How I failed to land a remote position
kostasbariotis.com
kostasbariotis.com
- Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use stupid filters like "the right fit" - which most of the time equates to finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1 who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best)
- As someone reading your blog post, even I did not make it past your full email text. It's just too long for HR to even bother. A shorter, concise, "get in your face" email sometimes works better
- HR filters are the worst way to get remote positions. You said you have friends working for remote-first companies like Github and Automattic - that should have been your first method of entry to go direct to the team itself and not need to get through HR first - if you're a great programmer and your friends know it, they will gladly recommend you
But I look back and think that maybe I've missed something, and I've just floated down the stream meandering, jumping from one raft to the next. I maybe haven't found the "best" match for my interests and skills since I've never thought too deeply about what exactly I wanted to do. I've just always "had skills and friends doing interesting things", and it's not been bad.
The transition to remote happened four years ago. I joined one smaller startup (with a single parent company funding its growth) ... a spinoff of sorts. I stayed for three years and it was the worst professional experience of my life, though I did appreciate California pay while living in the Southeast. There is and continues to be a lot of management churn, and a picture of the company should be in the Wikipedia entry for "Dunning Kruger".
A year ago I started working for an already-acquired startup that was part of a larger company (think 5K-15K employees). It's been the best experience in a long time ... I belong to a smaller team within that "startup", work on pretty interesting things. There's no equity, but my effective annual compensation has increased approx 40% (generous bonus plan, and they like my work).
I'd say for compensation and (mostly) positive development experiences, working through my network has paid well.
As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I disagree with this. I've worked remotely for almost all of my career, across three companies and long term consulting. I've also interviewed many candidates for positions that were remote-friendly.
For self-awareness, I'm going to acknowledge that there is an element of survivorship bias in play here. That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader.
What I believe actually happens is a cultural obstacle: two types of companies offer remote work. The first type has a cultural foundation set up to treat remote employees equally both in the work environment and in the interview process. The second type is well-intentioned, but does not design their work environment or interview process to enable remote employees to succeed as well as onsite candidates and employees.
If you are seeking positions at companies that merely offer remote work in a sort of half-hearted, "this is the future and we want to be trendy and 'get the best talent'" way, then yes, it will be competitive - you'll find that even if you do well in interviews onsite candidates will be chosen more often than not. But if you optimize your job search for positions which treat remote employees as first class citizens (especially with regards to on the job communication and the interview pipeline), you'll probably notice that the competitiveness of the process quickly returns to what you'd expect of typical engineering interviews in coastal areas.
> That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader.
Actually, how is this even a possible point to argue? The pool of candidates for an on-site job is limited to the population of that city + applicants willing to relocate. The pool of candidates for a remote job is literally everyone in the entire world.
What I don't agree with is mapping those numbers to competitiveness. How many of those 300-500 applications were actually competitive? You can do a first order qualification check on 300 - 500 resumes in a day if you're sorting into two piles: "I can immediately say no to this" and "I can't immediately say no to this."
You'll probably still have a lot to deal with at that point (though honestly I wouldn't be surprised if you've reduced 50% in my experience - people submit truly awful applications). Of those candidates, most are still going to be unqualified.
I distinctly recall phone interviewing 20 candidates back to back, each of whom couldn't answer very simple interview questions (and I mean simple, not "HN interview humblebrag simple"). I know, I know, this means we didn't have a high quality candidate pipeline. But that's harder to do with remote positions.
So to that last point, I suppose I have to concede if you're defining competition as higher numbers of raw applications. That's not the definition I'd use for competitiveness (though it's definitely a valid one), but probably better we get that sorted instead of talking past each other :). I would consider a position more competitive based on the quality of candidates applying to it, not based on the sheer number of people applying. As someone who has interviewed and worked in remote positions I've never really been concerned when applying for them, because I've always been reasonably confident I can hit the top n percentile of candidates, where n is inversely proportional to the total number.
It is not true. I for one do not even consider remote work. I don't imagine I am the only person in the entire world like this. The reason is that I had been working remotely sometime in the past and found it less attractive than working in the office. Combined with the fact that employers consider "remote" an additional perk justifying the lower compensation I now just turn down any remote offers without further negotiation.
Basically If you're already in America, you have several huge advantages over the rest of the world when applying for remote work (permanent or contract).
