70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/remote-work-y-combinator/

by one-possibility • 5 years ago

285 322 5 years ago

news.crunchbase.com

anonporridge4• 5 years ago

Cool.

Now start offering more part time roles.

echelon3• 5 years ago

- Live and move anywhere.

- Set your own hours.

- Four day work weeks.

- Part time roles.

- Work for both FANGMA and a startup [1]

- Sabbaticals.

[1] (Startup could be flexible so there's no overlap in meetings/oncall. Also makes it super easy to switch jobs while still getting paid from one of the two roles.)

askonomm5• 5 years ago

I just realized how spoiled us dev folk are. If only my grandmother would know the cushy life I get to live while still complaining about it she would slap me.

shagie3• 5 years ago

Live and work anywhere has tax code challenges - especially when that expands beyond the country that someone is in.

I've mentioned part time roles in another comment and really don't see that being feasible.

Working for two companies simultaneously gets into some tricky IP and non-compete situations (that are even enforceable in California - see Techno Lite, Inc. v. Emcod, LLC).

cmauniada• 5 years ago

This is next, I’d love this.

I’m currently in a weird position. My job pays for a full time salary but with less than part time work.

I’m not sure if I should pick up another full time job with full time work or a part time job with part time work.

shagie3• 5 years ago

For a developer role, I have difficulty seeing how part time is economical.

An article from 2019: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/720122267

GARCIA: The occupation with the single biggest part-time penalty is web developer. Wages for part-time web developers are 49.5% less than wages for full-time web developers. And that is our PLANET MONEY indicator - part-time web developers make only about half as much per hour as full-time web developers.

So if a FTE is making $100/h and working 40h/w, a part time developer is making $50/h and working 20h/w... though those are just numbers that I made up. They will vary.

The issue for the organization is that as a developer, part time makes a complete hash of the maker schedule when combined with actually having meetings.

I've been able to get my managers to try to schedule meetings clustered together so that I have chunks of time where I can work each day. But if I was part time - either fewer days per week or fewer hours per day, that would in turn translate to smaller maker time blocks or maker time blocks that were separated from each other by more than a day.

I see this with part time interns - where the ones work work each day are much more efficient at what they're doing than the ones that come in twice a week and have to get back into the grove of what they were working on and that takes a significant part of the time of when they get back in for that day.

ahelwer• 5 years ago

Part-time is much more difficult to find and much less lucrative than full-time consulting part of the time.

The big leap is you have to give up the perceived stability of your monthly paycheck. You are unemployed and unpaid by default. The easiest way to deal with this is to keep 6-12 months’ worth of living expenses in cash. You can tune your risk this way; less cash, more risk.

rr8083• 5 years ago

I love the idea of part time but realistically you have to spend loads of time outside regular hours just to keep up to date.

azemetre• 5 years ago

I have a hard time believing this for most software roles (which is just basic web development, scaling issues aside).

I can easily envision myself working part time on a react application or creating a spring app. Not exactly ground breaking stuff here.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

70% Of Startups Offer Remote Work during Pandemic, YC data shows.

Let's see how this looks 2 years after the pandemic is over.

xwdv3• 5 years ago

90% I predict. There is little to no advantage of having an in-office work force for tech startups unless physical presence is necessary for the job. Managers can crow all they want about wanting to see asses in chairs but the data does not support it.

donohoe• 5 years ago

What data?

dag112• 5 years ago

Myself and many people I know can't stand permanent WFH and specifically seek jobs with offices.

passivate3• 5 years ago

How did you predict that number?

kecupochren• 5 years ago

!remindme 8 years lol

btheshoe• 5 years ago

That's an optimistic timeline

snicker73• 5 years ago

The pandemic will never be over.

midrus5• 5 years ago

I don't know about other industries/professions, but... for developers? Not gonna happen. The demand for our skill is incredibly high, we're in a power position and as long as it is that way, pandemic or not, we can choose. And I know many people that, as me, would rather take a pay cut than go back to an office every day.

Salaries might at some point stabilize I suppose, as people will prefer to relocate to cheap places and overall there will be more offer of developers charging less money.

Overall I think this is a win-win for everyone (except middle managers that like micromanagement, those are the ones worried right now).

adamnemecek• 5 years ago

I wonder if this will last after the pandemic is over. If if ever ends.

exdsq• 5 years ago

Access to the global talent pool and no costs on offices? Sounds pretty good to me!

echelon3• 5 years ago

Access to the global talent pool

Great for companies. Great for non-Americans. Not so great for Americans earning high wages.

