
Guide to Remote Work - colinscape
https://zapier.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-remote-working/
======
WadeF
Hi HN! Co-founder & CEO of Zapier here. We wrote this book a little over a
year ago. It's mostly up-to-date though there's a few things I need to update.

I'm unavailable for about ~2 hours but you can AMA and I'll respond later. :-)

~~~
tjbarbour
Hi Wade, Love how outspoken you guys are about Remote work! I'm actually
starting a podcast to help others learn about Remote development by
interviewing developers that work remotely and sharing their experiences.
Would any developers at Zapier be interested in coming on?

Find me as tjbarbour on twitter or Gmail.

Thanks!

~~~
jeffthespasm
I'd listen to this for sure. Is following on Twitter the best way to stay
updated on the podcast?

~~~
tjbarbour
Hi! We're just getting started, so yeah you can follow

[https://twitter.com/wayoffsite](https://twitter.com/wayoffsite)

~~~
alexeiDarmin
I'm also interested in a podcast about remote work, followed

~~~
tjbarbour
Thank you!

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martinshen
This is a great guide but my biggest question is around compensation which was
not covered by this guide. Do you hire and pay the 60th percentile at approx.
local market rates? Do you hire the best remote people at SFBay market rates?
How do you handle equity? How is payroll and benefits handled?

~~~
WadeF
Great question. I've been meaning to update the book to include a chapter on
this.

The short version is it's mostly fixed to Chicago rates. We do have a fixed
bump for folks in SF/NYC. It's an imperfect but simple way to handle this.

Payroll and benefits are solved using a service like TriNet.

~~~
Akkuma
I think this system breaks down more than the imperfect implies, but still
works alright. Let's say I live somewhere that cost of living is more than
Chicago, but less than SF/NYC, such as DC. You are now asking people to take
pay cuts, which reduces the potential employee pool, certainly one of the
perks of being a remote company. Of course, the reverse also occurs where
people living somewhere with a lower cost of living would probably really want
to work for you guys thanks to a much larger salary, so I suppose it
ultimately balances itself out.

~~~
WadeF
Yeah. This stuff is hard when you're a startup and can't pay Google rates. But
as we've grown we've generally been able to grow salaries so folks are above
market in the market they are in. Sometimes we lose out on folks in really
high cost of living areas. But it's happening less often.

~~~
Touche
Thanks, knowing this I would avoid working for Zapier and would tell others
not to, as you don't pay based on merit, but based on "what you need" based on
cost of living. If a person is not limited to employment within a commuter
distance then they have no reason to limit their salary based on the salarys
within a commuter's distance.

A remote worker's "market" is the world, so you are competing with other
remote companies, not other local-to-me companies.

~~~
WadeF
We absolutely hire based on merit. People are living in rural areas making a
great salary because we pay mostly fixed to Chicago market.

We don't downsize your salary. But sometimes we can't upsize it. There's a few
companies we can't compete with on salary like Google. Most of those employers
seem to be in the bay area. Sometimes we lose out. A lot of times we don't.
The world isn't quite so black and white here.

~~~
Touche
Yes, you do downsize salaries. Paying Jill less than Bob where Jill is a
better worker because she lives in Little Rock Arkansas and Bob lives in NYC
is downsizing Jill's salary.

Jill can do better. Hopefully other remote companies seek out the Jills and
pay them what they are worth.

~~~
WadeF
I suppose that is true in the narrow case of SF/NYC. We're working to grow
profits to make it so that isn't the case in the couple places that have the
highest cost of living in the world.

------
phantom_oracle
I have a question concerning actual remote work vs. what is shown in "Who is
Hiring?" threads.

For example, how do full-time, actual remote (eg. you are in Japan and your
company is in Belgium) employees feel/interpret job-postings like:

> Somewhere, USA | X-Company | ONSITE / REMOTE | Full-time

From my understanding/seeing of so many of these types of postings, they
always have hidden gotchas like:

\- only for extremely senior positions

\- remote (at your home, which is 20 minutes from the office) once a week only

\- not actually remote, but just using the word as keyword-optimization

As my question above says, how do actual remote employees interpret such job-
ads?

~~~
eloff
I personally ignore anything that says onsite or remote. Largely they turn out
to be domestic USA only, or one day a week remote or some such nonsense. Not
worth the time to investigate further when there are lots of less ambiguous
job postings.

The second reason you want to ignore those is a remote worker for an onsite
team can often get cut out of the loop. A lot of communication will happen in
person, and the remote guy will miss out. Eventually people will trust him
less, share less with him, and pass him over for promotions. You're much
better off working for an all remote team, or a remote first team where
communication is mandated to be via a medium that all workers have access to.

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corbinpage
I help run a distributed company with folks in NY, CA, VA, and NC. Content
like this from Zapier or other successful remote-first companies provides an
excellent source of ideas to apply to my own team and also helps to slowly
remove the stigma against remote work. Appreciate you guys publishing these
types of articles!

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aerovistae
I have a question for anyone to answer who feels qualified to do so.

I'm a dev who's been working for about 5 years, degree in CS, focus on JS
front-end.

I would _love_ to do remote and skip the commute, but I'm afraid to, mostly
because impostor syndrome: while I'm a good coder, I tend to run into
roadblocks involving the code written by other people (e.g. "I can't see where
this is getting called from; I tried searching the codebase and don't see it
anywhere...what is it for?" or else with the toolchain / build system (e.g.
"The wiki really does not explain how to get this running locally at all, and
these components are not compatible and I'm getting a version error from this,
I'm really not sure what to do; tried googling extensively with no luck.")

I always seem to be the only one who has these problems.

While I tend to do well in person by being nice and asking a lot of questions,
I'm concerned I may be a poor fit for a remote role as it requires a high
degree of autonomy.

What do you think? Have you encountered these problems and still succeeded at
remote work?

~~~
brandon272
I think increased autonomy is the wrong way to look at it. Typically you will
still be part of a team and will be encouraged and required to collaborate
with coworkers to solve problems and get questions answered. You'll just be
doing it over Skype or Slack or whatever other communication tools are there
instead of in person.

~~~
tkhoven
Agreed - I've been in a fully remote team collaborating pretty intensively
with other team members, screen sharing and pair programming over
Skype/Screenhero/TeamViewer or whatever the designated tool is. Asking
questions through irc/Slack means that communication is a little more
asynchronous than face to face but we'd use short Skype sessions when we
needed to be a little more involved. Increased autonomy _can_ be part of it
but it really depends on your workplace.

------
mark_l_watson
I just downloaded the eBook and spent 15 minutes reading two chapters. Useful
material, thanks! Except for working as a contractor at Google, I have been
working remotely since 1998, when my wife and I moved to the mountains of
Central Arizona. I frequently read articles on remote work, and I find
Zapier's eBook on the subject to be better than most material I have seen on
this subject.

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radarsat1
Any info or tips on how to start remote working if you're not a "web guy"?

I'm more of a scientist / engineer, i.e. I work on somewhere in between
writing numerical methods, simulation, control, and gluing them to more useful
interfaces. I don't do UI, but I can handle it; I certainly don't do web
front- or back-ends, but I know something about databases; I like statistics,
but I'm not a machine learning expert, although I know how to set up and use
TensorFlow; I enjoy working on low-level code, embedded and real-time systems,
audio, signal processing and control and robotics. At the same time I'm
willing to sacrifice some of the "hands on" stuff I like to do (working with
mechanical systems) and be more of a software guy if it means I can travel and
work remotely. However, short of starting my own consultancy, which I'm not
sure I want to do (I have no idea about business), I don't know how to get it
going. I feel forever doomed to haunt the lab/office, because I have no idea
how to find freelance contracts for this sort of thing.

------
keriOJ
Another remote first company that is sharing some knowledge:
[https://teleport.org/remote/](https://teleport.org/remote/) Eating their own
dog-food as company who builds products for people who move around.

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fermigier
Not a single mention of "child" or "children" in the text. Nor in this
discussion so far.

I'm wondering how many of the people advocating working at home have children
and how they deal with them.

~~~
tylermac1
Are you asking about watching children while you work?

I would imagine most would go to daycare during the work week (our 1 year old
does on days when my wife works).

~~~
fermigier
Not necessarily watching children, but having them around can be in my own
experience a bit disturbing, specially when you're living in an apartment and
when they are between 1 and 5.

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Bahamut
My company is a heavily remote company (1/4-1/3 of the company or so is
remote), and one tool that has helped us massively is Sococo - it has a notion
of virtual rooms and virtual conference rooms, so it makes it pretty painless
to set up a meeting with the people needed that also supports screensharing
and webcams.

