Ask HN: Which companies are hiring in-person teams? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which companies are hiring in-person teams?

70 pointsfaxetheweaver34 comments

Comparing my pre-pandemic (in-person) and current remote working situations, I believe that I would be more productive and creative if I meet regularly in person with my coworkers. Doesn't have to be 5 days a week - in fact, a mix of remote and in-person enable important, focused work. Though remote seems to work well for a lot of people, I can't help but miss in-person interactions and the spark that they bring.

I'm looking at positions at startups and wish there was a filter for (current or eventual) in-person collaboration. I suspect that this may be the case for others who are on the hunt, so I hope that this thread can be generally helpful.

Which companies are hiring specifically for in-person roles? How many days a week are in person? (SF Bay Area roles would be particularly appreciated!)

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My employer, Notion Labs Inc, has open offices in San Francisco, New York, Dublin, Hyderabad and Tokyo, and plans to do Monday/Thursday in-person starting in a few months. We make a notes/wiki/tasks/organizer product that competes with Quip/Dropbox Paper/Trello/Airtable. Our engineering team culture is thoughtful, introspective, and a little bit scrappy. We’re tackling interesting challenges in these domains: a very write-heavy workload, a thick client React web app, interesting data modeling for collaborative editing. I find the work rewarding because we’re building something tons of people use every day. The business is doing well and we’re growing, but still very much a small team/start up (<500 across those offices, <100 eng) so now is a great time to join.

Careers page: https://www.notion.so/careers

My blog post about the data model: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion

Do you hire for an open position at one location at other location?

Generally no, for example a Japan sales focused position needs to be filled in Tokyo. But there may be some latitude for some kinds of positions depending on requirements and the hiring manager.

Are you concerned about having so much overhead for such a small company?

That’s a lot of expensive offices. I get that venture money is cheap right now, but with upcoming tightening there’s reason to suspect future funding rounds might not be so easy. Are you going to be stuck in a place where you have to chase hypergrowth even when it doesn’t make sense for the business?

Notion is a fine product, but there is a lot of competition (little or no pricing power) and little to no network effect (it is very easy to switch to other providers).

What are the 400 other people doing? Sales?

> Are you going to be stuck in a place where you have to chase hypergrowth even when it doesn’t make sense for the business

Currently the business is doing well, which is driving growth. Even in a plausible worst-case scenario, given our favorable funding to date (last round was $275 million at $10 billion valuation) I don't see cause for concern.

> What are the 400 other people doing? Sales?

I gave very vague rounded-up numbers to give a sense for maximum scale, please don't read too much into the ratio between the numbers.

All of these companies from the "Who's Hiring?" thread: https://hnhiring.com/locations/sf

A little out of topic. We (dyvenia) are not in SF but we hire only hybrid roles in Krakow with min 2 days of office work. While this might not help you, I just wanted to say that to us full remote doesn't work, especially in a time where senior skills are lacking and we hire people at the beginning of their carriers. We do a lot of training internally to bring people up to speed. I think the 100% remote dynamic, which is very strong in Poland in IT, is going to be problematic for a lot of people, especially those still in the early development of their skills or, and this makes me even more sad, for those looking to transition into IT from other paths like Finance or Engineering.

I disagree. I find mentoring weaker team members much easier over remote. They are not crammed into my cube trying to take notes, we can cut and paste back and forth, we can talk without disturbing the rest of the office.

I don't see the issues people keep insinuating.

Do they find it easier as well?

Yes, I believe they do.

Check out https://stytch.com - we’re hybrid, but the SF and NYC offices have people in just about every day. I usually go in twice a week and it’s been great for in-person collaboration.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/stytch

I have no connection to Stytch, but willl say parent commenter is really great to work with!

Nothing against your company (I'm definitely looking to fully WFH in the next 2 years minimum) but to the OP's point, all your job openings have a remote option.

All you need is 1 remote person on the team, or a business partner that works closely with the team, to all meetings being compulsory on Zoom anyways

OP isn't just looking for a company that has an office they can go to, but a company that forces everyone in person, which I believe will be very hard to find this year

Go for bigger companies. Most of the actual startup-y startups figured out the release from big city rent and compensation expectations really helps them grow while staying lean.

