Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?
I read a lot about remote work - either sourcing from Hacker News and other media. However, what I see in practice, at least in Benelux Area, is that companies are far more interest in on-site positions than remote positions.
Why is it so? If the advantages of remote working are so clear - why companies still hire only on-site positions?
99 comments
[ 19.1 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadIf nobody does what you have identified as the clearly superior way, either everyone is an idiot. Or you may be wrong.
Take a look at the HN Who is Hiring threads over the past 2 years, and count up the total remote jobs. It's increasing at an impressive rate. Companies are discovering that they can still hire talented developers for average salaries (particularly those devs living in economically depressed areas).
There are thousands of devs who don't have the option to up and move to N. California or NYC. Some of them are very talented. It's not hard to figure out, and I'm sure the same dynamics are at work in Europe.
I do as well, but mostly freelancing contracts. The only thing that sucks is the timezone difference.
Hiring people directly over borders is legal nightmare. Though technically sometimes possible, tax complications are hard to follow.
Big companies that are incorporated in many countries will just employ you in the most relevant country (including your own).
Smaller companies can't do this (overhead, financial burden, regulation, blah blah blah), so they just hire you as an independent contractor. You get paid by whatever arrangement, and file your taxes accordingly. They pay an invoice file their taxes accordingly.
- self-employed working as contractors,
- after some time working in the US (either an internship or a regular position), but who went back to Poland (mostly personal reasons, but sometimes visa as well),
- in smaller companies/startups from Bay Area (where making exceptions is a... standard).
In reality, money is a weaker motive than power. When workers are on site, particularly in an open plan office, the boss's brain receives reminders every hour of every day that he is wielding power over underlings. That's not what everyone cares about most - but it's the people who do care about that, who become bosses in the first place.
(In the West, it's customary to maintain the fiction that it's about money. Apparently in places like Japan and South Korea, they don't bother with that fiction; you can spend your time in the office browsing Hacker News if you like, but if your boss is in the office seventy hours a week, you've got to be there eighty hours a week.)
As for what to do about it, as I see it the main strategies, in increasing order of difficulty and potential value, are:
1. Remember that remote work is not sensitive to location, and search the whole world for remote working jobs.
2. Become a contractor and look for clients who want goods and services rather than bosses who want underlings.
3. Start your own company and try to fix the problem for other people as well as yourself.
More seriously I think a lot of the reluctance to hire remote workers revolves around communication. Managing developers requires great communication which is very hard to do remotely. Of course on the positive side if you are willing to make the effort there are some really, really good European developers out there who want to work remotely.
I proposed to the manager that I would rather be on call (even unpaid) in the library next-door than sit in the office paid with nothing to do.
The manager agreed that there was nothing for me to do and agreed that there was nothing wrong with what I was proposing in principle, but it was necessary for me to sit in the office during working hours. There were exactly zero occasions when I was urgently required to be there.
This comment, about power being a stronger motivation for money, reminded me of that situation and put it into perspective: thanks.
They hung out in a Dock Road pub. The techies wired up a loudspeaker to the pub (not radio, I suspect they hacked the Reddifusion cable radio) and called the staff when needed. I was quite impressed as a small boy (and, no, we as a country were not big on efficiency in those days).
Iain Sinclair has written about Trueman's Brewery round that time as well.
You won't agree with this but: is paying people to sleep in bunks any worse than subsidising low paid jobs using the benefit system as we do now? Typical commercial rents £600 to £750 a month and minimum wage £6.50 per hour.
Teaching: you have to trust people. You can't be the 'pit boss'. Might be why I stayed in teaching I suppose - management has to support performance, not wield power.
So if nobody can see you working because you're not in the building you're not contributing to this illusion of work being done.
Where I 'work' I have a manager that has to invent some crazy projects just to keep me occupied. If he didn't do that I could work half a day every week and be done with it.
In my Visual Studio projects folder I have a bit less than 100 projects. Maybe 3 or 4 are actually needed by the company, 20 are test or toy projects and the rest nobody has ever used these programs past their presentation (not because they're not good but just because they're not needed).
I find it hard to stay motivated (and this is quite an understatement !)
