
How I failed to land a remote position - kostarelo
https://kostasbariotis.com/how-i-failed-landing-a-remote-position/
======
phantom_oracle
Let me tell you something I learnt myself about remote job positions:

\- Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs
where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like
Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of
experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that
position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use
stupid filters like "the right fit" \- which most of the time equates to
finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1
who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best)

\- As someone reading your blog post, even I did not make it past your full
email text. It's just too long for HR to even bother. A shorter, concise, "get
in your face" email sometimes works better

\- HR filters are the worst way to get remote positions. You said you have
friends working for remote-first companies like Github and Automattic - that
should have been your first method of entry to go direct to the team itself
and not need to get through HR first - if you're a great programmer and your
friends know it, they will gladly recommend you

~~~
flyovercow
if

~~~
dsacco
_> if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social
connections?_

Two reasons:

1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the
claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true
meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment).

2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which
typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in
groups.

The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal
relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying
for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and
every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity
in your professional capacity.

Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good
heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's
abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's
abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely
rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work.

It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop
sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review
process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default
to it because it works often enough _and_ because it's intuitively an
attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction,
even if it's technically suboptimal.

------
mpetrovich
Thanks for sharing, remote job hunting is challenging. Some constructive
feedback:

TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies
unless they're directly relevant to the position.

Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others
applying to the same position.

These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company
you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is
this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals?

Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide
examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager
imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And
do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend
less than 30 seconds on yours.

Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more
time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that
stands out.

Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach
out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.

~~~
kostarelo
> It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the
> best person to help the company achieve its goals?

Yes that's actually something I didn't pay much attention. Thanks, will
definitely keep in mind.

~~~
nogbit
You should, I did exactly that sometime ago for only the 5 companies at that
time who were super interesting to me.

For each of their cover letters I told a personal story that was spot on
relevant to the position and their mission/values. It demonstrated all the
soft skills....each of them called me within a day or two.

------
zebraflask
Not to sound impolite at all, but your cover letter sounds more like a dating
site profile than a cover letter for a job. Overly personal, a lot of
irrelevant details. Too friendly.

Let your resume, portfolio, etc. do the talking.

~~~
smt88
I totally disagree. The resume/portfolio will talk either way, but they
usually don't say enough. If a cover letter can give me an idea of what it's
like to talk to someone in real life, it helps tremendously. Resumes just
blend together, and it becomes impossible to tell anyone apart.

Doing anything -- literally _anything_ \-- that differentiates a resume from
the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a
personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality
is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend
to like people who put themselves out there.

~~~
sotojuan
You stand out in a cover letter by finding a concise and convincing to
summarize why they should interview you and the value you bring. Not by
telling people your hobbies or how nice the beach near you is. That kind of
stuff should come up naturally in a call or in person.

The same applies to dating - putting so much info up front is rarely
successful.

~~~
smt88
> _You stand out in a cover letter by finding a concise and convincing to
> summarize why they should interview you and the value you bring_

You don't stand out that way because everyone else is writing the same thing.
After the first five, it's monotonous and loses any feeling of meaning or
sincerity.

I usually know what "value" someone will bring by their resume. I need a data
engineer -- you're a data engineer! Great. Business value is established.

Beyond that, I'm trying to figure out what it's like to work with you, whether
you're an ethical person, whether you can work independently, etc. Those
things are conveyed by personal details (and, eventually, the interview).

~~~
sotojuan
> Beyond that, I'm trying to figure out what it's like to work with you,
> whether you're an ethical person, whether you can work independently, etc.

Good point, you are right. I still believe what OP had in his cover letter was
unnecessary but it would not be a deal breaker for me. Honestly, if he got rid
of the paragraph about his hobbies and the sentence about where he lives, it's
pretty good aside from some generic phrases ("I like clean code" \- who
doesn't?).

------
oisino
I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in
LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for
vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more
candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way
higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success
role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely.
That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first
culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people
are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.

~~~
kostarelo
Can you recall a time where you hired a less qualified person in a remote
position for some reason?

