Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts(shinkim.io)
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Shift to Remote Work Based on 7k HN Who Is Hiring Posts
https://www.shinkim.io/posts/shift-to-remote-work-based-on-7-000-hacker-news-job-posts
85 comments
I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.
I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me.
In my experience, mentoring junior devs and new hires on my projects is much harder for everyone involved when you're not in the same office. Sometimes you're lucky and get someone who'll speak up and ask questions when they get stuck, but often (especially with juniors) people will just try to figure things out on their own in order to not look bad at their job or incompetent or something. Some devs would rather spend a whole day on a problem and only bring it up in the following day's stand up than show they can't solve it alone. That is really bad for a project. I find I have to poke the quieter juniors regularly on Slack just to make sure they're OK, but then people get annoyed about being micromanaged. This is something I really want to solve...
I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me.
In my experience, mentoring junior devs and new hires on my projects is much harder for everyone involved when you're not in the same office. Sometimes you're lucky and get someone who'll speak up and ask questions when they get stuck, but often (especially with juniors) people will just try to figure things out on their own in order to not look bad at their job or incompetent or something. Some devs would rather spend a whole day on a problem and only bring it up in the following day's stand up than show they can't solve it alone. That is really bad for a project. I find I have to poke the quieter juniors regularly on Slack just to make sure they're OK, but then people get annoyed about being micromanaged. This is something I really want to solve...
Maybe you should publicly commend the vocal juniors so that the rest can learn from their example. Say something like, "Jim Halpert realized that it would be a good idea to collaborate with me on the A4 project, and together we finished it far ahead of schedule." Phrase it so it ascribes agency to the junior, focusing on how they (with agency) decided to use the resources they had appropriately.
My Dad, still programming at 72, was one of the first people I know of to work as a remote developer. From about 1982 We lived on a remote-ish farm in Australia and out in the shed we had an IBM mainframe with a bunch of terminals and PCs on makeshift tables made from doors resting on filing cabinets. A couple of times a year some of his colleagues from the UK would fly out from the UK with a bag of tapes of source code, they would spend the next month merging their code and planning the next few months work.
Sounds like you're doing a fine job.
One thing you can do is let people flounder and fail on irrelevant small tasks for a week or two early, to help them learn the lesson that they don't know what they're doing.
The best way to make someone appreciate guidance, is to have them fall on their face, receive guidance and notice the difference.
One suggestion I had was, if you're stuck for more than 30 minutes, ping me. Juniors will almost always be stuck with something trivial you can answer within a few minutes. It gives you a break and it is something they really appreciate. If you communicate to them that they're not expected to know anything and that the first few years on the job is their real world education and a chance to ask questions without raising eyebrows, they'll be far more likely to do it.
Juniors are nice in my experience, you can mold them into something half-decent if they've got a bit of a brain and their mistakes are ones of innocence, not cunning or apathy. It's the 'senior' devs who don't know shit that you have to put up with that's almost always a disaster. They'll be well versed in lying and politics, wasting everybody's time.
One thing you can do is let people flounder and fail on irrelevant small tasks for a week or two early, to help them learn the lesson that they don't know what they're doing.
The best way to make someone appreciate guidance, is to have them fall on their face, receive guidance and notice the difference.
One suggestion I had was, if you're stuck for more than 30 minutes, ping me. Juniors will almost always be stuck with something trivial you can answer within a few minutes. It gives you a break and it is something they really appreciate. If you communicate to them that they're not expected to know anything and that the first few years on the job is their real world education and a chance to ask questions without raising eyebrows, they'll be far more likely to do it.
Juniors are nice in my experience, you can mold them into something half-decent if they've got a bit of a brain and their mistakes are ones of innocence, not cunning or apathy. It's the 'senior' devs who don't know shit that you have to put up with that's almost always a disaster. They'll be well versed in lying and politics, wasting everybody's time.
I got over this by having teammates who regularly asked for help in Slack. Suddenly, it felt very acceptable for me to do so. Our #dev channel is full of my coworkers and me asking and answering questions for everybody to see that we all need a nudge in the right direction from time to time. I think when that stuff gets hashed out in DMs or in other less public places, the new devs don’t realize it’s happening.