This is what happened to our manufacturing sector, and it's absolutely gunning for our knowledge work. It's inevitable.

tibbar• 5 years ago

One of the side effects of the pandemic is that there is now a global remote-first tech workforce. Working remotely is a skill that companies might not have wanted to gamble on their people learning, but now everyone has this skill. There's momentum in this direction now and changing it would actually require increased costs for many companies - more office space, fewer employees in low-cost areas, etc.

jrockway• 5 years ago

I like remote work and all, but to be completely honest, I'm not sure we've figured it out yet. All that we've gotten is forced equality; we aren't bringing in remote workers as second class citizens relative to the people that work in the office. That's a good start, and probably a necessary step on the way towards a "tipping point". But people don't have the same rapport that they do in person, decisions are tedious and contentious, and knowledge sharing is harder. We still have much to figure out, and it will be easy for someone to say "figuring it out isn't for us".

paxys2• 5 years ago

I'd say the pandemic only accelerated the trend which was already in place. My company is headquartered in the Bay Area and the majority of the staff live here, but over the last ~4 years the bulk of our engineering hiring (I'd say over 80%) has been in other offices.

altdataseller• 5 years ago

I'm surprised this is not 100%. 70% sounds pessimistic for remote work, tbh.

xwdv3• 5 years ago

Few years ago it was less than 20%.

drstewart• 5 years ago

I know most people will love this, but it's made it newly impossible to find jobs that will sponsor visas for those of us that want to move abroad

anonporridge4• 5 years ago

Looks like there's plenty of countries that offer remote work visas. https://www.letsdeel.com/blog/remote-work-visas

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.

lbrito• 5 years ago

Looks like there's plenty of countries that offer remote work visas

Not really; the selection of countries is very small and the visas very restrictive/bureaucratic. It's essentially a non-option for most people. Regular work visas are still the way to go unfortunately.

"Nomad visas" are essentially a rainbow-and-unicorn thing; we (developers) really want it to exist but it doesn't (at least in the way we'd like).

mFixman• 5 years ago

The entire point of moving abroad is the possibility to immigrate permanently to a better country, not to have a working holiday in the Caribbean.

rowanajmarshall3• 4 years ago

That list claims the Australian Working Holiday Visa is (quoted from article: "designed to allow digital nomads to spend a year in the country with the ability to apply for an extension". It's definitely not designed for digital nomads, it's designed for backpackers doing short stints of casual work, especially in fields like agriculture, mining, and construction [1]. Hell, to get the extension you need to work for 3 months in the above fields. And getting it that wrong puts the rest of the list into doubt.

[1] Full list here: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/whm-program/speci...

keithnz2• 5 years ago

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.

askonomm5• 5 years ago

I think a common solution to this is that if you want to be a remote worker with a worldwide employment pool, you need to set-up an entity from under which to invoice, whether that would be freelancing or having an LLC, and then you take care of your taxes, healthcare, and so on yourself. At least this is how I know everyone (myself included) do it. It's not really complicated, you just need to hire an accountant, and company formation usually is also not expensive.

TacticalCoder• 5 years ago

This. I've billed, from Belgium, clients in both the US and Switzerland. Had zero problem receiving payments.

learc834• 5 years ago

The more common this becomes the more likely people in the US (where most people are trying to work) take notice and enforce existing labor laws, and push for more regulation.

I’ve worked with people doing this in the past and they almost certainly are contractors in name only. That is they are essentially full time employees operating as contractors to skirt legal issues.

jono_wilson• 5 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure it can vary widely; we try to stick with US timezones, which at least brings all of South America into play. Deel is really great for the legal issues of onboarding international folks.

ThalesX• 5 years ago

Not affiliated but onboarded with Deel and it was truly a breeze... on the contractor side.

frfl• 5 years ago

There's companies that specialize in global employment*, either by being employers of record in the employee's country and managing all that means, letting the actual company that wants to hire the employee not worry about that. Some similarly assist with contract positions in such situations

letsdeel.com and remote.com are two such companies that provide this kind of service.

* well I should actually call it global HR, not employment.

pm902• 5 years ago

It isn’t that difficult to sort out issues wrt to employment laws. The bigger issues are probably due to data sharing/privacy concerns, threat of legal action by local Governments and problems with teams working in very different time zones.

mstibbard2• 5 years ago

I think most "remotes" are within time zone-proximity.

The employment regulation burden is also massive for going truly global-remote.

Australia and NZ for example have strong employment laws AND do not overlap time zone-wise with most of the rest of the world. We have some great talent here but it's often too hard to make it work.

Disclaimer: I made https://rafo.com.au to collate remote jobs that work for Aussies & Kiwis.

bin_bash2• 5 years ago

it's also hard to work with people across hemispheres because of daylight saving time. I'm used to the hour difference I have with people I work with in Europe but I have no idea how many hours I'm separated from Australians because it changes 4 times through the year.

ryankicks3• 5 years ago

Ryan here from YC.

There are certainly companies looking for talent that is only time-zone friendly. Having run an engineering team co-located in SF & Beijing, I know how hard it is myself to be working odd hours for standups, product syncs, etc.

That said, there are other companies that are hiring truly global. I know OneSignal is one such YC startup, having hired somebody during the pandemic in the Netherlands.