~~~
oisino
Personal referrals that this person was amazing. One huge challenge of remote
team members is training is a lot harder. You end up hiring very experienced
people due to this and not junior talent. Helpscout another remote team has a
bunch of articles on how they have this issue also

------
pzduniak
I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I
dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got
a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer
something I always wanted to do.

The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a
contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable
as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time
comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly
less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for
example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I
would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you
can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less
than 2 weeks.

Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult
for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list
of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on
major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it,
now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that.

Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork.
"Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost
doubling programmers' hourly rate.

------
luke3butler
I've been searching for a remote position for 6 months, and I can relate to OP
on a lot of this post. Methods slightly different.

I feel like I'm one of a huge crowd and being ignored completely is very
common, even when I surpass all of their requirement check-boxes boxes, then
some.

I spend a good amount of time on each cover letter, research the company, and
email the CEO or a lead developer on the team. I very rarely get a response,
but twice I got to the first stage and then it's as if I was forgotten.

I'm currently employed in a non-remote position, and I would be able to get a
new local job with ease simply because I can walk in and talk to someone. I
have gotten offers already, but I have a good list of reasons for wanting a
remote position.

I'm persisting, but it's getting a bit tiring going this long at it.

~~~
theparanoid
Contracting can be a backdoor to remote work. If you're specialized it's not
too difficult to find companies that need help. There's more risk (no
benefits, no steady income).

~~~
briandear
I prefer remote contracting. It’s great. More money, a lot of exposure to
different tech and ways of doing things (and ways to not do things.)

As far as benefits, there are few benefits that are worth having a lower
salary. Pension, retirement, all that nonsense – a waste of money – create
your own retirement investments with the increased money you make. I’d rather
money go into my pocket directly than to some benefit system that necessarily
results in some amount of dead-weight loss.

65 per hour gross as a full timer versus 100 per hour gross as a contractor.
35 per hour is like an additional salary.

But, it does take discipline and being extremely organized so it’s not for
everyone.

~~~
luke3butler
Would you say contracting on the side is taking on too much? I think I could
handle it.

I like having the stability, so easing into contracting might be a viable
option for me.

------
jondubois
To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you
specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that
you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source
contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine
and not a human ;p).

It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a
commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if
you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars).

It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have
policies against it.

Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote
work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.

~~~
briandear
Trust? If the features are being shipped there really isn’t much trust
required. You know after a week of that employee is delivering. Being in the
office does not guarantee a single minute of additional productivity. In fact,
I get more done in 2 hours working remote than I do at a typical day on-site.

Making people work on site for roles that don’t actually need to be – that’s
just nonsense. The only thing I care about is shipping. I don’t care about
eating lunch with the team, I don’t care about the idle chit chat. I certainly
don’t need to be sitting in a conference room looking a a computer projector
during sprint planning when I could just as easily be seeing that same screen
and listening to the same conversation sitting in my office at home. When I
work with the team, RARELY does it require interpretive dance to get a point
across. Even white boarding can be just as easy remotely.

If you don’t trust employees enough to be remote, then you shouldn’t hire them
to work in the office either.

Hardware engineering or other physical product-based businesses, I get it,
remote usually doesn’t work. But for writing code, sales, marketing? Not a
single reason not to be remote except if are working on something that
requires a triple-lockdown environment and is highly secret. Very few
companies have that level of absolute secrecy as a requirement – but even
then, there have been known to be remote people even on those types of teams.

~~~
jondubois
It's easy to ship poorly designed features quickly. Shipping well designed
features is a different matter.

As a developer, if you want to take extra time to implement something because
you want to put more thought into it, your employer has to trust that the
extra time that you're using will translate into a superior, better designed
product.

If the employer is trying to squeeze efficiency out of employees by giving
them ridiculous deadlines based on optimistic assumptions about how long x
should take to build, the result will be poor quality software and it will
cost more in the long run.

------
CydeWeys
Greece and California are ten timezones apart. I just don't see how you're
ever going to get past that unless you're willing to be nocturnal (and you
tell the companies you're applying to you're willing to work during their
daytime). You're competing for the job with hundreds of people in the same or
adjacent timezones.

