
Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges preventing startups from hiring remote? - hichamin
We&#x27;re starting a new company focused on solving the problem of talent war by helping late-stage startups have successful remote collaborations with tech talent. However, we&#x27;re still trying to figure out which vertical to focus on. Which of these verticals is most pressing?<p>1. Sourcing &amp; vetting candidates?
2. Managing international payroll?
3. Bootcamps? 
4. Infrastructure &amp; working space?<p>Let me know your thoughts!
======
ecwilson
Others have mentioned this to some extent, but what I've found the most
challenging is when a company tries to do both local and remote, but was not
_remote-first_. People who are remote are de-facto second-class citizens by
virtue of the fact that they aren't included in hallway conversations or
casual meetings. It's incredibly hard to overcome that. Teams that started
remote-first are already well-practiced in inclusion and remote rapport-
building, so it's less of an issue for them. But people who have the
_opportunity_ to meet locally and build rapport locally tend to get lazy and
their remote muscles atrophy over time, unless they are making a very
conscious effort, or the habits have already been deeply ingrained in them
over time.

I'd add that this culture-setting rolls down from management -- if they aren't
setting a good example, others will falter and the remote-supporting culture
will fall apart.

Things like payroll, taxes, infrastructure are all solvable today, IMO, with
the right resources or tools.

~~~
Benjammer
>I'd add that this culture-setting rolls down from management -- if they
aren't setting a good example, others will falter and the remote-supporting
culture will fall apart.

As someone who works at HQ for a local-first company with a significant
contingent of remote workers in two satellite offices, it's _exhausting_ to be
the developer in the corning who has to say "can we make sure the remote guys
can hear OK" or "got a ping from Dan, remote guys aren't getting sound" in
every single meeting.

Our office infra guy got a microphone with a padded box around it that you can
toss around during the full company meetings so remote people can hear
audience questions. The execs talking at these meetings have never once said
"hey make sure we pass around the mic," it is always someone sending a text
onto the big presentation hangout screen from a remote office saying "can you
repeat the questions too please?" while the mic sits there on the little table
right fucking next to the main speaker every single time.

When the managers and leadership don't care enough to prioritize it, it's
almost impossible to change the culture around supporting remote team members.

~~~
randycupertino
But why should the local team all have to suffer and endure this hassle just
so a few randos can enjoy their life being digital nomads? remote workers
chose their bed, they knew the risks, they should deal with it.

~~~
Fire-Dragon-DoL
Or, those employees are good, they are strong part of the company and with
your life-threatening sacrifice you can... Pass the damn microphone around and
get everyone included. Including people who are (not) digital nomads, live in
the same city as yours but decided that growing up their kids rather than
dropping them at childcare brings more value to society than the next meeting
where a company care so much about you that they don't even bother passing
around a microphone?

------
allday
The biggest challenge to making remote workers successful is the existing
company culture. If the organization has not been built with a conscious
"remote-first" mindset, new remote collaborators will inevitably be excluded
from necessary communications and decisions. Making a remote worker a true
part of the team requires a massive culture shift if your company does not
already (successfully) do distributed work.

~~~
redundo_twa
You also need to _maintain_ the culture. A phenomenon I just went through is a
company that started remote-first, then someone had the brilliant idea to get
an office for this or that geographical cluster of people, and slowly but
inexorably remote workers were marginalized.

Some people feel really insecure without an office, deep inside they think it
isn't a "serious business" unless you own real estate in a "serious" postcode.
I don't know if it's just an European thing but it's definitely an attitude
I've encountered.

~~~
jamie_ca
It also depends on the business somewhat, but actually having an office you
can invite outsiders to (investors, prospective clients) can be an indicator
of success. Truthful or not, it's the perception that counts.

~~~
redundo_twa
I understand, but that's such an "old world" style. It's like building a
datacentre, in the age of cloud computing, simply because owning big iron is
an indicator of success (all the big boys have datacentres, right?).

