Ask HN: What companies are truly remote-first?
What companies have committed to be truly remote-first (no hybrid-model companies or ones where leadership is non-remote)?
13 comments
There are GitLab, Automattic, Zapier, and Mozilla according to Amur Software [0]. They define the companies that are on the list with this method.
> To qualify as a distributed company work must be done primarily online and in a remote-first, remote-friendly fashion. Periodic employee meet-ups or corporate retreats are okay, and having office location(s) is okay, but leadership and corporate decision-making cannot run out of a centralized face-to-face headquarters while some percentage of employees opt-in to working remotely.
Recently, they released a new list of distributed companies for 2020 [1].
[0]: https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/what-are-the-biggest-distr...
[1]: https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-companies
> To qualify as a distributed company work must be done primarily online and in a remote-first, remote-friendly fashion. Periodic employee meet-ups or corporate retreats are okay, and having office location(s) is okay, but leadership and corporate decision-making cannot run out of a centralized face-to-face headquarters while some percentage of employees opt-in to working remotely.
Recently, they released a new list of distributed companies for 2020 [1].
[0]: https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/what-are-the-biggest-distr...
[1]: https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-companies
Automattic (aka Wordpress.com) was remote first since 2008, at least.
Zapier, GitLab and Hashicorp are a few that come to mind. I believe Hashicorp even has a rule were for a given team you can't have 3 or more people in the same city.
What's the reason for that?
My understanding (and personal opinion too) is that hybrid teams (half remote, half onsite) don't tend to work well. Most likely, the remote portion of the team will be left out of a lot small impromptu discussion that happen within the office. A solution is to force all conversation and discussions to happen via Slack/email but that makes a lot of small discussion not happen as the activation energy might be too high. Ultimately if you have a small portion of your team geographically removed from the rest of the team they might end up being left out a bit.
For example, let's say you have a team of 5 people, 4 people live in city A and 1 person lives in city B. It might be the case that the 4 people in city A meet up every week in person. They'll eventually form a closer working relationship with each other potentially leaving the person in city B out. Hashicorp's decision might be to try to prevent these kind of situations (for what it's worth I've heard about this Hashicorp rule by talking to people but I can't find anything online about it).
For example, let's say you have a team of 5 people, 4 people live in city A and 1 person lives in city B. It might be the case that the 4 people in city A meet up every week in person. They'll eventually form a closer working relationship with each other potentially leaving the person in city B out. Hashicorp's decision might be to try to prevent these kind of situations (for what it's worth I've heard about this Hashicorp rule by talking to people but I can't find anything online about it).
I think Elastic (the company behind ElasticSearch).
Ad Hoc (Modern US Government Contractor) adhocteam.us
Mattermost
You Need A Budget
Discourse!
scrapinghub is fully remote.
basecamp
Sourcegraph is all-remote: https://about.sourcegraph.com/company/remote.