His boss begged him to stay -- he could even work remotely. My friend took the deal. He lives in Charlotte now and flies to LA every 2 or 3 months.
The best place to look for remote jobs is to talk to people who have worked with you in the past and trust you.
But how feasible is it to do this today when so much of the current crop of advice seems to be teams-over-individuals, nobody-is-indispensible messages telling managers to avoid letting programmers gain this kind of leverage at almost any cost?
Those places are usually career dead ends anyway, even if you're not bothered about working remotely.
Unfortunately, there are many places which only have employers like that which means you either move or you deal with it.
* What hours did you and your team work in the last month? (anything that indicates long hours are frequent is a red flag, not because long hours are intrinsically bad (though they are), but because it's usually being used as a proxy for measuring productivity).
* What is your policy on remote working? Who do you have remote working currently and under what circumstances? ("no remote working" is ok for me if there's a non-bullshit reason but YMMV).
* Who is currently your best or one of your better developers? How did you come to that conclusion?
* What characteristics do you look for in clean code vs. technical debt-laden code? How do you handle and plan for paying down technical debt?
* Who reads your team's pull requests? (worst answer is "nobody", 2nd worst answer is "the team").
* Have you read any of my code? What did you think?
I'm usually not looking for a perfect answer to all of these questions, just avoiding the companies that give an impression of widespread systemic dysfunction in their answers or a manager who is clueless.
What's the best answer you've heard for this one?
I never thought about teasing the red flags, but it makes more sense than just asking directly.
You could publish a list somewhere, I think a lot of people would find these valuable.
How did they work for you in practice?
Best/worst reactions to them?
Teams are composed of individuals, and we've set up things so that if the team doesn't depend on the knowledge of one individual. However, we still have people working remotely and the engineers are valued because they create value, not because they hoard knowledge.
I had an awkward experience leaving my last company. I wanted to move and was willing to work remotely, but no one on my team or my immediate managers thought that was something the company would be willing to do so we agreed I'd resign. It wasn't until I had already accepted a job at another company that I started hearing from friends in other parts of the company that it was possible to become a remote worker. It was just so rare that my immediate team was quoting an old policy and they didn't bother to verify it with HR.
To be fair, the job I found has been great and I'm glad I left.
For those who are even thinking of bluffing e.g. along the lines of "lying" about "I will quit if I don't get a remote position" or "I am going to move", please don't. For the former, your credibility will be shattered if you they turn you down and you stay. For the latter, if you don't move, it will be even worse if it turns out you weren't ever planing to move. Also, you don't need to move to get a remote job (you might just have a horrid 1.5hr with traffic/15 mile commute from the outlying suburbs into the city center where the office is).
As for finding remote jobs, I think it's good to be experienced with something niche or in very high demand like Clojure, Haskel, Spark etc. Companies can easily find locals to work on popular technologies, but for the uncommon or hot ones, they sometimes need to bite the bullet and build a remote team - even if they would prefer not to.
I have for the 2 years, applied to 100+ jobs a week. When I don't have work or when I find my current work teetering off, I sit down every Monday, go to 40+ job sites I have collected over time and just apply to as many as possible within the 2 hours or so.
Its hit or miss, but I tend to find something within the month, someone looking for part time remote work.
I am always looking, but since its part time, I get filtered out a lot due to employers wanting full time folks.
Just Hustle. Keep Hustling. Don't stop hustling. It helps me.
In the end I took a regular salaried job that paid better and I got to spend more time doing what I loved: programming.
I've been hard at work preparing everything for remote developers to be able to help us out where ever they are and how for as much hours as we can afford them to work. My idea is to scale the company based on a dynamic remote team, where knowledge is shared and only ideas come from within the company itself.
Please tell me where you have been looking for remote work? I'm dying for some good parttimers.
If you need any part-time assistance with DevOps-related topics (Continuous Delivery/Integration, etc.), I'd be interested in hearing more - my email is in my profile.
The focus should be on increasing your skills, making them more unique and super necessary for employers.
And then use the relationships you have already (eg current employer or clients) to start working remotely.
Following are some of my impressions but they are subjective and perhaps a bit speculative.
Generally I've found that the attitude of most US companies is that if they are willing to hire remote, they are usually only interested in hiring candidates inside the US - even if they are a native English speaker (I was an American living in Vietnam). This is very different than the attitude that I've gotten talking to a companies in say ... Singapore or Germany.
