Since it's a throwaway, mind telling a bit more? I'm not from US too and it's hard to find remote jobs there. Are you in one of the nearby countries or Europe?
Eastern Europe. One job was on East Coast, which is not that terrible in terms of timezone differences. The other one was in SF, which I honestly though would be too much of a stretch (but applied anyway) - it turns out they found a way to make a tightly-knight coding team across nine timezones work reasonably well.
As for finding remote jobs, I think it's good to be experienced with something niche or in very high demand like Clojure, Haskel, Spark etc. Companies can easily find locals to work on popular technologies, but for the uncommon or hot ones, they sometimes need to bite the bullet and build a remote team - even if they would prefer not to.
Different each time: once it was a niche AI/ML developer job with little stack preference, once Node and once Scala. It's three jobs (not two) because when writing the top post I actually forgot about one job that I've found through Who's hiring :)
I don't really like this site and others like it. I could be wrong, but it appears to be an automated scraper of real managed content like https://weworkremotely.com/ which is what I'd recommend and found my first remote position through
The last time I tried one of these "work remotel" sites with an "io" tld, they ended up re-using my email address on other business ventures. Essentially some tard thought that I was a "lead" because I signed up for updates for a specific set of remote job criteria. I never got any of those updates, instead got emails promoting some other website/startup that the same guy ran.
this https://weworkremotely.com/
is really interesting but I notice a lot of jobs require the candidate to be an US resident, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, it's usually due to taxes. The company I work for hires people from other countries officially as contractors, otherwise they would need to maintain a legal presence in every country that they hire in - or so I'm told.
Yes, this is a difficult issue. At GitLab we have people in more than 30 countries. In the majority of countries we have contractors, in some (US/NL/UK) we have a company, in some we hire through a reseller (India/China), and in Belgium we can hire on the Dutch payroll due to the EU. I hope someone starts the Stripe/Adyen for payrolling people. If you plan to do so please email me so I can help with advise and be your first customer and investor.
Why would they not just hire people as contractors (instead of turning every non-US-resident down)? That's how I've been working for years and it's better for me as well as for the company.
A lot of remote work sites are like web theme sites - a Google search would make it seem like there's a plethora of options, but the reality is most are recycling the same primary content.
An old colleague of mine, who'd worked for an LA-based tech company for 10 years, went to hand in his resignation. He was moving to Charlotte so he could be with his girlfriend.
His boss begged him to stay -- he could even work remotely. My friend took the deal. He lives in Charlotte now and flies to LA every 2 or 3 months.
The best place to look for remote jobs is to talk to people who have worked with you in the past and trust you.
This is how I came to work remotely. When my wife and I had to move for her job, I had built quite a bit of the software my company relied on. Had leverage to go remote and the trust of my boss to do so.
Yup. I contracted with a company remotely, and built up a very good reputation with them. When I was eventually offered a full time position, I was able to mandate no relocation. The existing relationships and trust were what made that possible.
The longer view of this is to kick ass with the [current] company(ies) you work with to build a rep and become indispensable which would afford you some benefits (like remote working) down the road.
Totally agree with the last sentence. I had to relocate due to some family health issues and was able to renegotiate my existing position into a remote one.
I broadly agree with this, and nice to hear from people who've made it work.
But how feasible is it to do this today when so much of the current crop of advice seems to be teams-over-individuals, nobody-is-indispensible messages telling managers to avoid letting programmers gain this kind of leverage at almost any cost?
Don't work for companies like that. I have a few "red flags" which I look for when I interview for companies to avoid this type of mindset and if I see enough red flags I reject the company.
Those places are usually career dead ends anyway, even if you're not bothered about working remotely.
Unfortunately, there are many places which only have employers like that which means you either move or you deal with it.
Can you elaborate on what you're looking for at the interview stage to determine a company has this mindset? I've seen it after a few weeks at an org but figuring that out earlier would be helpful.
I have a few questions I ask which often tease out the red flags:
* What hours did you and your team work in the last month? (anything that indicates long hours are frequent is a red flag, not because long hours are intrinsically bad (though they are), but because it's usually being used as a proxy for measuring productivity).
