6 Things to ask when interviewing for a remote job

>> Chat works so well at communicating with the team that we’re all available 24/7/365

We’re fully remote at my job - no 2 people are in the same state in the whole, small, org. And I think we work well.

But people sign off at 6:30 in their own timezone by and large - and while they’ll check slack as much as they’d check email, slack is not going to cut for 24 hour access.

And it shouldn’t - we don’t want a culture of no downtime at all. If it’s an emergency use their pager* - which yes does get expensive for foreign employees but really the company is fine picking up those charges.

Even if you are remote quality of life matters - and people’s timezones, and schedules should be respected.

* Note that everyone does have a "pager number"- including our support reps. But most people haven’t been paged in more than a year. We consider this to be the right way to do things.

   "How many full time remote people do you currently have working for you?"
   GOOD: "We have about 25% of our workforce remote."
   BAD: "You would be the first one and really, we just listed remote to get 
   more applicants. Are you open to relocation?"

somebody had success with such draw apps? this is a missing piece for us

I've never worked remote in either situation, but I'm kind of inclined to think that being remote on a fully remote team is much, much better. I would think that a partially remote team would have a hard time fully committing to using remote work flows and tools, and the remote workers would inevitably always be a little out of the loop. Of course, if you're cool with that, and are happy with something more like a consultant role then maybe that's fine. If you're looking for a bigger or more central role in the org, then you'll have a hard time being remote in a partially remote org. Does that perception seem accurate? Or do I have the wrong impression?

As an anecdotal case, I recently started working remote most days of the week at my job, and it's been dramatically successful compared to the occasional days I'd do it at my last job. So far as I can tell, the reasons are subtle:

* Hipchat/slack integration: My current job does exactly what is listed in the article: even when sitting next to someone, we rely on the IM client for most conversation. Meanwhile, at my previous job, Such tools were rarely used: IM or email, you'd expect a 24 hour response time, so most questions were handled in person.

* Hours. My current job has remote offices, but only spanning a 3 hour time difference. My past job had offices in Seattle, Detroit, and two areas of India (Pune and Bangalore), so a 12 hour time shift was normal. This made ANY remote action difficult, so teams got more insular, so coordination took more time.

* Lots of Remote-ness. My current team is spread across 4 cities. My previous job had everyone local, except for several people in Pune, India. Thus, the difference to my team in having me work from home rather than office is very little: only one person would actually be in the same office as me anyway.

* VPN. My current job has VPN feel exactly like being there. My previous job had VPN be extremely slow, and some crippling dependencies. We had some workarounds, but basically working remote felt like something you suffered through, not something sustainable.

* Monitors/Home Office. My wife recently redid my office, and as such I have a private space to work from at home, and can plug my laptop into a preferred mouse/keyboard/monitor. This makes me much more productive than I'd be before.

Would have been helpful to explain why some answers are bad, why they show a bad "fully-remote" environment. Otherwise good post. The 1st item is very important: being the first/only fully remote employee is really tough.