Hi HN! Co-founder & CEO of Zapier here. We wrote this book a little over a year ago. It's mostly up-to-date though there's a few things I need to update.
I'm unavailable for about ~2 hours but you can AMA and I'll respond later. :-)
Hi Wade,
Love how outspoken you guys are about Remote work!
I'm actually starting a podcast to help others learn about Remote development by interviewing developers that work remotely and sharing their experiences. Would any developers at Zapier be interested in coming on?
Hi Wade, great guide. In chapter 6 Sqwiggle is mentioned as a tool to help build strong relationships as a team. I know you used to use Sqwiggle. We did too until it shut down earlier this year. I'm curious to know if you ever came across any alternatives or what you use now?
Disclaimer: I'm lead developer on our replacement for Sqwiggle which is currently in open beta, PukkaTeam.
Awesome stuff. Can you comment of the actual production of the book, how it was written, marketed, etc? Seems like a nice content marketing case study.
This is a great guide but my biggest question is around compensation which was not covered by this guide. Do you hire and pay the 60th percentile at approx. local market rates? Do you hire the best remote people at SFBay market rates? How do you handle equity? How is payroll and benefits handled?
> Do you hire and pay the 60th percentile at approx. local market rates? Do you hire the best remote people at SFBay market rates?
The business owner in me says start low and raise your rates until you get the talent you're happy with. I would offer uniform base pay as typically lower costs of living come with other tradeoffs. If someone wants to make that work let them (but make it clear that it's their responsibility to make sure the electricity and internet are flowing when it's time to get to work)
> How is payroll and benefits handled?
I would suggest doing it like the oil companies, you setup a company and banking in the caribbean somewhere, and then pay folks salary into bank accounts there for them as well. Make it their problem to move/repatriate money. Don't withhold any taxes and factor in a fixed rate for any bennies you want to offer (unless legally prohibited in specific jurisdictions of course, IANAL). Let them optimize the money.
I know this is how big oil companies pay most of their workers who are on rigs in various locales in the world (and not just offshore!).
I'm not the author but our company is remote and our comp is handled employee by employee. There isn't a "we offer 60% of market" it's a negotiation between me and the person I'm recruiting. So for example a Computer Vision engineer living in SF and one living in Edmonton with the same skills and background would get the same pay.
I personally ignore anything that says onsite or remote. Largely they turn out to be domestic USA only, or one day a week remote or some such nonsense. Not worth the time to investigate further when there are lots of less ambiguous job postings.
The second reason you want to ignore those is a remote worker for an onsite team can often get cut out of the loop. A lot of communication will happen in person, and the remote guy will miss out. Eventually people will trust him less, share less with him, and pass him over for promotions. You're much better off working for an all remote team, or a remote first team where communication is mandated to be via a medium that all workers have access to.
>>For example, how do full-time, actual remote (eg. you are in Japan and your company is in Belgium)
working from let's say Iowa for a company in SF is remote in my book, doesn't have to be international (even though personally I worked remote for a EU-based company at one point).
who's hiring postings - I've spoken to a couple of hiring managers- nothing clicked but those gigs were 100% remote work from home positions.
I mentally filter out those ads - they're almost always looking for US-based, sometimes even only their city. Others like remote "for the right candidate" give the impression that they'll take on remote workers only as a last resort, which seems unlikely to work out if that's their mindset. The best results tend to mention "remote-first" or "international" - to me this says they have a culture of remote work, properly understand where it does and doesn't work and know how to get around or mitigate its limitations. The most annoying for keyword filtering are, of course, "no remote".
Look for ads that say their entire organisation is remote/distributed. A lot of ads on weworkremotely.com do this to clarify that they don't have an actual office and everybody is telecommuting.
It's been generally okay for me in the past, but it looks more and more like I'll be moving overseas sometime in the near future. This reduces the number of "remote" positions available to at least half, or less. The reasons I've been personally given is that it creates complex tax/paperwork situations, or timezone conflicts. So I've started specifically asking about the flexibility of being a "digital nomad" (despite how much I hate that term). This term seems to signal actual remote possibilities fairly well.
I help run a distributed company with folks in NY, CA, VA, and NC. Content like this from Zapier or other successful remote-first companies provides an excellent source of ideas to apply to my own team and also helps to slowly remove the stigma against remote work. Appreciate you guys publishing these types of articles!
I have a question for anyone to answer who feels qualified to do so.
