Analyzing the "Who's hiring thread" for the last 5 months, I found that there are a "good" number of companies willing to do this, but still is not that much and a lot of them say "Just in US"
October Remote: 40 (16.1%), Total Posts: 248
November Remote: 35 (15.8%), Total Posts: 221
December Remote: 39 (17.0%), Total Posts: 230
January Remote: 26 (13.5%), Total Posts: 193
February Remote: 35 (19.4%), Total Posts: 180
Number of people re posting 4 times (1), 3 times (5), 2 times (23), 1 time (110)
I would like to hear, if your company hire remote developers, how has it worked for you, how do you find those guys?
If your company doesn't, what are the main reasons for this? what would it take you to consider a developer in other state or country?
I've seen startups that are fine hiring "consultancy shops" whose developers are overseas but not hiring the developers directly, why is that?
DISCLAIMER: I'm interesting in the subject mostly because I'm working on a current solution to help companies and developers connect through engager.io, we believe there is a giant market of good developers outside the U.S, but unfortunately not all the companies want to hire remotely or can sponsor H1B1 visas.
I just don't understand all those "US-only" hiring.
I have hired a number of devs in Brazil for telecommuting work in the past. We've done a fair amount of mobile dev, but mostly it's HTML / JS single load apps, not usually native iOS, and mostly apps, not games. I'm not sure if that would be a fit for you.
If you're interested, send me a resume please, and who knows? I may not have anything right now, but things come up here and there. Best of luck.
I make apps, but I am focused in games, and I use C++, C, Obj-C, Lua, Java...
I don't know JS at all.
I am wondering why.
And I don't tried to actually get hired yet (I have a startup, that yes, is running out of money, but no, I won't give up that easily :P)
But I am paying attention, as plan D in case my startup fails in plan A, B and C.
(note: Most of the reason for this is because US companies going overseas are primarily doing so to save money and probably are trying to cut more corners than they should.)
I've seen projects like the one you mention above too, they were people who hired guys for $5/hour and expect to have the best work in the world. You get what you paid, I guess.
For instance I know at least 3 companies owned by Americans in my city, all their customers are in the U.S, the developers all locals, and they just act as "middleman". Seems like there are still some cultural barriers here?
(my gf thought I was making this up)
So yes, there is a cultural barrier. No, its not fair.. neither is life. I hate it, and even as an American, its still a struggle for me to find remote jobs. But you know what? honestly? screw them. Money talks in the new age, and the rest of the world is catching up very very quickly
I would not just limit this to being American. Being British I have felt that it has been a big contributing reason on why I have been hired over people from countries such as China or India.
My main experience of remote work is that a 'normal' 8 hour day doesn't work - everyone needs to be a little flexible with their days and hours of work both for regularly scheduled standup meetings and for ad-hoc conversations with workmates. The oft-seen "US only" may be a timezone related concern.
I understand that international payments are seen as comparatively cumbersome, and (for employees, at least) the tax situation may well be more complicated.
I've worked as contractor for companies in the U.S and Germany, normally I would just send them a receipt and received my money without problems in my bank (I did have to take care of the taxes in my country).
We have paid using SWIFT transfers, which sometimes require a bit of work to set up, but nothing too onerous - it's like doing any complicated transaction at a bank. Once set up, the recurring payments are generally trivial - as you said, we get an invoice, send payment, and things are merry.
Tax-wise this is an expense like any other to our US-based company. Note that in this case the developers actually LIVE overseas. If somebody is in the US but is not a resident / authorized to work, then it's a whole different story.
I work at a big co on the west coast and we have had developers in India, hired by the company's India arm, on some projects.
There are coordination issues because it's exactly halfway around the world, especially if a project requires collaboration with another department. Projects sent overseas need to be well-defined and self-contained to get a good result. This alone could cause you to shy away from hiring in other time zones.
Expectations and the engineering culture are different in the two countries. I have worked with India developers who produced work that was worse in terms of depth, quality, and maintainability than the same project later taken up in the US. I do not have an anthropological explanation, and the developers from India I've worked with stateside didn't have the same issues. /fireproof
More experience and tech muscle is concentrated in the US team. How about this: if you were highly skilled and experienced, as a rule you would have moved to the US for the greater opportunity and the big bucks. There's a positive feedback loop here, because banging together lots of skilled workers creates more opportunity and attractive companies, creating more motivation to come, and so on.