This is why remote mature companies like Gitlab emphasize transparent communication and highly discourage private channels / DMs. Otherwise it is much easier for individuals to become silo-ed in a remote company than in a onsite company. Remote teams need to overemphasize transparent and public communication.
The flip-side of this is that the constant interruptions from the help channel prevent you from entering flow / getting deep work done.
I find that a balance can be managed if people are nudged to at the owner of the specific component they need help with, i.e. @guild-frontend or @owner-fooservice
I find that a balance can be managed if people are nudged to at the owner of the specific component they need help with, i.e. @guild-frontend or @owner-fooservice
>"I like remote working, and I've done it on and off for more than 2 decades. It suits me."
Exactly the same here for exactly 20 years. I make my own products and make products for other companies as consultant.
No real problems when I need to hire subcontractor though. Being an old fart I know many very experienced people who would never pass an opportunity to make some dosh.
Exactly the same here for exactly 20 years. I make my own products and make products for other companies as consultant.
No real problems when I need to hire subcontractor though. Being an old fart I know many very experienced people who would never pass an opportunity to make some dosh.
I've also noticed in the job post data that remote-mature companies prefer employees with remote work experience. I'm guessing it's partially due to this problem of difficulty of getting juniors up to speed remotely.
Now most of us have remote work experience...
Pairing maybe?
I always feel like pairing is the most annoying and most mediocre way of getting people to ask the right questions. It takes double the time for easy tasks, and makes everyone really awkward. In sessions I have supervised it looks like ~70% of the time it just one person driving the keyboard solo. It does get people to learn, and if someone does something weird or gets stuck, the other usually speaks up. But it seems so slow in the average case.
> I'm all for this, I might even be able to move to a cheaper country and do the full digital nomad thing. I sort of want to find a way to save a minimum of $100,000 per year in order to retire within the next 10 years.
As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.
There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.
As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.
There's still plenty of remote work, just make sure you don't go into this completely blind.
PEOs make this... well, not easy, but certainly less onerous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organiza...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_employer_organiza...
But international PEOs have such crazy high fees that finding a local tax accountant suddenly becomes much less of a bad idea.
Okay, cheaper American city !
Sadly most american cities are cheap for a reason, unless you're into suburban life obviously.
Actually I found Chicago to be extremely affordable, and really lively. The absolute friendliest people on earth.
If remote work holds up I expect to see San Fran's real estate market, at least it's rental market collapse
If remote work holds up I expect to see San Fran's real estate market, at least it's rental market collapse
The cost of living in Chicago is amazing for a Top 3 metro. My theory has always been that the winter weather discount is baked into the CoL.
Chicago's a very nice city. There are basically three main factors keeping the cost low currently:
1. Population decline. 2. A very large amount of good housing stock. Chicago's completely flat with solid public transit reaching out to the suburbs. 3. Lower proportion of tech and startups. Similar to how tech has driven up the CoL in many cities, the relative lack of tech in Chicago has kept CoL down.
Winter is rough in Chicago, but the CoL in Boston has skyrocketed which invalidates that as being the _only_ reason.
1. Population decline. 2. A very large amount of good housing stock. Chicago's completely flat with solid public transit reaching out to the suburbs. 3. Lower proportion of tech and startups. Similar to how tech has driven up the CoL in many cities, the relative lack of tech in Chicago has kept CoL down.
Winter is rough in Chicago, but the CoL in Boston has skyrocketed which invalidates that as being the _only_ reason.
Agreed, weather cannot be the only reason. What drives the population decline in Chicago despite the low CoL?
Rising tax burden and fiscal mismanagement. Check out property taxes and the debt Chicago, Cook County, and the state carry.
Your dollars go further in Tennessee, Florida, or Texas (all of which have no state income tax).
Your dollars go further in Tennessee, Florida, or Texas (all of which have no state income tax).
