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 you could work for anyone from anywhere. As a French web designer planning on moving to a foreign country, I thought I could apply for any remote job quite easily. But most remote jobs actually mean remote but within the US. Or, work from home 3 days per week, and 2 days at the office. Or even, work mostly from home but come to the office once per month.
It was probably naive from my part to believe I could get a remote job easily. I thought working in a field as connected and open as the web would provide me lots of opportunities.
Anyway, I ended up forgetting about remote jobs and settled for a job in either New York (very difficult btw) or London (more likely to happen).
Another approach to this is to stop looking for a job with a salary and strike out on your own as a contractor/company. If you have contacts in the industry already, this isn't as hard as it might seem, and makes it far easier to truly work remotely without being tied to one specific office.
Having said that from experience (I did Paris-London for a while) I think you'd find it hard to telecommute or work remotely between countries for a long period - the time differences, travel time for meetings etc and the lack of physical presence in the city make it more difficult to keep in touch. It is much easier to work for and get work from people in the same physical location. I was surprised just how important physical presence is in order to maintain the contacts which keep work coming in, and reassure clients that you will be available.
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 standup; some of the team may be having their standup right at the start of their day and some will be having it at the end, but it works.
There are plenty of tools available (Skype, Hipchat and Google Hangouts to name an obvious three) which make maintaining lines of communication between telecommuting teams possible.
Thanks for the informative counter-example - it's certainly possible, and congratulations on your company's success. I agree communication is key to keeping things going, and perhaps in tech companies this is easier (my work was in publishing at the time, quite an old-fashioned industry).
The managers I was interacting with were not technically minded, so that might make a difference, email was the main medium. But the problems I saw as a small company were more related to staying in touch with disparate clients and cultivating work over the long term than working day to day - the people making subcontracting decisions tended to forget you were there if you were never in the client office. This might depend on size and industry as well as communication - smaller companies probably depend on networking more than larger ones.
I agree with the parent commenter completely, but there is a difference between grey-area and you.
You imply being an employee of a company with remote workers. Grey-area is discussing the difficulties of being a remote independent contractor/consultant.
Being remote independent is difficult, since you're not just in the technical position, but you're also in sales (selling your skills). Obtaining leads means networking with decision makers--finding, meeting, networking with them; discovering what their itch is, and you're the right person to scratch it--and more often than not, doing so requires physical presence in social situations. It's hunting for a new job every 6-12 months.
But it is great being in charge of your own destiny.
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.
If you don't mind, please drop me a line about which company you work for (or post up here).
I'm not on the job market now (necessarily), but am keeping an eye out for your kind of companies and would love to keep yours on my radar, if possible.
EDIT - My email and all contact info are in my profile.
It can work..but rarely does it work well unless you have a really good manager and a really good team. Even then, there are tons of mis-communications along the way. I have experienced this working on remote teams.
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.
Yes, this was my impression too. I was looking for new potential gigs for us - http://codedose.com (shameless plug: if you want to build a nice web app at near half of the Bay area rates drop me a line at mglomba@codedose.com) to discover that the actual pool of really remote offers is limited. Hopefully this is only a temporary state as they have just started!
Actually, that's not naive at all. If you don't mind working on multiple projects throughout a year, you're welcome to create a profile on https://Scoutzie.com and you could work with any number of clients you want.
The beauty, you can quite literally work from home in your underwear, at whatever hours you choose. As long as you make it clear to the clients how you work on the projects, you get all the flexibility you want.
I understand that won't give you a 100% security of having a full-time job, but part-time you could actually make more money than if you were to take on a full-time gig. The harder you work, the more money you make, it's that simple.
Actually, some of Scoutzie designers also to front and back-end development (example: https://scoutzie.com/samvj) . We are working on making them easier to find. Likewise, freelancers who can do all of the above can list themselves and their skills.
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.
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.
Not to mention that a good portion (I'd say about 20-30%) are asking for blatantly illegal or unethical activities (e.g., scraping proprietary data, building spyware, etc.)
I would disagree here. You actually can find well paid mid-term and long-term contracts on oDesk. Classification obviously depends on your expenses but I would say it's quite possible to get more money on oDesk than in most IT companies in EU.
Well, you could get money by working a lot and doing cheap crappy jobs, that doesn't make it a good job. Besides, I've heard stories for clients being scammed out of their money on oDesk and developers losing reputation because of jerky clients. I bet there are outliers, but overall, it's sup-par, imho.
Yeah, but I would say it's everywhere like that. You have good developers and bad developers, you have interesting projects and bad projects, you have good customers and bad customers. You can find YC companies on oDesk, you can find cool startups there. IMHO it's not difficult to filter good projects.
It is probably worth noting that this guy is probably somewhat biased due to being the founder of (as far as I can tell) a similar hire-people-from-me-I'm-not-quite-a-recruitment-agent type website.
However, I'd like to point out that we are not at all a recruitment agency, but rather a community of awesome freelancers. We do curate the talent to make sure you only get the best, but we are certainly not recruiters.
