Show HN: RemoteCoder.io – A jobsite for remote programmers
remotecoder.io
remotecoder.io
That was my first hurdle though, there aren't really that many remote jobs in Europe that are advertised. I think that's because companies don't really have a problem finding candidates. I spoke to a recruiter based in London and he said that most remote jobs he has get filled within hours or days rather than weeks for onsite positions.
The other thing I wanted to do was actually put some content in there that would be useful to the candidate to know what it's like to actually work at a company. The top listing on this site is as follows:
JavaScript developer for a massive multiplayer game:
React.js;
Phaser;
In the end I abandoned the idea, but I'd still like to resurrect the idea (the site is still up). Maybe just revert to basic listings like this, but if anyone has any suggestions / feedback I'd appreciate it!
Edit: Formatting.
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Also, good job on getting RemoteTechJobs.eu up and running. Another reason I built the job board (and built it quickly in 2 weeks) was to force myself to get something done and ship it on time. It's great to see other people doing the same.
I had/have exactly this frustration. And I've had exactly same idea - create a job board explicitly for world wide remote jobs. Even created free account on redhat openshift with Golang toolset (I was also thinking to learn Go this way)... But then I got a new job :)
Anyway, wish you all the best!
I'd also recommend, having some indication of the listing companies commitment to remote work. Joining a team who is new to remote as one of the only remote workers is not fun. Supplying a short poll to each job creation, that generates a remote score, similar to the Joel Test people used to use, would help build confidence in potential users.
That said, I always cringe when I see the "employer confidential" flag on job postings...
I for one would never apply for a job (or even make the first contact) at an anonymous company. The demand for engineers seems to be high enough for me (anyone) to at least be able to check out the work of a potential employer before making contact.
These changes, particularly in the Yahoo case, reflect poorly on those managers in my mind, not on the concept of remote work.
The ideal programming environment is effectively remote- every engineer in their own office, with multi-party audio or video (e.g.: google hangouts) for collaboration.
If your primary cost is engineering staff, why would you make them %50 less effective when they're working and on top of that take 2 hours out of their day each day for a stressful commute?
All of my remote gigs have had very different cultures. People communicated, friends were made, etc, etc.
Because the engineers are not the ones doing the accounting or managing. The accountants and managers do. It's similar to how social events tend to be planned by socially-focused people, which is how a shy and/or introverted person can end up being dragged to a noisy bar for their birthday.
Point taken regarding company anonymity. Seems a lot of people have issue with that. I added that "feature" in just because I saw it on other jobs sites (e.g. authenticjobs) and felt that not having it would exclude certain potential companies from posting an ad. On reflection though, I agree with you that knowing which company you're applying to would be better so I'm going to make company information mandatory from now on.
Their application was one of the more onerous, asking all kinds of questions, but I put up with it. It took me about an hour to complete.
The promise made on the website was "once we get your application, we'll send you an email with info about the company".
Well, I got an email... and in it was several more questions, plus the comment "we're in europe so we're used to paying european salaries, are you willing to work for less? How much will you work for?" ... but no information about the company.
Won't be doing that again. They basically just wasted my time.
If it succeeds, it will be huge, but the odds are always against any chicken-and-egg service like that.
People who a) work on open source, or b) have enough free time that they're able to publish in their free time are the only people you want to hire? Great, have at it. But you'll quickly be wiping out a lot of people with experience behind them because they have a family.
Some of them would have been the type to actually write code in their spare time when they were younger, you know, before github was around and before they had kids, they're probably still smart, but github isn't their CV and may never be.
That said, code examples are a very nice thing to have, so it goes both ways.
Whilst worthy, a developer's contributions to OSS or public code commits aren't the only determining factor of their quality/hireability.
From a purely practical perspective, being a developer who exclusively works on closed-source code in 2014 is a bad career decision.
Depends on the context. I have lots of pure crap in my bitbucket and github accounts, because I tinker and explore outside of my day job. I even have one project that is almost complete (that is, it functions without bugs and doesn't make me want to scratch my eyes out when I look at the UI), but because I work on it for an hour here, an hour there, in the capacity of said exploration, the quality of the code is...less than stellar. Yet somehow I manage to be employed without a single gap in my resume.
That I don't have a high-code-quality complete project in these locations says one thing and one thing only about me, with respect to being a signal to employers: I'm not willing to devote myself 100%, heart-and-soul, to programming at my peak for 10+ hours a day.
You're deluding yourself if you think your comment about being a bad career decision applies outside of a small sphere (usually web-dev or mobile-dev for startups seeking a very particular kind of employee (young, naive, willing to work long and hard for relatively lesser pay). I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have. Certainly that won't necessarily last forever, but right now it's not a bad career decision for a great many (vast majority) to eschew public display of their personal code projects.
Frankly, I view the insistence on public display of personal code in the same category as I view trivia-quiz-interviewing: they're both bandwagon nonsense things that people convince themselves are highly effective ways to measure people.
