At the same time, the initial application form for a lot of them keeps growing so for myself it just seems no longer worth spending the time to craft responses to these questions for a very small response rate.
* Well-run 100% remote companies - Extremely high application rate, not only because the pool of candidates is much wider (people all over the country and in some cases all over the world) but also because it's a dream job for many of them. In order to deal with that extremely high application rate, the companies need to figure out a way to turn away the vast majority of them as quickly as possible. In many cases, that involves up-front hurdles, like passing tests before you even get a preliminary call with an actual person. But because there is no coordination between companies, you have to jump through the same hurdles for every single application, which makes these opportunities infeasible for a lot of people who just need a job right now. There are a few services, such as Triplebyte, that are seeking to reduce the friction by letting you apply once and qualify for multiple companies, but their support for remote positions is still in its infancy.
* Well-run companies with some remote positions - These positions tend to be those that can't be filled locally because they are too highly specialized. It is uncommon for traditional companies with mostly in-office workers to be looking for remote generalists unless they're growing so rapidly that they can't even find them in their own market. Instead, for these remote positions, you need to have a rare set of hyper-specific skills. Chances are that at any given time, a job seeker will only match those skills for a handful of companies, so it's better if you're just passively looking for new opportunities, rather than actively looking for a new job.
* Poorly run companies or those paying below-market salaries - These constitute the vast majority of remote positions I've seen advertised. They're hoping that the pool of potential candidates is large enough that at least a few will be dumb enough or desperate enough to apply.
The one thing I'll add about 100% remote companies is that because they operate with much more written collaboration than a traditional company, the application and interview process frequently reflect that.
This is a big part of why you'll very robust application processes upfront. They want to see if you can effectively communicate your thoughts in writing.
I've been interviewing for remote senior engineering positions for the past 6 months and all of them pay significantly below market (market in my case is third-tier 100-person startup in NYC). These were all well funded, well known "remote ok" companies.
Now, it could be I'm overvalued, but afaict nobody is paying SV salaries, certainly not FANG salaries, probably not east coast startup salaries, and in some cases they're not even competitive with boring local companies in small midwestern cities.
Who am I kidding? It’s probably 750.
And it wasn't some prestigious or well known company or a startup pulling off something crazy. Just a tiny company doing a rather boring web application for businesses.
To me, that's not something to brag about.
If you get 1,200+ applicants for a single position, you're doing it wrong. You've just wasted SO many people's time.
Instead, companies advertising open remote roles should be more frank about qualifications (to deter unqualified people) and about demand (to save the time of qualified candidates for whom it's still a long shot).
If I knew there were 1,199 other people who had applied for a position before me, I would likely not waste my time, even if the application process only takes a few minutes.
"We ended up with over 1,200 applications for the programmer opening at Basecamp. If you’re having trouble attracting talent, feel free to copy our playbook: Hire remote, be explicit about pay, detail job exhaustively."
Also hiring people in other jurisdictions opens up legal compliance and other issues. So if you have an office in San Francisco and wanted to hire someone in Cincinnati, you'd have to follow a bunch of labor laws as if you were local, and then the other state you now also owe a variety of different taxes in. Then some stuff is even city by city depending on the state. So a company in Los Angeles wanting to hire someone in San Francisco or vice-verses might run into extra stuff to take care of.
So I could see as a smaller startup how this could be a huge hassle of keeping up with all the different rules and keeping track of everything as they change, etc. There was a company in SF that wanted to hire me but wasn't sure if it'd work out long term since never worked with some of the stuff they were using and didn't know if it'd last if I moved across the country, but I guess for only a single person in a state it isn't worth it...
Wouldn't surprise me if that HR lady would need to consult with legal and lawyers then even some lawyers and officials don't even know answers to everything. So easier for them if I just packed my bags and flew to California. Sounds like my state's interest would be making regulations on remote businesses easier to keep residents.
Kinda same with affiliate marketing which I dabbled in, I was in a program but got kicked out because the company didn't like a rule here. Kinda sucks based on your state, you lose out on opportunities. I guess the state wants more money from businesses remote, but instead they alienate the business. I wasn't making any money from that program but if I did that could have been a big income hit so sounds like the state trying to gain money from a business could back fire if they decide to just pull out. Then they lose out both tax money from that business and the individual earnings on sales. So instead of getting half the pie, they want the full pie but end up getting no pie in the end if the business decides to just kick the residents out.
Then you use cloud hosting? Your video game is getting popular in India, click a few buttons and spin up instances to make it faster for them? Sounds easy for IT but then they might forget to consider that some jurisdictions consider a server so then yet another thing to make you meet local regulations. Like India for example, so now you are operating a business in India and all the stuff that comes with it. However probably the way those laws are written would consider ownership, some might apply to just dedicated servers you own colocated instead of rented servers like a VPS or dedi the company retains ownership of, like some places in the US wants property taxes on servers and other business equipments. Which is kinda disappointed because some stuff might be cheaper long term building your own server and shipping it to a datacenter somewhere then the cloud, but got to consider how the area the datacenter is in would treat that. Then I know there was a case where Los Angeles County wanted to charge property taxes on a satellite in outterspace.
Seems we're living in the future with amazing tech, but when it comes to all the legal stuff. They wrote everything considering that someone lives in a house and commutes to work every day with maybe a week of vacation a year. They haven't really considered the idea of remote work or even people living in Vans, RVs, Boats, living out of a suitcase flying or cruising around the globe since those communities struggle. Even the laws disadvantage homeless people from voting, getting required documents they'd need to get a job or bank account etc.
Very discouraging stuff though, seems like startups are already challenging and then you deal with a very outdated stuff then some local jurisdictions like cities or counties don't even have this stuff online either. So I guess that's another hurtle if you wanted to hire someone remotely in a small town in the midwest for example maybe. I guess if you get funding instead of bootstrapping/doing it yourself you can hire the right people to deal with all this stuff and later grow each category into their own departments like HR, Legal and accounting.
My idea if I had a startup that allowed working remotely, maybe setup like a "hub" office in areas that are interesting so they have a local office to report to, and make the office have like a co-working type space for remote workers who come into the office or someone might want to do half and half. Sounds like less questions of how to handle certain things and a headache. I hope in the future they simplify this sorta stuff though as more and more remote gains attraction.
Someone else in this thread was discussing that issue also. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22554014
Although there are other complications and this is a really good thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
Part of the reason I got the response was due to having remote experience as a consultant, and highlighting that I had that.
Incidentally I'm actually looking for an office gig now. I really miss the social aspects of being in an office, my main grievance are terrible commutes.