Hiring Developers in a Remote and Distributed Company | Hacker News Reader

Hiring Developers in a Remote and Distributed Company

softwaremill.com

56 pointswozmirek37 comments

I wish companies were more open about their salaries, esp. in remote roles. The discrepancies between what companies offer can be so big (like up to 3x for essentially the same job), that I often don't apply based on my prejudices ("they don't look like they'd be willing to pay too much") - and with time, I've found that my prejudices can sometimes be dead wrong.

I'd be interested to know too, they are based in Poland so I suspect pay Polish salaries [0]. The thing is an English speaker in Poland could just as easily get a remote job for a company in London and get double the salary.

When you open up to remote people, do you have to put the salaries up to reflect this?

[0] Glass door shows software engineer salaries in Poland are around zt6000/mo or £1200/mo.

Yeah £1200/mo sounds like a reasonable middle level developer salary in Eastern Europe (I am from Lithuania).

It's a good point about English speakers. I think it has to do with network and comfort zone. When you are 25 and have spent all your life in your home country, you usually have some kind of network, some reputation. Makes it easier, and comfortable.

While getting a client from the States or UK is something unfamiliar, out of comfort zone, maybe some tried and got disappointed by oDesk/elance etc (I find their application process totally soul crushing, when you might spend ~30mins to write a nice customized proposal and hear nothing back).

I am based in Poland (working remotely for US-based company though). I'd say the 6k zl is a bit low, in big cities an experienced dev can get 2x times that, or more (and outliers like Google pay much much more).

The phrase "we want to hire passionate people" tends to re-enforce that prejudice to me. It frequently seems like marketing speak for "we want people who will write code for us outside business hours without reasonable compensation".

Oh, yeah. The word itself is pretty close to a dealbreaker for me.

Luckily, none of the sort. We'd like to hire people who think and think independently. There's no such thing as you've mentioned here. Good point about the wording, though, haven't thought it's used like this.

I thought you tempered your use of "passionate" with specific examples that showed it wasn't exploitive or BS. It was clear you were looking for people who could write really high quality code and who had strong thoughts on what was right.

It's when you see "passionate" without any context that it becomes a turn off.

> I often don't apply based on my prejudices

I feel the same way. As a solution I always refer to job description to ballpark what the company prepare to offer.

1. If the company are looking for the best. Up to you.

2. If its for normal, somewhat replaceable job(meaning you have equivalent colleague on that position). Median between the company and your location.

3. If its for menial task. You're usually bounded by your location average salary, or even lower.

Polish language as a requirement is a big blocker I'd assume.

We hire people remotely, though so it happens that they dwell mostly in Poland (plus on in the UK and one moving to SF); that gives us a bigger advantage over companies that employ locally people that must communicate in English only, e.g. by easier company get-togethers and basically smoother in-house communication.

"Next, there's a short Skype/mobile call that basically makes sure you can communicate in both Polish and English"

You hire people remotely, but they have to speak polish?

From all over the country, usually. We do have two people working from abroad, though.

I guess Polish language requirement also makes clear that compensation will be "Polish" as well... So no need for a "North American" to apply.

This. I was getting more interested at every line, until I read about the Polish.

I mean, I'm italian (from Italy, not NY :p), and I would only require English because it's just the main language in tech in the current period of time.

That's true - we won't consider anyone without a good command of English. However, as written below, we think the overall communication could get fragmented if there was only one English-only speaking person in the company.

That's definitely understandable, though I guess a bit sad. Does anyone who's not Polish speak Polish? That hasn't been my experience. I've met a few Polish people and seemed such a foreign language to me(doesn't sound like any European or Slavic language I've ever heard). Does it have any related languages whose speakers would be able to pick it up easily?(such as French/Spanish/Italian for example).

Since you're hiring and working remotely doesn't this severely restrict your hiring pool?

Yup, that's true. People from Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia, Czech Republic can easily relate to Polish.

This might be a bit controversial (purely my opinion, not company's) but I think that you'd rather either go full monty and employ 100% multicultural crew or rather stick to a 100% monocultural group. Why? For easier communication.

I recall a situation, working at my previous work, where we hired one guy from South America. His tech side was impeccable, his English needed some brushing up, he's really amiable yet the main problem was people not always switching to English with him around. Not out of malice, some people weren't that comfortable with Eng.

