I honestly don't understand how any startup can even hope to compete if they don't offer remote options.
Hiring is incredibly tight right now, and I'm sure glad my options are "anybody within ~2 timezones" over basically only people within a 15 mile radius of my office because traffic is horrendous in my city.
Not to mention, how have companies not realized how to build robust remote company cultures over the past 2 years? My city currently has the highest hospitalization rates of any time during the pandemic, so hardly anyone is in the office anyway.
Just don't understand how any of these startup board members or VCs would be willing to invest in companies at this point that prohibit remote work.
Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.
People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. People going into remote should acknowledge this.
There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job.
While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an office (safely) in their early days. (Who knows what will happen as they grow.) Likewise, many job seekers I talk to want to be in-person and working alongside colleagues (safely) because they miss in-person interactions.
To your last point, I don't know if any angel investors in YC startups take into consideration a startups' willingness/unwillingness to be remote as a signal for whether they should invest. My guess is that there are better signals (technical founder, past experience, progress already made) that are more important deciding factors.
There seems to be a maddening amount of head in the sanding by execs/VCS etc. I work at a company that’s been fully remote for 2 years but they keep trying to target a Return to Office date that keeps getting pushed back.
Just see the reality, accept remote is going to be permanent and invest in making that better for everyone.
A company with a few people vs. a company with a lot of people are two different beasts. If things are not rigidly defined, it can be a lot more effective for people to be around each other, especially in the phase of spontaneous brainstorming or kitchen conversation or happy hour drinks. Most new companies aren’t hiring super experienced engineers to grind out a high risk venture, and maybe those are the people least affected by remote. Much harder to train or onboard someone who’s remote if you’re starting from 0.
Maturity is correlated with age, but age isn’t as strongly correlated with talent. Just because a team is just as capable working remotely doesn’t mean they’re as generally capable as a different team that’s more effective in person.
How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?
Saw a developer position recently which stated remote, but with expectation to come into the office twice a week. This would include workers from quite far away who would likely spend the day travelling, or have to spend two nights a week away from home.
This seemed very odd - why would I need to schlep my laptop to come into the office to do the same job I do at home? I mean the occasional on-site is fine, but twice a week?
My conclusion was either that they wanted to have two day-long onsite meetings a week and damn the productivity hit and travel costs (Red Flag #1) or their management was deeply insecure and had to somehow justify their existence (or a property rent payment) by dragging their dev team into the office (Red Flag #2).
I mean either commit to remote or stick to on-prem, but this made their management look like idiots.
I actually wrote a blog post about this divide of how some people really prefer to work in the office, whereas for others it's a non starter, at least after the pandemic showed to us that remote work is very feasible in this industry "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...
In the long term, i only see this divide growing, cultures forming around each of the approaches based on what works for different types of individuals. Who knows what that will look like in a few years.
Wherever you may be hospitalised people are surely a tiny minority
People may not be in the office because of the isolation policies after getting in touch with someone with the flu, which is common, as usual
Even if this number slides to 50% in a few years, we've accelerated what would have probably taken 20 years or more of transition in to just a few years. The impact on every city and region outside the historical major growth centres will be huge.
We are just in the opening phases of that change. A big %# isn't the only indicator of change, it's the amount relative to pre-pandemic.
Good point. I live in a big city (Washington DC) and I'm a huge fan of remote work. I like living in a city but that doesn't mean I want to spend hours every week shuttling back and forth to and from an office. My job went from pandemic-remote to forever-remote and I love it.
Some people will take their big city salaries and move to rural areas. More power to them. After the pandemic, I figure we can all get together once a quarter or whatever and socialize. Otherwise, we can focus on getting work done.
Meanwhile, I'm happy to see some startups trying to fix the "remote (US only)" stuff.
It could be a great business. On one hand, many great talents (including me) around the world are blocked from these opportunities (like those from India, Russia, China, etc). On the other hand, many companies would like to have great talents with lower cost, but most of them don't want to deal with the hassle.
Be interesting to know for the "remotes" how remote is remote. Some are localish remotes, some are world wide remotes, and some somewhere in-between.
One of the problems seems to be ( and I'm sure some start up will try to solve this) is employing people worldwide has a lot of legal issues with regards to local employment laws and payment issues.
I see a ton of comments from people on both sides of the issue, saying that either a) "I can't stand remote work" or b) "I'll only ever work remote from now on". This seems to imply that employees at non-remote-friendly companies will gradually leave to work at remote-friendly ones, and vice-versa.
If that's true, over time we can expect company cultures to start becoming more homogenous (and therefore more strident) in either their pro- or anti-remote work stance. It will be interesting to see what % of companies will fall into each camp.
Agree. This is what I've been saying to all my friends/coworkers. You like remote and your company doesn't? switch jobs. You like being in the office and your company went remote? Switch jobs. Problem solved... not everyone is the same and not everyone enjoys the same way of working.