Chicago has a huge part (1M+) that's effectively a Rust Belt city like Cleveland, St. Louis, or Detroit. It has deindustrialized and suffered disinvestment, and anyone in that section that has the ability to leave does.
Chicago has a wealthy, top-tier global city of 500k inside a depressed Rust Belt city of 2.5M. There's significantly less economic and population pressure on the core global city.
Such a great place, I try to tell, particularly young people how important picking the right city is. If you pick a bad City, you're going to end up not being able to afford to live your life will be needlessly stressful, you won't be able to find a partner. But if you pick a good city live can be pretty good
> If remote work holds up I expect to see San Fran's real estate market, at least it's rental market collapse
San Francisco's climate, walkable hoods, having a ton of things to do will probably make it come back from the dead even if the tech industry were to actually leave.
San Francisco's climate, walkable hoods, having a ton of things to do will probably make it come back from the dead even if the tech industry were to actually leave.
One of these reasons is often the lack of jobs. Suburbs are actually often fairly expensive since they try to bring the good of the country (individual houses, bigger lots) closer to the city where good jobs are located.
Just curious, why a city? What does a city give you personally that a town doesn't?
Public transportation.
Events and opportunities to socialize.
Even if I have a family one day, I still would want my kids to take language classes , etc.
I hate driving ( particularly when commuting), so a town wouldn't really work.
Events and opportunities to socialize.
Even if I have a family one day, I still would want my kids to take language classes , etc.
I hate driving ( particularly when commuting), so a town wouldn't really work.
> As someone from a "cheaper country", a crazy amount of these jobs dries out when they figure that they'll need to deal with your tax/labor law employment situation.
Why not make your laws more friendly?
Why not make your laws more friendly?
Reforming an entire country's tax and employment law to enable a few hundred people to work for companies too lazy to comply with the law is impractical at best. It's an edge case, and many of those laws are there to protect workers anyway.
Frequently the issue isn't so much that compliance is extraordinary difficult, it is that there is no section in the HR manual for handling it, and they don't want to deal with it. Most of the time it would take two days of labor at most, and a small percentage of the employee salary to make it kosher. In Canada it is so common that there is an entire industry that will arrange legal employment of Canadians by foreign corporations with no local presence. Most US companies don't even want to hear about how easy it is to comply.
Frequently the issue isn't so much that compliance is extraordinary difficult, it is that there is no section in the HR manual for handling it, and they don't want to deal with it. Most of the time it would take two days of labor at most, and a small percentage of the employee salary to make it kosher. In Canada it is so common that there is an entire industry that will arrange legal employment of Canadians by foreign corporations with no local presence. Most US companies don't even want to hear about how easy it is to comply.
Just imagine the labor pool if hiring from your country by a US corporation was trivial.
I guess the existing rent-seekers wouldn't like it however.
I guess the existing rent-seekers wouldn't like it however.
It's not about friendliness, it's about difference. As soon as the legal situation changes, many companies immediately get cold feet.
We need to convert the "ice-cream trucks" of my youth into drive by coffee shops... lol - except without the music, more like an app saying they're coming. Free business idea if anyone is listening. Put your order in on the phone.
I just wish they'd bring back milk delivery, like in the old days, but 24/7.
I ran out of cream for my coffee at 3AM in Amsterdam. But of course there's a 24/7 nitrous oxide delivery company in Amsterdam:
https://amsterdamlachgas.com/
I'm not a customer, but I would only consider it if they'd actually deliver fresh cream without any nitrous oxide at 3AM, to keep up the pretense that the N2O was actually intended for making late-night whipped cream.
But no, they brashly deliver incriminating accessories like balloons and "Slagroomspuit" dispensers. But no cream! Fuck that.
https://amsterdamlachgas.com/lachgas-toebehoren/
Somebody should start a 24/7 milk and cream delivery service. DeliverMOO!
I think you could make a killing delivering 24/7 fresh milk, cream, and dairy accessories like breakfast cereal and chocolate mix.