I'm a dev who's been working for about 5 years, degree in CS, focus on JS front-end.
I would love to do remote and skip the commute, but I'm afraid to, mostly because impostor syndrome: while I'm a good coder, I tend to run into roadblocks involving the code written by other people (e.g. "I can't see where this is getting called from; I tried searching the codebase and don't see it anywhere...what is it for?" or else with the toolchain / build system (e.g. "The wiki really does not explain how to get this running locally at all, and these components are not compatible and I'm getting a version error from this, I'm really not sure what to do; tried googling extensively with no luck.")
I always seem to be the only one who has these problems.
While I tend to do well in person by being nice and asking a lot of questions, I'm concerned I may be a poor fit for a remote role as it requires a high degree of autonomy.
What do you think? Have you encountered these problems and still succeeded at remote work?
I think increased autonomy is the wrong way to look at it. Typically you will still be part of a team and will be encouraged and required to collaborate with coworkers to solve problems and get questions answered. You'll just be doing it over Skype or Slack or whatever other communication tools are there instead of in person.
My main advice if you want to work remotely and you have those kinds of issues is to stick to the timezone of the company you are working for. I've done pair programming effectively remotely for long periods of time. I actually enjoy doing it remotely better (more control over your environment, more comfort, etc). As long as the team is open to interaction and has a mechanism for doing it, there is no problem. If you get too far out of the timezone, though, it is really difficult to organise overlapping sessions (I'm currently +9 with my team mates and it means I almost never have a "normal" working day).
Confidence is also quite important IMHO. It's easy to start doubting your ability when you have nobody else to compare to. If you have a bad day (as everyone does from time to time) and end up getting nothing done, you need to be OK with that. If you run and hide, it can pile up on you.
One thing you might try is to convince your current employer to try doing 1 day a week remote. This will let you get your feet wet without a lot of risk. If you have problems, you're back at the office the next day. My current employer did that and it worked so well that most people are free to work in the office or not as they choose from day to day. There are many people who now work permanently remotely as well.
Yes, being autonomous is one of the most important traits I look for when hiring for my team (Disclaimer: I lead a distributed engineering team of 22).
Whether you are can be a good fit or no depends on how frequently you need to ask your teammates a question.
If you need to do that say once a day, I would say that is fine. If you are part of a distributed who are in different timezones then to be productive you will have to learn how to remove the roadblocks yourself.
Now if you need to do that every 10 minutes then I would say it is a problem and not just a poor fit for remote work but a general problem that can be bad in a co-located team as well. Most of developers are going to dislike interruptions no matter how nicely you do that.
I can provide my anecdotal current experience. I just started a new role in a remote position with less "work experience" (vs. personal projects) than you and I can say that the autonomy is not an issue. I'm working on a complex, undocumented, "created-here" and over-engineered C++ code base left behind by a senior programmer and have found there to not be an issue. Granted there is a bit of a ramp-up time as I'm learning the code base but I ask questions in our chat application whenever I get stuck and my teammates are pretty responsive. I've actually found that I'm more productive/learn the code base more when I'm remote than when I visit and work in the office. In the office I use the other programmers as a crutch and they end up spoon-feeding me the solutions because it's easier for them. Remote, I make more of an effort to understand the components independently.
I wouldn't be too worried about "getting stuck" in the code. The larger and uglier the project, the slower it is to learn the components but I've learned to embrace getting stuck. It's part of the process and once you've figured it out you know that small part of the code base a little better.
Everyone has questions for their team members, including remote devs. It is just a matter of getting used to asking them via different tools. For small, non-time sensitive questions, email still works. But frequently, we'll get on google hangouts with each other and spend 30 minutes or so not only answering the immediate questions, but chatting in general, about work and more. It is part of what keeps us working well as a team, and not turning into individual remote silos.
This is a great question, and you're right - you may want to defer full-time remote work until you're most experienced. As a somewhat junior developer (don't take that the wrong way, I'm just talking about years-in-industry) one of the most important ways for you to get better is through osmosis with the more senior members of your team. A remote non-senior employee is less likely to witness, much less participate in, unscheduled design discussions or quick whiteboarding.
I just downloaded the eBook and spent 15 minutes reading two chapters. Useful material, thanks! Except for working as a contractor at Google, I have been working remotely since 1998, when my wife and I moved to the mountains of Central Arizona. I frequently read articles on remote work, and I find Zapier's eBook on the subject to be better than most material I have seen on this subject.
