

Who's hiring remotely? - remotestartup

I haven't seen a post exclusively for remote jobs.  Are you hiring (internships or otherwise) remotely?
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andreyf
I've been thinking about an interesting model for working remotely - something
that might be called micro-outsourcing. The paying party provides a set of
automated tests (like unit tests, but with speed/space constraints) and a
price. Coders submit code which runs against the tests. If it passes, the
payer can pay their predetermined amount to buy the source. The idea is to
make the turn around fast enough that it makes more sense to program even
simple code by "micro-outsourcing" dozens of ~1 hr pieces every day. This way,
you could get ~50 hours of code written in a day's time while still keeping
the entire architecture of the system in your head.

PS: someone said something insightful, but for some reason deleted it, along
the lines of "this will pinpoint the problems of relying on unit tests for
correctness". This is very true - one of the Interesting Problems such a
project would need to solve is a set of tools to let users quickly design
useful unit tests. I'm in no way delusional about automated tests not being
able to _prove_ correctness. But I'm not convinced mathematical correctness is
all that often necessary, nor that this is a problem without a good-enough
solution.

~~~
metamemetics
I'm not sure how this would work on closed-source projects. Coders would need
to see the existing code that others have written to get anything done, 1 hour
of coding could be 45 minutes of grokking how your system is setup and 15
minutes of work. It seems like "micro-outsourcing" would only work for micro-
requirements.

You could maybe do something based off of Git where the hirer pays to pull
from contractors who have already glanced at the project and can jump in and
add a feature, but the hirer would have to expose his business source code to
everyone. The alternative is to expose it to less people and have them work on
it for longer periods of time to deliver a properly integrated product which
puts you back at a regular outsourcing service.

I don't think micro-outsourcing would work because productivity returns from
the coder might not start taking off until after 1 hour.

~~~
andreyf
_It seems like "micro-outsourcing" would only work for micro-requirements._

Bingo. The role of the "programmer" then becomes to split a project into these
micro-requirements, with minimal glue in between. This also yields a system of
well-defined, loosely-coupled components... all things dear to my heart.

Even though I said ~1hr, I was thinking of one hour being the upper bound. If
I can write testable specs in 3 minutes instead of code which would take 30
minutes to write/debug, I could increase my productivity at least an order of
magnitude. But the point isn't even that, it's the kind of architecture one
could create by "requesting" tons of custom built components throughout one's
day, worrying about their whole structure instead of the bricklaying.

~~~
david927
This is something I would love, for both coding and system admin tasks.

The thing is, I would want to 'retain' a few people for these tasks. For
example, instead of one system admin, I would have four people who vaguely
know my systems (have passwords, etc.) and if I offer an hour's worth of work,
the first of the four to accept gets it.

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sidmitra
I've seen this post every few weeks, and yet i hardly see any entries/offers
and even though it gets decent upvotes (around 15-20).

For some reason, i get the feeling not a lot of startups prefer "hiring"
remotely, or perhaps places like Elance are more suited for this.

I've worked remotely for 3 startups and i've grown to prefer it.

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sfard
I envy developers who can work remotely. I wonder if there's some model that
can work for people like me. I'm not even sure how to describe my skill set
other than something like this "a non-douchebag guy with top-tier investment
banking and consulting experience who understands tech/dev/web well enough to
be the glue between the two worlds and also synaptically chaotic enough to
make people rethink positions on things and create order out of disparate
ideas". I hate how corporations compromise thinking and genuine human
relationships, so I'm going to quit things until I likely become an over-
qualified barista serving my former employers coffee. How can I work remotely
or for a grounds-up business?

Please sir, may I have some more?

~~~
seancron
Perhaps you can try contacting the people at Banksimple (
<https://banksimple.net/> ) and see if you can help them out at all. If your
description of your skill set is accurate, you might be able to help them.
That's the only online banking startup that I could think of, although there
are probably others that people can suggest.

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Ixiaus
I'm an independent contractor, I work from home (often times with companies
outside of my home city) and I doubt (from experience) you're are going to
find many startup opportunities that cultivate remote working; I envision the
startup experience as being something akin to a team based sport. You need to
be _together_ to roll with the punches, so to speak; there's an immediacy of
communication and deliverance of intent that happens when you are physically
proximate to each other.