Another thing that seems to happen is that some companies seem to throw the REMOTE OK tag to their posting without considering whether or not everyone on their engineering team is actually ok with working with a remote employee. I've done several interviews with teams that were REMOTE OK but had no existing remote employees. Usually it only takes one person to veto a hire. That's something to think about if they are looking at both local and remote candidates. Unless there is a really compelling reason to hire remote, usually they will go local (makes sense). You might not even want to work with one of these companies because they aren't set up for remote work... communication takes a bit more work from all team members - not just the remote ones.
Overall I've had a much more positive experience with the HN: "Who's hiring?"" thread than anywhere else. I think this is because the first point of contact is often an engineer and not an HR person. My resume is a bit odd and doesn't have a BRAND_NAME_SILICON_VALLEY_COMPANY or a BRAND_NAME_UNIVERSITY so it bounces right off the HR department. It's very helpful to be able to talk technology with someone in the initial conversation. If I can get a knowledgeable front-end engineer to look at some of my previous work, then I usually get to the coding round.
I had no luck with any of the remote hiring sites: remoteok.io or weworkremotely.com. YMMV
Ultimately getting a remote job seems to come down to:
1. Having some kind of portfolio to demonstrate your competence. 2. Doing as many interiews as possible. Also the more interviews you do the better you get at it.
Good luck!
* http://news.ycombinator.com (monthly posts for freelance jobs)
* http://dribbble.com/jobs (only design)
* http://getonbrd.com (latam)
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With broker
Here you apply as a professional, they approve you (or not) and then assign you projects.
* http://workingnotworking.com
I do not recommend
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Slack communities
Interact with other freelancers. Usually you will find a #Jobs channel.
Free membership
Paid membership
* http://join.nomadlist.com ($25 month | $75 year | $200 lifetime)
* http://workfrom.co/chat ($5 month | $50 year)
* http://freelance.chat ($25 lifetime)
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This list is from an article [1] that I wrote, hope can help!
[1] [redacted]
Paid membership * http://join.nomadlist.com ($25 month | $75 year | $200 lifetime) * http://workfrom.co/chat ($5 month | $50 year) * http://freelance.chat ($25 lifetime)
It's just a chat and there's a jobs channel. I know many people found clients etc. through it but it's very informal. Think of it like a bar, not a network event. You might meet the right people, you might not.
* http://automattic.com/work-with-us/ (all remote company) * https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer (another curated list)
I do not recommend
* http://upwork.com
* http://freelancer.com
* http://nubelo.com
* http://fiverr.com
* http://workana.com
* http://guru.com
EDIT I made a blog post about this https://gitlab.com/sytses/sytses.gitlab.io/commit/e9a000d321...
Btw. This seems to be a more readable version of the URL, one that you posted linked to git commit https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-payrolling.html
PS: Gitlab is awesome, keep up the good work.
What kind of remote jobs are you looking for? Tech or non-tech? I've generally found weworkremotely and the HN hiring thread to be among the best. If you're interested in remote jobs at startups, AngelList have a special collection for you https://angel.co/job-collections/remote/
It might be worth your time to look through http://nodesk.co/remote-work/ for a collection of remote job boards (it's a list so visit them all and save the ones you find useful) as well as http://workintech.io/ (job boards specifically geared for tech jobs).
Let me know what you're looking for and perhaps I can help point you in the right direction.
Otherwise you could seek employment at a place known for having primarily remote workers.
Contract work and freelance is also easy to remote.
In addition to all this, you will get a much lower rate than you're expecting. While it's true that you set your own rate, they basically told me if I don't charge at the same below-salary rates as the rest of the people on their network, they won't send business my way.
So huge waste of time on the interview, plus you'll make less than a salaried position for the advantage of sporadic work and no benefits. Stay away if you know what's good for you!
Toptal has a lot of open (internal) positions and their interview process is different than when applying to work on Toptal as a freelancer. Everyone on the Core development team is remote.
The good things are you don't have to chase down clients for payment or constantly hustle for gigs like other freelancer sites, it's like a temp agency they do all that for you, and you work for established companies (AirBnB ect) so hopefully the person telling you what to do has an idea of what they're doing instead of constantly asking for the impossible. You can also easily set own hours, so check in and out whenever you want.
The bad of course is wages unless you're living in a country with a very low cost of living or you just want to use toptal to gain remote work experience and don't mind not being payed Silicon Valley standard then it's probably not worth it to you to work there being there's dozens of jobs on hnhiring threads and other sites that will pay at least 2-3x as much.
Doesn't seem like they are a 'top 3%' themselves honestly.