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Comment by deedubaya | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of devs trying to convert to remote positions who get frustrated that they haven't landed a job after days/weeks/months.

Going remote isn't as easy as what many devs are probably accustomed to, especially if you're new to the game (as the tech hiring market has been :fire:).

If you're going to go remote, you need to realize a few things:

- You're competing against waaay more candidates. You need to stand out, not just be another warm body.

- You need to demonstrate, without a doubt, that you can/have worked autonomously.

- You need to demonstrate, without a doubt, that you can/have been self managing in the past.

- You need to demonstrate that you provide a better bang-for-the-buck than anyone else who has applied

Source: Working and hiring remotely for the last 7-ish years.

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This. I work remote currently and my job was not initially a remote position. After about a year of demonstrating the above, I was offered remote as a benefit. So that's something that might also be an option: finding a company that's open to remote work and converting after working in office for some amount of time.

I'm in a similar position.

Started on site, early on asked for remote which wasn't possible at the time, circumstances changed and I asked again. It felt like forever it was in the hands of higher-ups but after two years fro my my start date with the company I went on a 3 month remote trial.

Trial went well and I'm now permanently remote.

Ask, provide reasons why you should be permitted to work remotely & if denied ask why so that you can change and try again.

As a tech manager, this has worked really well for me. I have had 5 remote employees. 3 were local first, and all 3 were great. 2 were remote hires and both failed.

I worked at a place where a junior developer announced shortly after starting that he was moving 3 time zones away. The company decided to continue to employ him. It was probably doomed no matter what they did, but they also insisted he work on a VM at the company headquarters, and didn't have him visit the team in person on a regular schedule.

Edit: In this situation, he was hardly local first, given the short time between his hire and his moving far away. All of which is to say I agree with the poster I replied to.

I sort of did the same. Worked there for years, but office policy wouldn't allow full time remote, so I quit. Now they hire me back. I'm think I'm the only one in the entire company.

Not trolling, but really curious, how do you propose one demonstrates the following in a very convincing way during the interview?

> - You need to demonstrate, without a doubt, that you can/have worked autonomously, that you can/have been self managing in the past

Do you simply state your experience of having worked autonomously, or having self-managed? If yes, how would you still stand out, because it's like every other candidate also states the same thing "Oh yeah, I require minimum supervision, always get my sh*t done on time by self-managing".

and

> that you provide a better bang-for-the-buck than anyone else who has applied

This is even more vague and fuzzy. How do you demonstrate that you "provide a better bang-for-the-buck than anyone else who has applied" during a phone interview? References?

Well in my case I put a massive amount of effort into the technical portion of my interview. I was given a week, as they knew how busy I was. I spent a good 8 hours on it, and went above and beyond. Instead of a simple working SPA, I produced a full working system with full UI, REST API, 100% coverage, rolling data import, containerisation and deployment scripts for all services, pseudo-branding, documentation, GitHub organisation with repo per service, and to top it off, deployed it to a $5 droplet and provided credentials.

This is what you'll be up against when interviewing for good remote companies. I work for a remote first company, not just a remote friendly company, so the competition really is stiff.

With the wage I went in for, it was a no brainer. Was hired days later, and it's been the best job I've had so far.

As a remote worker, you really do have to be a self-manager, you're trusted by your team – in the same way you trust your team – to get shit done.

Another thing I did was ace the interview. I went into it with the confidence to present myself as I knew myself, as I knew they didn't. I switched the interview around and interviewed them, and in the end, we were all laughing.

What I would say is "show, don't tell".

> , I produced a full working system with full UI, REST API, 100% coverage, rolling data import, containerisation and deployment scripts for all services, pseudo-branding, documentation, GitHub organisation with repo per service, and to top it off, deployed it to a $5 droplet and provided credentials.

In 8 hours that's very impressive. Thank you for your feedback. I wasn't aware that remote companies gave coding assignments, but it makes sense.

From your experience, do most remote interview loops have take home projects like this or do they tend to focus heavily on whiteboard-esque programming challenges?

I've had 3 remote positions over the last 6 years, and all of them had realistic(-ish) programming challenges that I was evaluated on.

> Do you simply state your experience of having worked autonomously, or having self-managed?

Yes, and you back that up with evidence of a project completed, references backing up their positive experience, etc.

This is why I think more people who are looking for remote should be open to becoming a contractor/freelancer temporarily. Working remotely is already an accepted practice in that context, allowing you to build up a track record of successful remote work. That will give many companies the confidence they need to hire you remotely, and you can offer to take on a small project contract with them first if they need to see it for themselves.

I only contract remotely, with no intention of taking regular employment any time soon, and I still get asked if I'd like to join the team full time as a remote fairly often. Not because I'm so amazing but because they don't need to guess or take risks, they already have proof I can do it successfully for them.

Right. That network cable goes all the way to Bangladesh. Average programmer hourly wage in Bangladesh:

https://www.google.com/search?q=average+programmer+hourly+wa...

I clicked on the second link:

http://www.salaryexplorer.com/hourly-wage.php?loc=18&loctype...

   Maximum: 698 BDT / hr
   Average: 326 BDT / hr
   Median: 279 BDT / hr
   Minimum: 58 BDT / hr

In dollars that is:

   Maximum: $8.6 / hr
   Average: $4.0 / hr
   Median: $3.4 / hr
   Minimum: $0.72 / hr

I bet you're looking for more than them. But when they go remote, aren't you competing with them?

I would say it is easier to become remote if you are already working with a company that knows you. As for establishing such a relationship, I kind of agree with codingdave's advice in this thread.

> But when they go remote, aren't you competing with them?

Not really. There aren't many companies who are considering both American and Indian remote developers for the same positions.

Well paying remote jobs tend to have time zone constraints, and require better English communication skills than the average Indian developer has (there definitely are Indian developers with excellent communications skills, but they aren't average).

People think that because they are out of the office that politics doesn't affect them and they don't need soft skills. But communicating effectively is even more important in remote work because of the inherently lower communications bandwidth.

fair enough.

Assuming an Indian coder is a good English communicator, would working the night shift be such a big barrier ,compared to the salary potential ?

Many hiring managers will be carrying around at least some latent racism from previous interactions with offshored developers that worked out as well as a car crash.

In some projects, having a night shift can be a tremendous advantage. It works particular well in extremely agile environments with fast assignment->deployment turnarounds. For example, if the night shift does daily deployments, then the parent does QA during the day and sends fixes/new requests before the start of the night shift.

Other times, particularly if the project has complicated architectural requirements, it's too hard to get the night shift on the same page a super the parent.

You need to NOT be competing on price, add some other differential (in my case I tried competing on very good English and being on the same time zone as most of the U.S.).

Competing on price or selling yourself to the lowest bidder is a losing proposition.

That said, most of the best Indian devs aren't making that money remotely, they're making a lot more (or at least, I've seen them getting paid a lot more).

I got contacted and worked remotely through Hacker News and, although it didn't pan out (I wasn't a good fit) it was a great experience and I met really good people from around the world.

Considering the current perspective, 8 USD is good for Bangladeshi. AFAIK the current scenario is worst than that. Companies actually want to hire engineers 10k BDT which around 124 USD!! Same goes for upwork. The whole tech market looks totally unstable right now.

As an intermediate dev - is it even ~really~ possible to get a remote job then?

Assuming all of your demonstrating points are just from previous employment?

What if you built/launched something on your own? It doesn't have to be huge, or even commercial, but being able to demonstrate that you can go from idea to launch by yourself will help.

Really constructive answer. Thanks a lot!

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