How to push decent and deserving developers to embrace remote work?
Hello community,
This is my first post on the platform, hope I can get enough eyeballs to help answer a question that I have.
I was bitten by the remote work bug somewhere in 2016 & got into full-time remote work in mid-2017. Since then I have started a small club (offline) where I kept pushing my friends & immediate colleagues from my past company to embrace the remote work. Initially, I pursued 8 friends/colleagues & started educating them about remote work, made resumes for them because I was good at it, hunted jobs for them relevant to their skill set. Among 8 guys, 2 left my pursuit as they doubted that it can be a real deal, 1 of them had pretty serious family concerns and hence didn't show interest but promised to go remote in 2019. I was left with 5 guys still confused but eager to see what laid ahead.
I gave my 1000% (this being an indie maker community I am sure that each one of you knows the adrenaline rush you get while working on the stuff you really believe in.)
Long story short: In a span of 4 months in mid-2017 I was able to help those 5 guys earn a remote job. It's October 2018 all of them have completed a year or so at their new remote job & are eager to help me push this remote work culture further.
Question:
How to push the next 50 developers to embrace remote work?
- Convincing the first 5 was easy because they were friends/colleagues who trusted me.
More questions: If the community thinks it's relevant & worth a discussion.
Thanks!
If you have an evening for a quick read, the book "Remote" by Jason Fried is the best resource I have ever used to give good arguments for remote working for the employee and employer side. Great resource to learn from and spread the news to others.
I have found from my experience working with people is it's the employer who is not interested in doing remote work. They do not trust it yet (but they have never tried it before either!).
Sometimes it's not people's time to listen. If you find someone willing to learn about remote work, you can make a big difference in their life. If they are stuck in their ways and not willing to listen to how remote work can be amazing, I would not recommend forcing someone to remote work as your post implies. Education is only for those who want to learn.
I am aware of the employer's reluctance to hire a remote dev. I should have mentioned in my post that I am asking from developer's point of view. Sorry about that.
If you find someone willing to learn about remote work, you can make a big difference in their life. : Did this and doing.
You are correct about the not willing to listen part
At least in my experience, there are a lot of developers who want to work remotely. The problem is on the supply side. The vast majority of employers want to hire people in house. As a result only the most desirable developers are able to get these kinds of jobs.
Even worse, the kinds of developers who most tend to want to work remote are exactly those who employers are least likely to want to hire. In particular, it's harder for those who are more junior and who have no list of satisfied clients. It's also harder for people trying to geoarbitrage by moving to very different time-zones than the companies they'd like to work for.
I think there's a lot of variables here.
Of course, you have some people working just fine as a contractor an entire life and simply don't care about the government, but in this tradeoff you "normally" have more money involved. You accept the risks of no gov guarantees to have more money and handle the risk by yourself.
This leads us to the next point, different living costs... For someone that lives in Argentina or Afghanistan, a job who pays US$4k /month is a decent job... It's not the same for someone who lives in London for example.
I truly believe the remote job is the future, and we are at the beginning of this wave. We still need several things to set up though.
Fabio the brevity of your reply is remarkable. I wouldn't be able to write this short, maybe because one thought in my mind leads to another when it comes to this thing particularly. Not able to keep up with thoughts basically as there are a lot of reality checks to be fathomed when it comes to remote work ecosystem.
These are some points that have been running through my mind when I faced it myself & saw people facing it in the online remote communities.
Do you think the global wage standard should be set as per skillsets (of course with scaling according to geography?) I like how Buffer is working in that direction.
A platform pushing remote work protects the rights of remote workers on their platform? Is somebody doing this?
But I am happy we have started to move beyond the trivial issues like timezone, etc to a certain extent and are having tougher challenges.
Build community around remote work, I know there are tons of job boards which are remote focused. But I don't know any community which is focused what processes and tools remote companies use etc.
That is one thing I really wanna do. Processes & tools can be relevant once there are people eager to pursue remote culture. Or you think once they see and realise that processes and tools are easier than before they would be eager to jump into the remote work?
There is only some employees who allow remote so showing them how to build successful remote company would be where I would start.
Alrighty! Thanks!
might be a good resource to checkout: https://www.remoteonly.org/
Managed by the auth0 team
Looked at it before some time! Growing list.
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I agree with Justin. I'm a believer in distributed teams. While not everyone is cut out for remote work (you need the right amount of self-discipline and the ability to handle the "isolation"), the bigger issue is that employers and teams don't know how to handle distributed teams very well.
I just spent 2 years running prod and engineering at a startup where I moved the engineering team from 100% onsite to 50% distributed. It was great — the local team liked the flexibility, and we had an easier time recruiting and keeping the talent we wanted. But it took teaching everyone the muscles of how to do it well, and constant reminders.
I wrote some more about managing remote teams here: http://www.jottohq.com/info/managing-remote-teams.html
Hey Giff!
Yes, not all are cut for remote work hence I am mentally excluding those while asking the question. But there is a certain chunk of developers working in agencies in-house who are deserving (wage wise) or potentially do good or perform better in terms of efficiency and productivity if they are given a chance to work remotely.
If they comprehend their current structure of working they are anyways working remotely for a client somewhere in the world. The agency they are employed is the middlemen in a way.
As you mentioned that it took you two odd years to coach and teach them (congratulations for that and thanks for the efforts.) In hindsight or from experience do you think that with so many tools at our disposal we can simulate this for developers at large to make them understand or train them to go remote?
Well again I think the real mindshift change is with employers not developers. And that's a worthwhile effort albeit a slow nut to crack.
I think the biggest thing for the employee is just a sense of accountability to the team. Team working agreements can help, as can tools for video and screensharing and the like, but it really just comes down to personal accountability to the needs of the team.
Personal accountability >> monitoring via screen sharing.
The personal accountability can be gauged in multiple ways before employing a remote developer.
I have heard people leaving Crossover as their watchdog (screen and keyboard monitoring tool) become stricter day by day.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding but I think the minute accountability becomes oversight and lack of trust, it fails. It needs to be a responsibility felt by the employee, and if they can't muster it, they need to work in an office
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Thanks for the detailed reply, this is the beauty of niche communities.
First things first. You are correct, remote opportunities < number of developers who want to go remote. The remote opportunities earlier were born out of scarcity of developers in a single zip code & of course the price point this still holds true for some. The next phase was "wow this thing works" and the empowered devs demanded that they have at least a few days, weeks or months as remote and gradually once that worked their companies gained more trust and are allowing them remote. Next set of developers or potential remote workers would be normies (in positive connotation). These normies are the bright developers around us who are stuck in an in-house job in a random city and travelling for 2+ hours daily. I am looking a way to push these guys. The catch again how to break the jinx of more companies and more developers. Whom to target first? Convince the companies to accept or try remote setup? or empower the developers so that their collective voice can be heard by companies who would then accept remote work.
I know the remote contract & gig thing is short-lived & hence people like to work full time to stay on the safer side of the market. As I mentioned in my post the guy who promised to start in 2019 had the same fear that upon finishing a contract remote-work he wouldn't be able to score another remote job. I guess this can be a feature for platforms pushing remote work. What say?
I have a lot more to discuss but tough to mention in a single post.
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Thanks to you too! Will be back with a few more questions in this context once I get my head around it.
:)