Last year alone, YC startups hired across over 40 countries. I can dig into more data re: how many were US-based companies hiring abroad -- that's a good distinction.

pleb_nz2• 5 years ago

Nice site and awesome work. Going to have a better read of what's available later on for someone here in NZ.

aunty_helen2• 5 years ago

I dunno bro, contactors generally dodge the employment law issues. That's why a contractor charges out at 110 an hour whilst an employee would be happy with 50.

As someone who prepandemic was contracting back to nz whilst living in south america and now is starting to hire contractors, NZ and OZ don't represent good value spend in comparison to many other countries that have great people also but are getting paid 5 instead.

I have friends back home I would love to bring on to my team but the thought of paying them gives me shivvers.

xtracto2• 5 years ago

Payment in remote countries is a solved issue, by the likes of GlobalizationPartners or via.work

I've been working for US companies while living in Mexico for years. 100% legally hired in my country, with all the benefits and even equity from the USA startups

colordrops4• 5 years ago

Startups are going to either need to start paying a lot more or giving more serious equity stakes if they want to hire anyone who isn't straight out of college or already wealthy.

echelon3• 5 years ago

Those aren't the only levers.

Imagine a three day work week. Or part time work, letting you also maintain your FANGA job.

colordrops4• 5 years ago

Sure, I'm referring to recruiting FTEs. I'd be surprised if a startup offered a 3 day work week at the same or even for less comp. Perhaps for specialist skills.

anonporridge4• 5 years ago

You'd get access to a fairly large pool of the "almost wealthy" who have enough wealth saved and invested that it will grow to a nice sum over the decades, but still need some income to avoid touching it over that period.

i.e. those in leanFIRE, baristaFIRE, or coastFIRE positions.

vanilla_nut• 5 years ago

Or a homework-style schedule: show up to meetings Tuesday/Thursday, no required working hours the rest of the time. Work when you want, just be productive.

650REDHAIR• 5 years ago

Yeah, I don't ever see a FANGA company letting you work at a startup while a FT employee.

71a54xd2• 5 years ago

It's surprisingly hard to consistently find startups willing to pay over $140k - some offers are low key insulting. However, if I cared less about having any semblance of a social life I'd leave new york immediately. $200k+ full remote, I'd never go back.

randmeerkat• 5 years ago

They exist, just look at https://www.workatastartup.com and ask what the salary band is if it isn’t posted.

smt883• 5 years ago

It's funny you mention staying in New York to have a social life. I found it to be the worst place I've lived in the US for socializing. People are mistrustful of strangers, extremely busy, and often separated by absurd travel times (it can easily take 20 min to travel 1 mile without a car).

For those reasons, I wasn't able to make new friends outside of work, couldn't see my friends on weekdays, and generally felt lonely all the time.

cipheredStones• 5 years ago

FWIW, as a BE engineer with ~3 YOE, I recently got three full-remote startup offers between $200-210k. These were from companies based on the West Coast, though, so I'm not sure whether or not that's relevant to you. (I wasn't looking at stuff based out east, for time zone reasons.)

andy_ppp4• 5 years ago

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.

zachthewf• 5 years ago

For international, Deel does this from the employer's side and https://rebase.co/ does it on the employee's side.

PebblesRox• 5 years ago

I just heard of Mosey, though I think they are focused on different states within the US (at least at first). https://mosey.so/

pietrovismara2• 5 years ago

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.

CSMastermind• 5 years ago

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.

MattGaiser8• 5 years ago

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.

andrewingram2• 5 years ago

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%.

andy_ppp4• 5 years ago

Nobody is going to do that are they, it's insane for tax jurisdictions to want to do this they are just doing themselves out of 10% rather than winning 55%.

nivenkos• 5 years ago

Yeah, in Sweden it's about 60% (56% taxed as income, plus capital gains tax on the difference if the value goes up).

rr8083• 5 years ago

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?

Insperity• 5 years ago

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. zac.mutrux@insperity.com

livinglist• 5 years ago

I’m more curious about changes to state taxes laws in the future in response to the rise of remote positions. I know quite some people who live in low CoL states but get the same salary as those in high CoL states like Cali or NY

zuhayeer2• 5 years ago

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.

woodpanel• 5 years ago

Please, would love to hear more about your point about "(async, writing, Looms)" :-)

I'd just had the pleasure to work at a unicorn which started during the pandemic, but for whatever reason wanted to open actual offices mid-term. The result being that some teams were working more async-y than others.

And I immediatly felt, there's a need to explore how to sync teams in an async way, including many yet-to-exist tech-solutions.

So please, elaborate!

zuhayeer2• 5 years ago

The GitLab Handbook is a great start. They have an awesome guide to remote work: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

Strong written communication is a given, but they have some good advice here: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/effectiv...

If you aren't familiar, Loom (https://www.loom.com/) is a great tool for screen recordings and narrations to explain things asynchronously without having to book time with someone else. Particularly useful if you have a distributed team across the world. And also neat that it can be indexed like a document if someone has a similar query in the future, they can find this video instead of having to message you.

jmacd• 5 years ago

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.