/ EOT ;)

Is it really a requirement? Jeez.

I am Greek/Italian, with a good command of both langs, but talking about development or even IT any other language than (my poor) English it's cumbersome.

The thing is all of us are Polish and we had a discussion some time ago about hiring English speaking people. The problem was that it would make the communication more complicated (switching from Polish to English for inhouse communication) while providing little benefit for us at this particular time (there's still a lot of talent to scoop in Poland) so we decided to not recruit foreigners. This may change someday, but I don't think it will be in a forseeable future.

I've met a lot of talented polish developers. I think you have a large talent pool to work with.

Certainly a foreigner who is wild enough to have learned Polish and is a developer is probably a good candidate. I would be interested if it included language lessons, but that is a bit much to ask.

There are a large number of Polish outside of Poland living in the EU. I think they will be able to find someone.

Aren't a lot of those people living in richer countries than Poland, though? It would be hard to live in, say, the UK on a Polish salary.

That is a good point. The other way to look at it is a way to go back to Poland, especially if you do not intend to stay in Warsaw where I assume more of the job opportunities are.

Very interesting.

"But all in all, we take aboard around 20% of the applicants who started the recruitment process."

What is the % that take the survey and move forward?

Since the 'recruitment' process starts after passing the survey.. Have you given thought to analyzing the survey results of the 80% that don't make it, and see if you could better adjust the survey or conditions to weed out more undesirable candidates earlier? It seems quite resource intensive on your side to perform this process.

Around 90%.

That's a neat idea, I passed it to the recruiting tribe :) As for what's causing the people to drop out, it's mostly the tech stuff that's hard to notice in a short survey.

That's very high. Maybe you guys just get very high quality applicants, but we hire less than 1% of resumes we receive and less than 5% of those who go through the first interview and coding problems. We're a python shop, also full remote, so maybe that's why.

An interesting post, but I'm not quite sure I see a difference in hiring protocol between hiring for remote and non-remote work.

The remote hiring process listed in the blog posts goes:

1.) Application (survey) step

2.) Basic Skype call

3.) Programming task

4.) Feedback on programming task

5.) Long technical interview

6.) Lunch invitation

At least from my own personal experiences as well as outside information I've gathered over the years, isn't this process relatively the same for hiring non-remote workers?

Might be! Yet we've stumbled upon so many different doubts concerning remote work, including tracking people, mistrust, overt disregard and more, that we've thought: why not show people how we do it? Plus, some non-remote works require you to pair-program, which may be stressful for some and actually making some good impression face-to-face at which some people may not, well, excel. And talking via Skype from your living room is more comfortable than visiting an office, suited-up. Plus, you don't waste time for commuting.

Do you follow up the candidates that drop out of inactivity? Is the reason that they feel they're not up to the task, lack of time or do they pursue other opportunities?

Personally I find the a technical assignment really necessary as part of an recruitment process to really get down to the candidate's "coding personality". Weakness, strengths, interesting, motivation, etc. When doing recruiting I've found that more "open answered" technical assignment are better than "solve this very specific problem".

A solution that could be discussed and put in different perspectives ("what would be the first thing you do if traffic suddenly jumped by a factor 1000", "...if the amount of data was much larger", "...if you had to support feature x...") generally reveal more skills than something more focused on specific algorithms or even syntax.

We don't follow them as a rule, most of the time we hear about them doing sth else - seems that it's option 2 &3 then :)

The tech assignment is meant to check how you think AND how much you know - we think that it's easier for a programmer to spend time coding and learning than "reprogramming" their mindset (the coding personality).

As for the solution discussed - well, this checks the self-independence of a candidate, doesn't it? ;)

Personally I find the a technical assignment really necessary as part of an recruitment process to really get down to the candidate's "coding personality".

Ad-hoc personality tests are, at best, random. Especially if you don't tell the candidate ahead of time what he's supposed to be demonstrating.

If everyone is remote, where is that lunch held? Do you fly to them, or do they fly in to some "central" location? Just wondering what that location is if you are truly distributed...

As I answered you under the blog post itself, it's mostly held in Warsaw or any other big Polish city the person applying is based near :)

Makes sense until you get to the part about "having lunch together".

How does that work when remote workers are hundreds of miles away?

"We don't have HR"... Sounds like they are risking a github-style fiasco.

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