The goal is to allow any great freelancer to setup their own shop online without much upfront work. We support them by building tool that ensure security, timely payment, accurate project management and so forth.
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 ;-)
That actually describes me. I hate dicking around with drivers and the like (though I've heard Ubuntu got better), so I like the unixy OSX quite a lot.
I've heard that about linux every year for the past 14 years, usually from people who've only been using desktop linux for a year or two. Not exclusively, but usually.
"better" is always subjective, and it's never even been close to my expectations.
I don't think most people who've told me "oh, <foo> has gotten a lot better in the last year" even know what the problems are that keep some people away. I think it's largely PR parroting, and a way to seem marginally 'with it' re: linux. "hey yeah, I know ubuntu had some issues in the past, but you should really try it now - it's a lot better!" - just got 2 emails from people in the last week or so asking why I use OSX.
I was a desktop/laptop linux user from 2000-2008. That's about 9 years of "oh hey - things are so much better this year". And yet... in 2008 I still had issues trying to have multiple apps access audio at the same time. I still had issues plugging in an external monitor on a laptop (or 2 monitors on a desktop). I grew tired of rickety perlgtk scripts that were marginal wrappers around Xorg config files that never quite ever worked the way I could interpret the man page info. I've used desktop ubuntu distros virtualbox and vmware over the past couple years - things don't seem to have gotten that much better, mostly because the majority of the developers in those ecosystems don't see these things as massive problems to be solved in the first place (indeed, with some, it's a badge of honor that things are still hard to configure).
Again, the point is "hey, linux is better on the desktop now", in my experience, comes from people who've never really used it for a long time and had moderate expectations not met. Many people I know that use desktop linux expect it to be subpar for many things, and when it's just 'par' they herald this as a big improvement.
Linux user for 15 years, Debian/Ubuntu exclusively for the past 7 or so. IMO, it's without question that the Desktop experience is better every year, now to a point where it just works 99.9% of the time (in my experience, anyway). Haven't had a any problems with sound or multiple monitors in a while (using both Nvidia and ATI video cards).
Of course people will and should use whatever they want. I have to touch Windows and Macs regularly as well and they're not without problems. Each will have its pros/cons like anything else.
Sounds like you're annoyed with people asking you why you use OSX. I've asked that question myself in the past. I assume people make informed choices, so I'm always curious about the reasons. Personally, I don't mind people asking me why I use Linux.
I will say that the Desktop experience still is the weak point compared with how solid everything else is. Xorg is a pain, but I haven't had to touch it in a few years (defaults have been working fine for me), so that's been fine.
The reason I keep using Linux is not because it's perfect, but because the breadth of amazing and ridiculously easily accessible free software available for the Debian ecosystem is unparalleled (in my experience, anyway).
I can run the same software on servers, desktops, laptops, in the cloud, on crappy old hardware in a way not possible with Windows or Mac. I don't have to ask for permission or deal with licensing issues. I can focus on GSD* instead.
Not annoyed by the question, more bemused. Every few months as I meet new people, I routinely get a linux fan telling me how awesome everything is on desktop linux. It's the same enthusiastic fanboyism that drew me in in 99/2000. When ubuntu came out, the "everything just works" mantra was pushed heavily in the circles I was in, but... everything didn't work. The fact that you had a nice installer - great. My wireless cards still didn't work well. Sound drivers were a problem. Etc. I've posted most of it before.
Sort of like movies I guess - people pushing their favorite actors who were in some remake of something from 20 years ago. The actors are OK, but I'm not becoming a crazed fan over that stuff; life's too short.
As for linux - it's on all the servers I manage, and I can run virtual machines of what I need from linux, mac or windows when required. It's just not my cup of tea for desktop/laptops, and probably won't be for a long time (again). The macbook "just works" far in excess of any hype from the ubuntu crowd (again, thinking back to 8-10 years ago - "it just works!")
"just works!" but not for Mavericks. I wish I didn't download it. I now need to hand over more money to
Microsoft. Something I never thought I would do. Office
2004 doesn't work.
Agree. Desktop Linux do have it problems, it is getting better every year, but it's linux weakest point.
I can lose some time eventually with mundane things. But the ease I have on deploying things, testing things, etc. the things that matter for my work, it's incomparable.
On a side note:
I have some sound problems every once in a while, but I am a hard user of audio libraries, since I perform in music concerts using live coding... In the normal everyday department, it just works.
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.
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 the fact that it was, even 2 years ago, enough of a problem that people still encountered it... architecturally, that's a symptom of something really broken.
I'm not really interested in learning the ins and outs of modprobe and kernel driver recompiles to try to get sound working as I expect it to - it works the way I expect it to on my macbook, which leaves me time to do other more important stuff.
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.
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.
We weren't comparing Linux and Windows. I also agree that Linux wins hands-down in that particular matchup (unless you want to game...). The question for me is OSX vs Linux, and for me, OSX is WAY easier, and I get most of the deliciousness of Linux on the command line.
A lot of people do prefer OSX. Between OSX and Windows, I'd choose OSX in a heartbeat because cygwin wasn't so great when I tried it a while back.