> I have yet to see a job I'd be otherwise qualified for or interested in list "have a github profile with projects for us to look at" as a requirement, or even a nice-to-have.
Every job on this job board has such a requirement.
That may be true, but there's a whole world of programming jobs out there that have nothing to do with "web development". There's all sorts of internal corporate app stuff, embedded system/firmware, control systems / automation of various sorts, scientific computing, simulation software, data mining / machine learning stuff, etc., etc., etc.
You mean 99% of developers? There are very few companies who let you work on open source as part of your day job, and if a company only wants to hire devs who work on open source in their free time then I don't want to work for that company.
If you have a job that's exclusively closed-source and with no down time there's a good chance that's a bad job. You have to think about your own career. Unless it's a prestigious position that will make you attractive to other employers, you have to consider that being isolated from the larger software community puts you at a disadvantage in the market.
I guess that's where I disagree. I don't know how you can tie "ability to work on open source at work" to how good a job is. What does one have to do with the other?
Also, "down time" is just another way of saying "free time". If I have free time, I won't be in the office. Which brings me back to, I don't want to work at a company that only wants people who work on open source in their free time.
I really think the amount of open-source you work on has nothing to do with how good of a programmer you are or your work ethic. Which is why, for me, asking for a github profile is a red-flag when applying to jobs.
I appreciate that not everyone has or even cares about Github which is why it's an optional item when posting an ad. However, one of the differentiating factors of RemoteCoder is that it provides for tight Github integration in case an employer is interested in your github work. But perhaps this feature should be off by default? (at the moment it's on by default).
There's nothing wrong with having the GitHub account available for companies that want that, but using that as the only authentication and perpetuating the "GitHub is your CV" thing limits the site to that slice of companies and potential employees who know and care about GitHub -- mainly the startups you read about on HN. The other 95% of IT/tech jobs don't work like that.
Please don't withhold hiring company names. Recruiters do this and usually it means they don't actually have a job and are just canvassing resumes. I don't wish to accuse you of what has become a standard way to bootstrap (fake it 'til you make it) but it leads me to believe the content is imaginary and the last thing people need when they're job hunting (and possibly severely strapped for income) is time wasting leading them down the garden path.
It's not only unprofessional, but I'd suggest borderline immoral. :-)
And if they are real jobs, the first question will be who is the company anyway.
Let me search for that elusive remote FORTRAN position! :-) I would prioritize this over all others as it lets you search for "european" or technology, or "hip chat" if, for instance, you're sensitive to the chat system the employer uses.
Covers a lot of bases.
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(My github username is the same as my HN handle)
-Matt @ https://www.wfh.io
Beyond a small Twitter and RSS graphic at the top, there doesn't appear to be much effort on this site to build an audience, yet that's the most important part and what its long-term success will depend on - I advise the creator think about ways to surmount those obstacles.
I think it's telling that all the job listings are development based...
For now I just want to see if such a job board would be of any interest in the first place, especially given that there are other job boards (e.g. nomadlist, weworkremotely) that overlap it. I really wanted to see if some the differentiating factors (e.g. Github auth, remote region specificity) would be of interest to anyone.
1)Will you not hire a "salesperson" if they don't make sales calls in their free time, or a baseball team won't pick a player if they don't play in their free-time?
2)IMHO hiring should be a "selection" process and not a "rejection" process. Your application at this point looks like a "rejection" system.
3)Having github/open-source contributions is based on a lot of factors such as availability of free-time(being a good engineer dosen't necessarily mean one has to write code in their free-time), passion for a particular project/domain etc. Too much of anything causes burn-out.
4)Just because a lot of companies have this criteria, it does not make it a valid one. There's a lot of "herd" mentality in technology recruiting.
5)As a business decision I would think you should make open-source contributions optional and let the employers decide if they want it or not.
If you could build a community around it, then companies will be happy to pay (and I've learnt this lesson the hard way!). Follow petercooper suggestions and best of luck!
Reading some of the posted jobs, I can't tell if these are actual engineering jobs or $20/hr variety.
I think of a coder as someone mindlessly implementing logic that someone else has laid out before them... while a programmer is someone who comprehends the problem, develops an algorithm and implements it.
Of course, these days with so much work being about setting up a UI on whatever platform, there isn't as much algorithm development.
In my experience, those terms are mostly used by people who don't understand what you're doing (or in this case, the domain was available)
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{"type":"MongoError","msg":"E11000 duplicate key error index: remotecoder.users.$email_1 dup key: { : null }"}edit: Make that four that say that. What is this I don't even.
Also desperately needs a way to search or filter job listings by keyword.
Seems a real gap in the market given most companies don't even have any seats for you
especially weworkremotely will be a though competitor, since developed by the guys from basecamp they get a lot of trust from companies, and having a book about remote work helps attracting visitors as well...
That said, how would this be different from StackOverflow Careers? They have a search option for remote and it seems like companies are actually respecting what the checkbox means.