How about this: if you were highly skilled and experienced, as a rule you would have moved to the US for the greater opportunity and the big bucks
Makes sense, though there are a couple of things to consider one of them is visa issues. Also, not everyone wants to live in the U.S or Europe or leaving their hometown.
I was actually surprised speaking to a university lecturer today that had no idea companies like Mozilla hired people remotely. I had somewhat taken it for granted as the norm.
Another big barrier for smaller companies is the logistical difficulties in payroll, currency, international banking, tax compliance etc. - it's easier to be a contractor.
Thirdly, the company culture needs to be set up for remote working. Otherwise you'll have poor communications, and the remote people won't be plugged in to what's going on.
That's true, I remember a client once asking me why was my rate so much higher than the average (I'm located in Colombia).
If the employer and the client are not comfortable conversing in the same spoken language, it is almost guaranteed that the project will cost more money and be delayed. When dealing with a client or employer that does not have the competence of a native speaker in your language you must specify exactly what you need, as if you were talking to a child or machine. Most of the horror stories you see on sites like TDWTF are results of poor communication, not incompetence or malice.
I agree with this, as a freelancer/remote worker, one of your key assets is communication.
They never really made an effort to incorporate remote workers into their culture. The development team is about 20 people, 4 of whom were remote. It was a trial and an effort to get work out of them; there were days I wouldn't have much to do. Managers would book meeting times and then miss them; you'd spend an hour waiting for a ping on Google Hangout or Skype, then go back to doing something else. Group meetings required dialing in because they felt having a spare laptop in the room for a Hangout camera was more effort than the voice-only conferencing system "we've always used."
Last week I was notified that the remote workers were being given an ultimatum: move to Silicon Valley or accept a layoff. I have a family, a mortgage, and roots where I live. I accepted the layoff.
I've worked remotely for three companies. At two it worked: the teams were small, and coordinated, and serious effort was made by management to involve themselves in the day-to-day worklives of their developers. Developers weren't left to wonder for weeks on end what their role, assignment, deadlines and deliverables looked like. The third left me exactly wondering that, and wondering why they threw their money away idling us. I guess they just couldn't hack it.
It has worked fine most of the time, I remember only a handful of times in which I've had to stay up very late because of problems on the production server (we're 12-14 timezones apart!). The support for another of the products of this business is handled by another developer in Sweden, so it's a very distributed team :-)
I've also worked as a contractor with another team based in Cape Town, South-Africa.
To look for remote jobs, besides HN, check on StackOverflow. They allow you to filter job offerings by those which allow telecommuting, but many of them have clauses like "work from anywhere in the US" or "must be a US citizen or have a work permit to work on the US".
1. If you limit yourself to "locals only" you stand to miss out on some good talent.
2. Distributed software development teams certainly can work in practice, just look at many F/OSS projects.
3. Guess what, all our stuff is OSS anyway.
4. But, there is extra coordination cost and overhead when it comes to dealing with remote workers.
5. And there are times you just want everybody in a big room together to hash things out. This is obviously harder with a distributed team.
6. All of that said, we'd almost certainly look into remote workers. Within that framework, I think there might be some slight preference for people in the US (less language barrier, fewer time zone issues, etc). The idea of "rural sourcing"[2] strikes me as interesting as well.
7. But we would definitely consider non-US as well. I've heard good things about working with folks from Eastern Europe (Latvia, Ukraine, Estonia, etc.), as well as the Philippines. I think South American countries like Brazil would be intriguing as well. But, at the end of the day, it's about a match between talent, skills and the needs, weighed against the tradeoffs of cultural barriers, timezone issues, language issues, etc.
8. Perhaps surprisingly, I see India as lower on the list of places to seek remote talent. Partly because the timezone, language and cultural mismatches seem more severe between India and the US, compared to some other choices. And also a perception (which might be flawed) that there are fewer individual developers in India looking for remote work. My perception is that it's all Infosys and their ilk when going to India, and that doesn't interest me so much. That said, I'm not saying we wouldn't work with folks in India, just that some other areas seem like they might be better options. But time will tell.
"8 timezones: Covering the past, present and the future 7 countries: Equal chances for all employees"
Any Jitsuka here that can tell us more?