The correct solution would be for him to work half days and continue with job rewards to be identical: he gets more free time and a better life, while the company gets a more loyal employee who is more relaxed and would be more willing to go that extra mile on projects which actually are important.
It's really just one of those cases where human nature and the desire for him not to get 'paid for doing nothing' is actually hurting everyone involved. Humorous and very sad.
Last time I saw someone working from home for 1 day, his manager sent him 2 screens email, how it should be an exception, not a practice, etc.
There was a guy (can't remember his name) who said that US is the only place where you can put US guys, Mexican, Chinese and ... (whoever) and make them work together. In Europe this is not the case, probably because of historical reasons and as a result of the last 30 years of immigration policy (especially the french-speaking countries).
My other theory is that Europe is left behind US in the technical area. If something is top-notch in USA, it will "come" in mainland Europe in 10 or more years. For e.g. now the MBA is hot trend.
Disclaimer: I've been working remotely for the last 4 years.
Yet according to some (and it is open to interpretation) the UK has a lower productivity than France, by a pretty huge margin. It seems that the UK, while it might expect to have something done, by comparison actually gets a lot less done.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/20/britain-prod...
This is ridiculous. There are a ton of amazing engineers/designers/etc in Europe, who are just as able as their US counterparts and deliver work at the same quality level.
Plenty of them work remotely, either for EU or US companies.
My point is that on company/organization level the EU companies are more ... how to say it... conservative and full of bureaucracy that their US counterparts. They pay for an employee and it they don't see him at his desk - there is a problem. The "communication" habits are also quite different IMHO.
As someone working in a company in London with about 25 engineers from 15 different countries I have to disagree with this statement.
Could you elaborate on this one? I worked for an international company in France, and even though engineering was pretty diverse, most of the management was French.
From what I see around me, there is a problem where internal communication channels and communication culture is not mature enough to support remote work.
Yes remote work can be good and advantageous for some, but it can also be bad.
I'm not interested in relocation. If I could find a team that work with technologies that I like, I would accept a 'lower salary' just to work part-time (~15 - 20 hrs/week) remotely, then I would seriously consider joining, but that's not the case in Europe, apparently.
Having said that, there are some teams who are super organized and can just ship off short stories if you are an amazing coder. They are few and far between, though, so you will really need to network to find them.
Good luck!
Our VP of engineering lives on the other side of the country and I think it does more harm then good. He only knows what's going on based on the Trello board, bug tracker, and what people tell him. He misses the "unofficial" communication; the back-and-forth banter between devs, the morning coffee chats, the idle brainstorming, etc. that comes with physically working with other people. He's put himself in a glassbox and just sits there issuing development edicts without any grasp of what the real issues are.
We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart.
Remote work has great benefits for the remote worker - and having been one I know them as well. The downside is that when you're building something complex the communication overhead is too big.
Another thing is that remote workers in vastly different timezones provide a time window for architectural discussions which can be too short. So they are never there when you need them and can only work alone.
I prefer to give my team members flexibility to run their personal errands and family issues but to have them on-site to have the shortest group communication paths possible.
Europe does not have so many timezones, but if you decided to go farther east, that's different issue.
I don't think everyone in the team should be involved in the architectural decisions of your product. That's why there are different type of seniority and roles in the team. Then you just have to "manage" the execution.
Remote isn't bad, per-se, but having worked remote, managed remote workers, and now owning a business, it is my anecdotal experience that things generally run smoother, more efficiently, and with deeper levels of trust and involvement between people in the same room.
Therefore, for me, it works the other way around. If a company has salesmen, their product must be totally unimportant. They are probably competing on cost with China, and busy going under, because anybody who could innovate their way out of that trouble, has left already, or never came over in the first place.
When I choose my iPhone, my MacBook Air, my Martin acoustic guitar, etc, I didn't need a salesman to explain to me how great these products were. I went into the store and tried them out for myself. No one ever had to convince me to purchase the product. The product did that by itself.
On the other hand, if someone has to convince me to purchase a product I was never looking to purchase, or over a competitors, the product probably wasn't that great in the first place.
When you limit the dimensions of a face-to-face communication to the dimenions of a written communication, it is tautological to say the are the same. But the advantage of face-to-face is exactly having more communication dimensions.
