Ask HN: If you don't permit telecommuting, why?
Plenty of businesses are interested in hiring only onsite staff. I want to explain the viewpoints behind such policies – and then, ideally, address what it would take for those organizations to hire telecommuters or remote workers.
So I’d like to hear from two types of respondents:
* Someone who has been in a hiring role at an organization where the job requisitions typically say, “Local candidates only, please.” (Whether or not you’re in agreement with the policy.)
* Someone who’s applied to a job that says, “on site only” and gotten a remote job despite that requirement.
If you applied to an “on-site only” job ad and got the gig anyway, there’s just one question: How’d you make that happen?
My questions are primarily for the people on the hiring side:
* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site? Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.
* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?
* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?
* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?
* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position? For example, “If a rock star in my field applied for the job, we’d do anything to get him to say Yes – including letting him work remotely.” But there can be many other answers, and I’d very much like to hear yours.
147 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThe solution is really to use communication tools like Slack and also put the focus on deliverables instead of "work units".
If someone is in front of you banging on their keyboard, you need not have any assurance that they're doing work, either.
About 15 years ago I got a demo at a Gartner conference from a company doing just that. The vendor's primary goal, they said, was to measure where the developer was spending his time (coding vs debugger vs editor... I think it was a Visual Studio add-in?). But they admitted employers could use it to track what the developer was/wasn't doing.
...and that was before Facebook.
Not that I don't think you can start a good startup as all-remote, but I just don't think that's how 37S bootstrapped.
Is there any real evidence showing how much this actually matters, or is it just Valley voodoo? I suppose that is partially tied up in the answer to your question.
> I don't think anybody cares too much about your 1000th engineer being remote, the organizational DNA has already been set a long time ago.
Yet hundreds of companies at this size seem to care shitloads about it.
We were primarily a remote work company as part of the DNA - it was great and productive.
We were small and mostly senior technical folks so the level of trust was pretty high.
People were located in the Czech republic, the Netherlands, Vancouver, Minnesota, China, and Cali.
Best work experience I have had by far.
I think that the real answer might be something quite embarrassing, and politically incorrect.
- We really don't know how to deal with the differences, and it is scary to try;
- There are some company process that we are afraid of changing to accommodate telecommuting;
- The risks and costs outweigh the benefits, or the benefits are fuzzy while the risks and costs are clear;
- etc
I'm curious what you think it might be. I would guess here but lack experience to guide my guess.
I gave it an up-vote anyway, because this is an interesting and highly relevant topic in the tech field, though I'm dubious of getting any substantive responses from anyone who's any kind of manager.
A while back I was in a dead end job and working on a side project that was an image search engine that had nearly perfect relevance in a time when both Google Image Search and Bing Image Search were both embarrassingly bad -- at least at the time I started.
It took about a year to get the product really ready populate the database, and by that time the big guys had come a long way.
This got the attention of a company in LA that had ambitious ideas for an intelligent social media aggregator and they had explored several dead ends in terms of building the brains of the product so they brought me in. They were hoping I would relocate but they had to start getting traction.
It lasted about a year. A prototype of what I built was picked up by the team and developed into a "MVP" that didn't really get product market fit.
I moved on to another company that was based in Rochester, NY that hired remotes, but that is another story.
1) Spontaneous meetings become impossible, scribbling something on a whiteboard becomes much more difficult, the barrier to communication is too high.
2) We've had bad experiences with people who work in other studios/HQ. They tend to shirk responsibility, and it's very frustrating to get them to actually acknowledge your issue as high priority. Managers assume this would carry into remote work if it were offered.
3) We work in R&D, all internet access is monitored/blocked and we use internal systems for communications only, so while we can VPN in sometimes it's discouraged because I have liberties at home that I don't have in my offices internal network.
They do their best to make a good office environment, but it's still open plan (much to my dismay, I can't ever focus in that environment for some reason) but try to strongly discourage remote working.
I think 2) has to do with people not feeling they are part of the team.
Our solution to 3) is a separate work machine (laptop) set up so that you can not access the internet in any other way than through the VPN to the office. So, to work remotly you need to bring your work computer with you. You can not connect using your private computer.
If your work product doesn't lend itself to spoken discussion too well, or if that kind of collaboration doesn't suit the team, I can easily see why it would be very difficult to make it work. It is easy to collaborate remotely on ideas, but pretty difficult to collaborate on the final product.