Agreed. People who apply to us by reaching out directly to someone they know essentially skip our first level of triage (https://handbook.hmn.md/getting-started/hiring-process/), so if you have contacts, use them. I know Automattic is similar (we're a partner of theirs).
1. Don't try to arbitrage by expecting Silicon Valley wages in remote areas. Companies pay the market wage (or a bit above) in each area, and you will make a lot less money if you work even in Western Europe rather than San Francisco, and of course much less if you are in Greece. There is no reason for them to pay you San Francisco wages if you are living in Colorado or Austin, let alone Greece.
2. There is a coordination failure here. 70 resumes? It's crazy. I've never applied to more than 2 jobs at once and never had more than 3 resumes out there.
There is a rough balance between tech workers and tech jobs. So what do you think the steady state job acceptance rate will be if each job seeker sends out 70 resumes? It will be 1 in 70. If each job seeker sends out 3 resumes, it will be 1 in 3. Do you prefer 1 in 3 or 1 in 70? I know what the firms prefer. Having been on both sides of the hiring process, I can tell you that everyone applying to 70 positions has a lot of consequences that make job search suck for everyone:
First, it means you are not a good fit for the average position you apply to. And employers know that. People complain about crazy filters and hoops, but what happens when you as a company get 4200 applications for 60 positions because everyone is applying to 70 jobs when they are really a good fit for say, 10 of them. I am not blaming the individual job seeker, as this is a coordination problem. Without penalties for sending out too many resumes, it's in everyone's interest to spam employers, creating a lot of noise in the job search process and causing employers to be even more strict in their screening.
Perhaps one solution would be something like a $1000 application fee for each job you apply to after the 5th application, to be paid into a fund for unemployed tech workers. It would also be nice if there was a central clearinghouse of resumes so that you don't have people sending different resumes to different firms, but just different cover letters.
That solution also has problems, but this blog is kind of a good example of what is wrong with job search -- you have a job seeker who thinks they will be able to work remotely from Greece and earn SV wages yet who is themselves extremely picky about the kind of job they want, say ruling out all big companies, and then proceeding to spam lots of small companies with an offer of remote Greek employment. Now think about your situation -- you are a small company so you probably don't have a lot of VISA/immigration infrastructure. You probably don't have lawyers on staff who can tell you what Greek labor laws are, nor is this something a small company would want to get into. Small companies are also much less likely to be willing to work with even a domestic remote employee because team communication/cohesion is more important to firms that don't have a lot of engineering processes. Finally, small companies generally don't have a lot of resources to spend on search and so (since every employer is getting spammed) most of the hires come from referrals.
Basically this user is going for the exact opposite profile of the employer who would be willing to hire him. This information is available, sending in a job application costs nothing.
Two reasons:
1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment).
2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in groups.
The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity in your professional capacity.
Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work.
It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default to it because it works often enough and because it's intuitively an attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction, even if it's technically suboptimal.
How do you judge someone in a meritocracy?
Interviews? Not reflective of actual work. Also trivial to bias in favor of one group due to culture fit elements. Short term projects? Exclude people who have limited free time (generally the more senior/older ones). Resume? Trivial to lie on. References? How do you know the reference is competent?
Social connections are merely another, imperfect, attempt to judge someone's merit. Specifically you trust the judgement of someone whose merit you have already proven in an actual job environment.
I can't think of one company which refuses referrals. Rather, even the largest of public companies have referral programs.
TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies unless they're directly relevant to the position.
Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others applying to the same position.
These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals?
Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend less than 30 seconds on yours.
Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that stands out.
Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.
I think a couple of a paragraphs about why you want to work for the company and a CV would suffice.
Best of luck with stuff though, an interesting post.
Yes that's actually something I didn't pay much attention. Thanks, will definitely keep in mind.
For each of their cover letters I told a personal story that was spot on relevant to the position and their mission/values. It demonstrated all the soft skills....each of them called me within a day or two.
Let your resume, portfolio, etc. do the talking.
- Make it less personal, the whole first paragraph is unnecessary, as is the 5th. Much of the blog paragraph could be removed.
- Focus on the projects.
- Add _far_ more about relevance to the company applying. I'm not sure how much was being added in the placeholder for company relevant information, but I'd expect roughly 50-70% of a cover letter to be company specific, explaining how your skills and experience will make you a good hire for the company.
