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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Please tell that to the European employers.

Most, especially in the German speaking part of Europe, are still run like factories, barely have flexible working hours and don't even want to hear about remote work as managers prefer having a close eye on employees at all time.

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Same feeling here in France.

I get 3-4 opportunities for freelance work per week in the Paris region. I couldn't find any proposing full remote work (not just one day per week) after searching for 2 months

The funny thing is that now I work remotely for a German company from France

Slightly at a tangent, and I hope you don't mind me asking: I moved to Paris last month and the freelancing opportunities seem to be a lot less plentiful than in London (android developer), do you look anywhere specific? I'm on freelance-info.fr and linkedin only

I started on Malt. I get most offers through Linkedin now. I also worked with intermediaries (consultime, digital & you). They can be old-fashioned and you have to negotiate well with them but they're almost necessary if you want to work for big corps. Send them your resume or try to find a recruiter through LinkedIn. There are other platforms like Malt: Comet (I haven't worked there though) and others that I can't remember right now..

Nice one! Thanks for the tips. I've got the furthest with a company called iD.Apps who seem pretty solid (and obviously focussed on mobile apps). But I hadn't heard of Malt, I'll register tonight and send my CV to the others too, cheers.

For mobile have a look at https://www.bam.tech/

I've worked for their sister company (Theodo) which makes web apps. They work with employees but sometimes when they get too much demand they can bring freelance on board

Really good working environment there

Yeah well I didn't see anyone in my country advertise full time remote positions but I got one by offering to take a job and do it remotely.

This was ages ago, but during on-boarding for my internship for Daimler-Benz, my boss was keen to tout the flexible work schedule. IIRC, it was "you are expected to work 37.5 hours per week; you have flexibility on exactly when; we have core hours where everyone is expected to be in; those are 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM."

IOW, "we're totally flexible on when you work that other 30 minutes per day..."

Lol, that is pretty much one of my past employers. They set a daily stand up everyday at 9:30am, so flexible time means I can arrive anytime before that..

One day I missed a stand-up because my wife was pregnant at the time and I wanted see our first baby MRI. The CTO sent me a nasty slack message in the company phone (which they claimed as a benefit “we give you state of art iphones!!”)

Also, there was catered lunch, which I sort of dislike and went out for lunch by myself sometimes. It was also frown upon, they want me to be in the office for the working hours.

I didn’t last long. In my subsequent job I made sure to pick just for the flexible hours since compensation in Europe, well st least where I am, doesn’t vary enourmously across companies.

Where exactly in Europe do you live that catered lunches are a thing yes bosses are so horrible, if you don't mind me asking?

Denmark, but that’s another discussion around lunch in the office. I personally don’t take it as a benefit.

I've heard that Germany has laws that limit employers' ability to monitor worker productivity. Something like, they can only monitor groups of three or more members?

I wonder if that's a reason German employers hesitate to allow workers the freedom to work unsupervised. As a remote worker myself, I know there's a greater temptation to slack off at times; knowing that I'm accountable for remaining productive is an important motivator for me.

IANL, but what you heard about German monitoring probably only applies to large companies that have a unionized workforce like Daimler,VW, etc.

In most software shops there are no unions and your performance is easily monitored (Scrum anyone?) and, contrary to popular belief around here, you can easily be fired without a problem should you or your performance, objectively or subjectively not meet the management's expectation anymore.

Nordics are the same. I might be wrong, and hope to be, but most of IT is still running few generations behind.

Lol no need to look all the way at Europe even. In the US not a single one of the big techs hires remotely still, and this I believe is a big barrier to the spread of remote hiring (“if google doesn’t hire remote, there must be some good reason - so we’re not gonna do it either!”)

There is a small company named 'Elasticsearch' were most of the workers are remote workers since I don't think they even have offices.

GitLab is also known for being all-remote.

That's true! Here's some more info about it https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

Microsoft hires remote. GitHub is mostly remote. I’ve seen remote Apple employees as well. FB and Google don’t do it though, they want you in their hyper infantilized offices (unlimited free ice cream?).

Not entirely accurate. You just have to be an exception to the rule. I'm aware of remote FB employees. They aren't posting remote jobs for sure though.

Having worked most of my career remote and now working in Menlo Park... I prefer working in an office by default but with no rule about it... which is my current work situation. I have a desk, and co-workers, but sometimes work remotely, in other offices, weird hours, etc.

Ymmv, but I think if you're in the right role, big company employers can make exceptions.

Some parts of Microsoft are remote-friendly, though indeed not most.

Stripe has a remote engineering hub: https://stripe.com/blog/remote-hub

I work for a major cloud provider and I'm remote as is the majority of my team nationally. Teams are often distributed and even if I went to the local office there is nobody from related business units to talk to.

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