* What is your policy on remote working? Who do you have remote working currently and under what circumstances? ("no remote working" is ok for me if there's a non-bullshit reason but YMMV).
* Who is currently your best or one of your better developers? How did you come to that conclusion?
* What characteristics do you look for in clean code vs. technical debt-laden code? How do you handle and plan for paying down technical debt?
* Who reads your team's pull requests? (worst answer is "nobody", 2nd worst answer is "the team").
* Have you read any of my code? What did you think?
I'm usually not looking for a perfect answer to all of these questions, just avoiding the companies that give an impression of widespread systemic dysfunction in their answers or a manager who is clueless.
Teams are composed of individuals, and we've set up things so that if the team doesn't depend on the knowledge of one individual. However, we still have people working remotely and the engineers are valued because they create value, not because they hoard knowledge.
This is true in some organizations, but it can depend on the culture and assumptions that people have about remote working. There are many companies that are bought into having people all in the same place because it helps with "velocity", or whatever management are into at the time. The irony is that many companies producing collaboration tools to support remote work software fall into this category of employer.
The team is more important than any individual, but each member of that team is indispensible. The team becomes the way it is not in a vacuum, not because of the company, or culture, or manager (though those contribute), but do to each individual on the team and what they bring. Kind of silly to think otherwise...
Um. That sounds really stupid advice. Software engineering is not like logging. Not if you want to run it profitably. I don't think any manager actually worth her salt will actually heed to such an advice. Younger, more insecure managers - they're better off practicing the crafr of management with onsite personnels. If some company that has an umbrella no-remote policy - well, just work elsewhere.
If you want to do that, make sure you ask the appropriate people, e.g. HR, about it before you do it. A single manager may not know anything about having remote workers, but HR may be able to assist.
I had an awkward experience leaving my last company. I wanted to move and was willing to work remotely, but no one on my team or my immediate managers thought that was something the company would be willing to do so we agreed I'd resign. It wasn't until I had already accepted a job at another company that I started hearing from friends in other parts of the company that it was possible to become a remote worker. It was just so rare that my immediate team was quoting an old policy and they didn't bother to verify it with HR.
To be fair, the job I found has been great and I'm glad I left.
+1 — this has happened to me twice. Once at the end of an internship I was allowed to continue working remotely while finishing a degree and again when I just decided I wanted to move! You're more valuable than you think!
Yes, this is very true. You have to be willing to lose your current employer to do this. No bluffing.
For those who are even thinking of bluffing e.g. along the lines of "lying" about "I will quit if I don't get a remote position" or "I am going to move", please don't. For the former, your credibility will be shattered if you they turn you down and you stay. For the latter, if you don't move, it will be even worse if it turns out you weren't ever planing to move. Also, you don't need to move to get a remote job (you might just have a horrid 1.5hr with traffic/15 mile commute from the outlying suburbs into the city center where the office is).
You'll have a job if you do that- but you might not be able to advance, you can be the odd person out, and out of sight/out of mind. I did what your friend did once upon a time; within a few years (during which I got a lot done), it was obvious that it wasn't going to work out any longer. Of course that's a possibility with any job, but if there's not many other opportunities around where you moved to, it can get tricky.
The interview experience is terrible. I completed a much more ambitious project than I needed to, demonstrating the ability to pick up a complex new framework quickly (React Native). I also implemented a very thorough auth system demonstrating mastery of secure programming (proper salting, message signing, defense against timing attacks.) That didn't matter one bit, I got denied for omitting a requirement which wasn't in the listed requirements and for not communicating to clarify the requirements. Whilst I understand the value of timely communication with real clients, I assumed these guys could get their own assignment requirements correct.
In addition to all this, you will get a much lower rate than you're expecting. While it's true that you set your own rate, they basically told me if I don't charge at the same below-salary rates as the rest of the people on their network, they won't send business my way.
So huge waste of time on the interview, plus you'll make less than a salaried position for the advantage of sporadic work and no benefits. Stay away if you know what's good for you!
