| I'm an employer that allows near 100% remote work. Remote work comes with its own set of trade-offs that need to be managed. These are the trade-offs I see with my 10-employee company in India: Pros: a) I can hire experienced people from anywhere in India b) My employees do not waste time in traffic. c) I have fewer personality conflicts to deal with ... but this could just be a side effect of being really small (~10 employees) d) Being in the services business with all my clients abroad, my employees develop better remote working skills e) I save on office rent Cons: a) It is hard to hire junior people to fit into a remote-only team in India. The 0-3 year experience crowd in India prefer being part a group and have a collegiate culture. I do not blame them - I've seen the 'in office/onsite' culture work well for them. But it hurts me as a services business because I get better margins on more junior folk. b) Many senior people do not want to join my company - it doesn't 'feel' busy, they would like to have better visibility into their direct reports, etc. This wasted so much time during the phone screens that I have had to list 'we are a distributed team' as a con on our careers page. c) The lack of office space is a major downer for a lot of people who would like to bring their relatives and show off a fancy office with dressed up colleagues. d) I have heard these genuine complaints often - "we do not really know our colleagues", "we do not get together often enough", etc. I sometimes worry that we may not end up being very cohesive. e) Remote work in India is interpreted by some candidates as 'easy work'. And it is interpreted by many people in their social circle to mean 'no work'. E.g.: "I have this errand in the middle of a weekday. Come with me. You work from home anyway." |