I ran out of cream for my coffee at 3AM in Amsterdam. But of course there's a 24/7 nitrous oxide delivery company in Amsterdam:
https://amsterdamlachgas.com/
I'm not a customer, but I would only consider it if they'd actually deliver fresh cream without any nitrous oxide at 3AM, to keep up the pretense that the N2O was actually intended for making late-night whipped cream.
But no, they brashly deliver incriminating accessories like balloons and "Slagroomspuit" dispensers. But no cream! Fuck that.
https://amsterdamlachgas.com/lachgas-toebehoren/
Somebody should start a 24/7 milk and cream delivery service. DeliverMOO!
I think you could make a killing delivering 24/7 fresh milk, cream, and dairy accessories like breakfast cereal and chocolate mix.
Amsterdam does not strike me as the kind of place that needs to put up a polite fiction in front of drug usage.
Are you kidding? Doing exactly that is like 30% of their tourism industry.
Maybe the sex industry can take up the slack. I don't care what costume the delivery person wears or how well they dance, I just want my fresh cream delivered 24/7!
Really? They have legalized prostitution there as well as legal drugs. The whole area seems the least "polite fiction" that I've ever seen.
We already have that where I live. It's an espresso machine in a van, they drive by offices in the morning and then stop and parks and other communal spots during lunch
Espresso trucks/vans seemed to be a big thing in the EU when I lived there, but don't seem to have much of a place in the US. Maybe it's due to the low walkability of the US and tendency to travel via car? Or maybe it's hard to get the licensing for it?
I have found coffee carts not uncommon in the US (midwest and california). I think aside from the michoacana guy, food trucks and carts in the US tend to stay put for a long period of time, and really, you don't need more than a cart that you pick up with a truck at the end of the morning. I've seen coffee carts post up at entrances to offices as well as along bike and walking trails.
This is everywhere in Australia. Coffee-and-sausage-roll carts towed behind an SUV from office to office in areas where somebody's stuck a bunch of office buildings in the burbs rather than the CBD.
Keep the music - excellent branding.
The music could play on the phones of everyone that has the app when it's approaching!
There are coffee vans in Australia that park in school carparks (for parents to grab a coffee after drop-off, or teachers to get one on their way in) or near popular beach spots or tour through office areas at specific times.
Yes! Drive-by Blue Bottle coffee trucks please!!
The best thing we did was bite the bullet and stop hiring remote folks using some CoL metric invented by HR.
The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.
The pool and quality of candidates we interviewed pretty much went up overnight and we started getting a lot of quality internal referral.
To clarify, your company didn't stop hiring remote, it just stopped making a cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates? Did management also increase salary for existing employees who lived in ow CoL areas?
We stopped making cost-of-living adjustment to salary offers to remote candidates.
Wasn't a company-wide move however.
Wasn't a company-wide move however.
Did the salaries drop or rise?
During a pandemic, the only roles that you can hire for are ones that are remote (by definition, more or less). So this is not really charting a "shift". The question is, post-pandemic, will new roles continue to be permanent remote or will they gravitate back towards office roles?
As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.
As someone who has posted many remote Who is Hiring posts, I know that they've had little bearing on our company's decision process to move new roles back in-person or stay remote.
In the data, I've seen companies marking jobs that are remote only during the pandemic as "onsite", "COVID remote", "remote until COVID is over". I've classified those type of posts as NOT remote in this analysis. For example, I'd assume if you are a NYC based company, and want everyone to be onsite after the pandemic, you wouldn't hire someone from Alaska without sharing the onsite expectation upfront (i.e. marking your job post as "onsite").
That's not what the GP is saying though. You won't even bother posting to fill a job that can't e done remote, so you need to consider the volume of postings as well as the composition.
That's a fair point that the overall volume needs to be considered. And during Apr–Jul it was true that hiring volumes were subdued, and it is likely that onsite-centric companies simply weren't able to hire at all. However, job post volumes exceeded pre-pandemic volumes from August and onwards. This suggests that there was actually a change in behavior. The job post volume charts didn't make it into the article but can be viewed here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jlLJkZJz3NBeyjylzTYA...
