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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

One frustrating thing I have found about companies willing to hire remotely is that many refuse to be your first remote gig; i.e. they only hire people who already have years of experience working remote. I understand the hesitation, but if good people really are so hard to find it should be a hesitation that can't stand up in the face of being unable to get things done.

Then again, neither should resistance to remote developers in general or the myriad of other, more bullshit things that go on in sourcing talent. Makes me wonder how self-imposed the "talent shortage" is.

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I struggled through the same thing almost 15 years ago and finally found a middle ground.

We had a team of three co-located with the customer and then we arranged for everyone to work remotely one day a week, barring Monday or Friday (for appearances). Tuesday was my day. After a few successful months of that, we expanded it out to 2 days each. We would have gone to three but the contract wrapped.

But it gave us a small space to experiment and see what would work and slowly convince the customer that it would be okay.

Hiring teams that are just "getting their feet wet" with remote workers are going to be more hesitant. When there is an in-company precedent for what remote work is like, I find them to be more open.

For me, making the transition from on-site to remote work was difficult. Like any job skill, it's something I had to be able to demonstrate proficiency and/or history with before I could land full-time, remote employment exactly where I wanted.

That creates a chicken-and-egg situation, though, since it is not a skill you can develop on your own. There are a set of skills (remote work, TDD, pair programming, Agile, etc.) that, almost by definition, you need to do professionally to become proficient at. If all the professional gigs expect you to already be proficient, you never get there.

I never worked remotely but I don't think it's hard and I want to do it in near future. The way to do that is to find a company that is open for new ideas. Start working on full time office job and after month or two if your job position allows for that, ask for day or two in a week of remote work. This will allow you and the company to test that solution and check it it's working for both of you.

Lots of finding work and vetting skills is actually a chicken or the egg problem. You have to find the places that are willing to offer opportunity with less proven background in order to open the door to bigger opportunities. This is like any job skill.

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