There is no enough money in this world to make me go back to 2~3 hours a day commute in a crowded bus.
Are there any startups attempting to sort out the tax situation when working from different places. It would involve a lot of figuring out with governments but as things stand I think being a digital nomad is going to be done semi illegally.
I would definitely sign up and pay my fair share to the correct jurisdiction.
And not just for salaries, which can be handled with companies like Deel and Remote. For me equity is the bigger concern.
If I join a UK startup, best case scenario is paying 10% tax on the upside of any exit windfalls. If I join any company outside the UK, that immediately jumps to ~55%.
A common solution is to use employers of record, intermediary companies residing in the country you want to hire in that hire the employee for you using local contracts. Then as an employee you can travel where you want, you will work under the laws of the country your contract was written in.
I'm surprised this isn't brought up more when talking about taking companies remote. Even in the US it's a huge amount of work to set up separate legal entities across different states to deal with taxes if you want to hire remote engineers across the country.
Multi-state employment can be quite complex and a lot of startups are struggling with it. I work for a company called Insperity that completely solves this problem (full stop) by taking on full responsibility for payroll taxes and a lot of HR related compliance issues. Some of our success stories include Netflix, Trulia, Workday, Buzzfeed, Hello Fresh etc. Anyone curious about this platform that enables remote work in any state is free to drop me a line--happy to discuss. [email protected]
Its not just tax its employment law too. If you're an employee in Europe you have a lot of protection, you can't just be fired, you need to follow a lot of laws. What US startup wants to employ someone in France with those conditions?
There are co-employers like Trinet, which allow a company to piggy back off their payroll infrastructure. So you have an operational employer and an HR, pay, and benefits employer.
Seems like a problem that will eventually self correct as more jobs go remote and countries realize they have to compete with each other for residents so they can profit off of these worker's productivity.
Before COVID, offering remote was a big differentiator for startups and definitely considered a perk.
Now, it's becoming so common that I guess they should offer something new to attract talent, and I'm wondering if it could be a 4-day week? I'd be very interested by that in any case.
I get why remote work is popular, and for some tasks/jobs I think it can work well. However, I think in-person interaction is critical for breaking new ground, starting new initiatives, etc. So far, nothing replaces being in the same room hashing out ideas on the whiteboard, etc.
Remote is such an overloaded term.
Is it US/North America only?
Is it equal work for equal pay globally?
I was someone who took the opportunity to relocate back to my home country when Covid struck, but had to take a near 50% pay cut to do so, despite doing the same work. I'm surprised this hasn't become more of a hot button issue within the community.
It’s interesting how divergent opinions on attending in person is for work vs school.
At this point though the ship has sailed for the work debate. Going into the office to do zoom calls with people at home means the pros of office are mostly removed, while the cons remain.
The office-to-WFH transition was fairly seamless for most engineering folk I know (outside of the psychological impact). On the other hand, many other roles such as product management and design benefit greatly from f2f meetings and whiteboarding sessions.
As a result, while I commend the overall increase in remote work, such roles should be thought out carefully as opposed to "let's offer remote work options just because everybody else is".
Is it conceivable that the attraction of the Bay Area will steadily decline as a result? Or most people here still expect it to recover once offices are open again and life is back to normal?
I love the climate myself. But on this very forum every other day people from CA discuss things which don't exactly justify 10% of income lost. In addition to the usual RE prices, AP classes, and surge in crime anecdata I see curious facts such as these:
Remote work would make CA residents not competitive with people from saner states on CoL alone. I believe most big companies are still planning on something like 3 days onsite later this year. But historically startups have employed a lot of us too. Could the job market diverge into startups in Austin and BigCo in the SFBA?
I've been wondering if my employer will eventually need to abandon its 5-tier city cost-of-living scale. For the same exact job titles and functions, those of us living in rural areas are paid up to 12% less than people living in cities.
I agree that cities have a higher cost of living, but the people trying to pull me away from my current employer into new remote work don't seem to need to make that distinction!
> I agree that cities have a higher cost of living, but the people trying to pull me away from my current employer into new remote work don't seem to need to make that distinction!
You should move to these other employers, as this is the only way your current stingy employer will learn.
70% is surprisingly low to me. I'm currently looking for startup roles, and it's genuinely difficult to find any that don't offer remote, to the point that I'm starting to seriously consider a career change.
There are some startups I work with that are still hiring in-person only. And conversely, I've spoken with a number of candidates who are (not surprisingly) sick of remote work -- and open to relocating. That market still exists, and we'll see how it plays out in the next couple of years.
At workatastartup.com, you can filter by "Not remote" jobs, but it's probably not as intuitive as it could be. We need to revamp some of our search filters accordingly. But until we have it, feel free to email me (ryan AT ycombinator DOT com) and I'll do what I can to help you find ones that might be a good fit.
