Ask HN: What method you’ve used to eliminate bad remote tech hires?

I'm not sure that it's particularly more difficult to eliminate bad remote hires than it is to eliminate bad in-office hires. Hiring in general is hard, and some number of poor employees always make it through. Some people come well-credentialed and interview well but then don't perform well, by a variety of metrics. Maybe their work is technically great but they're lazy, or reckless, or argumentative, or any number of other problems. I don't think any of this differs much from on-site workers vs remote workers.

In the end, the problems are the same regardless of where they might work. You've still got to filter and vet the people you're going to interview. It's not uncommon to remotely interview people even for on-site jobs; in fact there's almost always a phone screen and one or more phone/video interviews before people are brought on-site, if they're brought on-site before the hire at all.

Remote work has specific challenges to be sure; you need people who can communicate well. They need to operate with less information. It's hard to have effective meetings; you can't replace the value of a few people standing around a whiteboard, despite the excruciatingly-slow advances in technology for sharing this kind of data.

They also need to be motivated self-starters, because for all you know they're simply watching TV and taking bonghits all day. You'll need to make sure you're effectively evaluating their productivity. I don't mean to say that remote people are more inclined to slack off, or that it's hard to slack off at the office, but there's no getting around the psychological aspects of this, especially if your team is primarily on-site and only some of them are remote. I've seen the resentment that can build up, where people are far more critical of the remote workers; if you don't see someone working as hard as you, it's easy to assume they're not.

The single best way to eliminate bad remote hires is to find people with a proven track record of remote work. Try to ask specific questions about remote work challenges and solutions to help gauge whether or not they can handle it.

In my experience, there is no such thing as "bad remote tech hire". Either it is a "bad hire" or you need to set the right training and expectations.

A bad hire will perform bad whether in person or remote. I do understand the premise of your question though. The issue with remote hires is not that they are bad, but they are probably not well equipped (training, expectations, process, tools) to do their job remotely. Also, unless someone is senior enough with some remote experience, I am personally hesitant hiring remote because it adds to the complexity.

So you don't eliminate bad remote hires. You eliminate the reasons why they are performing bad being remote if they are good otherwise. If they are bad anyway, then being remote probably makes it worse but not sure what you can do about the "remote" part only in such case.

Revoke the VPN key duck :)