- I'd probably add a cultural question about the company - this invites a response, will be something a recruiter can answer easily, and will show that culture matters to you.
- I'd probably play down the Node.js experience unless that's what the company specifically does - otherwise it reads like Node is the only major recent experience you have, which is unlikely to be useful at most companies.
Hmmm, that's actually a great idea. A conversation starter. Thanks.
Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there.
The same applies to dating - putting so much info up front is rarely successful.
You don't stand out that way because everyone else is writing the same thing. After the first five, it's monotonous and loses any feeling of meaning or sincerity.
I usually know what "value" someone will bring by their resume. I need a data engineer -- you're a data engineer! Great. Business value is established.
Beyond that, I'm trying to figure out what it's like to work with you, whether you're an ethical person, whether you can work independently, etc. Those things are conveyed by personal details (and, eventually, the interview).
Good point, you are right. I still believe what OP had in his cover letter was unnecessary but it would not be a deal breaker for me. Honestly, if he got rid of the paragraph about his hobbies and the sentence about where he lives, it's pretty good aside from some generic phrases ("I like clean code" - who doesn't?).
Exactly. I know that there are a lot of better developers out there than me. I had to differentiate myself by introducing him in a more fun way just like I would do if I was meeting them in person.
Once someone has demonstrated some level of ability, I care much more about how well they work with a team, how excited they are to learn, etc.
Good morning Kostas!
I saw something this morning that showed Chalkidiki, I wish I could remember where I saw it - the water was so clear and blue it looks blissful!
Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we are currently not hiring. But as a start up this could change in an instance. I will put your email into our database and should a match with your skill set arise we will reach out to you. I do want to let you know however, I am sorry to say, at the moment COMPANY_NAME lacks the legal resources to sponsor visas other than TN-1visas for Canadian and Mexican citizens.
Warmly,
EmilyWhat works to get my attention in the first paragraph of a cover letter would be any of the following:
1. Past employment at a well-known high quality employer (e.g. the Big 4).
2. Substantial contributions to important open source projects, ideally ones that I've heard about.
3. A history of high performance at previous employers, e.g. you've been promoted to tech lead and/or brought on at senior level.
I don't care about your beaches.
The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks.
Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that.
Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.
I feel like I'm one of a huge crowd and being ignored completely is very common, even when I surpass all of their requirement check-boxes boxes, then some.
I spend a good amount of time on each cover letter, research the company, and email the CEO or a lead developer on the team. I very rarely get a response, but twice I got to the first stage and then it's as if I was forgotten.
I'm currently employed in a non-remote position, and I would be able to get a new local job with ease simply because I can walk in and talk to someone. I have gotten offers already, but I have a good list of reasons for wanting a remote position.
I'm persisting, but it's getting a bit tiring going this long at it.
As far as benefits, there are few benefits that are worth having a lower salary. Pension, retirement, all that nonsense – a waste of money – create your own retirement investments with the increased money you make. I’d rather money go into my pocket directly than to some benefit system that necessarily results in some amount of dead-weight loss.
65 per hour gross as a full timer versus 100 per hour gross as a contractor. 35 per hour is like an additional salary.
But, it does take discipline and being extremely organized so it’s not for everyone.
I like having the stability, so easing into contracting might be a viable option for me.
It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars).
It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it.
Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.
Making people work on site for roles that don’t actually need to be – that’s just nonsense. The only thing I care about is shipping. I don’t care about eating lunch with the team, I don’t care about the idle chit chat. I certainly don’t need to be sitting in a conference room looking a a computer projector during sprint planning when I could just as easily be seeing that same screen and listening to the same conversation sitting in my office at home. When I work with the team, RARELY does it require interpretive dance to get a point across. Even white boarding can be just as easy remotely.
If you don’t trust employees enough to be remote, then you shouldn’t hire them to work in the office either.
Hardware engineering or other physical product-based businesses, I get it, remote usually doesn’t work. But for writing code, sales, marketing? Not a single reason not to be remote except if are working on something that requires a triple-lockdown environment and is highly secret. Very few companies have that level of absolute secrecy as a requirement – but even then, there have been known to be remote people even on those types of teams.