I turned on messages (and InMail) on LinkedIn 48 hours ago out of sheer morbid curiosity as to what would happen. At last count I received 124 new messages from recruiters. It's insane how thirsty they are right now.
As for the positions; I'm being offered 40-60% of my current salary, and they're in the same range below someone with the same amount experience in the industry niche I inhabit. (That's a pretty good indicator of desperation and keyword-carpet-bombing) All of them that I've opened have been remote, which is notable.
Much like the mortgage industry before 2008, recruiting is a numbers game right now and appears to be staffed by a lot of folks who have no idea what they're doing or what they're offering.
I've heard that many of those "remote" positions are nothing more than bait and switch--once you start talking to them they try to slip in that there's office time required.
Even within remote companies there are distinctions between the way different teams practice remote. For example, a lot of companies that transitioned to remote out of necessity come from the perspective of copy / pasting in-office activities online (ie meetings, happy hours, etc) whereas natively remote companies think about things from a more original and untethered view (async, writing, Looms). Be careful to spot the difference when joining a company.
I live in a smaller city in Europe where wages aren’t anywhere close to what you often see mentioned on HN, with the shift to remote, should I start considering a full-remote position? How do you find these positions? Any advice on this topic would be appreciated. (For context I have 2 YOE, mostly backend, kubernetes, aws and I currently earn around €50k a year which not a bad salary for my area)
But that 50K probably gets you healthcare, education and safe, clean functioning society? In other country you have to pay for this stuff separately since the governments/systems are dumb or corrupt. So I'd say the 50K is reasonable.
Another thing to look at is the ratio of between how much you per month after all taxes and how much 2/3 bedroom houses cost.
People with relatively little experience are some of the worst candidates for remote positions. Not saying anything about you in particular, but they tend to need more guidance and get stuck more easily. Not only that, there's a lot of learning though osmosis that won't happen when they're not near other people.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
Hiring is incredibly tight right now, and I'm sure glad my options are "anybody within ~2 timezones" over basically only people within a 15 mile radius of my office because traffic is horrendous in my city.
Not to mention, how have companies not realized how to build robust remote company cultures over the past 2 years? My city currently has the highest hospitalization rates of any time during the pandemic, so hardly anyone is in the office anyway.
Just don't understand how any of these startup board members or VCs would be willing to invest in companies at this point that prohibit remote work.
[+] [-] nostrebored|4 years ago|reply
People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.
Engineering is one segment where this penalty seems to be lower. However, engineers seem to be unable to understand that every other function functions better in person.
The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity. People going into remote should acknowledge this.
[+] [-] ryankicks|4 years ago|reply
There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job.
While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an office (safely) in their early days. (Who knows what will happen as they grow.) Likewise, many job seekers I talk to want to be in-person and working alongside colleagues (safely) because they miss in-person interactions.
To your last point, I don't know if any angel investors in YC startups take into consideration a startups' willingness/unwillingness to be remote as a signal for whether they should invest. My guess is that there are better signals (technical founder, past experience, progress already made) that are more important deciding factors.
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
Just see the reality, accept remote is going to be permanent and invest in making that better for everyone.
[+] [-] engmgrmgr|4 years ago|reply
Maturity is correlated with age, but age isn’t as strongly correlated with talent. Just because a team is just as capable working remotely doesn’t mean they’re as generally capable as a different team that’s more effective in person.
How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?
[+] [-] danjac|4 years ago|reply
This seemed very odd - why would I need to schlep my laptop to come into the office to do the same job I do at home? I mean the occasional on-site is fine, but twice a week?
My conclusion was either that they wanted to have two day-long onsite meetings a week and damn the productivity hit and travel costs (Red Flag #1) or their management was deeply insecure and had to somehow justify their existence (or a property rent payment) by dragging their dev team into the office (Red Flag #2).
I mean either commit to remote or stick to on-prem, but this made their management look like idiots.
[+] [-] KronisLV|4 years ago|reply
In the long term, i only see this divide growing, cultures forming around each of the approaches based on what works for different types of individuals. Who knows what that will look like in a few years.
[+] [-] jollofricepeas|4 years ago|reply
- PayPal wants their people in Austin.
- Amazon wants their people at one of the hubs.
- What other large firms are telling applicants they have to reside in a particular city or close to a hub?
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmacd|4 years ago|reply
We are just in the opening phases of that change. A big %# isn't the only indicator of change, it's the amount relative to pre-pandemic.
[+] [-] Breza|4 years ago|reply
Some people will take their big city salaries and move to rural areas. More power to them. After the pandemic, I figure we can all get together once a quarter or whatever and socialize. Otherwise, we can focus on getting work done.