Breza• 4 years ago

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.

flog2• 5 years ago

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.

sanderjd5• 5 years ago

I don't think it is an overloaded term... It just means that there is no office you are expected to go into. Those things you identified are just other dimensions that are also important.

flog2• 5 years ago

I guess what I was hinting at was the difficulty in filtering "remote" roles

r00fus• 5 years ago

Timezone and management capabilities of your organization could have been an issue in why the pay was so different.

Especially for startups, managing payroll in another country could be challenging. Also the latency on communications for daylight working hours could be bad - back and forth discussions leading to swift actions are hamper by a 9+hr timezone difference.

vultour• 5 years ago

They don't need to manage payroll in another country. Everybody working overseas does so as a contractor which means it's just another expense for the employer.

chrischen2• 5 years ago

Equal pay globally would mean less pay for Silicon Valley tech workers and more pay for Chinese/Indian/Eastern European devs.

kortilla7• 5 years ago

Unlikely for Chinese devs, most of them don’t speak English. Definitely more common in India/Eastern Europe.

Salgat3• 5 years ago

It's so much easier to just hire someone in the same country. No visa/sponsorship, no timezone worries, no language/culture barriers. It's just so much easier.

xtracto2• 5 years ago

I work (from Mexico) with people in the US, which has 4 time zones for mainland. My time zone lands in CT, Which is convenient both for ET and PT. I didn't require a sponsorship and I am able to communicate pretty well with my American peers.

And I'm between 50% and 70% cheaper than hiring someone in the US at the same level (PhD, 10+ years of industry experience, Executive level experience, startup experience, highly technical , etc etc).

And I know several people with a profile similar to mine.

Companies that discover this are getting an "unfair advantage "

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

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.

pm902• 5 years ago

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.

passivate3• 5 years ago

I think organizations should be free to shape their own culture, and candidates can chose where they wish to work as well. Maybe the remote/in-person ratio will skew towards remote in the future, but there is no need to deny others' preferences as well. Remote work isn't a "right". There isn't one way of doing things that works in every situation in every industry in every country/culture. People are different, some are more social, some are less, etc, etc. Personally, I enjoy working with others, I love the little personal interactions in the hallway especially with people who I don't regularly work with, and it furthers bonding in our organization. But we're a vaccine company so there is literally no way for us to be remote anyway.

d3nj4l2• 5 years ago

    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.

Likewise, and it's maddening, because I don't have any sense of long term stability to invest in my home as I'll have to move if the Return to Office actually happens.

odiroot• 5 years ago

I guess most execs/VCs are the kind of people who spent most of their career at "McKinseys" of this world, and this all they know. They want to return to their comfortable baseline.

nostrebored4• 5 years ago

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.

arrakis2021• 5 years ago

This. As someone who works remotely and loves it, I’ve observed this on HN for years. It’s like engineers can’t (or won’t?) acknowledge that other roles in an organization go beyond staring at lines of code on a computer screen.

Hell, even product managers I know like coming in to an office to collaborate on the big whiteboard wall they can’t fit inside their home.

cardosof• 5 years ago

While I agree with your comments and find them very true, it must be said that widening the talent pool means hiring high skilled professionals for the same or less money. The remote penalty can be offset by a stronger team in a cost effective way.

tikhonj3• 5 years ago

People keep on saying this but it's just not obviously true.

People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.

Companies do so many suboptimal things that this argument isn't credible. We've seen how many organizations can barely limp through a "digital transformation", so why should we expect them to be operating anywhere near optimally along other axes? They could just as easily be paying for office space because of tradition or internal momentum, because it confers status or because it gives executives a feeling of control. (This isn't even speculation: I've actually heard executives say that they want people back in the office to keep an eye on them and make sure they're working hard.)

It's not that engineers "don't understand" that "every other function functions better in person", it's that they disagree—with a pretty reasonable basis at that. Companies pushed open offices on the back of the same kind of baseless assumptions contravening both research and individuals' direct experience, and the push to return everyone to the office isn't any different or better-supported.

MattGaiser8• 5 years ago

Companies do all manner of things because "that's how they have always been done."

ClumsyPilot• 5 years ago

"People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason."

Ah yes, the magical world where office politics and power dynamics does not exist.

Back in the real world at a certain corp I am closely familiar with there are 3 redundant projects that do the exact same thing and it takes 2 months for a new joiner to be issued with their work computer, and two more to get an admin account so they can start development.

thatfrenchguy• 5 years ago

There’s also the mechanical money aspect behind it, if you pay bay area money to someone who lives in Idaho Falls, at some point they’ll be like “well my house is paid off my retirement money is full and life costs nothing here and I already live here, why would I work here 60 hours a week when I could enjoy life?”. Doesn’t happen the same with your bay area employees.

mavelikara• 5 years ago

Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.

Yet, VC investments and returns soared in the last two years they were all working remote.

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.

Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments in typical tech companies have had a sizeable fraction of their employees located outside the office for some time now, long before Engineering.

Office work aids productivity of some functions. There is no good reason, IMO, to make sweeping universal statement about productivity.

cm20123• 5 years ago

Marketing works better remote, and most agencies will be remote moving forward forever.