~~~
dhd415
I would agree. One of the things I felt when I first moved to working remotely
was a sense of isolation due partly to losing the awareness of what other
people or teams were working on that you have when working in an office due to
just seeing them meeting or talking together. Sococo gives that back to you
because you can see other people and teams meeting in the "virtual conference
rooms". There's been more than one instance where I've dropped in on a meeting
to assist with a production issue or a development question that came up
because I could see those conversations were happening, something is more
difficult if a chat tool such as Slack is your primary or sole form of
communication.

------
markdog12
Gitlab's handbook also has some good remote working tips:
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

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blokeish
Perused that link a bit. Cool job on the guys writing all that up for others
to read.

Personally, I found GitLab's approach (also documented over at their site)
more pertinent to my situation—starting with the fact that apart from remote,
GitLab are also multicultural, which adds a whole other dimension.

One remark: Zapier mention they use a website called HelloSign for electronic
signatures. I have checked them out, and that's a total no-go. Although they
claim to comply with EU law on electronic signatures, they most definitely do
not: what they offer is a “paste a PNG of your handwritten scrawl on this box”
kind of service, which not only does not come within a mile of being an
advanced electronic signature, as per Regulation (EU) 910/2014, but also
follows the inanely dangerous precedent set by, I think, Adobe, of affixing an
image in the likeness of a hand-written signature or seal to a document. This
causes people to just assume that if one such image is present, the document
is valid, without actually checking the signature. So, although something like
that HelloSign website might be fine for private contracts, at least in the EU
those “signatures” have no public effect. Just thought I should mention.

~~~
jobvandervoort
Our handbook [0].

We also use HelloSign. If anything, it's very convenient.

I have zero legal knowledge on this, but I did see that they reference
910/2014 compliancy explicitly on their website. [1]

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

[1]:
[https://www.hellosign.com/info/legal](https://www.hellosign.com/info/legal)

------
techno_modus
I liked this book from 37signals (the authors of Getting Real): Remote Office
not required: [https://37signals.com/remote](https://37signals.com/remote) It
is also available as an audio book.

------
jacknews
Good, but could add some some foundation pieces, which are often glossed over
or just assumed to be in place, but when they aren't, none of the other
'cultural' points matter much.

ie what is a team? A group of people working toward a common vision/goal. So
have one clearly defined.

Why are team members working at all? Because they expect some kind of reward.
So ensure sure they have a stake in the success of the endeavor, even if it's
only "be part of this cool project".

------
sdepablos
Interesting document, but it's there any way to get an ePub version? I tend to
read in my Kindle and PDFs are a pain in the a.. ;)

~~~
WadeF
Yep! Here you go: [https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Remote-Work-Manage-
ebo...](https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Remote-Work-Manage-
ebook/dp/B00VDQ280A)

------
intro-b
what's the response to an undergrad senior (CS major, typical software dev
internships, portfolio) interested in working remotely after graduation? i
assume the typical route is getting a full-time position and then
transitioning—is it too arrogant/presumptuous to think startups would be
interested in a new grad hire for remote positions?

~~~
bckygldstn
I can give two cents as an ex undergrad interested in remote work: I worked
onsite after graduation before transitioning to remote for the same company
after 6 months.

I found that I was learning a lot less, as you might expect. I missed out on
"casual" learning opportunities, like overhearing a new git command or having
a quick chat about what a p-value means. And I no longer interacted with the
salespeople, scientists, and people in other areas of the business that help
broaden my knowledge. Admittedly, this might be different in a remote-first
culture, we were quite an open/chatty/collaborative office.

I also made a lot of mistakes as I learnt how to be a good remote worker. It's
definitely a skill that needs to be developed, and remote companies would be
sensible to prefer candidates with that experience already.

So I'd recommend the pathway of working onsite for a remote-friendly company
for a while, transitioning to remote, then using the experience to apply for a
remote-first job. It also means you're less committed if you discover you
don't enjoy remote work. I discovered I didn't enjoy remote work.

~~~
cauterized
As a hiring manager, I think this is a great idea. Also, a lot of remote-
friendly companies will let you WFH a few days per week, which is a good way
to get accustomed to it without going all-in, and compare the gaps between
your remote vs. on-premises workdays. A good manager at a remote-friendly
company can usually also help you learn to be a more effective remote worker.