Any info or tips on how to start remote working if you're not a "web guy"?
I'm more of a scientist / engineer, i.e. I work on somewhere in between writing numerical methods, simulation, control, and gluing them to more useful interfaces. I don't do UI, but I can handle it; I certainly don't do web front- or back-ends, but I know something about databases; I like statistics, but I'm not a machine learning expert, although I know how to set up and use TensorFlow; I enjoy working on low-level code, embedded and real-time systems, audio, signal processing and control and robotics. At the same time I'm willing to sacrifice some of the "hands on" stuff I like to do (working with mechanical systems) and be more of a software guy if it means I can travel and work remotely. However, short of starting my own consultancy, which I'm not sure I want to do (I have no idea about business), I don't know how to get it going. I feel forever doomed to haunt the lab/office, because I have no idea how to find freelance contracts for this sort of thing.
Another remote first company that is sharing some knowledge:
https://teleport.org/remote/
Eating their own dog-food as company who builds products for people who move around.
I work at home since July, have 3 boys aged 4, 6, and 8. We homeschool. I have an office in my basement that's about the most isolated place in the house. They come see me a few times each day but for the most part it's not a problem at all, which is a lot less of a problem than I thought it was going to be. Maybe it's easier because we have multiple and they keep each other busy, I dunno.
Unrelated bonus - I've gone from filling up my car about once a week to about once a month, have lost 10 pounds, and went from ~$60 for lunch per week to basically $10 or so.
edit: it's a globally distributed team, so no matter what time there's folks working on something. This means that what used to be my old "coffee and HN time" in the morning before going to the office has become "go ahead and get stuff done" time. I go running mid-day. The whole schedule just gets a lot more flexible in a pretty nice way.
I have 3. When I first started working from home, we set some ground rules, which mostly amount to "Be quiet in here." and "I might boot you out of my office, just say OK and go.", and "If my headset is on, and I am talking, do not interrupt."
It actually has been great. Taking a break to talk to a child is refreshing. Being able to be a parent more than just after dinner is good for everyone involved. And they get to see what I do.
It helps if your entire company is remote - then everyone understands the balancing that happens between family and work.At my company, it is common to step away from your desk to go to a child's activity, help them with something, or just go play with your kids. And when babies cry or toddlers interrupt conference calls, people just laugh. We all understand what it is like to work remotely, and our leadership care about the work getting done, not the schedule you keep.
I will admit that it would be harder to work for the kind of place where remote worker are still expected to sit in their desks from 9-5, lurking on some always-on hangout/slack/whatever. If kids are involved, I would skip that kind of team and look for people who value full flexibility in remote work, not just in location.
Great question. Another section of the book we need to update. We have quite a few folks with kids (maybe half?) and a 14 week parental leave when you have a kid or adopt a kid. We've learned a decent amount on making kids and working at home a good experience.
Different things work for different people - here's how it worked for me
I started working at home when my son was born (he's 25 now) ... my partner worked mornings ... what worked for us wasfor me to get up and spend the morning with my son (and later daughter) at 11 when he went down to nap I started work, my partner got home about the time he woke, I worked thru to 7 or 8ish. I arranged child care for the 1 day a week I had to go to work (50 miles away)
Later when they started pre-school and then school I continued to do the morning up and away process
I work from home and drop my 8-month-old off at daycare in the morning.
Because I'm a bit of a night-owl, though, and daycare ends, I end up working for about 30-60 minutes with her in the room. It's a little unpredictable, but people understand.
I'm glad you said that. I worked from home frequently when my son was 1-2 years old. Now he's 4, and forget about it... there's no way he could stay away from dada all day!
My company is a heavily remote company (1/4-1/3 of the company or so is remote), and one tool that has helped us massively is Sococo - it has a notion of virtual rooms and virtual conference rooms, so it makes it pretty painless to set up a meeting with the people needed that also supports screensharing and webcams.
I would agree. One of the things I felt when I first moved to working remotely was a sense of isolation due partly to losing the awareness of what other people or teams were working on that you have when working in an office due to just seeing them meeting or talking together. Sococo gives that back to you because you can see other people and teams meeting in the "virtual conference rooms". There's been more than one instance where I've dropped in on a meeting to assist with a production issue or a development question that came up because I could see those conversations were happening, something is more difficult if a chat tool such as Slack is your primary or sole form of communication.