In IT, tbh, I think we should just _own it_. There are more productive and
creative ways to send out that sort of signal.

~~~
hluska
I'm jumping in to say that I agree with you. Our industry quite literally
invented tools to make physical offices obsolete. Speaking as a tech person,
it strikes me as hypocritical at best and self sabotaging at worse to maintain
this interest in physical space as a marker of success.

But, then the marketing/sales part of my experience chimes in and I think of
all the various times in my career that having physical space added to my
credibility. I think of the sectors (government tech and financial tech
instantly come to mind) where decisions makers are heavily moved by AAA office
space. And, I think of how many times I've seen spending an obscene amount on
rent actually convert into paying customers.

My inner developer is saying "right on" but my inner marketer/sales type is
thinking of all these times when physical space has a positive ROI from a
sales/marketing point of view.

------
DoofusOfDeath
IMO one of the least-solved problems is communication. Two areas in
particular: (1) lack of a shared real whiteboard, and (2) video-call quality.

These are two areas where good solutions may exist at reasonable price-points,
but if so that information isn't widely known.

Not sure if it fits with your business model, but it would be extremely
helpful for someone to carefully evaluate the effectiveness of various
technologies / products / services for those areas, and provide recipes for
known-good setups.

I.e., if one of your clients can tell you their current and upcoming team
sizes, network connectivities, etc., you can tell them what products and
services give them good video / whiteboard quality at various price points.

IME companies with remote workers tend to be "penny wise, pound foolish"
regarding these things.

EDIT: To be more specific: For call quality, having good data on what setups
result in good call quality in Skype vs. Slack vs. Google Hangouts etc. And
for shared whiteboards, having good information on how effective / sufficient
teams find various approaches such as (some website + iPads), (some website +
a particular Wacom tablet), (everyone on the team having a particular model of
interactive whiteboard such as this one [0]), etc.

[0] [https://www.cdwg.com/product/SMART-Board-6075-75in-LED-
displ...](https://www.cdwg.com/product/SMART-Board-6075-75in-LED-
display/4477254?RecommendedForEDC=4527545&RecoType=RP&cm_sp=Product-_-
Session&ProgramIdentifier=3)

~~~
deweller
Anecdotally I can say that Zoom has worked the best for us.

But no software can fix variances in bandwidth or latency. I wish there was a
way to test a remote hire's internet connection quality. Lack of access to a
good internet connection would be a deal breaker for a remote hire for us.

~~~
hluska
You know, I might have an idea for you. A few years ago, I built a diagnostics
tool for a product whose primary users were using some absolutely horrible
internet connections.

One of the most useful parts of it was timing http requests and tracking
response times. We solved some very complicated technical support issues using
this tool. Do you think it would be useful to adapt something like this to
remote workers? It's weird because I've struggled with internet connections
when I've worked with remote workers, but never thought of actually testing it
until I read this comment...

------
throwaway2016a
5\. Managing people

Personally, I find the toughest part to be actually managing the people. You
really need to trust your team to be self-motivating which can be tough for a
manager to do, especially new ones, because you need to give up some control.

But even though you trust them you need to have a way to measure results. That
means being more disciplined and mature in your project planning than you
might be if everyone is co-located.

For a startup that is key. Startups often skimp on disciplined project
management.

I also find it tougher to do things like say, identify when someone is having
a rough time (personal or professional) and take steps to correct or
accommodate for that. If a co-located employee starts underperforming but I
can see they are clearly checked out (like their head is somewhere else) I
might suspect there is something going on at home and adjust my management
style with that person. If they are remote it is harder to tell those things.
Communication becomes extremely important when body language / behavioral
clues are lacking.

So to pile on a lot of the other answers here... communication, communication,
communication.

~~~
laughfactory
Yes, this is why it's critical to adopt an output/outcome mentality. When you
can't see if or when we're working the only signal of status is whether shit
is getting done. This should be the only thing you care about, and it should
be super obvious of you're project managing correctly.

------
jvalencia
The biggest challenge with remote is coordination. I've now managed 4 remote
teams. The turn-around time between communication cycles with people on the
other side of the globe can drastically increase the time it takes to get
consensus on issues that locally might take 10 minutes.

