For what it's worth, I'm involved in the hiring process at chartboost.com. (Company tripled in employee size the past couple months!) When we get a resume / inquiry from somebody who wants to work remotely, it's instant rejection. Telecommuting is a long debate whose scope is outside of this discussion, but for a lot of companies that's a tough sell. Especially at 115k.
Sorry to hear that, I once read a quote that said hiring is about getting the best person available in your market at the time you are looking for them. There are two constraints there both of them hinged on time, the first being the developers timing of being on the market and the second being your timing of need for the position. Both of those conspire against you in your ability to find the best person. When I realized this, I realized that companies can actually take a few steps to stop those forces from acting against them.
First, they can stop hiring for positions and start hiring good people, if a good person becomes available, hire them. Find a position for them they will make you more money. This clear the window of their time line.
The second is the companies timing of having a need and for a company not willing to look at a global market, that need is constrained to the best available talent in their geographical region, this is a huge constraint to put on oneself given the fact that by just letting a developer who can do all of their job off-site, work from a remote location, the barrier can be removed. I am amazed that companies still conspire against themselves in such a manner.
I like the points you make. Working remotely is how product development and many other tasks that require highly skilled professionals is getting done in 2011. Working out of offices every day of the week is an archaic practice.
A bit over ten years ago I worked briefly at a company that didn't have internet access for the employees, so people had to write down things they needed to look up on paper and then look it up at home when they got back from work. The company, which had been around for decades and was an engineering shop, predictably went bankrupt because they were not able to adapt to modern conditions. You have to be able to keep up if you are going to work in the tech industry. This applies to companies even more so than employees.
Companies that can't handle working remotely in 2011 are exactly the same. They are dinosaurs and are becoming completely irrelevant. It's no wonder they can't even respond to emails, they are hopelessly confused and mired in the past.
This whole conversation will seem absurd in the post oil future where driving back and forth to work each day when it's completely unnecessary is seen as madness. Face to face interactions? What sort of argument is that anyway. We have had that for a while now through videophones. Almost everything that can be done in an office can be done in a home office. Even 3D prototype fabrication and hardware development is being done remotely.
When a company says they can't handle people working remotely the right response is stunned silence, and then the observation they sure as heck better get that fixed pronto. It's not like it's even difficult to do, it's dead simple and doesn't even cost anything extra. There is simply no excuse for such a level of backwardness in a tech company in this day and age. What's next? Eschewing electricity?
People from more than 3/4 of all the countries in the world took classes at Stanford this quarter and none of them even knew if the professor was wearing pants because everything was remote. Laptops have been around for decades. Video conferencing for several years, IM for decades, collaborative white boards and editing software. Bugtracking and version control are all on the web. What on earth is going on at these companies that they don't know about what is going on? Even hospitals are getting xrays evaluated overseas. Customer support calls from someone in Texas are routed to a customer service rep working out of his kitchen in Ireland. Idle fast food employees at the 10am slump in Idaho are taking orders for the lunch crowd rush at 12 noon for a sister restaurant in Atlanta.
Here's a prediction that is so right I'm calling it a fact. Any tech company at the cusp of 2012 that doesn't have remote employees is on life support. If they can't fix that, I absolutely guarantee you that company is not going to be around 3 years from now. They just aren't. Any skeptics about this, let's check back right here in this comment in 2015 and see who got it right. Will there be any tech companies with no remote employees (other than sole proprietorships with no employees) in 2015? I say no.
People from more than 3/4 of all the countries in the world took classes at Stanford this quarter and none of them even knew if the professor was wearing pants because everything was remote. Laptops have been around for decades. Video conferencing for several years, IM for decades, collaborative white boards and editing software. Bugtracking and version control are all on the web. What on earth is going on at these companies that they don't know about what is going on? Even hospitals are getting xrays evaluated overseas.
There is a crucial observation in this particular portion of your post. Remote development forces you to streamline processes like "put everything into the bug tracker" and "diagram everything on the whiteboard". Having remote developers can actually force you to become a more streamlined and efficient company. You are right though, with Skype, bug trackers, and SaaS there is no valid reason why someone can not consider a remote candidate, save for some serious security concerns, like top secret classified information and systems.