Perused that link a bit. Cool job on the guys writing all that up for others to read.
Personally, I found GitLab's approach (also documented over at their site) more pertinent to my situation—starting with the fact that apart from remote, GitLab are also multicultural, which adds a whole other dimension.
One remark: Zapier mention they use a website called HelloSign for electronic signatures. I have checked them out, and that's a total no-go. Although they claim to comply with EU law on electronic signatures, they most definitely do not: what they offer is a “paste a PNG of your handwritten scrawl on this box” kind of service, which not only does not come within a mile of being an advanced electronic signature, as per Regulation (EU) 910/2014, but also follows the inanely dangerous precedent set by, I think, Adobe, of affixing an image in the likeness of a hand-written signature or seal to a document. This causes people to just assume that if one such image is present, the document is valid, without actually checking the signature. So, although something like that HelloSign website might be fine for private contracts, at least in the EU those “signatures” have no public effect. Just thought I should mention.
I liked this book from 37signals (the authors of Getting Real):
Remote Office not required: https://37signals.com/remote
It is also available as an audio book.
Good, but could add some some foundation pieces, which are often glossed over or just assumed to be in place, but when they aren't, none of the other 'cultural' points matter much.
ie what is a team?
A group of people working toward a common vision/goal. So have one clearly defined.
Why are team members working at all?
Because they expect some kind of reward. So ensure sure they have a stake in the success of the endeavor, even if it's only "be part of this cool project".
what's the response to an undergrad senior (CS major, typical software dev internships, portfolio) interested in working remotely after graduation? i assume the typical route is getting a full-time position and then transitioning—is it too arrogant/presumptuous to think startups would be interested in a new grad hire for remote positions?
I can give two cents as an ex undergrad interested in remote work: I worked onsite after graduation before transitioning to remote for the same company after 6 months.
I found that I was learning a lot less, as you might expect. I missed out on "casual" learning opportunities, like overhearing a new git command or having a quick chat about what a p-value means. And I no longer interacted with the salespeople, scientists, and people in other areas of the business that help broaden my knowledge. Admittedly, this might be different in a remote-first culture, we were quite an open/chatty/collaborative office.
I also made a lot of mistakes as I learnt how to be a good remote worker. It's definitely a skill that needs to be developed, and remote companies would be sensible to prefer candidates with that experience already.
So I'd recommend the pathway of working onsite for a remote-friendly company for a while, transitioning to remote, then using the experience to apply for a remote-first job. It also means you're less committed if you discover you don't enjoy remote work. I discovered I didn't enjoy remote work.
One thing I may suggest that allowing people to get ebook without signup as it is going to help this guide get into hands of many more people and will help Zapier in many ways, more prospective clients, employees, partnerships and goodwill in general.
This is awesome. I wish I had more time to do something like this myself. We're a team of 14 full-timers, 23 total with contractors, all remote.
We describe trust as a core value in our company and it goes both ways. We trust our team to do a great job, help each other when needed, be transparent, etc. They trust me and our execs to be open, honest, etc and I've gone above and beyond in that department. So I love the focus on trust in the 'running a remote team' section.
I'd also add: If you're planning on doing this as a founder/exec, expect to spend time and money dealing with different jurisdictions. Our team is mostly in the USA and for full-timers we have to file corporate taxes in every state where we have an employee. We have a team of accountants and HR folks that help us now, but it's still a lot of work and if it wasn't for my amazing co-founder, this would have been impossible to wade through.
For international domains, we have worked with or are working with people in Sweden, Greece, Paraguay and I think a few others. In general we reach out to our local law firm who connect us with counsel in those countries to figure out NDA's etc. It's not cheap.
Also had to work with local legislation in some countries that deal with workers comp type stuff and number of hours worked each week, government benefits - the list is long.
But the benefits are that we have an amazing, talented, diverse team who bring cultural influences from around the world and the USA and are able to live and work anywhere in the world they want to.
In terms of tools: VoiP is still ridiculously unreliable. I specifically include Skype and Slack in this criticism. As the team grew we discovered a secret weapon for super reliable voip calls: Teamspeak. It's AWESOME. It has push-to-talk which is great for big team meetings and you can see packet loss on a per user basis. You can also isolate yourself and your team to a single server so you're not load sharing with other teams during peak. It's been a real life saver.
