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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine and not a human ;p).

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.

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Trust? If the features are being shipped there really isn’t much trust required. You know after a week of that employee is delivering. Being in the office does not guarantee a single minute of additional productivity. In fact, I get more done in 2 hours working remote than I do at a typical day on-site.

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.

It's easy to ship poorly designed features quickly. Shipping well designed features is a different matter.

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.

> It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it.

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...

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