As a developer, if you want to take extra time to implement something because you want to put more thought into it, your employer has to trust that the extra time that you're using will translate into a superior, better designed product.
If the employer is trying to squeeze efficiency out of employees by giving them ridiculous deadlines based on optimistic assumptions about how long x should take to build, the result will be poor quality software and it will cost more in the long run.
Strange, but seems to be true.
Reminds me of one of this comment:
> That's unfortunate. I could rock your world with my knowledge of all of those things, regrettably my physical presence is tied to a 50-square-mile chunk of rock that isn't anywhere near your 50-square-mile chunk of rock. With all the things we have in common - language, currency, culture - it's a shame such an outdated concept as 'physical proximity' is a requirement for the position. If only we had a globe-spanning communication network that would obviate the need for such silly self-imposed limitations... :-)
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadminjobs/comments/4638md/hiring...
That's interesting, I'd love to hear from others who agree/disagree with that.
To preempt the comments regarding survivorship bias or humblebrag: I acknowledge that people absolutely experience higher bars when interviewing fully remote positions. That said, I personally believe (from my own experience and that of friends) that people who typically experience higher competition in seeking remote positions are probably not optimizing their search.
There are, broadly speaking, two classes of companies featuring remote positions. The first type is a company built on a foundation of remote-friendly culture - people communicate in Slack for almost everything, at least half the company is remote, positions are headlined with remote work, etc. The second type is a company that offers remote work and has a well-intentioned desire for remote employees, but which ultimately does not favor them.
I've worked in both sorts of roles. If you are competing against non-remote candidates for the second type of company, then all things being equal they likely will not proceed with you. This is not only because of the cultural differences in preference but also because the interview process is not optimized to treat remote employees as first class citizens.
Remote workers seem to be held to higher standards, and my impressiom is that there's an emphasis in being comfortable with both the domain and the tech stack so that your only obstacle to be overcome to be productive is getting used to the quirks of being part of a remote team and the processes involved.
You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than going through the official website application.
One thing which is surprisingly not as oftenly discussed here are other criteria besides pay taken into account when making a choice between remote and non-remote.
I’d like to make an argument that remote work works only for a particular use case: when you need to execute on a particular vision with some strict framework of action. You’d need employees who are highly senior (therefore autonomious) and have great communication skills.
Probably the main reason why I’m considering to move away from working remotely is the lack of challenging projects. Even though I definitely improved my engineering skills by working on projects and reading up blogs/books, I’d learn much more if I had direct interaction with other engineers which is impossible due to constraints of communication medium in remote context.
I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate than other teams in the company.
I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's experiences with remote managers/team leads.
Now we're hiring a full-time machine learning instructor, and I can't even imagine trying to find someone in SF. Even remote is difficult, but at least there are applicants.
As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the world (8-12 hours difference).
Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or GMT-7, depending.
I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are not (all) coding robots yet.
Unfortunately, I forgot to reply to the commenter.
Best of luck with finding your remote job!
Perhaps one will come out of the attention your blog post has joined. Since people at your current employer may well know about this, perhaps put a small text 'ad' at the top of your blog advertising that you are always interested in the appropriate remote opportunities in Node.js?
Here's my two cents (I edited your email):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lA...
Anyway, IMO alot of other commenters here have given some really good feedback, so I won't elaborate on any constructive criticism. But if you'd like to chat sometime about potential opportunities, send me a message sometime (email is in my profile, or as you know I'm always on that Slack group). I have a few decent people in my network I can probably send your way.
I appreciate the post, was a good read :)
I think it's very reasonable to have one person responsible for compute storage and virtualization infrastructure.
I can see how a big company would specialize though.
Mail me if you're the least bit interested in a growing team with little shiny-chasing and lots of pragmatic engineering.
I'm about a decade removed from any real "two-box shops" (small and/or startup focus etc.) and so sometimes think they can't possibly exist anymore. I see a few of the "we want the world" job postings and experience burnout just reading some of them.
"Pragmatic engineering" I like the sound of that but I'd secretly hope it's not meant to rhyme with "best practices" - I like good practices and all but I like and appreciate the actual games much more. :O) That's just a small parting snark - mostly harmless. Best of luck on your search! I'm trying to maintain some focus on data operations at the moment but with any luck my next jump attempt will be into something counter to current trends.