If I worked in an field that required a lot of visual collaboration, like design, I don't think it would work nearly as well. The online, webex style tools are still too poor to support good collaboration on those kinds of tasks IMO.
I run a fully remote company, and most of the objections I've heard from others we've found workaround for.
The biggest unsolved problem is whiteboarding - there is no good collaborative online whiteboarding solution that doesn't require a lot of expensive equipment to be deployed to everyone.
Looks like there are a few other options:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/groupboard-collaborative-whi...
https://syncpadapp.com/
Maybe my company is just weird, but we don't use whiteboards all that much. At least for code our preferred collaboration method is pairing, which isn't as hard over a network.
We write NLP software, and most of our whiteboard usage is for drawing out linguistic constructs and often involves only one person doing the drawing, which seems like an easy subset of whiteboarding to handle remotely.
If you really must, give everybody a Wacom tablet + Paint + Screen sharing (or just a VNC server over the VPN so everybody can draw)
Edit: I found another called deekit.com
* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site? Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.
Ad hoc meetings are 1000 times easier when everybody is in the office. Standup and other meetings are hindered by teleconferencing at best. Even with high quality video and audio, it is often much harder to hear the remote person, harder to collaborate (I can't just walk to a whiteboard and draw something up quickly and have them easily see it.)
Having them train a new hire or an intern is much harder. Furthermore, interns and new hires much prefer somebody being able to sit with them and collaborate. Sure, you can do screen sharing, but it's not the same at all.
One thing that makes our team 'special' is the culture of the team. We often do team building exercises (paintballing, curling, etc.), have optional happy hours, etc. and all of that is physically impossible without flying somebody out.
It is much harder for the remote person to get support from help-desk. If you are onsite, you walk down to one of a few different help desks and get help right away. If your hardware is faulty, you get a new laptop and are up and running within a few hours. This is not possible with somebody remote, and we've had major headaches dealing with this.
* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?
No.
* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?
I think this one is pretty hard to answer. I'd assume many potential employees pass on even applying since we don't really support remote work. I don't think I can give a proper answer here, unfortunately. I can say that we're fine with this tradeoff. We haven't had any problem attracting talent in the past (paying boatloads of money helps.)
* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?
Yes, we allow this with extenuating circumstances. We've had team/org members get sick and prefer to work from home for a few months while they recover. We've had employees leave the country to be with their parents due to illness. Employees who wanted to work from home a majority of the time while their child is young, etc. Generally we're pretty okay with short term telecommuting, but we don't really offer full time (forever) telecommuting.
Note that team members regularly WFH for a week or two while visiting home (if they don't want to take vacation), and nobody cares if you WFH once a week or two.
* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position? For example, “If a rock star in my field applied for the job, we’d do anything to get him to say Yes – including letting him work remotely.” But there can be many other answers, and I’d very much like to hear yours.
If a known rock-star (guaranteed) applied, we'd let them work remotely. If we had trouble attracting the talent we needed, we'd let them work remotely.
In order to stay price competitive in our industry, we need to use a mix of junior, intermediate, and senior talent.
We have never found a junior or newly-intermediate candidate successfully work remote. Part of the point in having senior people is for them to be available to guide the less learned staff, so it makes no sense for them to all be remote too.
To be fair, for the right senior staffer, we would be willing to consider 100% remote. For the right intermediate staffer, we would be similarly be willing to consider a split onsite and telecommute arrangement, or other flexible scheduling options.
I have found this to be quite productive.
Real-time communication with voice, but also the visually shared WIP.
Is this your experience?
Personally I'm not a fan of pair programming, I don't like shoulder surfing, but it's an invaluable tool for mentoring the juniors so I still participate when I'm not working on one of my more niche responsibilities I don't share with the rest of the team as much (DevOps, Salesforce developer, DB developer, business analyst, etc.)
The key reason for this is that our culture and processes within the company are not very well equipped to accommodate remote workers. We're spread across two sites (one of which is a factory), and communication is difficult enough as it is.
I prefer on-site employees to remote for two reasons:
1 - I find that on-site employees are a bit easier to manage. The bar to communication is lower when they're so accessible. Also, I'm working with legacy hardware and software, and there is so much to understand in order to get started on many projects, and it can be a lot easier to sit side saddle with a junior engineer to help them through the first steps.
2 - I don't have a lot of great confidence in my hiring practices and the owners of the company are a little more conservative. As such, I make the safer choice to hire candidates willing to work on-site instead -- I can see when they come in, I can task and re-task on a whim, and I have a much better sense of when they begin down rabbit holes.