Source: I know many agency owners, also am one. Also, most marketers I've been trying to recruit have said their agency's are remote indefinitely now.

runevault• 5 years ago

My employer believed as you are claiming, and so we had office space. I had to fight tooth and nail to keep my work from home part time schedule pre-pandemic because they were so obsessed with people being in the office. Then the pandemic hit and they saw no discernable loss in productivity. They no longer require people to come in and in fact we expanded our hiring to allow remote workers because there was 0 reason not to.

zebraflask• 5 years ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test.

For a basic non-engineering example, think about B2B sales. How much of a typical B2B sales cycle involves phone calls and emails and video meetings versus how much involves in-person meetings? Hasn't the first part of that more or less been "remote" since well before the virus?

To an extent, I think a large part of this view, as other comments have noted, might involve things like expensive office leases, etc., and to a certain mindset - realizing that a company doesn't necessarily need much of a physical presence highlights many varieties of poor longterm decision-making.

mbesto2• 5 years ago

Because everyone who seriously invests money in businesses

You're right, so let's follow the money...

I regularly work with investors who acquire businesses (AUMs are typically ~$1B, I guess that is serious enough?).

knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company.

- I don't know a single one who deliberately has said "there is a performance hit if they are remote, we should switch to in office to increase performance".

- I know of no industry study that is able to quantify this.

- "People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason." People have also have been enforcing 40 hour weeks and argue open offices are better for performance. We still haven't agreed either of these are true. Thus, this is a poor argument.

I actually don't have any concrete evidence for one way or the other, but I do know there isn't unequivocal evidence that confirms your statement to be true.

indymike• 5 years ago

The tradeoff you’re hoping to make is that the increase in talent pool outweighs the decrease in productivity.

No, the trade-off is being able to hire the best people possible instead of the best people who will work in the office. Honestly, the office has been dying since 4G and high speed internet got everywhere. Offices should be optional - there if you need it, there for meetings, team work sessions and presentations. We don't have to work like it's 1998 anymore.

tata71• 5 years ago

every other function functions better in person.

Every other "function" is a person who hasn't bothered to learn to use a damn computer.....

AdamJMarsh• 5 years ago

This is becoming a very outdated view.

If a business takes a performance hit, perhaps their talent acquisition, organisation, process flows and leadership are sub par?

Don't believe me? Wait till you lose your best performers because you want them in an office. There's a bigger performance hit you'll take there, along with staff who are demoralised and stressed out with one eye open on the job's market, trying to drop kids off or whatever else they need the flexibility for.

Remember my post as a warning the next time you espouse this view, because it's inaccurate and it isn't valid in every single case.

mulmen5• 5 years ago

There is a precisely zero percent chance that customer service works better in person. I have done it personally. My mom did it for over a decade from home. Engineering is not the only task that can be done remotely.

midrus5• 5 years ago

Not my experience at all.

The last two companies I've worked for where 100% remote, in both of these places engineering was a lot more productive. I personally invested less total time in work (about 7 or 8 hours total) and got a lot more done.

Both of these companies had a culture of writing things down, so everything was documented, an all important conversations where posted in the open for anyone to see. Everything is searchable.

For the kind of work I do (web development) in-person interactions are only good for middle managers that enjoy micro managing as a way to justify their job.

What does not work is to try to keep doing the same things you did in the office in a remote way. You need to adapt to the new context.

If your company went remote and suddenly you have 5 video calls a day, you're doing it wrong. Of course it will be worse and less productive.

it_does_follow• 5 years ago

Even if all of this were true (which I don't think anyone seriously believes anymore), there is still no way startups can compete right now without remote offerings.

The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile).

There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.

onion2k2• 5 years ago

everyone who seriously invests money in businesses knows that there’s a performance hit you take as a remote company

That's an interesting opinion, and very different to my experience, because investors were the first group of people I encountered who really embraced remote work. Two decades ago I worked for a company that had remote meetings with investors, remote board meetings, and that did work remotely. We had full time remote staff hundreds of miles away. The company paid for video conferencing hardware and ISDN lines for some of the staff. Most investors I've met since, including ones who invested in things I did, had no issue with remote work and understood the economics of it very well. I definitely don't think any of them believed fully remote companies were less effective, and I'm pretty sure they were happy money wasn't being spent on fancy offices (although I never grew a business enough to really get to that point to be fair).

I'd be very surprised to hear that the idea of remote work being less effective was coming from serious investors.

j4yav• 5 years ago

Does everybody really know this? How do they explain all-remote unicorns where all the departments seem to be able to be effective remotely? My experience having worked at a couple of them now is that people are more productive once async working really takes hold.

heurisko• 5 years ago

People haven’t been paying for offices for the last ten years for no reason.

Companies have been paying for open plan offices for years. When I first started my career I found it bizarre that open plan offices were in any way considered suitable for programming problems.