Established organizations have processes and they are _established_ , nothing
changes too quickly, therefore making it more feasible to leverage remote
workers.

~~~
papachito
We all work remotely here, also 37signals started with most people working
remotely.

~~~
Ixiaus
Are you accepting applications? :)

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dawson
I'm looking to hire a ROR developer to help with an NHS project (familiarity
with mechanize a bonus). Please email dk401@cam.ac.uk for specs and chat.

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blehn
I'm not hiring, per se, but I've been playing with a project management app
idea for a while (unoriginal, I know). I do UX/design, so I'm looking for a
programmer to partner up with. I'm thinking Node.js would be fun--I'm trying
to do something very responsive and fast with some real-time-y features. I'm
in NYC but remote is fine with me. let me know if you're interested.

~~~
BRadmin
And how should people contact you?

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blehn
email address in profile

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icey
You have to put it in the about box. The email address field isn't publicly
visible, it's only for administrative use.

~~~
blehn
aha, got it. thanks

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lzimm
yeah, i'd really love to see a list too.

personally, even though i fully acknowledge the whole "work with us and share
the energy/dedication/soul" thing, i'm most productive when i have the freedom
to swap up my view/environment every day (which is something you can't really
do too easily inside an office)... inspiration, or something, i dunno.

i think it also forces people to be more thoughtful about the way they
communicate/interrupt each other, which is pretty huge.

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JangoSteve
I know a few people who have gotten awesome remote positions. They all started
as on-site hires who had to move for family reasons, and the
companies/startups were flexible enough to let them keep working remotely.
I've not seen many (any?) Startups that consider remote hires from te outset.

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hundredwatt
On a similar note, I am curious if anyone has experience starting a company
where the founders were all remote, especially if everyone met over the
internet. What were the additional challenges or advantages that the remote
arrangement brought out?

~~~
idiopathic
The founders at our company are all remote, with developers spread across
India, UK and USA. We are doing well, having won Seedcamp last year.

It still amazes me the visceral reaction people have against remote working.
This would be fine as a principle, if the same people did not also complain to
me that doctors do not embrace technology. But given that our platform is
designed for doctors and patients to work together online (including online
consultations) it behooves us to practice what we preach.

I will give the following tips: \- You need different habits to work online.
In my case, I have a _lot_ of experience in setting up teams to work together
virtually based on all my previous IT projects, including writing software for
medical students to share their education across hospitals using Palm Pilots,
and migraiting 300 employees to use a wiki. I also worked as a management
consultant in a company that took pride in working with 2,700 hospitals but
without traveling to the hospitals - all research was through phone and email.
\- You have to teach the rest of the team these habits, few people know them
already. For example, in a telephone conference, you have to explicitly laugh
when you would have smiled, as you cannot rely on visual cues for bonding. \-
Make use of wikis and document every meeting you have, as you have it, with
everyone seeing what you type as you type it. \- my co-founders were either
people I knew, or people I got to know in person through volunteer work I
would ask them to do over coffee meetings before I asked them to join the
company.

By far the biggest saving we have is time. It is not being cheap and cutting
costs of office space, it is about slashing the time we spend on commuting and
meeting, and I would definitely say that we would never have achieved as much
as we did, as quickly as we did, if it was not for working virtually.

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slig2
I'm looking for someone who could build an generator similar to this one:
<http://www.mensus.net/brain/logic.shtml>

It's not that trivial, so I don't think that using some random dude from a
freelancing site would be viable.

~~~
remotestartup
How should people contact you? There's no email address in your publicly
visible profile.

~~~
slig2
I made this account because my other one was on non-procastinaio mode. I was
also hoping that someone would reply to me and then I would contact him.
Thanks for the heads up.

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remotestartup
Collabora is hiring multimedia developers remotely.
[http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/25/want-to-join-the-
co...](http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/05/25/want-to-join-the-collabora-
multimedia-team/)

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idiopathic
We are hiring. We want people with either backend J2EE and EJB expertise, or
front-end expertise in Struts 2. We _love_ developers who know hot work
remotely. Drop me a line on mohammad@patientsknowbest.com.

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retroryan
I am looking for a senior level developer who knows either flex or java. The
work is all remote and is for a major video game company, fun stuff! Email is
in my profile.

