[hostyle]

My personal anecdote: companies are idiots.

99% of these jobs are city based and require you to relocate. Why? If my work is all done on the internet, why can't my commute be aswell? Why should I have to constantly migrate when I have a perfectly good and happy place to live out in the country? Why isn't remote working catching on more?

All of these claimed shortages are in "IT" which is a very lose term. In Ireland for example something like 50% of IT jobs are phone tech support in foreign languages. We constantly hear of the shortages in this area - yet its low paid and generally requires foreigners to fill the roles. So why not try to hire actual foreigners? In actual foreign countries? Across the internet? Why try to hire expensively educated and irish people with a high cost of living and offer them minimum wage?

The shortage is never in qualified candidates. It's in qualified candidates willing to accept minimum wage. And if all that wasn't bad enough, foreign corporates get to pay extra low tax rates by moving to Ireland, just so they can try to screw the population out of a proper wage packet - all endorsed by the government of course.

[AndrewKemendo]

>Why isn't remote working catching on more?

Right now 100% of my startup team is remote. There are definite advantages, but as far as we are all concerned we think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Why?

Because the communications mediums available still do not give the resolution we need to communicate optimally. Even with Skype/join.me/freedcamp etc... the turn around time for decision making is orders of magnitude slower with remote teams than it is with co-located teams - especially when you are on different time zones and in different continents.

A perfect example is when we wanted to implement a design and UX change on our beta website. The change came at my request after visiting a customer and went to the CTO and the design lead. The CTO started working on the back-end about an hour after I sent the message, but it was almost a day later that the design lead got the message because he was 8 hours behind. We needed some of the design pieces before the front end could be finished and tied together with the back end. About a day later the design lead finished the design and committed the change. At which point it was midnight US time so another 8 hours till the commit could be integrated. We realized we needed a slight change so we had to repeat this process. The whole thing ended up being a couple days for something that would have taken maybe two hours total had we all been in house.

These lags add up very quickly and have pushed something that would take a day of turn around to nearly a week.

[MrDom]

It sounds like your issue is entirely to do with the fact that your team is spread around too many time zones. What if everybody on your team lived somewhere within 3 time zones from each other? That happens to cover the entirety of the united states, canada and mexico, by the way.

I've worked on teams spread across the North American continent and we had no issues with making fast decisions. Most of the time it felt like we were in the same room, since we had a skype group video chat running for 7 hours a day (at which point it would kick us off for being on too long).

IMHO, the reason remote isn't done more often is it's a hassle. You need the right tools in place. You need people with the right mindset. There are tax issues around employing people in multiple states and/or countries. There are also shipping costs involved in sending equipment around the country and/or the world. The lack of control over said equipment and the data on it... the list goes on and on. Each one is surmountable on its own, but add them together and it become so much easier to insist everybody be in the same room. Especially if it's going to be a high stress environment, like a startup.

Still, it would be nice to work from a cabin in the woods.

[toomuchtodo]

>IMHO, the reason remote isn't done more often is it's a hassle. You need the right tools in place. You need people with the right mindset. There are tax issues around employing people in multiple states and/or countries. There are also shipping costs involved in sending equipment around the country and/or the world. The lack of control over said equipment and the data on it... the list goes on and on. Each one is surmountable on its own, but add them together and it become so much easier to insist everybody be in the same room. Especially if it's going to be a high stress environment, like a startup.

Bottom line: The founders/company owners/whatever MUST be invested in the company being a fully remote company. It doesn't work otherwise. If you're at somewhere where working remote is handled half-assed, I suggest departing for a place that takes it seriously. They are out there.

Disclaimer: I work for a 100% remote startup.

[bloodorange]

Though I agree that these are problems that exist with remote working, unless you are able to lose less time and build an equivalent or better team, you may still have come out ahead.

[dpritchett]

Exactly! Compare the Linux kernel project (globally distributed, world-class devs) to a team of undergrads working in the same room.

Maybe face to face has higher communications bandwidth, but it doesn't automatically win in every scenario.

[x0x0]

except the kernel now has strong interfaces between subsystems I think, which aids collaboration by decreasing required communications and making changes more local. Small companies working on a single product lack these.

[tomkinstinch]

> 99% of these jobs are city based and require you to relocate. Why? If my work is all done on the internet, why can't my commute be aswell? Why should I have to constantly migrate when I have a perfectly good and happy place to live out in the country? Why isn't remote working catching on more?

This has been my experience as well. I moved from the Bay Area back to a place in the US with more a reasonable cost of living (in the same time zone as family). Local jobs have no clue what market rates are, or even how to hire competently (no work samples, or technical problem solving). When I try to look for remote work online, companies in both NY and the Bay Area stop the conversation when they find out I'm not willing to move. Even Hired.com, which has a location checkbox marked "Remote", asked me to delist my profile until I am willing to relocate.

How do you all go about finding remote work?

[toomuchtodo]

https://weworkremotely.com

https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote

In my case, I answered a HackerNews job posting.

[nine_k]

As a sibling comment says, it's a pain to be in a significantly different time zone.

Try to emphasize that you'll be always available at the prospective employer's local time, and will be able to spend time in the office once in a few months if necessary.

Also, try to contact companies that already have remote workforce and a remote-work policy (like github).

[rwmj]

.. and Red Hat.

Distributed team, with members in the US, all through Europe, China, Japan and Oz. We work entirely over email, IRC and a weekly Google Hangout.