However it's evident that many companies haven't got an issue with handicapping their staff in this way.

wayoutthere• 5 years ago

My company (management consulting) has smashed profitability records the last two years. A large part of that was not having office expenses and not doing in-person events. It’s completely apparent that many people used the office as their social outlet, with little work of value happening during those interactions. We are more productive in fewer hours.

Beyond that, our clients are seeing increased success on their major initiatives — communications are much easier when handled digitally as it forces some amount of PMO hygiene if you want to get anything done.

I actually am noticing a bifurcation of companies: the ones who pivoted to full remote indefinitely are able to pay more and are winning the war for talent, particularly in engineering roles. On top of that, it turns out out in-person isn’t so great or efficient when over half your meeting participants are virtual: everyone in the meeting room needs their laptop open anyway for the camera and hot mic issues abound.

Personally, I’m not going back. If they try to push us back, I’m getting another job. This is why employers pulled back on trying to bring everyone back — one of my clients who announced in October they were requiring everyone in-office in January saw 30% of their engineering staff walk out the door over the course of 6 weeks. That’s apocalyptic, it will take them a year plus to recover as most of their teams are now in the “on-call death spiral”. They are now permanently hybrid for all roles, not just engineering.

lawn• 5 years ago

Just like how open-plan offices boost productivity right?

I think we just have to face the fact that many people and companies spend a lot of money on suboptimal things.

engmgrmgr• 5 years ago

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?

marcind• 4 years ago

How do you reach the same level of effectiveness teaching or debugging math problems on a whiteboard without investing a lot of time asynchronously?

If I may be so bold, we've taken a stab at this: https://sharetheboard.com

Our focus was originally on shared whiteboarding (PdMs + devs) but in 2020, for obvious reasons, schools started contacting us and using the tech for remote/hybrid teaching.

But it's true: the real-time part of teaching/writing/debugging is critical in the learning process. For this same reason, many of the teachers we work with use our app to share a piece of paper in real time. Similar result and you don't have to own a whiteboard.

(if you get a chance to kick the tires on it, I'd love some candid feedback)

ryankicks3• 5 years ago

Ryan from YC here.

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.

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

For very early stage (2-5 people) companies, I understand. You're building the business together, will be making tons of moment-by-moment changes, and the working relationship is critical, so I understand. We took that approach initially at the startup where I work.

Once you start to grow significantly, though (series A or later) it's just become much to prohibitively difficult to hire significant numbers of great people if we limit ourselves to the teeny area around our office. This is especially true for some hires where we need specialized expertise.

Companies love to crow about diversity, and one of the primary reasons they give is that diversity is a natural consequence of searching high and low for all the best people. Imagine if you limited your hiring to only brunettes with green eyes. Limiting your company to a teeny geographic monoculture is no less absurd. This is why I think VCs should take a long hard critical look at any growing company that is not willing to expand their geographic diversity.

KronisLV• 5 years ago

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.

danjac• 5 years ago

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.

jollofricepeas• 5 years ago

Good point. This is true for the larger firms too but they can weather storms better.

- 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?

jokethrowaway3• 5 years ago

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

mint2• 5 years ago

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.

chrischen2• 5 years ago

School is also child care/babysitting.

geraldwhen• 5 years ago

Socialization is the word you’re looking for. Kids need to be around other kids.

MattGaiser8• 5 years ago

Nobody seems really willing to tackle improving remote learning.

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.

missedthecue5• 5 years ago

I don't think the problems that plague remote learning are technical in nature. They are fundamental. It's just hard to learn in a non-collaborative environment.

mkl• 5 years ago

You're dead wrong there. Many universities are, and I and my colleagues have been working our butts off moving beyond lectures. Beside recent changes, some universities have been offering fully remote lectureless degrees for decades.

The thing is, it's an enormous amount of work to do well, so no university can just switch everything instantly.

digbert• 5 years ago

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.

ryankicks3• 5 years ago

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.

MattGaiser8• 5 years ago

I would want to know if a startup that wasn't remote could even get applicants.

The market is really busy right now.

62951413• 5 years ago

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:

* 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?

paxys2• 5 years ago

I don't see that happening. Tech jobs aside, the Bay Area is still a very desirable place to live, and has been so long before Silicon Valley was a thing. Software engineers moving out of the area will create a gap that others will very happily fill in.

e4e78a06• 5 years ago

It is becoming less desirable imo. Wildfire season has replaced summer, crime and cost of living are out of control, and local parks have turned into homeless encampments.

grp000• 5 years ago

Except most industries don't pay as well as IT.

kortilla7• 5 years ago

the Bay Area is still a very desirable place to live, and has been so long before Silicon Valley was a thing

Not that desirable. The South Bay was just a place to grow fruit before Silicon Valley.

andrew_2• 5 years ago

I intentionally avoid companies based in the Bay Area (SF) even being remote. The hoops that the State of CA makes employees jump through yearly is annoying at best.

tdeck• 5 years ago

The hoops that the State of CA makes employees jump through yearly is annoying at best.