~~~
kostarelo
Aw no I wasn't targeting California at all. I was mostly targeting timezones
that I would be working the same hours with theirs. The spreadsheet has some
outliers but those must be a few exceptions that I would be happy to stay late
at night to work with.

------
blakesterz
>> I took back like 3 offers which lead me to the conclusion that the market
of the remote positions is highly competitive and it's really hard to find the
job that you would be happy enough.

That's interesting, I'd love to hear from others who agree/disagree with that.

~~~
dsacco
I disagree with that. I've worked remotely for most of my career (three tech
companies + long term consulting). I've worked remotely for so long that when
I decide to join another company I'm specifically looking to work in an office
:)

To preempt the comments regarding survivorship bias or humblebrag: I
acknowledge that people absolutely experience higher bars when interviewing
fully remote positions. That said, I personally believe (from my own
experience and that of friends) that people who typically experience higher
competition in seeking remote positions are probably not optimizing their
search.

There are, broadly speaking, two classes of companies featuring remote
positions. The first type is a company built on a foundation of remote-
friendly culture - people communicate in Slack for almost everything, at least
half the company is remote, positions are headlined with remote work, etc. The
second type is a company that offers remote work and has a well-intentioned
desire for remote employees, but which ultimately does not favor them.

I've worked in both sorts of roles. If you are competing against non-remote
candidates for the second type of company, then all things being equal they
likely will not proceed with you. This is not only because of the cultural
differences in preference but also because the interview process is not
optimized to treat remote employees as first class citizens.

------
rampage101
The cover letter should have more direct language and be mostly about your
skill-set.

You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than
going through the official website application.

------
nnd
I’ve been working remotely for the last 3 years, including for one of the top
rememoré-only companies. I’ve also did freelancing sourcing clients on my own
and working through a recruiter.

One thing which is surprisingly not as oftenly discussed here are other
criteria besides pay taken into account when making a choice between remote
and non-remote.

I’d like to make an argument that remote work works only for a particular use
case: when you need to execute on a particular vision with some strict
framework of action. You’d need employees who are highly senior (therefore
autonomious) and have great communication skills.

Probably the main reason why I’m considering to move away from working
remotely is the lack of challenging projects. Even though I definitely
improved my engineering skills by working on projects and reading up
blogs/books, I’d learn much more if I had direct interaction with other
engineers which is impossible due to constraints of communication medium in
remote context.

------
was_boring
I find this, and many of the comments here interesting. I've been working on a
mixed remote/office department for a few years now and lead a team (remotely,
with a 3 hour time difference) which is mixed as well.

I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other
leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for
themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to
stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company
goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I
also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not
living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate
than other teams in the company.

I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management
differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's
experiences with remote managers/team leads.

------
austenallred
When we hired for a remote position we received probably 100x the applications
as when we hired in San Francisco. The pool of labor is much bigger and much
cheaper.

Now we're hiring a full-time machine learning instructor, and I can't even
imagine trying to find someone in SF. Even remote is difficult, but at least
there are applicants.

------
wallflower
To me, there is one extremely insightful comment on the original post. The
commenter asked what the timezone of the remote positions were and if that had
an effect on the applications and hiring team.

As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the
past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big
difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours
difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the
world (8-12 hours difference).

Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or
GMT-7, depending.

I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and
work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world
doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are
not (all) coding robots yet.

~~~
kostarelo
Absolutely. FYI, I was targeting specifically timezones that I could be
comfortable working with. There are a few outliers in the spreadsheet but were
mostly close to my timezone so we would work the same hours.