Also, we don't do video. I know many remote teams do. We don't. What I love about it is that it really levels the playing field in terms of who is more charismatic on video. It also removes the distraction, frees up desktop space and reduces bandwidth usage for international team mates. When another company wants to do a hangout etc, we sometimes just tell them we don't do video and it's great. I can stand in my office staring out the window, really listening to what someone is saying, rather than having to think about whether I look good or watch them. Voice only for remote teams is awesome IMHO.
Thanks again to @WadeF and Zapier for doing this. I still find it absurd that remote work isn't the default for tech teams. One day we'll look back and wonder if perhaps lack of trust was the only reason big tech companies don't feel comfortable having everyone work remotely.
[+] [-] WadeF|9 years ago|reply
I'm unavailable for about ~2 hours but you can AMA and I'll respond later. :-)
[+] [-] tjbarbour|9 years ago|reply
Find me as tjbarbour on twitter or Gmail.
Thanks!
[+] [-] simonhamp|9 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I'm lead developer on our replacement for Sqwiggle which is currently in open beta, PukkaTeam.
[+] [-] esuzeb|9 years ago|reply
btw: I really love your companies "chattyness" on all types of knowledge that you guys gain! :o)
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
I've had dozens of institutional VCs say that they wont invest in us because we're a 100% remote company.
[+] [-] shostack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinshen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnm1019|9 years ago|reply
The business owner in me says start low and raise your rates until you get the talent you're happy with. I would offer uniform base pay as typically lower costs of living come with other tradeoffs. If someone wants to make that work let them (but make it clear that it's their responsibility to make sure the electricity and internet are flowing when it's time to get to work)
> How is payroll and benefits handled?
I would suggest doing it like the oil companies, you setup a company and banking in the caribbean somewhere, and then pay folks salary into bank accounts there for them as well. Make it their problem to move/repatriate money. Don't withhold any taxes and factor in a fixed rate for any bennies you want to offer (unless legally prohibited in specific jurisdictions of course, IANAL). Let them optimize the money. I know this is how big oil companies pay most of their workers who are on rigs in various locales in the world (and not just offshore!).
[+] [-] WadeF|9 years ago|reply
The short version is it's mostly fixed to Chicago rates. We do have a fixed bump for folks in SF/NYC. It's an imperfect but simple way to handle this.
Payroll and benefits are solved using a service like TriNet.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phantom_oracle|9 years ago|reply
For example, how do full-time, actual remote (eg. you are in Japan and your company is in Belgium) employees feel/interpret job-postings like:
> Somewhere, USA | X-Company | ONSITE / REMOTE | Full-time
From my understanding/seeing of so many of these types of postings, they always have hidden gotchas like:
- only for extremely senior positions
- remote (at your home, which is 20 minutes from the office) once a week only
- not actually remote, but just using the word as keyword-optimization
As my question above says, how do actual remote employees interpret such job-ads?
[+] [-] eloff|9 years ago|reply
The second reason you want to ignore those is a remote worker for an onsite team can often get cut out of the loop. A lot of communication will happen in person, and the remote guy will miss out. Eventually people will trust him less, share less with him, and pass him over for promotions. You're much better off working for an all remote team, or a remote first team where communication is mandated to be via a medium that all workers have access to.
[+] [-] ChemicalWarfare|9 years ago|reply
working from let's say Iowa for a company in SF is remote in my book, doesn't have to be international (even though personally I worked remote for a EU-based company at one point).
who's hiring postings - I've spoken to a couple of hiring managers- nothing clicked but those gigs were 100% remote work from home positions.
[+] [-] tkhoven|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamors|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corbinpage|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerovistae|9 years ago|reply
I'm a dev who's been working for about 5 years, degree in CS, focus on JS front-end.
I would love to do remote and skip the commute, but I'm afraid to, mostly because impostor syndrome: while I'm a good coder, I tend to run into roadblocks involving the code written by other people (e.g. "I can't see where this is getting called from; I tried searching the codebase and don't see it anywhere...what is it for?" or else with the toolchain / build system (e.g. "The wiki really does not explain how to get this running locally at all, and these components are not compatible and I'm getting a version error from this, I'm really not sure what to do; tried googling extensively with no luck.")
I always seem to be the only one who has these problems.
While I tend to do well in person by being nice and asking a lot of questions, I'm concerned I may be a poor fit for a remote role as it requires a high degree of autonomy.
What do you think? Have you encountered these problems and still succeeded at remote work?