I did try OSX for a while, and wanted to like it because I can get it for free at work, but I'm so used to Linux that OSX quirks really annoyed me. Things like package management being an aftermarket hack, pain trying to get functional RAID10, Apple changing core functionality between releases breaking my setup, etc. For me, Linux is WAY easier. :-)
A fair point. Thanks for posting. I never really got good at running Linux on the desktop; I gave up each time I tried, due to a sound driver issue or similar. I suppose if I'd stuck with it, I might feel as you do.
funny thing is that OSX works pretty flawless on my Core2Quad hackintosh (zero issues with standby, audio, wifi, bluetooth) while Ubuntu 13.x on the same machine gave me some headaches and random behavior like standby not working properly from time to time etc.
Ubuntu is alright -- the problem with Linux as an OS 'for the people' is that the people find the command line frightening.
Putting a pretty UX on top of Linux and making it easier to use just moves users further and further away from 'Linux' and closer and closer to an OS X or Windows, only without the games, hardware compatibility, and enterprise software options.
Which is the best way for an average user to interact with the machine, is it not?
The ideal OS would be OS X levels of usable, but built entirely on Free Software. Once such an OS exists, it will draw in users, and the games/hardware-compatibility etc will always follow the users.
Isn't this true of a huge number of people, given the state of Desktop Linux?
Additionally, many people can't afford to give up having commercial support for their OS as a target for software products (Adobe's in particular, in my experience).
It hardly requires 'Stallman levels of fanaticism' to prefer an OS that you can explore and tinker with, if you're someone who likes to know - or maybe even tweak - how things work under the hood. A "hacker", in other words.
I tinker and play with Linux all the time, on servers and VMs. Saying that "you don't love open source enough to use an open source OS" implies to me that OSS is intrinsically better and preferable to non-OSS, even if a closed-source alternative would be better for your personal needs. That strikes me as fairly dogmatic (although it's very possible I misread the original intent).
I personally use OS X as my desktop OS because it suits my needs, despite contributing regularly to open source. I agree completely that there are many non-'fanatical' reasons to prefer Linux as a desktop OS.
That actually sums me up quite well. For various reasons, I just don't get along on Linux. It always made me run back to Windows, but I wanted to use open/free software. I eventually settled on OS X as it allowed me to use most of the programs I liked from Linux without having to sacrifice a good desktop environment.
To summarize; "I'll use free software but not if it means neglecting superior proprietary software".
Obviously to each his own in this matter. Linux is great in some areas but not for user experience or corporate support.
_Your dark troll side has spoken_. I'm not even sure that that's technically correct, it's probably not possible to get the same kernel by compiling Darwin. I would be surprised if Apple kept pushing new feature into the open source kernel.
They do keep adding stuff to the open source portion, but you're right that there's plenty of closed source code running on a stock OS X kernel. This is loaded in as kexts, so the mach_kernel binary itself is open and reproducible. Drivers for anything vaguely recent are all closed, as are any security related things (crypto, firewall, sandbox, quarantine, etc.) and a few other odds and ends. Recompiling the kernel is entirely doable [1] (and occasionally useful for kext development), though running a kernel with literally no proprietary code will be quite a lot of effort. (and various important bits of OSX userspace will cease functioning)
[1] I've personally had success with the instructions at http://shantonu.blogspot.com/ - not that Apple has accepted any of my patches...
In my experience, the vast majority of projects have a defined technology stack. Where are you seeing all these job listings that let you use any tech that strikes your fancy in production?
I love open source, which is why I hate Mac and run GNU/Linux. Also I don't 'cringe' when I hear about .NET, I just think that it might not be the best tool for the job for me right now.
"We're looking for a younger developer" - it's probably important to point out it says "junior developer" Discriminating based on skills is fine. Doing it by age is very problematic.
Yeah, try looking through odesk's postings. Half are blatantly illegal/ethical (e.g., "we're looking for someone to develop an app to bypass's Acme's company's anti-scraping efforts and steal all their data") or they're of this type (e.g., "I've got a really great idea and all I need is for a dev to build me a web application and a couple of mobile apps. It shouldn't take a smart person more than a few hours"). Between glancing at odesk jobs, reading the latest NSA escapades, and reading the comments on my local newspaper make me totally lose any hope in this country's future.
These postings (weworkremotely.com), on the other hand, are showing some promise. I'm sure they were mostly bad at first, but presumably, a lot of good companies reading this post are starting to put up their jobs.
Although to be fair, that job 20 does offer equity in the company in lieu of monetary compensation. Maybe not what you're looking for, but still a different beast than working for free.
You can't influence the outcome of a lottery ticket (aside from picking rarely chosen number sets). You can influence company success. In practice there is still a difference.
Edit: I'm responding to the general idea of startup equity being equal to a lottery ticket. I haven't read the specific job posting in question.
Not to whizz in anyone's cornflakes here, and we're happy the 37 signals guys have come around, but StackOverflow Careers has had remote specific job listings for a really long time. If you're interested we keep a decent number of them running pretty much all the time http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs?allowsremote=true
South Africa. My first guess was that my results were being filtered by location, but if so there's no visiblility of this restriction and the posting does state:
"We’re looking to hire the best people wherever they are in the world."
