Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts

https://www.shinkim.io/posts/shift-to-remote-work-based-on-7-000-hacker-news-job-posts

by shinkim0914 • 5 years ago

191 79 5 years ago

brdd• 5 years ago

During a pandemic, the only roles that you can hire for are ones that are remote (by definition, more or less). So this is not really charting a "shift". The question is, post-pandemic, will new roles continue to be permanent remote or will they gravitate back towards office roles?

As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

In the data, I've seen companies marking jobs that are remote only during the pandemic as "onsite", "COVID remote", "remote until COVID is over". I've classified those type of posts as NOT remote in this analysis. For example, I'd assume if you are a NYC based company, and want everyone to be onsite after the pandemic, you wouldn't hire someone from Alaska without sharing the onsite expectation upfront (i.e. marking your job post as "onsite").

skeeter2020• 5 years ago

That's not what the GP is saying though. You won't even bother posting to fill a job that can't e done remote, so you need to consider the volume of postings as well as the composition.

pieterhg• 5 years ago

"A recent IBM survey found that 61% of workers want to continue working from home permanently even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over." https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-r...

Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same.

I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open

eli• 5 years ago

That's funny coming from IBM

https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)

Rapzid• 5 years ago

Friend works in finance at a major alcohol/wine company not too far from SF(I'm guessing people can guess). Said prior to the pandemic there was no way they would have hired full time remote workers for their department. Now, they have no plans to go back after the pandemic due to how it has worked out and the fact they can get talent from all over the country and from cheaper COL areas.

austincheney• 5 years ago

From looking at various HN comments working from home is appealing due to only one factor: personality. It appears economics, commute, child care issues, martial status, and other personal indicators are largely irrelevant. People that can handle being away from social interactions appear to love working from home while people who need social interaction do not regardless of whether all other personal indicators are stressors.

wobbly_bush• 5 years ago

Or perhaps those are the most vocal people. The other people might just be trying to wait things out instead of being particularly vocal about it.

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

It seems like a lot of people try to boil this down to one thing, but I don't think there is a dominant reason for wanting to WFH.

I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.

parentheses2• 5 years ago

HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is still correct

parentheses2• 5 years ago

HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is likely correct

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

I agree that the directional trend is more important than absolute numbers. Though I will say there are a fair number of traditional employers hiring on HN (e.g. Disney, NASA, Oracle, USDS).

11thEarlOfMar• 5 years ago

Very interesting take.

Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

Indeed! :)

stakkur• 5 years ago

This would seem to be a lagging indicator, not a predictor.

offtop55• 5 years ago

I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years.

I definitely could see the government creating incentives to get people back to work. The big issue of people no longer commuting, is millions of people working auxiliary industries which are getting screwed right now. The guy who works at the cafe next to your office, the landlords who own buildings, even car mechanics.

I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.

izacus2• 5 years ago

I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years.

As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.

There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.

offtop55• 5 years ago

Okay, cheaper American city !

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.

Why not make your laws more friendly?

zinckiwi• 5 years ago

PEOs make this... well, not easy, but certainly less onerous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organiza...

rhacker2• 5 years ago

We need to convert the "ice-cream trucks" of my youth into drive by coffee shops... lol - except without the music, more like an app saying they're coming. Free business idea if anyone is listening. Put your order in on the phone.

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

Yes! Drive-by Blue Bottle coffee trucks please!!

sensitive-ears• 5 years ago

We already have that where I live. It's an espresso machine in a van, they drive by offices in the morning and then stop and parks and other communal spots during lunch

DonHopkins2• 5 years ago

I just wish they'd bring back milk delivery, like in the old days, but 24/7.

I ran out of cream for my coffee at 3AM in Amsterdam. But of course there's a 24/7 nitrous oxide delivery company in Amsterdam:

https://amsterdamlachgas.com/

I'm not a customer, but I would only consider it if they'd actually deliver fresh cream without any nitrous oxide at 3AM, to keep up the pretense that the N2O was actually intended for making late-night whipped cream.

But no, they brashly deliver incriminating accessories like balloons and "Slagroomspuit" dispensers. But no cream! Fuck that.

https://amsterdamlachgas.com/lachgas-toebehoren/

Somebody should start a 24/7 milk and cream delivery service. DeliverMOO!

I think you could make a killing delivering 24/7 fresh milk, cream, and dairy accessories like breakfast cereal and chocolate mix.

prawn• 5 years ago

There are coffee vans in Australia that park in school carparks (for parents to grab a coffee after drop-off, or teachers to get one on their way in) or near popular beach spots or tour through office areas at specific times.

Sophistifunk2• 5 years ago

This is everywhere in Australia. Coffee-and-sausage-roll carts towed behind an SUV from office to office in areas where somebody's stuck a bunch of office buildings in the burbs rather than the CBD.

krallistic• 5 years ago

Keep the music - excellent branding.

onion2k• 5 years ago

I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.

I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me.