[+] [-] namelosw|4 years ago|reply
It could be a great business. On one hand, many great talents (including me) around the world are blocked from these opportunities (like those from India, Russia, China, etc). On the other hand, many companies would like to have great talents with lower cost, but most of them don't want to deal with the hassle.
[+] [-] keithnz|4 years ago|reply
One of the problems seems to be ( and I'm sure some start up will try to solve this) is employing people worldwide has a lot of legal issues with regards to local employment laws and payment issues.
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|4 years ago|reply
If that's true, over time we can expect company cultures to start becoming more homogenous (and therefore more strident) in either their pro- or anti-remote work stance. It will be interesting to see what % of companies will fall into each camp.
[+] [-] midrus|4 years ago|reply
There is no enough money in this world to make me go back to 2~3 hours a day commute in a crowded bus.
[+] [-] nso95|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|4 years ago|reply
I would definitely sign up and pay my fair share to the correct jurisdiction.
[+] [-] andrewingram|4 years ago|reply
If I join a UK startup, best case scenario is paying 10% tax on the upside of any exit windfalls. If I join any company outside the UK, that immediately jumps to ~55%.
[+] [-] pietrovismara|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CSMastermind|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Insperity|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zachthewf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rr808|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PebblesRox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drstewart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply
Seems like a problem that will eventually self correct as more jobs go remote and countries realize they have to compete with each other for residents so they can profit off of these worker's productivity.
[+] [-] endisneigh|4 years ago|reply
Let's see how this looks 2 years after the pandemic is over.
[+] [-] aweb|4 years ago|reply
Before COVID, offering remote was a big differentiator for startups and definitely considered a perk.
Now, it's becoming so common that I guess they should offer something new to attract talent, and I'm wondering if it could be a 4-day week? I'd be very interested by that in any case.
[+] [-] anonporridge|4 years ago|reply
Now start offering more part time roles.
[+] [-] avidphantasm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flog|4 years ago|reply
I was someone who took the opportunity to relocate back to my home country when Covid struck, but had to take a near 50% pay cut to do so, despite doing the same work. I'm surprised this hasn't become more of a hot button issue within the community.
[+] [-] mint2|4 years ago|reply
At this point though the ship has sailed for the work debate. Going into the office to do zoom calls with people at home means the pros of office are mostly removed, while the cons remain.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
It would be as if companies worked remotely by putting everyone on Zoom calls all day. Education in general refuses to move beyond the damn lecture.
[+] [-] mrintellectual|4 years ago|reply
As a result, while I commend the overall increase in remote work, such roles should be thought out carefully as opposed to "let's offer remote work options just because everybody else is".
[+] [-] 62951413|4 years ago|reply
I love the climate myself. But on this very forum every other day people from CA discuss things which don't exactly justify 10% of income lost. In addition to the usual RE prices, AP classes, and surge in crime anecdata I see curious facts such as these:
* https://www.meritechcapital.com/blog/2021-review-select-saas... ("Company Headquarters" in particular)
* https://www.saastr.com/the-third-wave-of-migration-from-the-...
Remote work would make CA residents not competitive with people from saner states on CoL alone. I believe most big companies are still planning on something like 3 days onsite later this year. But historically startups have employed a lot of us too. Could the job market diverge into startups in Austin and BigCo in the SFBA?
[+] [-] digitalsushi|4 years ago|reply
I agree that cities have a higher cost of living, but the people trying to pull me away from my current employer into new remote work don't seem to need to make that distinction!
[+] [-] warkdarrior|4 years ago|reply
You should move to these other employers, as this is the only way your current stingy employer will learn.
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francisofascii|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digbert|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryankicks|4 years ago|reply
At workatastartup.com, you can filter by "Not remote" jobs, but it's probably not as intuitive as it could be. We need to revamp some of our search filters accordingly. But until we have it, feel free to email me (ryan AT ycombinator DOT com) and I'll do what I can to help you find ones that might be a good fit.
[+] [-] andrew_|4 years ago|reply
As for the positions; I'm being offered 40-60% of my current salary, and they're in the same range below someone with the same amount experience in the industry niche I inhabit. (That's a pretty good indicator of desperation and keyword-carpet-bombing) All of them that I've opened have been remote, which is notable.
Much like the mortgage industry before 2008, recruiting is a numbers game right now and appears to be staffed by a lot of folks who have no idea what they're doing or what they're offering.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
I felt overwhelmed processing with my 5 a day, haha.
[+] [-] nathanaldensr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zuhayeer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cwizard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YetAnotherNick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BatteryMountain|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dehrmann|4 years ago|reply
People with relatively little experience are some of the worst candidates for remote positions. Not saying anything about you in particular, but they tend to need more guidance and get stuck more easily. Not only that, there's a lot of learning though osmosis that won't happen when they're not near other people.