I found the posting from the OP's link, BTW; if this is indeed the issue, it looks like careers.so ought to apply viewing restrictions equivalent to the search restrictions, otherwise cross-posts to other job sites are going to confuse other people in the same way it did me.
Yes. All the differences here are due to employers choosing where they want to advertise their jobs. We have 7 granular advertising regions for employers to choose from. You can see them at the bottom of the post job page.
I'm not a professional developer but I would be very interested even in low-salary junior developer job in Ruby. But most jobs posting I see require excellent knowledge of virtually every technology out there.
I wonder how many developers are excellent at:
* UNIX admin (setting up sql + nginx + unicorn on BSD/Linux)
Rails/JS/CSS3/HTML5
* TDD
* Excellent Closure and/or Scala
* Virtualisatin/scaling/concurrency (put another dozens of varying subjects here... and you're spot on).
I mean, I do linux/unix setup/admin writing firewall rules, setting services for FUN at home since 2000 and there's nothing I can't do given a little bit of time some documentation and a guy to ask a few questions if I get into serious trouble.
But saying I or everyone else is a master in all these things, seriously?
My gut tells me that most companies want the miracle-man or don't know what they are looking for. Hope I'm wrong.
Spolsky did write for years about how he only hired devs who (very rough paraphrasing from memory):
- were geniuses
- top of class
- CS only
- Ivy League
- could recall the ins and outs of pointer arithmetic
- Solve binary-recursive-whatcha-ma-callem puzzles in their sleep
- are rockstars
Well, one programming teacher I had said that i was like a hunting dog, because I would stick with a problem until I've solved it, If I had incredible coding skills I would probably apply
Intimidating is often the point. I'd imagine it's a reflection of the culture, in this case that timidity may be eaten for brunch at the daily stand up.
And so all job postings list expert skills in everything under the sun, and all applicants apply to every job. Thus we get this mutually-assured diluted applicant pool which benefits neither side. And with no feedback to de-selected applicants, things never change. So it goes....
I wonder how one can prove to have a track record of getting stuff done. If we exclude hobby projects / open source contributions, I have no idea how I could show any kind of track record. I'm not allowed to talk about the projects I do at work, for example, and I don't have time or motivation for hobby projects after work.
That's the same Catch-22 situation I'm in. I'm trying to find work and eveyrwhere I look it's "We want to look at your Github profile and open source contribution!" Fuck. I don't have any of those because I mostly code at work and if I do stuff at home it's very unprofessional and only for personal use. I don't have time to contribute to open source and frankly I don't even want to but that doesn't make me less of a good programmer. I love my job but when I'm at home, I have other hobbies and interests.
I ask applicants for a Github link, but it's not nearly as big a deal as you might think. Some people have interesting work on github. Others don't, but have something else to show instead. I'll look at whatever a candidate sends over (within reason).
And open source contributions are a lot easier to make than you might expect, when you consider non-code contributions. Opening an issue on github for an open-source library is a great signal. A well-written bug ticket tells me:
1 - You write enough unique software to encounter bugs in other developers' work (i.e., you're not just duplicating the same CRUD work everyone else is)
2 - You understand how to identify common tasks in your application that should be delegated to a library (and don't try to just re-write everything yourself)
3 - The details in the bug ticket show that you understand what information is relevant to solving a problem and can communicate with other developers.
Those sorts of contributions should be possible in most work environments, as part of your normal job responsibilities.
The reality is most of your competition does have side projects. It's an unfortunate reality of this industry. I've been on both sides of the equation and it's definitely true that having an active github and StackOverflow profile is very helpful :-/
Agreed - I can't show my full time job stuff and my at home stuff is for a little side money to pay my bills and not open source. I don't want to just throw random stuff up there.
I saw a job posting about "you can show us your resume if you want, but we really want to see your GitHub." The company doesn't have its own Github page. Should I tell them mine is just as populated as theirs?
(I do have Githubs, but they are because I like coding for fun, and I don't like coding for fun to find jobs.)
Is there a way you could convince your work to let you talk about the project in general terms? Don't have to be specific, like "developed a hack to take my data back from NSA", but you could describe the technologies and the processes?
You can be anywhere in the world, you can work whenever you want. We even just expect 30 hours p/week, with full-time pay.
I know this comment is self-promoting, but we're a small bootstrapped and profitable startup from Australia. It's not easy to get the word out... so am taking the opportunity here.
It'd be nice if remote working opportunities didn't come with national borders. The border-less nature of the Internet and knowledge-based work doesn't seem to require geographic location and yet due to complex logistical restrictions most of these job postings are US-only.
Kind of a weird place to be.
I wonder if there's some kind of hack that could allow small companies and startups to get around the policy issues without getting various regional governments upset with them.
Remote doesn't generally mean completely de-coupled. For us it's more of a timezone issue than anything else. It's still very handy to have people who can meet and collaborate at least for a decent chunk of the day. Which means for a company in the United States getting farther away than western Europe is a real challenge.
