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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

Most of the companies I've interviewed with will only consider remote workers who have prior experience working remotely. I just don't know how to demonstrate to employers that I have the self-discipline to actually work if I'm not forced to go into an office full of distractions every day.

In any case, after yet another round of rejections for (mostly remote) gigs, I've given up on getting out of my crappy job for the time being. It's a non-programming "architect/sme" type job, but it pays well. I've been focusing my creative energy on a little side project which I've managed to find the self-discipline to work on in my free time over the last year (maybe it'll be successful and then that can be my 'exit plan' from this place).

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Couchbase is happy to hire remote workers, even without previous remote experience.

I've worked for Couchbase for a year and a half now, and it's a nice place. We're a mature startup building a NoSQL database, headed for IPO soon (within a year or two).

And we're hiring: https://www.couchbase.com/careers/open-positions

There's no reliable way to tell which roles permit working remotely.

For instance, this one requires being onsite: https://jobs.jobvite.com/couchbase/job/oApC4fwp

On paper, yes. In practice, the company has a lot of distributed-work-friendly DNA from the open source movement, so I would expect the matter to be negotiable even for positions that explicitly name a work site. How negotiable? Mumble. I can say that my immediate work group has a manager and two engineers in Mountain View, and one engineer each in Denver, Toronto, and Manchester.

Good to know, thanks. I've looked at Couchbase before, but when I saw locations listed for each position and no "Remote work possible" in the job description, I assumed you weren't considering remote applicants.

That's a really great point. A lot of open source companies are very remote friendly or even remote first.

I had the same problem initially. No one would take me on board because of the 'lack of experience'.

A Workaround is to pick up a few freelance gigs on the side using Upwork, Freelancer (or similar) and then leverage that as you have technically been working with clients remotely.

That's how I got around it

I was able to get a remote job at my current employer without any prior remote experience. As long as you are a more senior developer, it's assumed that you have the self-discipline to do good work remotely.

We're currently hiring too if you have a background that fits. https://jobs.lever.co/sonatype

Are you actually hiring? I applied for a position at Sonatype (which appears to still be open) about a month ago and got an automated rejection email the same day.

No offense, but I can only assume your company is engaged in either a resume-collection exercise or some sort of purple squirrel hunt.

We don't have any automated systems involved in the hiring process. I checked internally and I guess we had specific reasons we didn't go any further.

A good tactic can be to start at a remote friendly but not remote first company. To gauge this, look for employers where many employees are on site, many are remote. Work on site and do great work. After a year or so, ask for full remote.

Not an instant solution, but over time can lead to the experience you need.

Great advice that has worked for me and my teammates. I have hired remote people before, and fired them all in the first year. I have two remote employees that worked in the office for a year before going remote that do great work.

> Most of the companies I've interviewed with will only consider remote workers who have prior experience working remotely.

I also ran into this. What helped me was being able to point to side projects that I had successfully completed. From what I can tell, what employers really want to know is that you can work on your own, from your own house. Side projects help with that. It also helps if you can work from home 1-2 days a week at your current job. Then you can point to that as proof that you work from home 20% of the time.

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