Ask YC: For a startup hiring its first employee, what are pros/cons of local vs remote? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: For a startup hiring its first employee, what are pros/cons of local vs remote?

10 pointswastedbrains9 comments

(37Signals says remote works well, others say hire local)

There is a good related thread here, but not exactly the same question:<p>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246795/hiring-your-first-employee

View on HN

If the employee is going to be a 'peer' then remotely will work fine as they will most likely be responsible and highly motivated to do a good job. If they are just a cog in your machine and productivity is key (thinking not so much), you can't beat local yokels.

Also with developers, there's a huge difference between being able to look someone in the eye after they just horked your entire product/service and trying to do the same over the phone/via email. Remote developers simply don't care, because they don't usually have to care.

In this case we would likely be thinking of the person as a mini founder, with a significant amount of equity. So hopefully the ownership of their work would help with the self motivation.

You might do well to find someone who is active in OSS communities, ideally, someone who has contributed code. This allows you to see the quality of their work and communication skills, and (in my opinion) it gives some indication of their willingness to work remotely and still "get things done".

I work for Mozilla, and I am a full time remote employee. When I was hired, I came in to the office to work for two weeks, and now, I typically visit the office at least once a quarter for at least a week. For a startup on a tight budget, that much travel might be difficult to handle.

I would also encourage you to find a place to live in IRC (either host your own private server or set up a channel on freenode or something). IRC brings a sense of closeness to local and remote resources. If people stay in the channel and use it, there is also a good opportunity for "water cooler chat". When I work in an office, I listen to people casually talking around me. If they are talking about something interesting or something I might have some useful comments about, I speak up. If people in your team live in IRC, then they will use that medium as a place to ask those little one off questions that normally happen either in the hallway, snack-room, or via IM. If it happens in IRC, you can easily capture that knowledge for future use, and other people can see the conversation and might have something useful to say about it.

I also encourage the use of an IRC "backchannel" if you have meetings that include remote resources. If you want to see an example of a meeting like that, tune in to http://air.mozilla.com and irc://irc.mozilla.org #staffmeeting on Mondays at 1PM PST.

I strongly disagee with josefresco. I have a 5 year old "startup" with 6 full time remote workers -- 3 developers. It works great.

If an employee isn't caring about his work, it doesn't matter if he is local or remote. Hiring smart, passionate people is the most important factor.

Do you already have someone in mind or are you planning on going through the interview process?

Interview process

I personally have no problem hiring someone to work remotely. In my case; most everyone I've hired to work remotely - I've worked with in the past - so I knew they'd get the work done effectively. If I hired someone I didn't know and they wanted to work remotely I'd bring them in house for a period of time during a probation period - then I'd let them work from anywhere they wanted too.

Yeah if we hired remotely we think we would have a two week or so on site period. We would also probably hire as a 3 month trial period that allows for reevaluation at the end of the 3 months.

i gotta go with local. I just don't have a good experience with people working remotely. Both cases suffered huuuge delays. There are way too many distractions for them, and the work suffers. At least if they are doing it full time at your office, you are pretty much guaranteed that they'll be working on your project all of that time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com