$1B Business Where All 700 Employees Work Remotely (2019) | Hacker News Reader

$1B Business Where All 700 Employees Work Remotely (2019)

forbes.com

107 pointsthrowaway315743 comments

If the majority are remote then it can work. Don’t be remote where the company is otherwise geo-located. Hallway conversations often make decisions.

Seconded. I've had a fabulous experience at an all-remote company, and a pretty lousy experience where I was the only remote worker.

It really looks like this guy found his calling, good for him! I'm impressed his managed to keep his organization healthy with 700 remote employees, that takes some real business/management talent.

In my own business, we are a remote team of 6 and we do pretty well. The way we've made it work so far is by doing very little collaboration, and instead opting to each have our own focus with little overlap. There are times when I'd really love to have some other engineers to whiteboard with and collaborate on difficult problems, but that seems impossible to do remotely. At least very easily.

Thanks! What we do for remote brainstorming is using indentation in Google Docs. We find that most ideas can be represented by a tree structure. We use indentation to indicate what is connected. You can't easily do arrows between different ideas but I've seen it work on almost every case.

BTW We're trying to bring real-time collaboration to GitLab issues so you can do the same in GitLab. I spend some time on that this weekend https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301...

What's the problem with starting screen sharing? That's how we do it and it works quite well. (Same timezone though)

Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?

Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.

Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?

If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire".

I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.

- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.

- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.

- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).

Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.

> If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire"

Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid to go the remote path there.

I did take your comment in the intended spirit! My response were answers in that same spirit (points you might give that executive to say "we're a remote organization already").

"Not trying to be snarky" is a sarcastic warning that snark is, indeed, incoming

Automattic?

https://automattic.com/work-with-us/

Automattician here. Over 1000 employees, fully distributed (with the exception of Tumblr, which has an office space).

Red Hat is about 50% remote, and was plenty profitable before being acquired by IBM last year.

Edit: And is still profitable now. It sounds like I was saying it was only profitable before being acquired :-)

Is the acquisition affecting the number of remote positions Red Hat have?

Not to my knowledge.

the op is asking for remote only companies. thousands of companies do partial remote work like red hat

Red Hat working is more remote than you'd think from the pure numbers, since even if you're working in an office your team won't all be in the same office. The team I'm in has people working in offices in CZ, around the US, the UK, Australia, and in China. So we work using remote tools anyway.

yes, but that's happening in every big company.

Buffer and Basecamp come to mind, plus they are more efficient: they pay significantly more while managing to turn impressive revenue/profit vs the headcount.

Isn’t that the wrong metric to look at? You are looking for massive successes from the very small number of remote companies to compare with the massive successes out of all companies. A better (but still somewhat flawed approach) would be to take a random sample of non-remote companies equivalent in size to the number of remote-only companies and compare the distributions of their success.

I work for one Or at least one where remote-only is quite common. Side effect : I have no idea how many coworkers I have, just know the team I work with normally and a few outside. It's a tech company, but it's an manufacturing one.

I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?

And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....

This doesn't sound right. In a remote environment it's crucial to be able to find people. You need a good directory/orgchart. In an office you can walk over to section and ask. In a global chat room or such this is harder.

There are directories. I just haven't needed them - but then I'm mostly a dev on some lists of products. There is no global chat room though, but there are optional "ask for help here" lists where all the team leads are likely to be paying attention.

Communication protocols are one of those good things to be sorting out too, from management perspective. I've had this job for a few years now, and am pretty happy.

Basecamp https://github.com/basecamp/handbook/search?q=remote&unscope...

Florida Virtual School employs thousands of teachers. And they've been operating for over twenty years. They're publicly funded, though.

Profitability means nothing at this stage (and is sometimes even undesirable). As long as it is following the same growth path as more established companies in its segment, it can be considered a success.

Toptal is profitable and 100% remote, not a single office anywhere. Not sure if largest, but quite big at ~500 employees.

Toptal is a software consultancy right?

Elastic is not remote-only and they are not VC funded anymore (they IPO'd)

Check out AffinityX. Likely not the largest, but profitable and growing.

Is Zapier profitable and in those categories?

Zapier.

WordPress perhaps?

I'd be happy to answer any questions about remote work. We've published extensively about this subject https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/ and today we released a remote work emergency toolkit https://twitter.com/darrenmurph/status/1237771768020054016

>We've published extensively about this subject

For entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of All-Remote culture I think the hiring page is better [1]. And a list of countries that they dont hire due to legal reasons. [2]. And list of countries they have listed as cooperate entity for Payroll [3]

I think a lot of the issues and problems with All-Remote is not in the communication or working style ( which can be adopted ) but actually in the hiring and legals where smalls startups have absolutely no time, idea, nor the energy to do it themselves. I remember reading HashiCorp's founder saying the same thing where its was the hardest part of hiring across the world.

This may actually be startup idea to solve this.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/hiring/

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines

[3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...

For sure that is a big problem. I blogged about it in 2016 https://sytse.com/2016/12/28/adyen-for-payrolling.html and I'm excited to be an investor in Remote.com that tries to solve that problem. It is started by our old VP of Product Job van der Voort.

Happy to answer questions about remote as well!

Loads of guides in the links Sid mentioned.

Plenty to watch in our Remote Work playlist at GitLab Unfiltered: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0Kq7QUX-Ux5f...

We're doing a webinar on Friday (2020-03-13) and would be happy to answer Qs there as well: https://gitlab.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hSUtLvcSTsqQ7ftNb...

Prior comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496011

given the majority of coworkers are now remote due to coronavirus, I hate it. I miss just grabbing someone to my computer and have a chat about my problem. now I'll have to arrange a meeting, share screen and all, do you see it, do you hear me?

plus in meetings remote workers rarely get the chance to speak. otherwise opinionated colleagues are now silent.

I think gitlab has a huge advantage in remote work as in their mission is clearly understood by their employees ( to clone github.com). Its a very outsourcable class of problem where requirements are clearly understood and employees aren't required to really come up anything new or innovative.

I am yet to see a 100% remote company thats doing something brand new and innovative.

C'mon that's just unfair. GitHub is Microsoft now, I for one I'm glad gitlab exists even if I don't personally use it much, but it's a nice replacement if centralized microsoft-owned github goes down like it has been in the last weeks/months...

Basecamp has a lot of competition and probably some frontend clones maybe, but I don't think it could be called unoriginall or a copycat of any of it's competitors (Todoist,Asana,Etc)

They also have great (free) books on working remote like REWORK. Maybe you like that example better?

Anyways nothing in life is black or white

yes gitlab is nice, i use it personally. i wasn't implying otherwise. Gitlab is a copy of github, everything was exactly the same as github until few yrs ago. Like feature by feature replication. I really don't think they did anything truly innovative like github did.

>Anyways nothing in life is black or white

yea ofcourse, you seem to drawn a false implication that copycat = bad, which is obviously not the case like you pointed out.

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