is that some companies seem to throw the REMOTE OK tag to their posting without considering whether or not everyone on their engineering team is actually ok with working with a remote employee. I've done several interviews with teams that were REMOTE OK but had no existing remote employees. Usually it only takes one person to veto a hire. That's something to think about if they are looking at both local and remote candidates. Unless there is a really compelling reason to hire remote, usually they will go local (makes sense). You might not even want to work with one of these companies because they aren't set up for remote work... communication takes a bit more work from all team members - not just the remote ones.

Overall I've had a much more positive experience with the HN: "Who's hiring?"" thread than anywhere else. I think this is because the first point of contact is often an engineer and not an HR person. My resume is a bit odd and doesn't have a BRAND_NAME_SILICON_VALLEY_COMPANY or a BRAND_NAME_UNIVERSITY so it bounces right off the HR department. It's very helpful to be able to talk technology with someone in the initial conversation. If I can get a knowledgeable front-end engineer to look at some of my previous work, then I usually get to the coding round.

I had no luck with any of the remote hiring sites: remoteok.io or weworkremotely.com. YMMV

Ultimately getting a remote job seems to come down to:

1. Having some kind of portfolio to demonstrate your competence. 2. Doing as many interiews as possible. Also the more interviews you do the better you get at it.

Good luck!