Were you interviewing for one of the Core developer teams (the ones actually building Toptal), or for Toptal to work as a freelance developer (to work on Client projects)?
Toptal has a lot of open (internal) positions and their interview process is different than when applying to work on Toptal as a freelancer. Everyone on the Core development team is remote.
Is there anything positive anyone who uses toptal can share about them vs other services? It seems others are concerned about the interview process and rate fixing
The good things are you don't have to chase down clients for payment or constantly hustle for gigs like other freelancer sites, it's like a temp agency they do all that for you, and you work for established companies (AirBnB ect) so hopefully the person telling you what to do has an idea of what they're doing instead of constantly asking for the impossible. You can also easily set own hours, so check in and out whenever you want.
The bad of course is wages unless you're living in a country with a very low cost of living or you just want to use toptal to gain remote work experience and don't mind not being payed Silicon Valley standard then it's probably not worth it to you to work there being there's dozens of jobs on hnhiring threads and other sites that will pay at least 2-3x as much.
Wow thanks for the HN thread. From that it looks like they were called out for practices and decided to astroturf the thread with fake positive views. There are a couple of 'current toptal users/devs' on there that clearly just created their account for the thread and never posted again after.
Doesn't seem like they are a 'top 3%' themselves honestly.
Can anyone confirm, that any of these sites have found them remote jobs? I would love to know as I am interested in joining, but I don't actually think its worth it?
As the maker of Nomad List: no, definitely no guarantee and it's not the main purpose of the community at all.
It's just a chat and there's a jobs channel. I know many people found clients etc. through it but it's very informal. Think of it like a bar, not a network event. You might meet the right people, you might not.
Could you explain me why you don't like those "I do not recomment" sites? I just registered at upwork.com and would love to know the (bad) experiences you had with them, for instance. Thanks!
In all honesty, I work part time on remote jobs. I have a lot of debt I need to pay off, family medical.
I have for the 2 years, applied to 100+ jobs a week. When I don't have work or when I find my current work teetering off, I sit down every Monday, go to 40+ job sites I have collected over time and just apply to as many as possible within the 2 hours or so.
Its hit or miss, but I tend to find something within the month, someone looking for part time remote work.
I am always looking, but since its part time, I get filtered out a lot due to employers wanting full time folks.
Just Hustle. Keep Hustling. Don't stop hustling. It helps me.
I got tired of the part-time contract work. It was frustrating to me that I had to spend about half my time on overhead instead of just working. I had to find jobs, negotiate jobs, manage scope, manage expectations, manage clients, time tracking and billing. It was kinda fun to bill $125/hr, but with all that overhead and taxes it worked out to less than a $125k/yr salary.
In the end I took a regular salaried job that paid better and I got to spend more time doing what I loved: programming.
One of my companies has been growing and our single developer is leaving.
I've been hard at work preparing everything for remote developers to be able to help us out where ever they are and how for as much hours as we can afford them to work. My idea is to scale the company based on a dynamic remote team, where knowledge is shared and only ideas come from within the company itself.
Please tell me where you have been looking for remote work? I'm dying for some good parttimers.
The Who is Hiring threads on HN have been pretty useful - you tend to find likeminded people.
If you need any part-time assistance with DevOps-related topics (Continuous Delivery/Integration, etc.), I'd be interested in hearing more - my email is in my profile.
How do you apply for such vast number of jobs? For me, applying for the job is a tedious process of researching about the company, products, team members, CEO and CTO, and only after that crafting a cover letter and attaching CV.
I'm not sure if there really is a best place to look for remote jobs. It depends. I personally don't like aggregators as it's so easy to overlook a job post. I prefer visiting individual job boards. As a side note, I do agree with some of the comments in this thread. The best way is of course to talk to people you know and have worked with in the past. Meetups and events can also be a great place. Perhaps it won't land you a remote job today, but it may in the future.
What kind of remote jobs are you looking for? Tech or non-tech? I've generally found weworkremotely and the HN hiring thread to be among the best. If you're interested in remote jobs at startups, AngelList have a special collection for you https://angel.co/job-collections/remote/
It might be worth your time to look through http://nodesk.co/remote-work/ for a collection of remote job boards (it's a list so visit them all and save the ones you find useful) as well as http://workintech.io/ (job boards specifically geared for tech jobs).