It is obvious that face-to-face communication can be richer. But it does not follow that internet or just written communication is significantly deficient in an overwhelming majority of situations in our field.
Also: pair programming.
I've only worked remotely the past 12 years, people communicate in writing just fine, as long as they care about the job.
All the companies I've worked for remotely, insisted that occasionally we get together to have some face-to-face time. I've never complained because I know these meetings makes management happy, and I also got to travel around the world, but purely from the perspective of doing work, all of these have been a waste of time and money. The only purpose of these meetings is social.
I would also point out that working from home means significantly fewer disruptions (with the exception of kids in some cases -- I have a closed off office for work). I worked at a physical office and the number of "hey I have a quick question" scenarios was really frustrating when they could have googled it, yet it takes me out of my flow to stop and answer it and I lose focus. And this is not even counting the number of environment level interruptions you can't control in an office -- phone calls, people walking around, people laughing, chatting too loud, etc.
At least with communication mechanisms like HipChat/Slack it's more passive when people ask you questions. You can reach a stopping point and then answer them at your convenience.
- slack . - skype / hangout, - shared screen, shared editing sessions - code review.
add regular meetups and you're ok.
At this level, other aspect of the project management are likely better target for optimisation.
That being said, I still don't get what's wrong with videocall: share screen, facial expression and microphone and you are good to go. It's like a booster: I was stuck in an ugly bug for 2 days, we made videocall and took care of it, works great.
You need to find the remote job boards. Oh, and networking, networking, networking.
http://jobs.remotive.io/
Please add others.
https://nomadjobs.io/
Also if the role requires some kind of client facing element, that rules out remote work.
Also if the role requires some kind of client facing element, that rules out remote work.
Part of finding that kind of work is to do with marketing ;)
I would like to emigrate in the next few years and work remotely for European companies and this is my intended strategy. Perhaps this is something you should try and maybe tell HN how that would work out for you.
Main problem is bureaucracy. The US is a big place and it is United from West to East Coast.
In Europe, once you start making lots of money, every country you touch wants your money. So if you hire a French guy the French gobertment will love to tax YOUR ENTIRE business based on their socialistic views of the world, even when you are located in other country. Rinse and repeat with any country you touch.
Instead of focusing on the tech side of things you have to make an incredible effort with bureaucracy alone.
The advantages of remote working are very clear, but so are the disadvantages: People can goof all day or do the laundry, take care of the kids at the employer expense. The employer could also abuse taking extra hours of the employee for free.
For neither the employer or the employee to abuse each other or just being productive when nobody is watching you(directly, of course I know what my people are doing even when I am not in front of them)a series of techniques has been developed . It takes practice, effort and time for people to get used to it.
But yes, once you try it you will never want to go back. You can never eliminate the need to meet your coworkers from time to time(once a week or month) though.
Most business in Europe are old and big, they do what has been proved to work(in a pre Internet world) for decades. They move slowly, but they move.
Big companies operate over the principle of "nobody ever got fired for doing what used to work". When they see success examples of other big companies doing remote working, they will follow. But today only a few jobs, like programming or personal assistants could be completely done remotely.
My advice is to create your own company and to take advantage of this problem, you know in the business world we call them "opportunities". As remote communications improve this is going to explode.
And the multiple taxation is not an issue anymore - your company and you are taxed by location within the EU (assuming you're a citizen of the EU). Hell, you can even take advantage of it by establishing a residence in a cheap country but actually living elsewhere. Your company is taxed where it's founded, but there are some issues with legally operating in other EU countries.
As others mentioned, while more common, intra-community workers are a bureaucracy nightmare if you don't register a subsidiary in the employee's country, which if you do, then you have tax/social security+other stuff you need to take care in the employee's country.
Best way to do it is for employee to setup it's own company in country of residence and play by the rules, and then just be paid for services rendered and be responsible for all taxes/other.
The other taxes, well, it's up to the person. If he wants a pension, he'll pay them in some country.
But what do I know, everyone I know is breaking some law in regards to taxes, so I might not be the best person to listen to...
There are answers to most (if not all) of these questions out there, but finding the right answer can be tricky and takes a lot of time (which, for a company, translates to a lot of money being spent on lawyers). So, as a company, do you spend all that time and money and take the risk that you made a mistake somewhere and the employment contract will be governed by rules you did not expect - or do you rather hire someone who will move to your place?