Daily scrum meetings in voice calls with about ten team members. Weekly team meeting (voice calls) for organizational stuff. We have to plan for time zone differences for that (up to five different time zones). Voice calls on different topics during the day if needed (like discussions regarding requirements). Email and messenger for things like bug reports (bug tracker also) and clarification requests or other short queries. We have face to face meetings occasionally like every few months, but very rarely with the whole team.
It's not even governmental stuff; one of the sticking points we have is our payroll package, which doesn't support foreign places like "Wyoming", "other countries", and "Indiana."
The same issue probably applies to our health insurance plan - it's only useful in the U.S. and would also be expensive to change.
A health insurance plan isn't much of a perk for many countries outside of the US that have universal health care.
In that scenario I wouldn't care if that was only available to in-country employees, the same way that I wouldn't care about missing out on perks like catered lunches.
There is: international tax lawyers. There are rarely real prohibitions on employing people who live outside of your own borders. The main disincentive for companies to hire outside of their own country is potentially severely increasing their tax complexity.
This is a more general comment about job postings in general - Why are salary ranges so seldom listed. If you look at a lot of leading job boards even the company name isn't listed (recruiters).
Isn't salary a basic piece of information that every job listing should have?
They keep it hidden for several reasons, though in reality they boil down trying to pay you as little as possible.
-They hope to wow you with the position so you'll accept a pay lower than you wanted. This doesn't work when the salary range is listed up front and is so low you won't bother to respond.
-They're going to base their offer on how much you make now. This works when you're trying to move up in your career, they can offer you a little more then you make now but not as much as if you're already getting paid well. Again, they lose this position if they're up front with their range.
Good points, but personally, I have never played along with the "We'll pay you just a bit more than what you are making right now".
When the question "How much do you make right now?" comes up in an interview, I answer "How much I make right now is irrelevant, here is how much I want if I'll be working for you" (said with more tact, obviously).
"Unfortunately my current employment contract precludes me from discussing my salary. I'm sure you understand and have similar policies yourself. However, a ballpark figure would be north of $[desired-salary]."
How would you react if the candidate gave you the answer I typically give in this situation? ("my current salary is irrelevant, here is how much I want")
I'd be fine with that. It's used as a discussion point to arrive at a salary the person is happy with. If your original salary isn't one you want to base it off, that's ok.
That's admirable. It's unfortunate that a majority of the money discussion folks in HR will end the conversation if a candidate doesn't give a current salary.
During the last decade I changed several jobs. For each next job I managed to get 3-4x of my previous salary. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't happen if I had disclosed my previous salary.
For each next job? So if you started at 20k, and by several you mean 3, and by 3-4x you mean 3, that's still an impressive trajectory (20k to 180k in a decade). Even more so if you started at 40k, changed job 4 times and quadrupled each time..?
I think you're doing more things right than just not mentioning your previous salary...
As much as I would love for companies to do this, I don't think it's really to the benefit of either the company or the applicant. While many companies set absolute caps on maximum value that a given position can bring, a person filling that position will likely be tens of thousands of dollars below that cap when they're hired. What that means is that there's a ton of wiggle room for both the applicant and the company to negotiate salary.
When you list out a salary without giving any thought as to the applicant, I would imagine that you'd a lot of resumes from people who treat job searches like college applications (reach, backup, safety), while also weeding out potential winners with an arbitrary value on the job listing that could easily fluctuate to accommodate people who fit great with the company but need more than market compensation to sign on.
That said, I think that a company should be up front about how much they were looking to spend on a new hire when asked. I remember being e-mailed by a family friend who was looking for a developer. I let him know that I was happily employed and that I wasn't interested in leaving unless the price was right. He e-mailed back saying that he didn't want to talk about salary at all until he was convinced that I was a good fit for the company. Sorry, bud, but I'm not putting myself through 3 months of interview hell just to satisfy my curiosity.
I never understood this. Shouldn't the salary be relative to the amount of value I add? Two people doing the same work, but one decides to rent a $3000,- apartment in SF and the other lives in North-east Veszprem. Why would a company pay the first guy more? Or the second guy less? Would feel very unfair if you're the second guy.
It's a really complicated thing. I agree the salary should be relative to the amount of value you add. But what a "good salary" is, depends on where you live.
If you do an amazing job, and I pay you an amazing amount. That amazing amount could vary depending on your cost of living.
I agree in a perfect world that you should get paid the same no matter where you are, and globalisation will probably head in that direction. But so will cost of living balancing out too (if people in lower cost of living countries are earning lots more money, the price of things will go up.... supply/demand).
I guess ultimately, when comparing what you pay people, why use the dollar amount as opposed to the benefit to their lives. Shouldn't you be paying everyone an amount that equally benefits them? Why should one person be far greater benefited from their salary? Ultimately it's what you do with the money that matters, not the number on the note.
Say you have 2 good candidates for a remote job. The slightly better one lives in Warsaw, you prefer him. You offer them $60k. The slightly worse one lives in NY, you offer $100k?