My company, Antithesis, is building a fully in-person team. We have worked on hard projects before -- we built FoundationDB -- and this is the model that we found works for complex, audacious projects. Working closely on design at a whiteboard or coding as a pair is just far more rewarding in person. And in order to grow fast we need high bandwidth, low latency knowledge transfer options. Again, that's also just clearly more feasible in-person. And, of course, there's the great chance to increase team trust and cohesion through chance conversations and occasional lunches together. What we're working on now is both more complex and more audacious that FoundationDB: therefore we are all together in the office.

It's true that there are some downsides from the company's perspective: we have a smaller pool of talent to pull from and the office environment can be interrupt prone. Both, however, we think are more than offset by the upsides.

We're located in Northern VA and growing! Check out a list of jobs at https://antithesis.breezy.hr/ or, if you love building complex things and are great to work with, just shoot us a message at jobs@antithesis.com.

Going by the top post on the front-page at the moment, Google

unless you have applied to go full remote.

but don't let facts get in the way of a good ideological flame war.

They’ve also declined over 10% of the applications to go full remote. So, just because you apply doesn’t mean you will get it

90% approval sounds pretty good unless you’re in the 10% that has to switch companies to stay remote. I'd take those odds!

Some hardware companies seem to require people on site too. Some jobs I saw last year included a factory robot diagnostics company and a drone company.

At Asana we've got a hybrid thing going on, where generally (pandemic aside) we're in the office "more often than not". Have a look at asana.com/jobs - the people are awesome, culture is great, company is fun, the mission is inspiring, the product is the best and we're leading the space of collaborative work management platforms.

We felt the same way. This Paul Graham quote is funny “If Zoom were the default and someone just invented face to face, it would seem like an amazing step forward.”

We’re growing our team and are in person in SF if you’re interested: nader at brev.dev

> “If Zoom were the default and someone just invented face to face, it would seem like an amazing step forward.”

That's a fairly biased way of phrasing it though...

How about:

If Zoom was the default and someone invented that you have to get up two hours earlier every day, get prepared, go sit in traffic for 90 minutes, then at the end of the day keep watching traffic info to see when you can leave which ends up being 8pm to avoid a 2 hour commute and then get home at 9pm, kids already sleep so you don't see them, crash in bed for that early,early start again tomorrow.

Yeah, not feeling like a step forward when the full picture is painted.

This is also unfair and biased, if I accepted an in-person job like 5 hours away obviously it's going to suck.

There's a happy medium -- if the commute was short I'd love it because it gets me out of the house and clears my mind. I also like the separation of space and there's no way I can afford to have a second office in my home. There's also great energy from co-workers. Obviously reasonable parameters on both sides make a difference.

I wonder what people with kids think though, I don't have that experience but I imagine as long as schools are open working at home might be better?

> I wonder what people with kids think though, I don't have that experience but I imagine as long as schools are open working at home might be better?

The worst part, when they're young, is that it's very difficult-to-impossible to succesfully fight through traffic at evening rush hour to get home early enough while they are still awake (young kids sleep very early).

Skydio in San Mateo, CA. Flying robots are a lot easier and more fun to make in person!

Check out --> http://autonomy.skyd.io/

Contact me {hayk at skydio dot com}

Check out Philo! We're hybrid (days a week in office) in SF, NYC and Boston. We've also just decided to offer remote flexibility for experienced folks too. We're trying to make it work for everyone. :)

For folks who decide they want to do the hybrid model, we'll add $500 a month to their paycheck to be put towards parking, transportation, whatever expenses they might accrue coming into the office.

https://jobs.philo.com

If anyone is based in Houston and looking for an optional in-person environment, my startup apmhelp.com (we help property managers scale their business) has space and will continue to grow at the Ion office in midtown.

We're hiring accountants, folks with consulting exp, engineers, and RE/Property management exp.

LinkedIn has such filter.

It's called flex office by most companies.

I heard "hybrid" more, maybe "flex" is more corporate

A lot of companies have "hybrid" status with a few days per week in office.

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