Any advice on where to start? How to find customers? Is there a good lecture about this topic?
If you want to hire a French employee, you can incorporate a French subsidiary, and you invoice his wages (+ some operating expenses) from your main company to the subsidiary. Doesn't cost much. Clean and simple.
How is this a problem at all?
I've been quoted a cost of around 8% of salary to be retained by this subsidiary- hardly insubstantial.
Alternatively they can put a framework in place so that the UK company can directly employ in France. Here the costs are lower but coming in at at least 3000 euros is by no means small change.
I suppose the cheapest option (I haven't investigated) would be for the French employee to incorporate themselves and deal on a corp/corp basis. However the admin cost is then incurred by them and they wouldn't be covered by us on French employment terms.
The admin for employing a UK person is vastly easier and cheaper. We already have the contracts and accounting in place. I have been very surprised that cross-border hiring is so difficult/messy/costly in Europe.
That's the problem.
Those qualifications aside, I think (A) coding is uniquely well suited to remote work and (B) transitioning to remote work as a major way of working is a long cultural transition that companies will need to grow around. They'll only do that if it's advantageous enough and the process could take a generation.
Coding is well suited to remote work because it can be parceled effectively with clear responsibilities and deliverables. It's like journalism in that sense. If you need to produce 2 articles a week and the articles are the output of your work, then it's easy for everyone to understand that you did in fact contribute two articles and form an opinion of their quality.
The parts that are hard about remote working is structuring a culture that is able to cooperate without physical presence. Physical presence is a key feature of how we interact. Online discussions are different to face-t-face discussions. People travel international at great expense and inconvenience in order to do business face to face. It's subtle buts adds up to a lot.
Maybe we are getting better at remote communication and collaboration. Maybe the ways we work can adapt to the environment of remote working. But, it's a cultural shift.
Remote work is strange in the same way that remote parenting, remote dating or remote friendship is. At the end of the day, the relationship that will come out of a remote marriage will not be the same as a regular marriage. That may be OK for remote working. I am sure that some companies are making it their advantage, but it's not a simple matter.
TLDR: If a company that exists in a building today decided to transition over two years to a company where people work from home, the company would probably fail. The transition is hard.
Don't forget non-strange remote business relationships like remote retail (buy from amazon), remote entertainment (Hollywood movie not a stage show or play, or recorded music not a live band), or remote manufacturing (imported from China not the now abandoned factory down the road), or remote software (believe it or not, companies used to write their own OS 50 years ago instead of buying a microsoft/apple product) or remote senior management (for a long time, its pretty unusual for most megacorporation employees to work at the same office as their CEO, even if they work at the same office as their boss). With increased specialization on a very long term all business has trended toward ever more remote "business interaction"... the only part that's new, is the very long term trend is starting to finally impact the lowest organizational levels of white collar general office labor.
Another hidden assumption is that physical presence or um, excessive face to face communication is necessarily a productive useful activity, combined with a heavy dose of "its popular and/or traditional therefore that means its inherently better" and/or "cultural shift is bad or unnecessary". I'm unconvinced that "mind work" is best done with enormous amounts of interpersonal coordination. That means the architecture is a poor match. By analogy its possible for a very bad general contractor to try to make the painter, plumber, electrican, and carpenter all work at the same time in the same corner of a little closet, and maybe, by heroic levels of effort and incredible professionalism and cooperation it can somehow be accomplished, but its a kind of dumb non-profitable goal. Also if you design for scalability you've just lost the game when you tightly coupled, what do you intend to do next year when "it" goes viral and the database is a department of 50 people on the other side of the country, not one dude at a conference table with the other one dude departments?
Online commerce is not a bad analogy. Barnes & Noble didn't become Amazon, Amazon did. IE, the advantages of online commerce where big enough to invent a new kind of company to do it. Remote working might be a bigger challenge than that on the kind of scale proponents seem to hope for.
Maybe we will see large companies go all, part or mostly remote. I don't really know. It's clear that remote collaboration can work (plenty of examples), but whether or not it works with existing structures is hard to know.