Is that really how it would work? What if the Warsaw guy demanded $100k, would you pick the NY guy.
This stuff about cost of living or finding the salary they would be happy with is all baloney. Employers want to pay as little as the candidate will accept. Candidate want the maximum salary an employer is willing to pay them. Anywhere between those two an agreement is possible. Negotiation is (a) figuring out if that range exists and (b) trying to get as close as possible to your ideal place in that range. Same as any other market. Employers (and recruiters are even worse) are trying get have more information than the candidate earlier to help them win at this game.
Employers do the initial advertising, control the process, do it more times, have less at stake. There are some markets where candidates have the stronger hand, but they're unusual. To me, not advertising a salary range is like having separate tourist prices, charging a couple walking into a hotel reception late at night double price, etc. It feels like a dirty trick played by the pro on the amateur.
You make an incorrect assumption that causes an incorrect conclusion.
Not all employers want to pay as little as the candidate will accept. I can state this as fact as I am an employer and I do not do that.
As an employer, I want a happy and loyal staff member. Negotiating them down on price doesn't achieve that. I have never offered less than someones initial asking price, and sometimes paid more.
I think it's wrong to assume the employer and employee have differing objectives. We hopefully both want a successful relationship/partnership. Achieving a salary that both are happy with is part of that.
As for your example, again you assume that the employer makes an offer or the employee demands something. Can't it just be a discussion to find the most appropriate salary? That's how I do it.
Perhaps I overstated a little. There are of course other factors. An employers doesn't really benefit if the employee feels screwed. I don't mean to imply that the process is purely cold & inhuman.
However, there is an underlying economic reality here. It's a negotiation over price. The employee has a minimum salary they would accept, some larger amount where they feel satisfied and less likely to look for an alternative job. But, they always want more and if they think they can get more, they will often try. You as the employer also most likely have maximum you are willing to pay and a lower amount that you would prefer to pay.
Even if it manifests as a discussion, this is in many real ways just a veneer over that underlying reality. You are not really offering the Warsaw candidate less then the NY one because they have a lower cost of living. You are offering it because it matches their expectations and they are likely to accept it which is in turn because their alternative are probably comparable. Not advertising a salary range leaves you the opportunity to take advantage of that possibility.
I do think we should be civil and nice and ethical. After all, my problem with undisclosed salary is that it isn't nice. Lets be honest though.
Shouldn't you be paying everyone an amount that equally benefits them?
Because that's entirely subjective and can't be calculated objectively.
Person A in SF might be paying $3000/mo in rent but also has top bands, a lot of popular culture, great shops, and so forth at their front door. These things counteract the lack of much disposable income for them.
Person B in Vietnam might pay $200/mo for a house but may also have frequent power cuts, poor access to healthcare, etc.. but the extra money counteracts these negative points for them.
This is one of many reasons Westerners get paid colossal salaries to work in places like Iraq or pockets of the Middle East. Cultural and security issues (in varying measures) are compensated for by a higher income.
I guess it would feel more fair if the deal explicitly contained a note like "and if you move elsewhere for whichever reason, we'll adjust the salary so that you have at least as good a standard of living as you do now".
No idea if it's enough start a job board but seems to me like requiring the name of the company and a salary range is not a bad requirement for keeping quality up.
On WFH.io (https://www.wfh.io), we always try to link back to the employer's job posting. Job boards in the UK are mainly populated by recruiters, and it's not until after you submit your CV that you actually find out who's hiring. To me that seems completely ridiculous but is standard procedure here.
Also, if the job posting doesn't explicitly mention remote/WFH, then we try to avoid posting the job.
I often get recruiters who try to sell me a job based purely on technologies and not what the company actually does. I'll ask them who the company is and they usually wont say, either due to the fact that I haven't sent my CV/resume or they think I am another recruiter that is trying to steal the details.
Missing from these job posts is "WHat's in it for me": There's largely no mention of compensation in any form on most of thes e job postings. Most don't even mention the office culture or expectations beyond the fact that the company's virtual and they want good engineers.
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. Still, having to deal with that kind of paperwork is a huge burden on both employer and employee. I would not be surprised if this also caused extra hassle when you do visit the US on occasion as they'll assume you're trying to work there illegally.
Of course, making this kind of thing not worth your while is the whole point of protectionism. IIRC, India has a similar arrangement.
One way around this is presumably to open a branch office in another country, and have contractors work for the branch.
If you are employing people, that may be true, but if you're paying a corporation, even if it's a one-person corporation, I can't see why income tax would come into it. It's one company paying another for services. I imagine the parent was thinking of contractor companies, not individual contractors working as short-term employees, in which case income tax wouldn't apply.
If "setting up an offshore subsidiary company for the purposes of employing remote workers" fits your definition of "it's extremely easy", then yes, I can't argue with you.
That's not at all what I was suggesting. I'm not suggesting setting up subsidiaries or anything of the kind.
It's easy to subcontract work out to other countries if you're not tied to the idea of having employees, but instead hire companies (companies which already exist, like say small design shops, packaging firms for apps, or tech firms) to perform services for you, rather than individuals.