I can recall several times where clearly (or so we thought) laid out plans
were given over to have them come back a week later with some measure of
misunderstanding. The 2 solutions to this have either been micromanaging the
remote team, which is painful or time consuming -- or giving the team enough
autonomy to work independently, which is risky.

~~~
hluska
I've found a middle ground between micromanaging the team and giving them
enough autonomy to work independently. It works best on definable tasks when
the remote team's manager is technical enough to do their job on her/his own.

Instead of just a requirements document, give them a requirements document but
also define a set of red/green tests to show whether the requirements were
met. It's hard to do this with front end, where feel is often very important,
but in my experience, it works well provided that the remote team's manager is
qualified to make the types of architectural decisions necessary to pull this
off.

You can even start tying compensation into passing red/green tests!

~~~
eloff
That's not likely to be a good idea re the compensation. There are a lot of
studies showing knowledge workers perform more poorly at the task with
financial incentives.

~~~
hluska
This is either an unfortunate reality or a limitation of my experience, but
I've only had to resort to writing red/green tests when my remote teammates
have been at a level where poor performance would be something of an
improvement. It's more useful for me when I see tons of commits, yet no
forward progress on a measurable goal.

------
DisruptiveDave
Young founders with zero or near-zero management experience in person, never
mind remote. To a lesser degree - and strictly for small team, early stage
startups - part of the journey is living it together. The whole vibe loses
something when you're staying late and eating ramen together over Skype.

------
mitchellh
I'm the founder of a company that is ~250 people, remote first, and still
fully remote. We do have an office in SF, but ~10% of our employees are
present, almost no full teams are centralized, and all our processes revolve
around remote work. Important to note that we're a US-founded company (this
comes along later).

I'm going to use this comment as a way to talk about remote hiring generally,
rather than respond directly to your comments. I want to help others
understand some of the challenges it has been being one of the larger
(relatively) fully distributed companies.

I think there is a common misconception that the world is mostly flat and that
our company can hire from anywhere. I am commonly criticized when tweeting job
postings (almost always remote) when the countries we can hire from is limited
to a select few. "Not real remote" "first world remote only" "remote != 8
countries" etc. are common criticisms.

Disclaimer for the remainder: I am not a lawyer and my exact details because
of that may be wrong. Please consult your own legal team.

When hiring remote, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1.) You have to adhere to employment laws within the country you're hiring
from. Employment laws vary widely between countries and getting them wrong can
be very expensive. For example: vacation time will vary, holidays will vary,
the ability to let someone go will vary, what you can/cannot expect from an
employee varies. In one country, emailing an employee outside of work hours is
legally considered harassment; when working with multiple timezones that's a
challenge because "in work hours" for one country may be "out of work hours"
for another country.

2.) To employ someone full time, many countries require you to have a legally
entity within that country. Establishing a legal entity takes a lot of time
and a lot of money.

In the past 12 months, we've had at least one member (more now) on our
HR/finance teams establishing legal entities _full time_. I've had my
signature on at least 8 incorporation documents in the past 6 months. By the
way, most incorporation documents require a "wet" signature so if you're
remote like we are, be prepared to be FedExing a lot of sensitive legal
documents around.

Beyond just paperwork, there are often requirements to establish a legal
entity: a real, physical, local address is one. In one country, we had to pay
out of a local bank account in local currency (which has its own red tape),
and this country also required we maintain a minimum balance to pay 3 months
salary in the local account in local currency at all times. For a startup,
that much cash "not working" can be problematic depending what stage you're
at.

In one country we're establishing an entity in, the process just takes a LONG
time. We've been responding to any inquiries and sending paperwork immediately
and we're 8 months in and still probably 2 months away from completing the
process. Meanwhile, we still can't legally hire there.

A lot of legal paperwork is understandable in the local language of where