In instance 1, could you use a remote screen sharing app to sit side saddle with a new junior dev? (and then record the session to allow the dev to replay the session later, come up with follow-up questions)
In instance 2, how often do you check on the progress of a dev? Is it a longer period of time for a remote vs an on-site employee?
I wanted to expound on "The bar to communication is lower when they're so accessible."
I think a lot of communication involves understanding the culture (and by this I mean 'the way someone views the world' and not a more the mainstream sort of 'they are asian' type of definition) of a person. The speed at which you are able to understand a person's culture (what technologies they like and don't like and why, what they're previous jobs were like, what type of family did they grow up in, what jokes do they like, etc, etc, etc) increases drastically when they are working on site, and it's usually small bits of downtime (lunch, coffee break, shooting the shit late night) when you learn a lot of this stuff. Not having this understanding comes with a communication cost, and it's not just for the managers, it's also for the engineers they work with (and it goes both ways, the telecommuter is going to have a tougher time understanding the culture of their coworkers/manger).
Which isn't to say this why my company doesn't allow telecommuting (on the contrary, we do), but I think this nuance is hard to put a tangible dollar amount on but is very real. Additionally this does happen eventually with remotes (I have two great ones that I really think I understand) and there are things you can do to facilitate it, but it is harder.
I think BS. We just got a new remote QA team and they are doing great.
We have two remote devs also who are doing good work.
I interpret the evidence to show that remote does work.
I still get push back on it but the rationale is based on words like "better" and "easier" without quantifiers.
My feelings are that some managers like to interrupt frequently for "urgent fires" and that is easier when someone is a few metres away.
(I'm looking for examples to include, so details are helpful!)
Edit: good environment means clear direction, open communication. Which is necessary onsite as well
When I was at the office for a decade, 90% of the insight and productivity came from informal conversations in the hallway, lunches and things I overheard in passing. As a remote worker, nearly all communication is very deliberate so I am not exposed to those ad-hoc conversations. Everything is very deliberate: I receive an email, a text or a meeting. The net result is my personal career becomes very confined and stunted... I become that guy who does that one thing rather than a team-member who has an awareness of everything and the ability to jump in as needed.
Being remote also limits my upward mobility. Most of my promotions and moves were because I would walk back from a meeting with an executive and talk about what was discussed and express interest in taking ownership. These walk-and-talks are the only availability in an execs schedule. I tried to get time with an exec remotely and it was a full two months before I could get any time-- and since it was scheduled it wasn't ad-hoc and overly formal ("What would you like to discuss?").
So, in my judgement, remote workers are fine for very defined single tasks. For dynamic workers that move about the company and immerse themselves in lots of projects and want upward mobility, I can't recommend it.
I feel like my experience of being in office and remote at the same company gives me some unique perspective versus the people who join a company remotely and never fully appreciate what they are missing.
Lots of people talk about how an open environment, where there is violent, perpetual collaboration thrust upon you, is supposedly good for information sharing, keeping people on the same page, allowing everyone visibility into many other teams.
It's just complete bullshit. I'm sorry to describe it in such terms but there is no other way to put it. It does not ever, not at any time, offer valuable information exchange that would not be equally as effective with deliberate communication -- even deliberate in-person communication like a planned meeting or a planned conversation about a dedicated topic.
I've never seen or heard of any situation where the pan-everything violently un-turn-off-able stream of never ending "collaboration" helps anyone.
What it does do is allow the people who are in charge of schedules -- generally managers whose status in the firm dictates that they are entitled to interrupt others or restructure work priorities in an ad hoc manner without conforming to any policy about it or even having to give any justification for it -- the opportunity to do whatever they want in terms of interrupting and redirecting people.
I've come to believe that this kind of schedule flailing is just a device by which managers (a) try to make it look like they're doing a lot of work because gee whiz look how I had to whip everybody's schedules all around and tell them about That Thing That Just Happened or That Thing Some Business Person Needs Somewhere OMGzzz -- or (b) it assuages their personal insecurity that they aren't relevant enough to the specifics of the workflow beneath them; like, if there was really an efficient meritocracy then the high-performing subordinates would get paid more, like the way basketball players get paid more than the coach generally even when it's a good coach doing a good job. Since business offers less efficient opportunities for rent-seeking and more chances to obfuscate, the manager can use ad hoc interruptions and reprioritizations as a sort of performative gasp for justifying how important they are and how they are deserving of higher compensation.
