Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?
Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?
If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire".
I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.
- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.
- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.
- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).
Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.
> If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire"
Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid to go the remote path there.
I did take your comment in the intended spirit! My response were answers in that same spirit (points you might give that executive to say "we're a remote organization already").
Red Hat working is more remote than you'd think from the pure numbers, since even if you're working in an office your team won't all be in the same office. The team I'm in has people working in offices in CZ, around the US, the UK, Australia, and in China. So we work using remote tools anyway.
Buffer and Basecamp come to mind, plus they are more efficient: they pay significantly more while managing to turn impressive revenue/profit vs the headcount.
Isn’t that the wrong metric to look at? You are looking for massive successes from the very small number of remote companies to compare with the massive successes out of all companies. A better (but still somewhat flawed approach) would be to take a random sample of non-remote companies equivalent in size to the number of remote-only companies and compare the distributions of their success.
I work for one Or at least one where remote-only is quite common. Side effect : I have no idea how many coworkers I have, just know the team I work with normally and a few outside.
It's a tech company, but it's an manufacturing one.
I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?
And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....
This doesn't sound right. In a remote environment it's crucial to be able to find people. You need a good directory/orgchart. In an office you can walk over to section and ask. In a global chat room or such this is harder.
There are directories. I just haven't needed them - but then I'm mostly a dev on some lists of products.
There is no global chat room though, but there are optional "ask for help here" lists where all the team leads are likely to be paying attention.
Communication protocols are one of those good things to be sorting out too, from management perspective.
I've had this job for a few years now, and am pretty happy.
Profitability means nothing at this stage (and is sometimes even undesirable). As long as it is following the same growth path as more established companies in its segment, it can be considered a success.
Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?