Let me know what you're looking for and perhaps I can help point you in the right direction.
Many I know with remote positions had worked at the company previously and then went to move or quit, and was given permission to work remotely. Obviously one needs to be an effective employee for that to be the case, and not mind occasionally traveling.
Otherwise you could seek employment at a place known for having primarily remote workers.
Contract work and freelance is also easy to remote.
I've gotten two remote jobs off the HN "Who's hiring?" thread. It can be a bit frustrating. I applied to every single remote posting on the thread for 2 months in a row. So I guess that's one job per month (maybe I was lucky or unlucky who knows).
Following are some of my impressions but they are subjective and perhaps a bit speculative.
Generally I've found that the attitude of most US companies is that if they are willing to hire remote, they are usually only interested in hiring candidates inside the US - even if they are a native English speaker (I was an American living in Vietnam). This is very different than the attitude that I've gotten talking to a companies in say ... Singapore or Germany.
Another thing that seems to happen is that some companies seem to throw the REMOTE OK tag to their posting without considering whether or not everyone on their engineering team is actually ok with working with a remote employee. I've done several interviews with teams that were REMOTE OK but had no existing remote employees. Usually it only takes one person to veto a hire. That's something to think about if they are looking at both local and remote candidates. Unless there is a really compelling reason to hire remote, usually they will go local (makes sense). You might not even want to work with one of these companies because they aren't set up for remote work... communication takes a bit more work from all team members - not just the remote ones.
Overall I've had a much more positive experience with the HN: "Who's hiring?"" thread than anywhere else. I think this is because the first point of contact is often an engineer and not an HR person. My resume is a bit odd and doesn't have a BRAND_NAME_SILICON_VALLEY_COMPANY or a BRAND_NAME_UNIVERSITY so it bounces right off the HR department. It's very helpful to be able to talk technology with someone in the initial conversation. If I can get a knowledgeable front-end engineer to look at some of my previous work, then I usually get to the coding round.
I had no luck with any of the remote hiring sites: remoteok.io or weworkremotely.com. YMMV
Ultimately getting a remote job seems to come down to:
1. Having some kind of portfolio to demonstrate your competence.
2. Doing as many interiews as possible. Also the more interviews you do the better you get at it.
I'm a Sr. Security Engineer at a security firm called Defense Point Security. We are always looking for remote talent. Feel free to shoot me an email at ryan.damour@defpoint.com with your resume!
92 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadAs for finding remote jobs, I think it's good to be experienced with something niche or in very high demand like Clojure, Haskel, Spark etc. Companies can easily find locals to work on popular technologies, but for the uncommon or hot ones, they sometimes need to bite the bullet and build a remote team - even if they would prefer not to.
EDIT I made a blog post about this https://gitlab.com/sytses/sytses.gitlab.io/commit/e9a000d321...
Btw. This seems to be a more readable version of the URL, one that you posted linked to git commit https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-payrolling.html
PS: Gitlab is awesome, keep up the good work.
His boss begged him to stay -- he could even work remotely. My friend took the deal. He lives in Charlotte now and flies to LA every 2 or 3 months.
The best place to look for remote jobs is to talk to people who have worked with you in the past and trust you.
But how feasible is it to do this today when so much of the current crop of advice seems to be teams-over-individuals, nobody-is-indispensible messages telling managers to avoid letting programmers gain this kind of leverage at almost any cost?
Those places are usually career dead ends anyway, even if you're not bothered about working remotely.
Unfortunately, there are many places which only have employers like that which means you either move or you deal with it.
* What hours did you and your team work in the last month? (anything that indicates long hours are frequent is a red flag, not because long hours are intrinsically bad (though they are), but because it's usually being used as a proxy for measuring productivity).
* What is your policy on remote working? Who do you have remote working currently and under what circumstances? ("no remote working" is ok for me if there's a non-bullshit reason but YMMV).
* Who is currently your best or one of your better developers? How did you come to that conclusion?