I do agree with you about remote working being a limit to upward mobility -- mostly because of the sort of status effects I described above. You have to be physically present in an office because it's a display of fealty. You roll over and expose your belly to the bosses every time you smile, nod, and laugh at their completely pointless vocal interruptions that could have been handled asynchronously over chat or email. That fealty is what gets you promoted, and it's way harder to signal fealty when you work remotely. Taking selfies of you laying on your back on the floor at home with your belly exposed is probably not a good substitute.
As a remote worker this is very true. I actually took a trip down to the main office this week (first time in two years since I was hired on), and the amount of insight I gained from wandering the office, talking to managers and just interacting with people on the smoking patio (I've learned this is always the easiest place to get a pulse on what is going on in the company, smokers don't like sitting around with a group of people sucking down nicotine in dead silence, there's always conversation going on). I easily found 10 new projects we could put on the backlog, and that's being conservative.
Actually, after talking with my director about it I think I'm going to start taking trips down there a little more frequently - even so we do have fairly good communication over email, phone and IM to a couple of teams within the company we work closely with, and it has lead to some projects we otherwise wouldn't have done (rolled out Salesforce to a subset of users who were dying without a proper CRM trying to keep track of all of the people we need to contact at our clients when things go awry), but it's still a lot more limited than what I got done in a week of talking with people.
This is a culture issue at companies that will evolve over time. The focus needs to shift from "good their butts are in their seats" to "good they just delivered X number of features". The focus should be on the results.
As I have been performing above average for all my time there, they insisted to find a compromise so that I wouldn't leave. Told them I would consider staying but with 2 days per week telecommuting, 3 days on-site. I already had their trust, they knew I delivered, so they agreed cheerfully.
Some coworkers who tried to get some telecommuting days before got slightly angry at management for a few days, but not that much, as they liked me staying and understood why management dit it.
I think it worked because I was just not bluffing, and after more than 1 year working there, they fully trusted me. It would have never happened if I had asked for telecommuting at day 1.
Are you saying that you would never allow workers to telecommute even if they lived in the area? Or are you saying that you wouldn't allow for 100% remote positions in which the employee is not capable of easily making it into the office if needed? I think there is a difference between "telecommuting" and "remote working".
The issue is not remote working, the very thing you wrote is the issue.
Virtually every time, remote working doesn't create new issues but reveals and - embarassingly - exposes existing ones.
You can no longer take a chance by letting things such as hallway affairs become a norm and an invisible force. You need to plan everything(and know what to plan), track everything relevant (and know what's relevant), be in control of the conditions for career and team progression (and therefore know precisely what these conditions are), you need to know your stuff. You can no longer just wait for magic to happen, put people in rooms and cross your fingers. Or send them to restaurant and expect team communication to have improved to the benefit of your KPIs.
The truth is 60-80% of today's companies are terribly run. Management of these companies is playing games without realizing it.
Remote working simply requires real management for it. Real managers quickly love it as remote working basically is : output-as-a-service : no noise, just efficiency and result. But the manager more tham ever needs to know what he is doing, because remote working accelerate the consequences of managerial weaknesses. What would have tanked a company in 5 years can tank it in 5 weeks.
But the positive is that once a remote setup has been successfully established, there is an organization insanely streamlined, efficient and competitive.
I really wish Moral Mazes was required reading in college. It would have helped me prepare for the shocking business world dysfunction that awaits virtually every employee, in every field, after graduation.
Peopleware is a classic within specifically software management, and deals with many of the same human-affirming principles that you see in Moral Mazes, but deals with them in formats that are specific to software. There are a lot of connections between the two books, but the connections haven't been well formalized as far as I know.
I love these two books because as you read them the slow feeling of horror comes over you as you see the true diff between how companies operate and how a company should operate if it is to maintain even the tiniest degree of humanity-affirming ethical commitment or even the tiniest degree of genuine concerns for (even from a market competition point of view) how productivity should be marshaled for general human progress.
I find there are more or less two types of reactions. Some people read them and go, "Yep. I've seen all that. No surprises here. Oh well, back to work." and just don't care because they just want to focus on local instrumentally rational actions even if it means participating in what is making the entire concept of employment so shitty. Some other people read them and find that it makes their soul glow again a little and they have a hard time ever fitting back into a company now that they have some formalized tools for recognizing how shittily they are being treated at all times.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...
Also a good popular article drawing on Moral Mazes: < http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... >.