------
mohsinr
Great ebook thank you.

One thing I may suggest that allowing people to get ebook without signup as it
is going to help this guide get into hands of many more people and will help
Zapier in many ways, more prospective clients, employees, partnerships and
goodwill in general.

------
mmaunder
This is awesome. I wish I had more time to do something like this myself.
We're a team of 14 full-timers, 23 total with contractors, all remote.

We describe trust as a core value in our company and it goes both ways. We
trust our team to do a great job, help each other when needed, be transparent,
etc. They trust me and our execs to be open, honest, etc and I've gone above
and beyond in that department. So I love the focus on trust in the 'running a
remote team' section.

I'd also add: If you're planning on doing this as a founder/exec, expect to
spend time and money dealing with different jurisdictions. Our team is mostly
in the USA and for full-timers we have to file corporate taxes in every state
where we have an employee. We have a team of accountants and HR folks that
help us now, but it's still a lot of work and if it wasn't for my amazing co-
founder, this would have been impossible to wade through.

For international domains, we have worked with or are working with people in
Sweden, Greece, Paraguay and I think a few others. In general we reach out to
our local law firm who connect us with counsel in those countries to figure
out NDA's etc. It's not cheap.

Also had to work with local legislation in some countries that deal with
workers comp type stuff and number of hours worked each week, government
benefits - the list is long.

But the benefits are that we have an amazing, talented, diverse team who bring
cultural influences from around the world and the USA and are able to live and
work anywhere in the world they want to.

In terms of tools: VoiP is still ridiculously unreliable. I specifically
include Skype and Slack in this criticism. As the team grew we discovered a
secret weapon for super reliable voip calls: Teamspeak. It's AWESOME. It has
push-to-talk which is great for big team meetings and you can see packet loss
on a per user basis. You can also isolate yourself and your team to a single
server so you're not load sharing with other teams during peak. It's been a
real life saver.

Also, we don't do video. I know many remote teams do. We don't. What I love
about it is that it really levels the playing field in terms of who is more
charismatic on video. It also removes the distraction, frees up desktop space
and reduces bandwidth usage for international team mates. When another company
wants to do a hangout etc, we sometimes just tell them we don't do video and
it's great. I can stand in my office staring out the window, really listening
to what someone is saying, rather than having to think about whether I look
good or watch them. Voice only for remote teams is awesome IMHO.

Thanks again to @WadeF and Zapier for doing this. I still find it absurd that
remote work isn't the default for tech teams. One day we'll look back and
wonder if perhaps lack of trust was the only reason big tech companies don't
feel comfortable having everyone work remotely.

~~~
e12e
Interesting note about Teamspeak (I've only used it for gaming). My current
batch of students (~18-20 year olds) seem to swear by Discord. The main reason
being that it is more convenient to manage "servers" (If I understand
correctly these are all hosted by Discord - but are "equivalent" logically to
TS servers - access control, rooms etc). But they are easier to manage and
shift between on the client side (I've only briefly looked at the chat app).

My personal intuition would be to try Mumble (as it's open source) - but if TS
works, that's great.

[https://discordapp.com/](https://discordapp.com/)

[https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Running_Murmur](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Running_Murmur)

~~~
amlozano
Having experience with all of them, Discord is the easiest one to get going
with. For non-technical people especially.

Having a browser app is a huge boon, you can get people into the chatroom
without them having to download anything. Having the phone apps is also
amazing, keep up with the room even when you are on the go.

------
herpderpherpder
Ugh. Another one of these.

The only thing I take away from these "sign up to get our ebook" bits is that
you don't have enough confidence in your material to believe I'd subscribe
after reading it.

~~~
WadeF
You can read it free here: [https://zapier.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-
remote-workin...](https://zapier.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-remote-
working/)

Can also get it on Amazon free here: [https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-
Remote-Work-Manage-ebo...](https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Remote-Work-
Manage-ebook/dp/B00VDQ280A)

No email required.

~~~
troydavis
How about adding a direct link to the PDF (or any other single document that
exists) on [https://zapier.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-remote-
workin...](https://zapier.com/learn/the-ultimate-guide-to-remote-working/)?