* What characteristics do you look for in clean code vs. technical debt-laden code? How do you handle and plan for paying down technical debt?
* Who reads your team's pull requests? (worst answer is "nobody", 2nd worst answer is "the team").
* Have you read any of my code? What did you think?
I'm usually not looking for a perfect answer to all of these questions, just avoiding the companies that give an impression of widespread systemic dysfunction in their answers or a manager who is clueless.
What's the best answer you've heard for this one?
I never thought about teasing the red flags, but it makes more sense than just asking directly.
You could publish a list somewhere, I think a lot of people would find these valuable.
How did they work for you in practice?
Best/worst reactions to them?
Teams are composed of individuals, and we've set up things so that if the team doesn't depend on the knowledge of one individual. However, we still have people working remotely and the engineers are valued because they create value, not because they hoard knowledge.
I had an awkward experience leaving my last company. I wanted to move and was willing to work remotely, but no one on my team or my immediate managers thought that was something the company would be willing to do so we agreed I'd resign. It wasn't until I had already accepted a job at another company that I started hearing from friends in other parts of the company that it was possible to become a remote worker. It was just so rare that my immediate team was quoting an old policy and they didn't bother to verify it with HR.
To be fair, the job I found has been great and I'm glad I left.
For those who are even thinking of bluffing e.g. along the lines of "lying" about "I will quit if I don't get a remote position" or "I am going to move", please don't. For the former, your credibility will be shattered if you they turn you down and you stay. For the latter, if you don't move, it will be even worse if it turns out you weren't ever planing to move. Also, you don't need to move to get a remote job (you might just have a horrid 1.5hr with traffic/15 mile commute from the outlying suburbs into the city center where the office is).
http://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&l=Remote&d=20&u=Km
In addition to all this, you will get a much lower rate than you're expecting. While it's true that you set your own rate, they basically told me if I don't charge at the same below-salary rates as the rest of the people on their network, they won't send business my way.
So huge waste of time on the interview, plus you'll make less than a salaried position for the advantage of sporadic work and no benefits. Stay away if you know what's good for you!
Toptal has a lot of open (internal) positions and their interview process is different than when applying to work on Toptal as a freelancer. Everyone on the Core development team is remote.
https://www.toptal.com/careers
The good things are you don't have to chase down clients for payment or constantly hustle for gigs like other freelancer sites, it's like a temp agency they do all that for you, and you work for established companies (AirBnB ect) so hopefully the person telling you what to do has an idea of what they're doing instead of constantly asking for the impossible. You can also easily set own hours, so check in and out whenever you want.
The bad of course is wages unless you're living in a country with a very low cost of living or you just want to use toptal to gain remote work experience and don't mind not being payed Silicon Valley standard then it's probably not worth it to you to work there being there's dozens of jobs on hnhiring threads and other sites that will pay at least 2-3x as much.
Doesn't seem like they are a 'top 3%' themselves honestly.
* http://weworkremotely.com
* http://remoteok.io
* http://remotebase.io
* http://workingnomads.co
* http://authenticjobs.com
* http://folyo.me
* http://jobspresso.co
* http://wfh.io
* http://remotefriendly.work
* http://linkedin.com/jobs
* http://angel.co/jobs
* http://designernews.co/jobs
* http://news.ycombinator.com (monthly posts for freelance jobs)
* http://dribbble.com/jobs (only design)
* http://getonbrd.com (latam)
-----------
With broker
Here you apply as a professional, they approve you (or not) and then assign you projects.
* http://toptal.com
* http://workmarket.com
* http://crew.co
* http://hired.com
* http://onsite.io
* http://workingnotworking.com
* http://gun.io
* http://gigster.com
I do not recommend
* http://upwork.com
* http://freelancer.com
* http://nubelo.com
* http://fiverr.com
* http://workana.com
* http://guru.com
-----------
Slack communities
Interact with other freelancers. Usually you will find a #Jobs channel.