~~~
lzimm
hm, i worked at a major video game company (albeit i'm not proud to say i
worked for THQ) building server tech for an MMO.

it was kinda weird that they gave me the freedom to basically build all the
really important shit (ie: i got to pretty much lay the foundation and
designed a bunch of distributed systems and algorithms as i went a long)
despite me being the most junior member of the team, but it was all java
stuff, plus i grew up doing flash/flex work.

i have a portfolio up at <http://www.lzimm.com>, not sure if i'm senior enough
for you, but thought i'd throw that out there just in case :)

~~~
blabre
"We were tasked with turning one of the top rated strategy games of all time
into one of the world's flagship tests of a new set of economics." The task
itself sounds pretty cool -- kinda off topic, but could you describe it a
little more? (I've been interested in virtual world economies for a bit.)

Great article (<http://www.lzimm.com/nov2009/purpose.html>), too!

~~~
lzimm
Hey dude, sorry, almost missed your reply, but thanks for the comment :)

Anyways, I'm kinda stuck on what I can tell you.

I basically built a bit of infrastructure shit that let us build all the
pricing and billing logic at scale. So my role was more "low level" than what
went on with the actual transaction processing, which I think was pretty
typical. That said though, I'm sure that's not your question, which is more
resolved around the economics at large, so even though I'm probably not
supposed to talk about this, I don't really care:

\- the entire gaming industry is struggling to make money in new ways (ie:
piracy blah blah blah). \- one way to do it is subscriptions (ala WoW), but i
think most the big publishers are finding that its pretty hard to actually do
that successfully (WoW is a pretty rare phenomenon) \- the other big way to do
that (online, at least) is the whole free-to-play thing, where you make money
by letting people buy virtual goods and crap (ala all the facebook crap) \-
the thing is, when you get into games that people take seriously, you have to
be careful about the goods you let people buy, because all of that shit can
really change game mechanics, so you have to either: restrict yourself to
selling things that don't mean anything, like avatars and crap; be very
careful that if you do sell items that affect gameplay, not to build strange
new equilibria, or more importantly, prematurely alienate players before you
get to those equilibria in the first place; or (taking the approach that we
were taking.. i think anyways, i got pretty fed up at this point because it
seemed like they kept focussing on incredibly moot details), make it so that
you can't buy an advantage that you can't get by just playing the game (ie:
only letting people buy items that you can get through random item drops that
reward gameplay as opposed to debits from your bank account)

i have no idea why i did that in bullet points.

furthermore, i have an incredibly bad sense of grammar right now, so i'm not
sure if that even made any sense. drop me an email if you wanna chat more :)

\--

edit: uhhg, i have to admit, this reply seems terribly uninsightful, sorry :(

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szilveszter
the sponsor of the ubuntu linux distribution, canonical, hires people from all
around the world (70% of employees working remotely):
<http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/>

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c00p3r
No one hiring because they cannot switch their minds from corporate culture to
the open source one.

Look at freebsd, apache *, webkit, and thousands other projects - they're
growing up by the effort of hundreds of remote commiters, and managed somehow
to follow the architecture agreements and the design decisions.

The idea is very clear - you cannot pay people on 'per hour' or even 'per
line' basis - it works only for a full-time jobs where people are bounded by
contracts, NDA, and other papers.

In contrast, in the open source world, people bound by idea, desire and the
common effort, see the nginx project as an example.

But it is possible to pay for accomplished goals or milestones. Of course, you
need to define the basic rules before - coding style, unit-tests requirements
and so on.

So, if you like to hire people remote people, you need two things - idea and
trust. Set up trac or code.google.com, write your ideas and requirements and
pay for closed tickets/issues.

Update: To anonymous coward down-voters: It is better for everyone (even for
you) to share your opinions instead of simply click the button. =)

~~~
alexgartrell
You were downvoted because your response is off topic. Beyond that, remoting
does work for proprietary software (see Stackoverflow), so your argument is
shaky at best.

The reason the other downvoters didn't respond was that there's no need to
pursue this thread of communication further, as it does not really relate.
It's cowardice in the same way not fighting the guy who cuts you off in
traffic is cowardice.

And I don't intend to turn this into any kind of debate or anything. Just my
two cents on why you got downvoted.

