Remote Work: Hiring, recruiting, and essential tools | Hacker News Reader

Remote Work: Hiring, recruiting, and essential tools

blog.garrytan.com

105 pointsgarry14 comments

I just want to share my favorite remote work pair programming tool for MacOS: Tuple

It has much better screen sharing than any of the other commonly used tools (Zoom/Slack/Skype/VNC, etc) with higher resolution, very low latency, and no distracting overlaying UI components (I can't emphasize how important this particular issue is to me).

It's essentially a reborn and upgraded version of ScreenHero (from back before Slack bought them out and then utterly destroyed what was so great about it).

I am not affiliated with Tuple in any way, but I want their product to succeed because I love it so much, so I evangelize it whenever I can!

How does it compare to the newly launched product 'Screen' (from the Screenhero founders)?

https://screen.so/

I think it's awesome to see the Screenhero folks back in the game, but when I tried Screen.so out, it still suffered from two of my biggest complaints:

1. Unnecessary UI elements floating over the screen. Screen opts to have a floating box with buttons and stuff that you can drag around, but it's always floating over your screen. You can minimize it, but then you lose functionality. Tuple, on the other hand, hides their functionality in the system tray menu, and in the application's title bar. With Tuple, you can go into full screen mode and Tuple is completely invisible and the experience is seamless.

2. Screen.so places an annoying green border around the screen when recording/sharing (they did this with Slack, too, and I hated it). The green border often obscures application scroll bars and other window elements, and is completely unnecessary.

Thank you so much for sharing this!

> One thing that we're really big on is, wherever we can, we'll engage in a paid trial, or a paid test of some kind. For engineers, this is rather straightforward. We'll basically just ask what their desired hourly or day rate is, and we'll put them on a modular project for them to work on. That kind of doesn't require being highly integrated with the rest of the team.

This is great for the company. But for the candidate, I'm not convinced.

If I'm a W2 employee, I don't have any interest in complicating my tax return for a couple of days trial contract. Realistically, how much more are you going to learn about me in that time frame over a 1-2 hour technical interview.

Some plan on a longer trial contract - I see alot of 3-6 month contract-to-hire situations. This still isn't good enough because in startups the candidate will miss out on stock vesting. In large companies the candidate will be 'other'... there is a clear divide between FTE's and contractors at most large corps/there is a risk that the project might change/role availability will change.

If a company is serious about hiring employees. I'm convinced w2 from the start is the best.

It sends the message - we trust you, you belong, you're a part of our team. There can definitely be a probationary period, and there should be a more stringent hiring process. To me this is about signaling. If a company isn't willing to hire full time I think one of the following: 1. You don't have enough funding to do this right. 2. You don't know how to properly interview people. or 3. You think this is being generous but in reality don't fully understand the implications.

Remote work is about trust. If you don't trust someone - you don't have any business hiring them. Even in the current covid situation I'm seeing people hesitant to hire remotely. It's crazy. It's so much easier to slack off in an office than in a properly setup remote team.

Contractors are great for remote as well. But set clear expectations - straddling between contractor and employee is counter productive.

I think you learn a lot - way more than an interview will tell you. That’s true on both sides. As a candidate you get to see what the code quality is like, how the engineering process actually works, how communication works, etc.

It’s not possible to do trials of significant length with a lot of folks. It can even just be a few hours and a simple bug fix task.

We don’t typically do contract to hire over a prolonged period. Once we’ve built conviction we make full time W2 offers. We try to get there as quickly as possible and a paid test is one of the tools we use.

Also probably tailored to US law?

Here in Germany you're usually not allowed to do any paid work without notifying your current employer, or at all.

Also not even sure how it would work for currently-not-employed people, you can't just write a bill for 2 days of work without a company.

And this is just additional to any tax problems.

That said, I think I like the idea a lot more than sitting through interviews. But it's simply not feasible (here) unless you're a freelancer already and just do this as a short paid gig before starting there. (Because then you should be prepared for such a gig, anyway).

Had a lot of fun doing this. Thanks to Garry and Katelin for the opportunity. Happy to answer any questions. AMA.

As YC alumni and founder with experience working remotely — and given it appears likely, per YC, that the YC S20 summer batch will be 100% remote — would it be possible provide any suggestions for working remotely with YC as part of a YC batch?

(Already created a related “Ask HN” [1] - but please feel to reply (if you do) wherever makes sense to you.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22750941

Yes I’d say:

- make use of the office hours that YC provides. You can schedule these once you’ve been accepted. They’ve already been doing office hours by video.

- ask YC alumni for introductions to investors. The community has really pulled together to support the W20 batch that just graduated. They’re the first to do demo day remotely. I know some of the companies had no trouble raising substantial rounds fully remotely.

- one aspect of YC that works really well is meeting other founders serendipitously. I anticipate that YC will probably figure something out to enable this, but don’t be afraid to reach out to relevant alums asking to connect.

Thanks for sharing — all good advice regardless of if YC ends up doing the next batch 100% remote or not.

One of the things that people are running into is Zoom link overload. My days are back to back

One thing I don't think they included is scheduling meetings - beyond just a calendly availability.

I've been using https://Woven.com to coordinate work availability for the past year and it's really helped me get a handle on my time.

I think time & calendars are going to be the next tools people are really going to need as they have to do a lot more self-directed remote owkr.

I think 99% of people are just using Outlook for this (or Google Calendar, if that's how you roll). It knows everyone's availability, will notify you if someone can't make the meeting you are creating, and can automatically generate the Zoom info and add it to the invite. Then, if you want, you can link your Exchange calendar to Zoom so it just pops up a join button in a notification five minutes before (or, of course, just open the calendar event and click the link). It's very similar for Teams and webex too, if you use those ones (just need the webex plugin), and Google Calendar auto generates Hangouts Meet links if you are a GSuite group.

It's much easier to use the calendar everyone already has than to find yet another SaaS to manage. And, by default, Outlook doesn't show what you are doing if there is a conflict, just "busy", so it does allow you to add blocked periods for lunch or focused work.

For the reverse, working remotely, I found:

- Define a product instead of taking orders.

- Don't be afraid to cut bait.

- Work the job while quoting.

- Clients are not equipped to provide technical direction.

Maxing out the ratings on Upwork only finds people who work towards that rating, sometimes even complete offshore teams.

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