"A recent IBM survey found that 61% of workers want to continue working from home permanently even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over."
https://mytechdecisions.com/facility/ibm-61-want-permanent-r...
Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same.
I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open
Some other surveys show a considerable percentage of business owners, executives and managers at companies think the same.
I can attest to the growth. I run a job board called Remote OK and you can see the explosive rise in job posts and revenue here from around May 2020: https://remoteok.io/open
That's funny coming from IBM
https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)
https://qz.com/924167/ibm-remote-work-pioneer-is-calling-tho... (2017)
Friend works in finance at a major alcohol/wine company not too far from SF(I'm guessing people can guess). Said prior to the pandemic there was no way they would have hired full time remote workers for their department. Now, they have no plans to go back after the pandemic due to how it has worked out and the fact they can get talent from all over the country and from cheaper COL areas.
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Remote has been an option for many people in tech, even before the covid situation. Most people regularly took work from home days or had regularly scheduled work from home days, at least once or twice a week. Some people spent months in remote situations, working from second homes during ski season or vacation spots.
But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business.
Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities.
Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote.
This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.
But, there was a belief amongst all management that they had to have a central place for everyone to gather and do business.
Now, Covid forced the remote issue on many companies. Many companies are crunching numbers on remote work productivity and leasing expensive square footage in expensive cities.
Some decided remote is costing too much in productivity and requiring people to come into the office. Others are finding out that productivity drop is much smaller than expected and office space cost savings are fully justified in going full remote.
This will take at least couple of years to fully shake out and see what the remote situation looks like in the future. One interesting side effect of companies going fully remote is that office space costs will likely drop and change the calculations again, convincing many companies to gradually bring people back to central office.
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is likely correct
I agree that the directional trend is more important than absolute numbers. Though I will say there are a fair number of traditional employers hiring on HN (e.g. Disney, NASA, Oracle, USDS).
This is really nice. I've been hand-curating Remote jobs from Hackernews for a while. It's carefully curated by hard and tagged properly, everything listed on the page is 100% remote jobs. I was also planned on writing a report to see how remote jobs % is increased over the period of time and what tech trend is growing. But not finding time. This is an interesting report. If would like the data, I'm happy to share the last 12 months of data. Feel free to ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl)
My sister/brother if you have a nice high quality hand tagged consistent data set, do a show HN and get every data scientist a chance at your data. That is 99% of the struggle.
And/or drop it at http://kaggle.com/datasets for others to do analysis/visualizations on.
Disclosure: I work there.
Disclosure: I work there.
Let's still remember that "Who Is Hiring" posts are a very small fraction of jobs in the world and the vast majority of jobs in the world cannot possibly be remote.
I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't.
That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.
I know this may sound obvious but let's also be mindful of that fact when we go around saying that everything has gone remote. For most people it hasn't.
That said though -- very cool analysis. I love seeing analysis from huge amounts of social media data like this.
From looking at various HN comments working from home is appealing due to only one factor: personality. It appears economics, commute, child care issues, martial status, and other personal indicators are largely irrelevant. People that can handle being away from social interactions appear to love working from home while people who need social interaction do not regardless of whether all other personal indicators are stressors.
Or perhaps those are the most vocal people. The other people might just be trying to wait things out instead of being particularly vocal about it.
It seems like a lot of people try to boil this down to one thing, but I don't think there is a dominant reason for wanting to WFH.
I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.
I can handle, and honestly prefer being alone most of the time, but WFH was not enjoyable for me. I prefer collaborating in person.
A related ongoing thread that was pretty good earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945397
This would seem to be a lagging indicator, not a predictor.
Very interesting take.
Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.
Would be cool (and likely even more dramatic) to see the chart going back 10(?) years.
Indeed! :)
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is still correct
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I definitely could see the government creating incentives to get people back to work. The big issue of people no longer commuting, is millions of people working auxiliary industries which are getting screwed right now. The guy who works at the cafe next to your office, the landlords who own buildings, even car mechanics.
I suspect by the end of 2021, we'll see more 50% work from home, particularly for new engineers.