What hoops are these? Tax related or something else?

crisdux• 5 years ago

I can’t help but be a bit of a contrarian. I’m still skeptical regarding remote work being the optimal workplace strategy. I think there will emerge a competitive edge to companies that have their employees working in office settings, at least part of the time.

andrew_2• 5 years ago

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.

MattGaiser8• 5 years ago

124 messages in 48 hours?

I felt overwhelmed processing with my 5 a day, haha.

macintux• 5 years ago

I don’t think I’m getting anything at all. Good to feel wanted!

nathanaldensr• 5 years ago

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.

mrintellectual• 5 years ago

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".

avidphantasm2• 5 years ago

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.

baggygenes• 5 years ago

agreed, why I also think that regular (monthly) in-person get-together sessions are incredibly valuable. Make the time together special, on everyone's calendar, and really set the time aside for thinking as a group.

Doesn't need to be done every day or even every week.

9999000009993• 5 years ago

Why ?

Working remote , never being late to a meeting , never having to commute, vastly outweighs all that.

I have an odd feeling many people like in person work so they can socialize. We have bars and concerts for that.

We somehow went from COVID will kill us all if we dare step into an office to shut up and get back to work.

Stop wasting money on office space. Let people live wherever ( assuming your in the same country for tax reasons). I love the sheer level of freedom I have.

If I get sick of the city, I can work from a small town in Alaska, Alabama, etc.

Vs being told to commute for 3 hours a day

PraetorianGourd• 5 years ago

I think it’s going to be “I can…” versus “I am” or “I do”. Lots of people will _think_ “I’ll just up and move anywhere!” but very few actually will. And in my experience, having the freedom but electing not to exercise it is more depressing then not having the option. Sometimes the dream is better than the reality

jollybean• 5 years ago

I think the inability to see how they rebound off of others in their thinking and communication is a problem.

Mentorship, communications, even just basic professional behaviour.

All of this is learned, and you're learning all the time.

But ideas even, discussions, blackboards ... they don't happen over Zoom, especially without an appointment.

We don't get enough 'alone time' at the office, but 'group time' is incredibly important for all aspects of our work.

For some kinds of things, like 'going deep' for a few days, being alone is a godsend but it comes with a heavy price.

Also - just being around other professionals, putting on a pair of clothes designed for professional appearance, thinking about what you are going to say, i.e. 'being a professional' makes us almost all better people. It has it's drawbacks, but mostly it's good.

I think we're going to have to find the right, blended approach.

That said, what remote work does do is enable a kind of role-fitting that was never possible before. We have yet to contemplate the economic advantage of that - but that one comes along with a massive White Elephant: that everyone reading this will be displaced by someone working in a 'poor country' who is super sharp and who will work for 1/2 the salary.

Soft. Devs. think they are important until management can hire fully offshore for 1/3 the cost.

The arguments that a lot of people make against offshore apply almost as much to remote.

rowanajmarshall3• 5 years ago

I have an odd feeling many people like in person work so they can socialize. We have bars and concerts for that.

The splitting of society like this is awful for humans, we really aren't built for it. There are ways of addressing this and still keeping remote work, but removing socialisation for 8 hours a day is not it.

jonwithoutanh• 5 years ago

Why not hang out in a video call and hash ideas out on your individual whiteboards? I've done it this way for over a decade and it's been fine for "breaking new ground".

The most productive person I've ever worked with, who was responsible for the biggest initiatives at a previous company worked solo in Hong Kong while the rest of the team was in North America. Never presented an issue. He came up with many innovative ideas in NLP and other ML techniques (not my area). All of his collaboration was over video calls, was never an issue.

Perhaps you are not being inclusive of your remote workers in your brainstorming sessions?

Salgat3• 5 years ago

I don't get this because we have some of the most innovative and valuable projects (such as Linux) that have achieved their success through remote work. The problem isn't remote, the problem is corporate culture not adapting to it.

KerrAvon• 5 years ago

Agreed it’s impossible to hash out new ideas over videoconferencing. It’s so slow and grainy! Who can actually break new ground without other people nattering in the same room? Not everyone has even a 56k modem! Sharing germs and viruses is an absolute requirement. And if I can’t have a chance meeting with you at a wate rcooler to discuss what happened on Jay Leno last night, how can I can possibly start new initiatives?

I mean, I get why in-office work is unpopular, but for some tasks/jobs I think it can work well. So far, if you need to set up furniture or infect with other humans with your viruses and assorted bacteria and sometimes exchanging feces on our hands because we don’t wash them properly, nothing replaces being in the same room.

truetraveller• 5 years ago

You had me in the first sentence; I actually nodded!

avidphantasm2• 5 years ago

I also forgot to mention serendipity, which in my experience is critical to innovation. For me, working remotely drastically reduces serendipitous interactions. And I say this as an introvert who loves to be left alone for long stretches to do focused work. (note, my experience is mostly in academia, but with 4 years of commercial experience out of 24 years total.)

toomanyrichies• 5 years ago

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.

nso95• 5 years ago

Or, you know, just let your employees choose

teaearlgraycold• 5 years ago

As an all remote guy - I don't know if it makes sense to be in the office if half of the most important people in a meeting are on a screen.

itake• 5 years ago

I've worked on teams where everyone else was in-office and I was remote. I was constantly missing important "water cooler" conversations and my role slowly shifted into "code-monkey" since I no longer had the relevant business context.

midrus5• 5 years ago

Mixed environments (within a team) don't work well. People at the office will have conversations that won't get written down anywhere, so remote workers are in disadvantage all the time.

