

Ask YC: For a startup hiring its first employee, what are pros/cons of local vs remote? - wastedbrains

(37Signals says remote works well, others say hire local)<p>There is a good related thread here, but not exactly the same question:&#60;p&#62;http://stackoverflow.com/questions/246795/hiring-your-first-employee
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josefresco
If the employee is going to be a 'peer' then remotely will work fine as they
will most likely be responsible and highly motivated to do a good job. If they
are just a cog in your machine and productivity is key (thinking not so much),
you can't beat local yokels.

Also with developers, there's a huge difference between being able to look
someone in the eye after they just horked your entire product/service and
trying to do the same over the phone/via email. Remote developers simply don't
care, because they don't usually _have_ to care.

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wastedbrains
In this case we would likely be thinking of the person as a mini founder, with
a significant amount of equity. So hopefully the ownership of their work would
help with the self motivation.

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DEinspanjer
You might do well to find someone who is active in OSS communities, ideally,
someone who has contributed code. This allows you to see the quality of their
work and communication skills, and (in my opinion) it gives some indication of
their willingness to work remotely and still "get things done".

I work for Mozilla, and I am a full time remote employee. When I was hired, I
came in to the office to work for two weeks, and now, I typically visit the
office at least once a quarter for at least a week. For a startup on a tight
budget, that much travel might be difficult to handle.

I would also encourage you to find a place to live in IRC (either host your
own private server or set up a channel on freenode or something). IRC brings a
sense of closeness to local and remote resources. If people stay in the
channel and use it, there is also a good opportunity for "water cooler chat".
When I work in an office, I listen to people casually talking around me. If
they are talking about something interesting or something I might have some
useful comments about, I speak up. If people in your team live in IRC, then
they will use that medium as a place to ask those little one off questions
that normally happen either in the hallway, snack-room, or via IM. If it
happens in IRC, you can easily capture that knowledge for future use, and
other people can see the conversation and might have something useful to say
about it.

I also encourage the use of an IRC "backchannel" if you have meetings that
include remote resources. If you want to see an example of a meeting like
that, tune in to <http://air.mozilla.com> and irc://irc.mozilla.org
#staffmeeting on Mondays at 1PM PST.

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cvinson
I strongly disagee with josefresco. I have a 5 year old "startup" with 6 full
time remote workers -- 3 developers. It works great.

If an employee isn't caring about his work, it doesn't matter if he is local
or remote. Hiring smart, passionate people is the most important factor.

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tyohn
Do you already have someone in mind or are you planning on going through the
interview process?

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wastedbrains
Interview process

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tyohn
I personally have no problem hiring someone to work remotely. In my case; most
everyone I've hired to work remotely - I've worked with in the past - so I
knew they'd get the work done effectively. If I hired someone I didn't know
and they wanted to work remotely I'd bring them in house for a period of time
during a probation period - then I'd let them work from anywhere they wanted
too.

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wastedbrains
Yeah if we hired remotely we think we would have a two week or so on site
period. We would also probably hire as a 3 month trial period that allows for
reevaluation at the end of the 3 months.

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vaksel
i gotta go with local. I just don't have a good experience with people working
remotely. Both cases suffered huuuge delays. There are way too many
distractions for them, and the work suffers. At least if they are doing it
full time at your office, you are pretty much guaranteed that they'll be
working on your project all of that time.