Unfortunately, I forgot to reply to the commenter.

~~~
wallflower
Thanks for the reply with the information about timezones.

Best of luck with finding your remote job!

Perhaps one will come out of the attention your blog post has joined. Since
people at your current employer may well know about this, perhaps put a small
text 'ad' at the top of your blog advertising that you are always interested
in the appropriate remote opportunities in Node.js?

------
doggydogs94
The phrase "I am obsessed with clean and efficient code" should be rewritten.
Most developers will not want to work on the same project as you; they will
not want their code picked over for imperfections.

~~~
kostarelo
Wow, that's interesting. I do keep doing comments on PRs on small things but
not at the point where I would reject a PR but rather discuss it. Maybe it's a
strong phrase though.

~~~
taway_1212
Frankly, I agree with the OP. I dislike people who nitpick during the code
review, esp. if it's in a remote setting where communication is less
efficient.

------
soyiuz
The pitch is way too long and fluffy. The first paragraph is basically about
how nice the beaches are. That immediately puts me off (I am not currently at
the beach, and neither are my colleagues). It is always better to open with
facts instead of phrases that sound like marketing talk ("amazing beaches,"
"passionate doer," "great fit," "really love," "personal playground.") None of
these are meaningful to your job performance.

------
hollaur
I'm not a developer, but I've worked remotely for a long time as a freelancer
and full-time, remote employee.

Here's my two cents (I edited your email):

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-
lELZ0lA...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-
lELZ0lARgp1zybe6sIAAmx9QUs/edit?usp=sharing)

------
jxm262
hey @kostarelo! Recognize you from the Node.js slack group as you were one of
the first one's to join (i'm justin :wave:)

Anyway, IMO alot of other commenters here have given some really good
feedback, so I won't elaborate on any constructive criticism. But if you'd
like to chat sometime about potential opportunities, send me a message
sometime (email is in my profile, or as you know I'm always on that Slack
group). I have a few decent people in my network I can probably send your way.

I appreciate the post, was a good read :)

------
late2part
I'm on the other side of that coin! Do you know how hard it's been to find
someone that is good at SRE/DevOps & wants to manage ESXi/VMWare Boxes and
SANs/Storage?

~~~
seorphates
Is that one job or four? I see four distinct engineering disciplines in your
post - Site Reliability - DevOps - Compute - Storage. The only two I would
reasonably consider combining (in a day-to-day combined way) are the last two
and even that's a risk for any largish operation. The first two do not benefit
being combined and neither will garner the attention required to succeed. I
would not apply unless you were small, generous and good to your community.
Buy hey, if you threw in networking and security I'd know you have two boxes
and need help and I'd bite out of sheer curiosity, like a shark, testing,
tasting.

~~~
late2part
Your point of view is interesting but surprising. We are a small company and a
small group, but I don't view (my definitions) of devops/sre as terribly
dissimilar.

I think it's very reasonable to have one person responsible for compute
storage and virtualization infrastructure.

I can see how a big company would specialize though.

Mail me if you're the least bit interested in a growing team with little
shiny-chasing and lots of pragmatic engineering.

~~~
seorphates
Yes, you're not wrong. I tend to think of the slightly larger, more complex
scopes having multiple programs with many teams when looking at these things
lately. This is just a small example of an impetuous reply not adding value
and it didn't even reflect any real opinion that I may or may not hold.

I'm about a decade removed from any real "two-box shops" (small and/or startup
focus etc.) and so sometimes think they can't possibly exist anymore. I see a
few of the "we want the world" job postings and experience burnout just
reading some of them.

"Pragmatic engineering" I like the sound of that but I'd secretly hope it's
not meant to rhyme with "best practices" \- I like good practices and all but
I like and appreciate the actual games much more. :O) That's just a small
parting snark - mostly harmless. Best of luck on your search! I'm trying to
maintain some focus on data operations at the moment but with any luck my next
jump attempt will be into something counter to current trends.

------
wheresvic1
The spreadsheet was totally useless. The most interesting information was
missing :(

