[carom]

I have been a remote employee (starting years before the pandemic) at a number of companies. The biggest thing I've noticed is the importance of communication. More specifically, you need a chat-first workforce. Seeing some places that were awful at remote and some that were really good, it really comes down to how comfortable people were communicating via chat.

If I were building a remote company I would hire people out of chats. I would rather hire someone off of IRC than off of LinkedIn, because I know the people on IRC can communicate (and argue!) via text. This may mean Discord now. That's my strongest opinion.

Following that is managerial. I have had places that did not have 1:1s with your direct manager, just bi-weekly or daily 15 minute standups with everyone. That is a good way to sabotage your company. Employees have nowhere to air problems besides in front of the whole group, so problems don't get mentioned until they are breaking (e.g. I have been working on other stuff for 2 months waiting for this guy to deliver something, but I need it now).

Being good enough to know what needs to be done, and being able to hire good talent and then trust them to get that stuff done. I have seen non-technical founders being run around by a D-tier CTO. You need good people to get good people as well. That place had a very difficult time landing talent.

Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

[FreakLegion]

> Finally, pay well. I think the standard early startup pay range (180k + 1%) will not get you the technical talent you need. Maybe I am overestimating the technical challenges many companies face, but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

This was my view, too, but I've been trying the 'fewer, better' route for a while now and seniors seem to be only marginally ahead of the curve, if at all. Now I wonder whether hiring twice as many juniors and aggressively promoting the ones who prove themselves wouldn't be more effective. (This isn't a good idea for other, pragmatic reasons, but I do wonder if it would work.)

[anal_reactor]

I worked at a company whose business model was hiring students for internship. Not even juniors, just students. The place was bad, the product was bad, everything was bad, but they're still in business, which means that this model does work. I checked their website and they even started offering IT outsourcing services.

My prayers to whoever signs a contract with them.

[miki123211]

Komarch (a very large Polish IT company) is famous for this. They don't have any products of their own, they specialize in box-ticking, contract work and winning tender offers from the government. Because of how tender offers work, anything which cannot be measured doesn't matter, and any system which fulfills the pre-established requirements has to be accepted, no matter how bad it is. This usually means terrible UX and terrible code quality.

There's even a "law of Komarch", "anything that can be done by one senior can also be done by 50 interns."

[benterix]

If you are creating an MVP, this strategy may work. You could then hire more experienced people to rewrite everything if the product takes off.

[ProxCoques]

> you need a chat-first workforce

I second this. Worked for a large retail operation and people used to sometimes move between departments. These had very different communication styles: one group had communal rolling chats about all sorts of stuff all the time. Others only chatted if they had planned to do so, or created a specific private chat for a topic. Far easier to work in the department in which you could just fling out a question or comment any time and people would get back to you almost instantly and hash things out.

[celdon25]

> but I would not build a business off of $180k engineers. I would rather pay double that (while being selective about talent) and get something (better) built with fewer people.

Where are these 360k jobs posted? I never see anything close to that.

[carom]

Major metro big tech, toward the senior side of things. Check out [1]. Salaries in the 200s are very realistic. 300s is senior or long tenure with stock appreciation. It is worth grinding leetcode for a few months.

1. https://levels.fyi/

[celdon25]

Ah, thought you were referring to salary, not IOUs. I'll stick with consulting.

[carom]

Common misunderstanding. RSU grants at public companies vest regularly. At Google I had no cliff and my shares vested monthly. With auto sell it was just another ~10k of cash per month. Smaller grants would vest quarterly.

FWIW I consult now and make more than I ever did at a company, so also find a niche and raise your rates.

[celdon25]

Yeah that's my plan right now. I've thought about going back to full time every now and then but it is often too hard to advance and many companies with high growth end up failing. I have a lot of freedom where I'm at now (transitioned to a consultant with more pay and mostly choosing my own hours) and it was hard work to earn it at that company. Sometimes you get in too early and get burned out, sometimes you get in too late to make a difference. Big corporations aren't really for me either and I don't want to move back to a major coastal city, it ends up costing more than the difference in pay.

The company I'm currently with is doing pretty well too and I have a lot of time there so there's always a possibility of advancement there too. Though if there were jobs with 300k cash salary or more that didn't require relocation I'd have to really think about it. There's always a risk that the new job doesn't work out for whatever reason and I've been burned badly by that before. Never fully recovered from the 2016 move to Palo Alto!