In my experience, mentoring junior devs and new hires on my projects is much harder for everyone involved when you're not in the same office. Sometimes you're lucky and get someone who'll speak up and ask questions when they get stuck, but often (especially with juniors) people will just try to figure things out on their own in order to not look bad at their job or incompetent or something. Some devs would rather spend a whole day on a problem and only bring it up in the following day's stand up than show they can't solve it alone. That is really bad for a project. I find I have to poke the quieter juniors regularly on Slack just to make sure they're OK, but then people get annoyed about being micromanaged. This is something I really want to solve...

whatshisface• 5 years ago

Maybe you should publicly commend the vocal juniors so that the rest can learn from their example. Say something like, "Jim Halpert realized that it would be a good idea to collaborate with me on the A4 project, and together we finished it far ahead of schedule." Phrase it so it ascribes agency to the junior, focusing on how they (with agency) decided to use the resources they had appropriately.

alexashka• 5 years ago

Sounds like you're doing a fine job.

One thing you can do is let people flounder and fail on irrelevant small tasks for a week or two early, to help them learn the lesson that they don't know what they're doing.

The best way to make someone appreciate guidance, is to have them fall on their face, receive guidance and notice the difference.

One suggestion I had was, if you're stuck for more than 30 minutes, ping me. Juniors will almost always be stuck with something trivial you can answer within a few minutes. It gives you a break and it is something they really appreciate. If you communicate to them that they're not expected to know anything and that the first few years on the job is their real world education and a chance to ask questions without raising eyebrows, they'll be far more likely to do it.

Juniors are nice in my experience, you can mold them into something half-decent if they've got a bit of a brain and their mistakes are ones of innocence, not cunning or apathy. It's the 'senior' devs who don't know shit that you have to put up with that's almost always a disaster. They'll be well versed in lying and politics, wasting everybody's time.

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

I've also noticed in the job post data that remote-mature companies prefer employees with remote work experience. I'm guessing it's partially due to this problem of difficulty of getting juniors up to speed remotely.

alwaysdoit• 5 years ago

Pairing maybe?

amwelles• 5 years ago

I got over this by having teammates who regularly asked for help in Slack. Suddenly, it felt very acceptable for me to do so. Our #dev channel is full of my coworkers and me asking and answering questions for everybody to see that we all need a nudge in the right direction from time to time. I think when that stuff gets hashed out in DMs or in other less public places, the new devs don’t realize it’s happening.

FpUser• 5 years ago

"I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me."

Exactly the same here for exactly 20 years. I make my own products and make products for other companies as consultant.

No real problems when I need to hire subcontractor though. Being an old fart I know many very experienced people who would never pass an opportunity to make some dosh.

monkeycantype• 5 years ago

My Dad, still programming at 72, was one of the first people I know of to work as a remote developer. From about 1982 We lived on a remote-ish farm in Australia and out in the shed we had an IBM mainframe with a bunch of terminals and PCs on makeshift tables made from doors resting on filing cabinets. A couple of times a year some of his colleagues from the UK would fly out from the UK with a bag of tapes of source code, they would spend the next month merging their code and planning the next few months work.

wikibob• 5 years ago

Check out Puerto Rico.

Only jurisdiction in the entire world where an American tax subject can go and pay ZERO federal income tax.

dagmx• 5 years ago

Plus you get free presidential delivered toilet paper.

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

The best thing we did was bite the bullet and stop hiring remote folks using some CoL metric invented by HR.

The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.

shinkim091410• 5 years ago

To clarify, your company didn't stop hiring remote, it just stopped making a cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates? Did management also increase salary for existing employees who lived in ow CoL areas?

908B64B1974• 5 years ago

We stopped making cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates.

Wasn't a company-wide move however.

LockAndLol2• 5 years ago

Did the salaries drop or rise?

dang• 5 years ago

A related ongoing thread that was pretty good earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397

azhenley• 5 years ago

Are the FAANG companies hiring for remote positions though? I've been told they are remote currently, but as soon as they say it is "safe" then you have to show up to the office.

fakedang• 5 years ago

Maybe that might become a plus point against them when smaller companies want to hire good talent.

abinaya_rl2• 5 years ago

This is really nice. I've been hand-curating Remote jobs from Hackernews for a while. It's carefully curated by hard and tagged properly, everything listed on the page is 100% remote jobs. I was also planned on writing a report to see how remote jobs % is increased over the period of time and what tech trend is growing. But not finding time. This is an interesting report. If would like the data, I'm happy to share the last 12 months of data. Feel free to ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl)

greatgoat4202• 5 years ago

My sister/brother if you have a nice high quality hand tagged consistent data set, do a show HN and get every data scientist a chance at your data. That is 99% of the struggle.

jader201• 5 years ago

And/or drop it at http://kaggle.com/datasets for others to do analysis/visualizations on.

Disclosure: I work there.

dheera• 5 years ago

Let's still remember that "Who Is Hiring" posts are a very small fraction of jobs in the world and the vast majority of jobs in the world cannot possibly be remote.

I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't.

That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.

cccc4all• 5 years ago

Remote has been an option for many people in tech, even before the covid situation. Most people regularly took work from home days or had regularly scheduled work from home days, at least once or twice a week. Some people spent months in remote situations, working from second homes during ski season or vacation spots.

But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business.

Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities.

Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote.

This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.

Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts

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