I am going to go out on a limb here and say no, other may disagree and may have valid concerns but the benefits on both sides far outweigh the drawbacks. Especially for a start-up, while in product development, a start-up can significantly reduce capital expenditures by not having payable for facilities. This is a huge burden on a new company and the elimination of it, is by far one of the greatest advantages. Even in established companies it can help them to significantly reduce their footprint. The developer does not incur anymore expenses because they are already paying, housing, electricity, internet, phone, etc.
As well one of the other great benefits of having a distributed team is that you already have the process in place to on-board anyone in the world into your company with little expense. No relocation, no facilities set up, no cube build out.
The biggest concern with remote developer that managers have is "how do I know their working"? That's a red flag from micromanagement, but that is besides the point. The answer to that question should already exist in their in-house solution, all work should be done through a ticket system, and source control, if it is not then they have a lax process already and they probably have people who are not working right under their nose. The fact that a manager of development would not know how to answer the question of how to know if people are working, should be concerning to a subordinate of that manager, it may reflect that they are incompetent at their job.
To me their are no draw backs, I was actually opposed to distributed development a few years ago, I though it would isolate developers and not allow them to form a cohesive bond. It was ignorance on my part because Open Source projects have been proving the opposite for a long time now. I just finished a contract with IBM that was over 20 individuals on the team, all of which where remote. With Skype and other tools it was no different than all of us being in the same office. Those kind of successes changed my mind on the subject.
* Can't have lunch with coworkers. Lunch has always been a good time for socializing about non-work events and developing camaraderie.
* Can't go out drinking after work with coworkers, same benefits.
* It takes much more time to personally prepare one's own lunch than taking advantage of free healthy food now offered as standard benefit at campus by most reputable tech companies like Google.
* No employer provided on-campus child care.
* No employer provided Friday massages.
* When you don't feel like working, can't chit chat discretely about TV and sports with workers for several hours.
* Less mentorship capabilities for senior experienced engineers to be paired to train and guide freshmen. However, I haven't seen this in many companies so it's not going to be missed most places.
It's always been an advantage to work remotely if you are doing stuff where you are a sole worker who is able to work on black box projects where you get a spec or desire in and return a finished product. This works best for people that are recognized experts and is a subset of work possibilities.
The real sticking issue has always been retaining the advantages of highly collaborative group and team work. Being able to talk face to face, have all hands meetings, have access to the company source control server, be able to work on something in the same room with someone working collaboratively at the whiteboard and in a text editor. Ten years ago this was completely impractical as the infrastructure was just not in place.
All of that has changed rapidly in the last decade as tech and services have ramped up and delivered in spades. Not only is work able to be done electronically, but it is regularly being done electronically, and it works every bit as well as face to face, often even better since you have more control over distractions.
It's not only super advanced high tech companies taking advantage of technologies like video conferencing either. It's not leading edge at all anymore. Video conferencing comes built in to the ordinary inexpensive cell phones regular people have, and people with absolutely no technical ability are using it every day. It's an ordinary part of contemporary life. It is so common to do now, the idea that companies aren't doing it already or are fearful of it is quixotic and surprising that there are hold outs who are so backwards. It's like hearing about someone from the 1950s who came out of a stasis pod or emerged from a bomb shelter who isn't aware that cell phones and laptops exist. The suggestion that some of these companies are claiming to be startup high tech companies is almost completely absurd and unbelievable. You have to wonder what sort of investors are so clueless they would invest in management of a tech company of all things that simply doesn't know what it is doing and seems oblivious or hostile to the realities of the modern world.
I think you're both right. I couldn't come up with any real deal-breakers, either. I've been thinking of working from home a couple of days a week, but I thought maybe I wasn't thinking it through. I'm going to raise you 2020 though.
OK, then I don't get it. Why do you want to pay a remote employee less than on-site? This is assuming that your company was amenable to the idea in the first place.
The employee off site is actually cheaper than on-site. Theoretically, you should be willing to pay more, not less.
If the employee is not manageable off-site then you have a problem but an offer can be made conditionally that the first 3 months are a trial and if it doesn't work, then you are canned.
And I would gladly take less if I could live somewhere cheaper. Let's say you offered $115k for me to work onsite in SF. I would take $95 to be able work from home in Los Angeles, or $75 to be able work from outside the US.
