What a world we could have if companies realized they could sidestep this problem entirely if they hired remote workers.
I was later in their office on Hurontario near the 401 for a HackerNest meetup. I was speaking with a manager of theirs and mentioned someone who I knew that worked there, to find out he no longer did and he laughed about this person with a colleague.
I love hearing about a Canadian success story but their culture seems a bit off.
The Canadian and US labor markets are pretty interconnected so in my opinion these companies are going to have to start raising salaries if they really want to get talent. I feel like I read something on HN every week bemoaning the Canadian tech industry, when most of the problems have a pretty simple solution: pay more. Of course, that's easy to say but not necessarily easy to do financially.
Perhaps it’s worker protection that makes salaries lower in Canada? If it’s harder to fire people, that cost gets spread across all salaries to reflect the risk of having an employee you can’t easily fire.
Canadaians make far less than Americans even after accounting for the “benefits.”
I once saw a company looking to hire a senior rails developer at $25 CAD per hour. Insanity. I think it was even for a Vancouver company.
The US has a "payroll tax", which is paid by companies and is usually a percentage of the salary paid to the employee. You may not consider it a "business tax", but others might.
Also, some cities have business taxes on a per-employee basis.
Additionally, there is potentially a lot of variance in business taxes between one state/province/municipality and another.
Even in the US when you consider the whole instead of just Silicon Valley that is not a reasonable number to expect.
If Canada doesn't want all their CS graduates chasing the huge amounts of money they can make in the US, they need to raise their salaries. Otherwise they won't only face a tech-worker shortage, they'll have to deal with a full-on brain drain, which is even worse (of course, Google is expanding in Canada so hopefully this won't happen).
I'd love to a) know how to recruit good remote-capable employees and b) how to better manage remotely -- because at this point, we're going to open an office and hire locally.
Interstate taxation, necessary corporate filings/fees/forms, and offering healthcare in multiple states also make being fully remote incredibly difficult unless to restrict employees to being "remote" from the states in which you're already established.
but if business requirements, on the other hand, are complex, poorly understood or fluid, then developer will be absolutely lost and will start cranking up patterns instead of solutions. teamcity will be building alright and scrums will roll, but project will be a complete mess heading for a disaster. face to face will not save the day, but to some degree will mitigate lack of communication and understanding of common goal.
If you're trying to hire for a place people don't want to work in or if you're having issues with skill levels of new hires, the solution is to widen the net: Not in terms of skill ranges, but in terms of geography.
Not everyone wants to work remotely and that's fine. Especially considering that for the vast majority of people, there is someone better than them out there that desperately wants remote work.
Right, no issues hiring, but maybe some issues managing, communicating effectively, and completing work. You're potentially trading one set of problems for another.
Perhaps they've tried a bit of remote and it hasn't worked for them. We don't know.
When I hear comments like this I roll my eyes because those issues aren’t remote issues, those are incompetent manager issues – issues that don’t get resolved by simply sitting in an office.
Management, communication and productivity are challenges regardless of work location. Why do many remote companies “make it work” while others fail? My theory is it has nothing to do with on-site vs remote. It’s a scapegoat used by insecure or incompetent managers who lead mediocre employees they shouldn’t have hired in the first place.
If your workers can’t perform in a remote environment, then they aren’t going to suddenly get better by virtue of sharing a ping pong table.
For remote work a manager has to be more on top of keeping track of his/her employees.
I understand you have strong opinions about this, FWIW I work remotely so yeah I get it.
It's much more than this for me. Coding still requires teamwork, and, short of everyone being able to execute perfectly without in-person discussion, it's useful to communicate with all human gestures being immediately apparent.
I'm surprised at the level of negativity here against office work. I expected people to argue it as another option- not that it should always be the only option for effective teams. I say this as someone who works remotely, and who prefers office work with the right people and not too long of a commute.
I think the bigger issue is just finding the right people with whom you work effectively, not whether work is done in the office or remotely.
This strikes me as a bit rude and prejudicial. Not all of us are rockstars who can function effectively without social contact. I personally prefer a central meeting point and face to face communication.
All I'm arguing is that in-person work is preferable by some managers and employees. I'm not arguing that it should dogmatically be applied to everyone.
From your hn profile, I gather you understand yourself to be a bit disagreeable,
> I'm opinionated, inconsistent, irrelevant, irreverent and incontrovertible
I don't see that as a problem myself but I wonder, based on this statement, whether or not you've found working in offices to be effective for you. I'd also wonder if you ever admit to being wrong, and how you react under those circumstances. I'm not convinced you could lay any and all disagreement at the feet of insecure managers.
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211068518-Use-Y...
What amazing metrics they have! /s