I haven't encountered _Moral Mazes_ before; I'm going to look for it now!
This is beginning to look like the blind men and the elephant.
The inside joke on remote/distributed work is "You know, if we just had 1) better managers, 2) better specs, 3) better tools"
We have been trying all of this for 30 years or so. At some point a reasonable person would look around and see that most all startups are colocated, physically in the same room having to deal with each other all day long.
There are plenty of theories as to why this is true. Another observation: people not in the office do best at rote work: fix the bugs, align the images on the website, and so on.
If your job could be done by robots -- if it required minimal interaction over electronic tools to get specs and deliver on them in an over-the-wall manner -- it will be done by robots. Creating technology is about people, not technology. You sitting in a room and getting into flow-state and cranking out code is nowhere near as important as you interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans and trying to determine the nature of the problem you're solving.
Best-case scenario: you work on a tightly-knit team for a few weeks/months on a fixed-length job. Everybody gets into sync on the customer, specs, terminology, and solution. The customer's problem is not changing that much. You deliver some stuff as a team that people like. At that point, and not before, who cares where people are? Just get the work done.
You can scale that out to working in BigCorp on a fixed domain, but only so much. And the scary thing is that there are no alarms that go off if you're doing it wrong.
It's not impossible, or bad. But it works under very limited conditions. Understanding that is critical. I know there are a ton of folks who want to work remotely. I am one of them. But wanting something and looking realistically at what works or not are two different things.
Are you implying that "interacting minute-by-minute with messy humans" requires physical presence?
Indeed remote working exposes poor communication e.g. relying on random water cooler conversations instead of having proper communication channels - and many companies prefer to kill the messenger.
For example, there's a difference between, "I struggle when I am not in the ad-hoc conversations" and "Everyone will have the same experience."
That said, I'm extremely flexible with informal WFH arrangements, as long as it doesn't impact individual productivity & team effectiveness.
LOL. I work remotely and this is exactly what I do all day long. The problem lies with the companies communication processes. Thats all. If the majority of team communication is centralized in Slack, if documentation is stored in Google docs, if planning meetings are held on skype/google hangouts, if code reviews happen via github what is left? Given many companies use most of these tools already it seems really weird to me that they cling to this "Butt Seat / water cooler Culture" It is so easy to take ownership remotely if the team is remote, just IM the lead or executive and say so. Again, I think that companies the "Allow telecommuting" are to be avoided. "Remote-first" companies are where it is at.
As for the large chunk of "insight and productivity coming from informal conversations" - that depends on the company culture and "weight distribution" of the technical and industry knowledge among team members.
I've work remotely for a couple of fortune 50 companies as well as small (like 5 ppl small) startups and the only time this sort of thing was an issue was when I was literally the only remote employee on the team, but my technical/industry strength outweighed the concern so they were almost forced to keep me in the loop to provide insight from my end.
Sad, very sad
"informal conversations" move it to Slack (or your preferred communicator). Yes, people will still talk in the watercooler, but that will reflect there.
There is some need for "there time", of course, but not as much as people think
I could not agree more: I once bumped into someone in the bathroom on a different floor that I had met briefly years before during a re-org meet-and-greet. In a few moments of catching up, I found out he had worked on an in-house project that was essentially the same category as the products I was on a team to evaluate.
We didn't end up resurrecting his project, but his insight into the ultimate selection and experience with the rollout was extremely valuable.
A similar thing for a casual acquaintance who told me in passing about his private work in app development, and I was able to put him in touch with someone on our app team (it was a big company with a lot of silos).
I ended up later working remotely for a few months with the same company, and lost the serendipity of accidental human interaction when all my communication was low-bandwidth, narrowly focused, topic-at-hand meetings and communication.
I can sympathize with others complaining about the high cost of interruptions, but for the way I work and think, non-directed conversation is invaluable.
2. Rapport / Camaraderie: Knowing someone in-person, having lunch/dinner/coffee with them, having watercooler talks about casual stuff etc builds a rapport, which helps build closer work relationships. I don't think people in remote locations are any different than my colleagues here, but the rapport is simply not there if I am going to meet them on video conf or IM only a few times a week.
3. Impromptu discussions: These are triggered by spontaneous ideas, and ideas do not come according to a fixed schedule of meetings. By not having remote workers in these discussions, both sides lose (by not having more brains, as well as by missing out).