[+] [-] brandon272|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikekchar|9 years ago|reply
Confidence is also quite important IMHO. It's easy to start doubting your ability when you have nobody else to compare to. If you have a bad day (as everyone does from time to time) and end up getting nothing done, you need to be OK with that. If you run and hide, it can pile up on you.
One thing you might try is to convince your current employer to try doing 1 day a week remote. This will let you get your feet wet without a lot of risk. If you have problems, you're back at the office the next day. My current employer did that and it worked so well that most people are free to work in the office or not as they choose from day to day. There are many people who now work permanently remotely as well.
[+] [-] devman|9 years ago|reply
Whether you are can be a good fit or no depends on how frequently you need to ask your teammates a question.
If you need to do that say once a day, I would say that is fine. If you are part of a distributed who are in different timezones then to be productive you will have to learn how to remove the roadblocks yourself.
Now if you need to do that every 10 minutes then I would say it is a problem and not just a poor fit for remote work but a general problem that can be bad in a co-located team as well. Most of developers are going to dislike interruptions no matter how nicely you do that.
[+] [-] lazypenguin|9 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be too worried about "getting stuck" in the code. The larger and uglier the project, the slower it is to learn the components but I've learned to embrace getting stuck. It's part of the process and once you've figured it out you know that small part of the code base a little better.
[+] [-] codingdave|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finnh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] radarsat1|9 years ago|reply
I'm more of a scientist / engineer, i.e. I work on somewhere in between writing numerical methods, simulation, control, and gluing them to more useful interfaces. I don't do UI, but I can handle it; I certainly don't do web front- or back-ends, but I know something about databases; I like statistics, but I'm not a machine learning expert, although I know how to set up and use TensorFlow; I enjoy working on low-level code, embedded and real-time systems, audio, signal processing and control and robotics. At the same time I'm willing to sacrifice some of the "hands on" stuff I like to do (working with mechanical systems) and be more of a software guy if it means I can travel and work remotely. However, short of starting my own consultancy, which I'm not sure I want to do (I have no idea about business), I don't know how to get it going. I feel forever doomed to haunt the lab/office, because I have no idea how to find freelance contracts for this sort of thing.
[+] [-] keriOJ|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fermigier|9 years ago|reply
I'm wondering how many of the people advocating working at home have children and how they deal with them.
[+] [-] Jgrubb|9 years ago|reply
Unrelated bonus - I've gone from filling up my car about once a week to about once a month, have lost 10 pounds, and went from ~$60 for lunch per week to basically $10 or so.
edit: it's a globally distributed team, so no matter what time there's folks working on something. This means that what used to be my old "coffee and HN time" in the morning before going to the office has become "go ahead and get stuff done" time. I go running mid-day. The whole schedule just gets a lot more flexible in a pretty nice way.
[+] [-] codingdave|9 years ago|reply
It actually has been great. Taking a break to talk to a child is refreshing. Being able to be a parent more than just after dinner is good for everyone involved. And they get to see what I do.
It helps if your entire company is remote - then everyone understands the balancing that happens between family and work.At my company, it is common to step away from your desk to go to a child's activity, help them with something, or just go play with your kids. And when babies cry or toddlers interrupt conference calls, people just laugh. We all understand what it is like to work remotely, and our leadership care about the work getting done, not the schedule you keep.
I will admit that it would be harder to work for the kind of place where remote worker are still expected to sit in their desks from 9-5, lurking on some always-on hangout/slack/whatever. If kids are involved, I would skip that kind of team and look for people who value full flexibility in remote work, not just in location.
[+] [-] WadeF|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|9 years ago|reply
I started working at home when my son was born (he's 25 now) ... my partner worked mornings ... what worked for us wasfor me to get up and spend the morning with my son (and later daughter) at 11 when he went down to nap I started work, my partner got home about the time he woke, I worked thru to 7 or 8ish. I arranged child care for the 1 day a week I had to go to work (50 miles away)
Later when they started pre-school and then school I continued to do the morning up and away process
This worked great for us, YMMV
[+] [-] gwbas1c|9 years ago|reply
Because I'm a bit of a night-owl, though, and daycare ends, I end up working for about 30-60 minutes with her in the room. It's a little unpredictable, but people understand.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylermac1|9 years ago|reply
I would imagine most would go to daycare during the work week (our 1 year old does on days when my wife works).
[+] [-] Bahamut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhd415|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phmagic|9 years ago|reply
I am phmagic on gmail.