In my experience, either the entire team is in a single place or all of them are remote. Now having teams some teams in the office and some others 100% remote, that could work, but I'm skeptical too.

midrus5• 5 years ago

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.

digitalsushi• 5 years ago

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!

colordrops4• 5 years ago

It's more than a 12% difference for many companies.

warkdarrior• 5 years ago

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.

francisofascii• 5 years ago

12% less is a good deal. Since the real difference is about 30-50%.

pleb_nz2• 5 years ago

So, where is the best place for one to search for these roles from an international POV.

systematical• 5 years ago

100% remote and unlimited PTO or don't bother trying to recruit me.

Cwizard3• 5 years ago

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)

BatteryMountain• 5 years ago

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.

Cwizard3• 5 years ago

That 50K is before taxes. My average tax rate is ~35% top marginal tax rate 50%. But yes that does give me essential free education including university, free healthcare, and good institutions.

dehrmann• 5 years ago

For context I have 2 YOE

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.

Cwizard3• 5 years ago

Understandable, at what level of experience do you consider remote an option? In my current position I am a ‘tech lead’ (not as glamorous as it sounds) most of the people I mentor have little engineering experience (most people come from a operations or scripting background). I am an OK programmer but I have good organisational skills and wrote a lot of code before starting work so I have a bit of ‘unofficial’ experience, therefore I was chosen I think. I have a lot te learn still but overall I think I am good at my job. Just wondering what I can do to increase my salary.

YetAnotherNick• 5 years ago

Most remote companies don't pay by the country the company's office is located in but they pay by the countries employees are residing in.

DoingIsLearning2• 5 years ago

I still see a lot of bait and switch with HR messaging me with offers tagged as remote and then describing the job as 3x days remote 2 days on-site or something along those lines.

Even in platforms that have the additional tag of 'hybrid' instead of remote (e.g. Linkedin).

Very frustrating lack of transparency if you ask me.

sokoloff2• 5 years ago

On the bright side, that’s at least a strong signal that usually comes up before you’ve committed to join. (You’re lamenting that this specific lack of transparency comes up as late as it does, which is fair, but there’s a bright side that lack of transparency reveals itself while it’s still comparatively early.)

namelosw2• 5 years ago

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.

tclancy• 5 years ago

Small companies really can’t fix this. It means having the capability to legally comply with whatever US and foreign laws govern the hiring of a worker from that country. If you’re a tiny startup, there’s little incentive to take time to incorporate in a foreign country on the chance this potential hire is a superstar. So you work out some kind of contracting arrangement instead.

salmonlogs• 5 years ago

There are a bunch of companies out there that provide this as a service - remote employment. They setup a company in each local country and handle all the tax and legal implications.

namelosw2• 5 years ago

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I was saying maybe there could be startups tackling this issue, and offering their solutions as services, making the process as easy and smooth as possible.

There should be quite some companies are willing to pay for this kind of service, because remote working is booming, and the compensation varies a lot in different parts of the world.

hogrider2• 4 years ago

Usually this gets done "under the table". I don't think there's anythibg really preventing it stateside since labir protections are flimsy and are there only for citizens /residents.

aweb• 5 years ago

I was wondering about that topic recently!

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.

chadcmulligan• 5 years ago

I just signed up with an SME - at the interview - work from home as much as you want - now after a week, we're thinking one day a week wfh, and so on, I'm evaluating my options, its very annoying.

speby• 5 years ago

Selfishly, from a hiring perspective, it bums me out that the secret is now well-known. I've been working remote/hybrid-remote and recruiting remote/hybrid-remote teams for 12 years. I absolutely LOVED that all the dinosaurs were resistant to remote work because it was a recruiting magic wand. Then the pandemic came along and suddenly everyone was more or less forced to see that remote work works and now that recruiting advantage has lessened some.

Besides that, though, things are not binary. We're never going to go to a world where 100% of all people/all-roles that could be done remotely will ONLY be done remotely. There will always be a mixture, however small perhaps, of people that will do in-person companies and/or in-person jobs even if they don't need to.

One thing is clear though... remote is and has been a trend for quite some time. COVID merely thru jet fuel on that existing trend and sped it up probably by 15 years. And I would say that's a good thing.

hogrider2• 4 years ago

Great. Personally, I will starve before going back to unpaid stressfull commute to an open plan office. I'd consider it if the employer offered a commute addressing these points.

70% of startups offer remote work options as hiring heats up, YC data shows

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