2. and 3. shows your organization has communication problems. One of my favorite ways to combat that is to do some pair programming. You'll get to know people quite rapidly if you are talking to one each other 8 hours a day.
I am fine if a guy shows up two times a week or so but I am wary of full-time remote workers unless I know I can trust them to not waste time on irrelevant tangents. There needs to be some level of maturity.
Time zones are also an issue.I would not work with somebody 12 hours away.
I have noticed some business owners emphasize how many people they employ, how they are "job creators".
On the opposite end, I have seen entrepreneurs who strive to be as lean as possible (automate everything), with employing another person seen as a last resort.
Do you think it depends if the org./dept. is results focused versus process focused?
This happened because I worked on-site for a year and I wasn't happy with the lifestyle the city I lived in provided (specifically SF/the bay-area, spent 5mo in SF then 5mo in SJ, still wasn't happy, so I moved to VN for 6 weeks).
I told my boss I needed a change of scene-ary and I really enjoyed working for and doing the things that I do at work, but I really did not like the bay and I wanted to live other places. He agreed to let me work remotely from Vietnam for 6 weeks, then Florida indefinitely. I think a few things that drove that decision were:
1. After working with me for a year, I am a known quantity that they like. With every new hire, there is risk and some people think more risk, since people won't be there.
2. The company is very small (10 people) and I play an important role in our platform. It would be expensive to replace me and they don't really want to, because of 1.
* Why does the person who does this job need to be on-site? Please be specific. Give me examples of things that can only be done if she were in the office.
Having been on site and remote, a couple of things that I feel that I am missing out are:
1. I feel like I have less klout in the office. When it comes to product design and company policy decisions, I am often left sitting on my hands while everyone else chats about it in the office.
2. Sometimes I miss spontaneous product discussions that happen within the office and am not typically told about that. This should be fixable, but it is about building good habits and keeping the team informed.
* Have you been in a position where you personally would be okay with an employee being a telecommuter, but a decision-maker deemed otherwise? How did you handle it?
No.
* How has the policy affected your company’s ability to attract candidates?
Since the office is in the bay, people fly from all over the world to work in our office. Has not been an issue.
* Have you hired someone for an in-the-office job, and later given permission for the individual to work from home? What happened to make the change okay?
me! see above.
* What would it take for the company to change the no-telecommuters policy, even if only for one specific position? When I got hired, there was a no-telecommuters policy and they were letting go both of our remote workers. I think I have been able to work remotely because of the points mentioned above.
The reasons given by the founders to only allow local workers are: * we want everybody in the room to build the culture and for people to learn how to work together * whiteboard sessions/intense discussions are difficult to do remotely * for lead positions: face time is important to properly lead the team
I feel like it's a disastrous policy to find candidates. I'm in MA and we compete with a lot of companies over a rather small pool of candidates. The worse is that the "local only" comes with a "please, go easy on the WFH" policy. Recruiters literally laugh at us, and tell us that we will never be able to compete if we don't allow flexible hours/locations.
We did manager to hire a couple developers, but we had to lower our standards (and one could question them, but it's not really the point here).
Interestingly, after a while the "limit the WFH" policy was relaxed. And now people are still local but can take a couple days to stay home every week. I think it's just because the team delivered, worked hard and built trust. It's just sad that it took a long time, and that still has not changed the no full-remote policy.
I think the candidate would have to be extraordinary and, more important, fill a position that had been open for a long time to allow remote workers. Enough time to convince upper management that we had to consider a wider pool or we would never find anybody.
What is nice about non remote though:
- you can see if a college has time for your questions
- you can scribble stuff easier while explaining complex things
- less language barrier. I find it really hard to understand non-native speakers over a bad skype connection (high quality headsets would fix this I believe)
- you can sense how the other feels and act accordingly
- It's easier to guide inexperienced people when they feel more free to ask questions. Probably fixable through good culture, but an effort to be made. It's also easier to see when they really got what you mean. (had trouble with the remote people here, though being forced to write even tighter specifications or more making more detailed mockups is not necessarily bad)
Also it's really amazing how crappy many companies' web conferencing setup is. They break down regularly, have poor sound quality and are generally really flaky. I know this is getting better with Hangouts and alike, but still, they are occasionally going to crap out and always, it seems, at the most inopportune time.
> The language barrier thin is very real. I'm not a native English speaker and have very hard time understanding people with heavier accents. It's especially bad over phone/web conference.
Solution: Hire only people who speak good English (yes, you should test them / interview them before hiring them!)