[+] [-] markdog12|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blokeish|9 years ago|reply
Personally, I found GitLab's approach (also documented over at their site) more pertinent to my situation—starting with the fact that apart from remote, GitLab are also multicultural, which adds a whole other dimension.
One remark: Zapier mention they use a website called HelloSign for electronic signatures. I have checked them out, and that's a total no-go. Although they claim to comply with EU law on electronic signatures, they most definitely do not: what they offer is a “paste a PNG of your handwritten scrawl on this box” kind of service, which not only does not come within a mile of being an advanced electronic signature, as per Regulation (EU) 910/2014, but also follows the inanely dangerous precedent set by, I think, Adobe, of affixing an image in the likeness of a hand-written signature or seal to a document. This causes people to just assume that if one such image is present, the document is valid, without actually checking the signature. So, although something like that HelloSign website might be fine for private contracts, at least in the EU those “signatures” have no public effect. Just thought I should mention.
[+] [-] techno_modus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacknews|9 years ago|reply
ie what is a team? A group of people working toward a common vision/goal. So have one clearly defined.
Why are team members working at all? Because they expect some kind of reward. So ensure sure they have a stake in the success of the endeavor, even if it's only "be part of this cool project".
[+] [-] sdepablos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intro-b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bckygldstn|9 years ago|reply
I found that I was learning a lot less, as you might expect. I missed out on "casual" learning opportunities, like overhearing a new git command or having a quick chat about what a p-value means. And I no longer interacted with the salespeople, scientists, and people in other areas of the business that help broaden my knowledge. Admittedly, this might be different in a remote-first culture, we were quite an open/chatty/collaborative office.
I also made a lot of mistakes as I learnt how to be a good remote worker. It's definitely a skill that needs to be developed, and remote companies would be sensible to prefer candidates with that experience already.
So I'd recommend the pathway of working onsite for a remote-friendly company for a while, transitioning to remote, then using the experience to apply for a remote-first job. It also means you're less committed if you discover you don't enjoy remote work. I discovered I didn't enjoy remote work.
[+] [-] mohsinr|9 years ago|reply
One thing I may suggest that allowing people to get ebook without signup as it is going to help this guide get into hands of many more people and will help Zapier in many ways, more prospective clients, employees, partnerships and goodwill in general.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mmaunder|9 years ago|reply
We describe trust as a core value in our company and it goes both ways. We trust our team to do a great job, help each other when needed, be transparent, etc. They trust me and our execs to be open, honest, etc and I've gone above and beyond in that department. So I love the focus on trust in the 'running a remote team' section.
I'd also add: If you're planning on doing this as a founder/exec, expect to spend time and money dealing with different jurisdictions. Our team is mostly in the USA and for full-timers we have to file corporate taxes in every state where we have an employee. We have a team of accountants and HR folks that help us now, but it's still a lot of work and if it wasn't for my amazing co-founder, this would have been impossible to wade through.
For international domains, we have worked with or are working with people in Sweden, Greece, Paraguay and I think a few others. In general we reach out to our local law firm who connect us with counsel in those countries to figure out NDA's etc. It's not cheap.
Also had to work with local legislation in some countries that deal with workers comp type stuff and number of hours worked each week, government benefits - the list is long.
But the benefits are that we have an amazing, talented, diverse team who bring cultural influences from around the world and the USA and are able to live and work anywhere in the world they want to.
In terms of tools: VoiP is still ridiculously unreliable. I specifically include Skype and Slack in this criticism. As the team grew we discovered a secret weapon for super reliable voip calls: Teamspeak. It's AWESOME. It has push-to-talk which is great for big team meetings and you can see packet loss on a per user basis. You can also isolate yourself and your team to a single server so you're not load sharing with other teams during peak. It's been a real life saver.
Also, we don't do video. I know many remote teams do. We don't. What I love about it is that it really levels the playing field in terms of who is more charismatic on video. It also removes the distraction, frees up desktop space and reduces bandwidth usage for international team mates. When another company wants to do a hangout etc, we sometimes just tell them we don't do video and it's great. I can stand in my office staring out the window, really listening to what someone is saying, rather than having to think about whether I look good or watch them. Voice only for remote teams is awesome IMHO.
Thanks again to @WadeF and Zapier for doing this. I still find it absurd that remote work isn't the default for tech teams. One day we'll look back and wonder if perhaps lack of trust was the only reason big tech companies don't feel comfortable having everyone work remotely.