Free membership
* http://wearedomino.com
* http://designerhangout.co
* http://launch.chat
Paid membership
* http://join.nomadlist.com ($25 month | $75 year | $200 lifetime)
* http://workfrom.co/chat ($5 month | $50 year)
* http://freelance.chat ($25 lifetime)
-----------
This list is from an article [1] that I wrote, hope can help!
[1] [redacted]
Paid membership * http://join.nomadlist.com ($25 month | $75 year | $200 lifetime) * http://workfrom.co/chat ($5 month | $50 year) * http://freelance.chat ($25 lifetime)
It's just a chat and there's a jobs channel. I know many people found clients etc. through it but it's very informal. Think of it like a bar, not a network event. You might meet the right people, you might not.
* http://automattic.com/work-with-us/ (all remote company) * https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer (another curated list)
I have for the 2 years, applied to 100+ jobs a week. When I don't have work or when I find my current work teetering off, I sit down every Monday, go to 40+ job sites I have collected over time and just apply to as many as possible within the 2 hours or so.
Its hit or miss, but I tend to find something within the month, someone looking for part time remote work.
I am always looking, but since its part time, I get filtered out a lot due to employers wanting full time folks.
Just Hustle. Keep Hustling. Don't stop hustling. It helps me.
In the end I took a regular salaried job that paid better and I got to spend more time doing what I loved: programming.
I've been hard at work preparing everything for remote developers to be able to help us out where ever they are and how for as much hours as we can afford them to work. My idea is to scale the company based on a dynamic remote team, where knowledge is shared and only ideas come from within the company itself.
Please tell me where you have been looking for remote work? I'm dying for some good parttimers.
If you need any part-time assistance with DevOps-related topics (Continuous Delivery/Integration, etc.), I'd be interested in hearing more - my email is in my profile.
What kind of remote jobs are you looking for? Tech or non-tech? I've generally found weworkremotely and the HN hiring thread to be among the best. If you're interested in remote jobs at startups, AngelList have a special collection for you https://angel.co/job-collections/remote/
It might be worth your time to look through http://nodesk.co/remote-work/ for a collection of remote job boards (it's a list so visit them all and save the ones you find useful) as well as http://workintech.io/ (job boards specifically geared for tech jobs).
Let me know what you're looking for and perhaps I can help point you in the right direction.
The focus should be on increasing your skills, making them more unique and super necessary for employers.
And then use the relationships you have already (eg current employer or clients) to start working remotely.
Otherwise you could seek employment at a place known for having primarily remote workers.
Contract work and freelance is also easy to remote.
Following are some of my impressions but they are subjective and perhaps a bit speculative.
Generally I've found that the attitude of most US companies is that if they are willing to hire remote, they are usually only interested in hiring candidates inside the US - even if they are a native English speaker (I was an American living in Vietnam). This is very different than the attitude that I've gotten talking to a companies in say ... Singapore or Germany.
Another thing that seems to happen is that some companies seem to throw the REMOTE OK tag to their posting without considering whether or not everyone on their engineering team is actually ok with working with a remote employee. I've done several interviews with teams that were REMOTE OK but had no existing remote employees. Usually it only takes one person to veto a hire. That's something to think about if they are looking at both local and remote candidates. Unless there is a really compelling reason to hire remote, usually they will go local (makes sense). You might not even want to work with one of these companies because they aren't set up for remote work... communication takes a bit more work from all team members - not just the remote ones.
Overall I've had a much more positive experience with the HN: "Who's hiring?"" thread than anywhere else. I think this is because the first point of contact is often an engineer and not an HR person. My resume is a bit odd and doesn't have a BRAND_NAME_SILICON_VALLEY_COMPANY or a BRAND_NAME_UNIVERSITY so it bounces right off the HR department. It's very helpful to be able to talk technology with someone in the initial conversation. If I can get a knowledgeable front-end engineer to look at some of my previous work, then I usually get to the coding round.
I had no luck with any of the remote hiring sites: remoteok.io or weworkremotely.com. YMMV
Ultimately getting a remote job seems to come down to:
1. Having some kind of portfolio to demonstrate your competence. 2. Doing as many interiews as possible. Also the more interviews you do the better you get at it.
Good luck!