you're creating the entity. This means that you also have to pay lawyers
fluent in that language to vet the paperwork. We employ full time lawyers, but
primarily in English, so this requires us to go to expensive outside counsel.

Finally, this is all expensive. There are fees to creating entities but also
recall that we have multiple full time employees that spend their entire day
establishing legal entities. So we have our own full time salary costs plus
filing costs plus legal costs.

3.) Hiring contractors DOES work around some issues, but has its own
downsides. First, we can't offer options/stock to contractors and we'd like
all our employees to benefit from this. Second, we often can extend the same
full time benefits we want all our employees to share such as healthcare,
401K, etc. Put another way: we want all HashiCorp employees to be employees,
we don't want to create second class citizens.

Legally, some countries have legal limits on the hours a contractor can work
or length of time they can be contracted before they're considered an
"employee" by default and regardless of what you SAY the relationship is, the
country will consider it employment and points 1 and 2 above all take effect
immediately.

So we certainly DO hire contractors but our point of view is that we intend to
hire those people full time over time. We'll often hire contractors if we know
that we'll have a legal entity established to hire them within X months, and
we're up front with the new hire about this. We'll also pro-rate option/stock
vesting for their contractor period when they are hired.

4.) We prioritize countries where we have the most interest. We get asked a
lot "please hire in X" but if the number of times we've heard X is much lower
than Y, then we'll prioritize Y first.

This creates somewhat of an imbalance, since more countries with a more
established tech ecosystem generally have more qualified candidates and
therefore get prioritized higher.

We WANT to hire from everywhere, but as a startup with constrained capital and
timelines, we have to be pragmatic about choosing the locations where we'll
probably be able to hire the most roles while we continue to expand our
entities.

5.) We are also open to relocating employees into countries where we do have
entities. We've done this multiple times, we pay a relocation fee, and its a
great way to hire someone from a country where we can't [yet]. Also note
they're "relocating" but are still working remote.

Of course, this is highly dependent on the individual and it is unfair of us
to ask or force someone to do this if they have an established family, friend
circle, and generally just a life in their existing country. So this only
works some of the time!

6.) Despite building process around remote-first, we try to a keep a healthy
timezone overlap in each of our teams (3 to 4 hours out of the working day is
best). We find that teams that have a team member with a non-overlapping TZ
struggle for multiple reasons. So, even though we can hire in many countries
now, we'll restrict some job postings to certain countries so we can have that
overlap.

EDIT, some additions:

7.) Each US state ALSO requires a legal entity in addition to adhering to
state-local employment laws, taxes, and more. At this point HashiCorp has
entities in ~30 US states.

Further, there is a tax consequence to the business outside of employment
taxes. If you hire an employee in a state, you also now have to pay sales tax
on revenue from there. You may argue for/against whether that makes sense, but
for a startup this can be VERY expensive.

Our corporate tax obligation would be hundreds of thousands of dollars [less]
if we didn't employ people in New York state. We've had to weigh this in cases
because the tax obligation from hiring _one_ individual could suddenly be that
you can't afford to hire _multiple_ other individuals.

Note we don't want to avoid taxes, that's not what we're doing. But startups
are capital constrained and we have to determine long term how we continue to
grow and hundreds of thousands of dollars can make a difference.

\----------------------------------------------------

Finally, I want to note that we're 100% dedicated at HashiCorp to remaining
fully remote. We WANT to hire from everywhere. We're establishing the entities
and process to hire in new countries full time. 18 months ago we could only
legally hire in 2 countries, today we can hire in 8. By the end of the year it
should be at least 4 more. We'll continue from there.

I could write a LOT more about culture and process within the company. But
this comment is already getting very long and I think I'll keep it to this.
Maybe in the future I'll write more about "chat literacy", the importance of
decision inclusion, things that definitely don't work, keeping people
motivated/happy, managing people you can't physically see, the lack of body
language for signaling, and a lot more.

I hope this helps someone!