Face to face interaction between people is different from remote interaction in ways that are fairly fundamental to how we worked. Communication & collaboration is really our speciality as a species, and we have a lot of inbuilt faculties to help. Some need physical presence. I think the internet is full of examples of remote communication failing in ways it wouldn't have in person. We may even be demonstrating this now.
I pitched a partially remote team to a previous employer in Singapore and they were reluctant to try it initially.
First, they didn't know what remote meant (except for that time they outsourced something to a cheap country and it was a costly disaster). So, had to spend some time explaining that. Not rocking the boat is quite valuable when you're busy and worried - just keep doing what you know.
Second, a contractor is not an employee - contractors are services you buy piece by piece, whilst you "own" an employee (not pretty terminology but unfortunately often true) and you can milk that employee with a potentially infinite return on your finite investment. Is this a stupid thing to think, yes, but nevertheless I encountered it.
Third, it's about control. It's possible, but harder to micro-manage remotely (and in practice no sane contractor will accept it without extreme compensation).
Fourth, it's also a hell of a lot easier for a "consultant" to "end the contract" when he's fed up with bad management, than for an employee to move his entire life yet again (metaphorically if not physically). A consultant benefits from having had many "clients", an employee is hurt by too many moves. These "traps" make an employee more pliable and invested emotionally (at least in managers' eyes) so the managers prefer employees.
Fifth, IP. Employee contracts usually sign over everything. Remote contracts, being for services, have more opaque IP agreements. This also applies to a lesser extent to security - that remote dude is working on a foreign network, foreign machine, etc.
I'm not saying these are desirable things, but these were my conclusions from experience. YMMV, different businesses have different cultures, etc. If you want to change your internal culture, I think these are the issues/fears to address.
We ended up getting remote jobs because the test we put up for the job ended up not getting a single application locally, but dozens from all over the world. About half the folks who passed relocated, the rest stayed on remotely.
I'm now running my company completely remotely. We have a mailing address in London and Hong Kong and work from home. I see almost no reason to get an office. Unfortunately we're also not hiring because we have a long waitlist of nice candidates that we will hire (remotely) as soon as we clear enough revenue. Maybe that's the case for the other remote businesses.
1. Legal issues: Hiring people across borders is a nightmare for both the employer and the employee when it comes to social deductions, taxes, health insurance, applicable labor laws, etc. And if you hire people within borders, many European countries are small enough that they could just as well commute to your office (maybe that's also the reason why more remote work is available in Germany and the UK, being larger countries, as has been stated below).
2. No Silicon Valley: Let's face it - most American companies will expect you to show up at the office every day just as they do in Europe. The exception are primarily the tech startups, and in the United States there simply are a lot more of them than in Europe.
3. Worker protection: I think hiring remote workers is inherently more risky than hiring on-site staff. You will have less control over your employees, you might even have less control over the hiring process (no on-site meeting), etc. In the United States, you can just try it - hire someone to work remotely, see if he or she can deliver and if not, just terminate the employment and go back to hiring on-site staff. In many European countries, getting rid of employees once you have hired them can be quite challenging and requires solid proof that they are not delivering what they should - and to make matters worse, getting that proof will also be much more difficult if they are working remote with less oversight.
4. Language issues: Yes, many people in Europe speak English (more or less fluently). Nevertheless, following conference calls in a language that is not your native language will be more challenging than following a face-to-face meeting, so language barriers become more pronounced when interacting remotely (at least in my experience).
- Requirements are often given on a very high level, you will need to be aligning with business owners and other teams on a daily basis, communication is easier with all these people in the same building. (i.e. you won't be given a clear package to go off and work on on your own).
- If there is an existing team that you will be joining then the other team members will start asking why they are not allowed to work from home. (The reason for that is that in any large org they are needed for communications with other teams on a daily basis)
- If you are a contractor what is to say you are not working for another client? Much easier to keep an eye on you in-house.
Also, this is a slow cultural transition as people learn about remote tools for collaboration and start to accept it. So within a few more years it will be different.
Besides that, most of the positions posted in job boards are for Full-Stack or Front-End developers, not many Back-End or Data Science, which is what I am looking for.
If companies in Europe were more open to telecommuting, we would have much more chances to get a remote job and companies would have more chances to hire better developers. I guess this will change in the next years.