Take 37 signals for example, when they were a consulting company. A company in say Paris could have hired them to work remotely, without worrying about paying income tax - that's all handled on the subcontractor end if it is a company.
That's a bit of a different beast to what the original commenters were suggesting. Engagements of that caliber usually involve outsourcing whole projects or subprojects (web presence for product X, whatever). Of course, there's overlap between what you can get a remote employee/contractor do vs. what you can "outsource". Note that levies might still be due on services performed across certain countries' borders. (much like customs duties on goods)
I could also imagine a kind of "talent agency" model, though that doesn't seem to have caught on in tech. (Yet? I'd sign up for that if it provided me with a steady-ish flow of high-quality gigs and sorted out all the legal/tax paperwork for me.)
Back on topic, that's exactly what the original commenter (zura) suggested. You can hire a foreign company for contract work without needing to hand over an entire project - you'll be paying for deliverables/features instead of time, but the end result is the same. AFAIK you have to report it to the IRS, but don't owe any taxes on it.
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
That can't be true for contractors, or sites like Elance and oDesk would not be able to operate as easily as they do. A contractor is responsible for paying his own taxes, whether that is to the IRS in the US, or the tax authority in his own country.
You'd think so. Read up on W-8BEN if you don't believe me. I've been on the receiving end of this for doing a tech review of a book for a major US tech publisher. The amount of paperwork required on my end to satisfy the IRS meant I just gave up and effectively told the publisher to keep the money. (I did it for fun/experience anyway - tech reviewing books isn't a way to make a living.)
The burden is on the foreign person, not the US company. The US company can pay you as a contractor and not withhold any tax (just as they could with a US citizen 1099 contractor). The foreign contractor would have to file the W-8BEN (or not, since the US likely can't prosecute offenders in their home country).
The burden is indeed on the foreign person to fill out the W8-BEN etc. and pay any taxes due. However, as the withholding agent[1], the US company is liable for any unpaid taxes. So in practice, until the contractor proves to the company that they've sorted the situation, the company will need to withhold that portion of the payment as they may have to pay it to the IRS.
In any case, the whole thing is a pretty arduous procedure in international comparison.
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)
There are limits to how much you can do this as a US-based company, and if you overstep the bounds the IRS will come a-knockin'. I imagine it's much easier to hire someone as a real employee inside the US, and based on the size of many of the companies, they probably don't have the accounting or legal resources necessary to deal with real international employees.
Certainly possible but remember that "contractor" and "employee" have legal definitions. You can't "just" call an employee (by the legal definition) a contractor.
(Edit: I see ljoshua beat me to the possibility for issues here but it's important to emphasize that it can be done, just play by the rules to avoid trouble down the line.)
Actually there are. And it would be great if there was just a checklist that you could go against, but the best we've got is this page [1] from the IRS and some legal interpretation. I agree that the positions could more clearly state that it was a contracting position, but it looks like more of an employer-employee type job board than an eLance type deal to me. So they just have to be careful.
my guess it's about timezones and visa.
having 3 hours between a coworker and you is not that of a big deal but having 9hours time difference can be quite cumbersome.
Timezone doesn't make sense for Canada and South/Central America. Visa doesn't make much sense either, plenty of startups work with remote workers, no visa needed and for European people they can visit for 3 months with a business visa, nothing required for that, just a valid passport. Also, I have many south american friends who got a visa easily while working for successful startups.
I've had the hardest time finding a remote + part-time programming job. I have a day job, but want to work extra during the evenings as well. Basically, two jobs, but the second one being part time obviously.
I've tried craigslist, indeed, SO, even HN who's hiring. I send off to anything that looks like it might work. Have had zero success.
I can only assume it's a non-desired position. Who wants to give a programmer access to their codebase/databases while no one else is around? :shrug:
I think the main reason you're not finding anything with your approach is that in the event that a team needs someone to work a few extra hours a week in the evening, they hire someone they know personally, like former staff since they don't want to train someone who will only work a few hours a week. If you want to find work like that, my suggestion would be to pitch projects to companies.
For example, "Hi prospective company, I'm using your iPhone app and it really needs an update due to x and x reasons. I specialize in updates of this type; here are some past examples of related work I've done. I think we can strike a deal that really improves the app at a price that makes sense for both of us."
As an employer who sometimes work with part-time developer, it's just hard to find projects that fit in this kind of schedule. Unless you're in a different time zone, there's little opportunities to meet and coordinate (I like to spend time with my family in the evenings :-/ ) and progress is inevitably slow. For a freelance gig I'd be open to it, (or as a temporary solution to test the water before going full time), but not as a long term solution.
To be fair: As a someone who hires people, I'm very wary of hiring someone who wants to work on the side. In my experience it just never works. There's a reason it's called a "full-time" job. It tends to take all of your time, leaving my project dead in the water.
I love the concept, but as a developer working on non-web technologies, it's discouraging to see that this practice is less common outside the world of web dev.
One thing they should make clear on the website is who is actually allowed to apply for these positions. I'm in China and applied many times for "remote jobs", just to discover that the position was for US citizens only. It's rarely mentioned on the job ad, but I think it should.
Interesting that most of the backend jobs look to be for Rails. I wonder if there's a correlation between Ruby/Rails developers and a more liberal policy to remote working...or if it's just because Rails shops are much more likely to flock to a 37signals site.
I first saw it because I follow Jason Fried on Twitter. I suspect that those who follow 37 Signals closely are probably more aligned with the Rails ecosystem.
I don't know about rails in particular. But there are zero Java jobs. That's gotta say something about Java, which ironically used to be seen as the innovators language.
The arrival of Jason and David's book, Remote, is fantastic and I can't wait to read it. I think it is crystal clear that, if done properly, many people would lead much happier livers if they had the ability to choose where they worked from. People could still collaborate online with colleagues, probably lead healthier lives, be more productive, and be judged based on execution rather than whether they are at their desk earlier or later than others, even if they are just sitting there on, Faceboo or Reddit…. or HN ;-).
There are many companies of all sizes that support employees domestically and internationally working remotely. IBM, HP, Kaplan, The US Government, a number of major insurance companies, and many other organizations hire remotely. This gives access to a much broader talent pool.
Also, "The Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the entire five-year cost of implementing telework throughout government ($30 million) is less than a third of the cost of lost productivity from a single day shut down of federal offices in Washington DC due to snow ($100 million). - See more at: http://www.globalworkplaceanalytics.com/telecommuting-statis...
I've always found it time consuming to filter through all the crappy jobs when searching for good opportunities that allow you to work remotely. I'm actually working on creating a curated search experience specifically for jobs in all industries where people are able to work remotely. We're not quite set to launch yet but for anyone interested in staying updated I'd love you to register here. http://klearsearch.com/
Feedback from this community when we launch would be really great.
I don't understand why you all are so salty about this, it seems pretty good to me. Some decent jobs here, which is really more than I can say for some other job boards.
I've been reading their primary job board for a long time, and looking at this site I realized that I do miss seeing the cities listed.
It may seem paradoxical but I did like to know at a glance where the company was located, among other reasons for the fact that it communicates the likely salary (if they're in a small city and I'm in a large one, for example).
Otherwise it looks good (if top-heavy) and it's always nice to see remote opportunities.
Not surprisingly since they kinda pooh-pooh on managers in the book: "We believe that these staples of work life - meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office". More context will tell where they're coming from, but they don't acknowledge the importance that great managers acting as leaders have in a project. I still haven't finished the book though.
Yes, and I remember when I was reading their other title: "Getting Real", and they make a point about being the "anti-MS Project" company. It's like educating people about your convictions by not telling who you are, but who you aren't. Looking at the quote you pulled in, it's clear they are holding the "anti-manager" flag now.
It will be interesting to see if this will span across other roles too. I work in controlling and I could see me helping out a few companies/startups remotely.
One interesting thing for me is having both part-time and remote. While I see many startups might not need a full time finance/controller, I think many could use a part-time one.
I suppose remote working is only going to increase. The technology is in place and the only real issue is trust.
Here in Hong Kong, thanks to special offers, 1000 Mbps broadband is only slightly more expensive than 30 Mbps, crazy! I collaborate on a project with a partner in India every day and the experience is quite smooth.
Nice! Could use more postings (only 2 android gigs?), but I am sure that will come with time and publicity.
From a UI angle, though, why is everything so big? I had to zoom out two stops in firefox to fit a reasonable amount of content on the screen and make it look 'normal'.
I've been using http://couchcoder.com to find remote work for a couple years now. It has a much better filter than this site. They use a complex algorithm to syndicate remote jobs from all over the web.
I wish that I could use more criteria for filtering. It's great that they make it so easy to post jobs, but as others in the thread have mentioned, that results in a lot of jobs that aren't really exciting.
Hi,
I'm with Scanbuy's HR team. As I'm researching talent to work remote I found this site and wanted to put Scanbuy www.scanbuy.com on your radar. We're the leading global provider of mobile barcode solutions. We're presently hiring Sr. Web Application Engineers & SDET Testing Engineers. If interested, I'd love to connect and share our full posting: katie.walsh@scanbuy.net. Scanbuy is in NYC - I am too and we're open to hiring folks from anywhere in the continental US who's eligible to work for any US employer.
I knew it was too good to be true, there's a CAVEAT - when you click 'Copy Email Address'or even just click on the email address provided - you get a nasty bug that deletes system level files and directories from your OS. Seems like someone has hacked it already :(
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 you could work for anyone from anywhere. As a French web designer planning on moving to a foreign country, I thought I could apply for any remote job quite easily. But most remote jobs actually mean remote but within the US. Or, work from home 3 days per week, and 2 days at the office. Or even, work mostly from home but come to the office once per month.
It was probably naive from my part to believe I could get a remote job easily. I thought working in a field as connected and open as the web would provide me lots of opportunities.
Anyway, I ended up forgetting about remote jobs and settled for a job in either New York (very difficult btw) or London (more likely to happen).