~~~
itronitron
asking for a friend... what if you hire someone 'Alex', a resident of
Washington State and then they move to Germany because their spouse is
relocated for employment to Germany, where they both receive benefits but are
required to remain US Citizens (and return to the US each year)... in that
case are you paying Alex as if they are a Washington State resident or are you
legally required to pay them as if they are a German resident?

~~~
germanier
As soon as you start working on German soil, German employment laws apply
fully. Citizenship, prior residence, etc. are almost completely irrelevant.
There is a social security agreement between the US and Germany which might
exempt the person from German pension contributions but nothing more.

(If the spouse is working for the US military there are NATO agreements which
might make German employment law inapplicable but I know almost nothing about
that.)

~~~
myrle
Make sure and include a "Gerichtsstand" in the employment contract. This is
basically the name of the city in Germany where legal processes related to the
contract will be conducted. This will save you a good deal of unpleasantness
later, should any employment issue come before a court of law in Germany.

------
poulsbohemian
It’s been my experience that many first-time entrepreneurs and in many cases
first-time managers / executives, operate from a place of fear. They are
scared about their burn rate, about whether the team is working, whether they
have the right team, about countless administrative details, and on top of
that the good ones are hopefully out there actually talking to prospects and
seeking customer feedback. What this means is that many are scared of remote
because they _feel_ like they need you there present next to them in order to
_feel_ like there is forward momentum in the business. It’s a trust problem
and a management problem; maybe not even a legitimate problem so much as an
emotional burden. Is there a technical solution to that? Some might say the
solution revolves around time trackers and project management tools, but I’ve
seen those just become a further burden to the team without actually relieving
anyone’s general overbearing need to micromanage the team (something they can
control) over engaging with prospects / trying to grow the business (something
harder to control).

------
johnxie
Infrastructure & working space is a big challenge depending on where your
remote team member is based, but overall that has seen a big improvement with
more affordable UPS options and wireless connectivity for backup.

Timezone is a tough one. For us, finding a scrum time that works for everyone
(in a small team it's doable), and sticking to it daily helped to get the team
to communicate more openly with each other, and stay in sync.

Finding the right set of tools to manage remote teams is one the biggest
challenge when a team is distributed across the world. Traditional task
management tools didn't lets us easily ideate, organize, and share task lists
together, hence we were inspired to build Taskade (Disclaimer: I'm the co-
founder of [https://taskade.com](https://taskade.com)). The idea of having the
freedom to work together on task lists in real-time, see each other's
progress, and collaborate without any distractions.

------
joss82
Communication.

Communication! Communication! Communication!

If any part of your product requires people to communicate with each other,
then the team members lying on vastly different time zones will have low
efficiency because information round trip time will be larger than those of
the local (or time zone near) ones.

~~~
ako
Yes, Specifically being able to communicate in front of a whiteboard is
crucial. Exploring ideas, creating a shared understanding, etc, all becomes a
lot easier if you can support this with some interactive visualization on a
whiteboard. I feel disabled if I have to communicate without a whiteboard.

------
fragmede
Personally I'd say 1 and 4 are the most pressing, though 2 raises some other
issues. Personally I'd not hire anyone junior for remote work at all (sorry),
so 3 is an anti-issue to me.

Hiring is hard to begin with, and hiring remotely has additional pitfalls. A
company like Triplebyte that would perform additional vetting to prove a
candidate's ability to work remotely would be quite welcome.

Re 4. VC systems are still awful and both companies and employees aren't
willing to invest to the right level, and commit to workflow changes, in order
to make it seamless to work remotely. In particular, latency and packet loss
is what just _kills_ VC and makes it very apparent that we're not actually in
the same room together. The way to solve that is gigabit home-office Internet
connections, but $10k to run lines and an additional $500/month, as well as
the hassle of using a wired connection at home to take advantage of it, and
then a dedicated VC system, is a total non-starter for many, on both sides,
employer, and employee.

Throw in a timezone difference, and the _wrong_ remote employees can take more
time to manage than they're worth. (That's not to say there aren't some really
really good, really solid remote employees, just that there are also the wrong
hires - same as goes for in-person.)

Re. 2. On top of payroll, there are also plain cultural differences between
countries that make it more challenging than when there is no difference -
holiday schedules, vacation policies, etc, and until you've lived it, it's
hard to know what to look for in advance.

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
We are a pure remote company but Tax/employment-law is for us the biggest
issue. Or to be more precise, it's the biggest issue for potential co-workers.
We find that people are super interested in us, but when we tell them they
have to do their own tax and basically act as freelancers, most say no to us.
The majority simply wants a standard legal employment. Which I understand and
I would like to have that too.

~~~
basejumping
I keep seeing in remote job posts for US companies that you need a work
permit, they don't mention the option to work as a freelancer. In the
Netherlands a lot of people work from their own one person company.

------
codegeek
As a few others have said as well, the biggest challenge personally has been
Payroll and Taxes. A lot of good candidates want to feel part of the company
which means they need to be hired as employees. But legally, a US company
hiring in a different country can at best hire them as a consultant/freelancer
for tax purposes _unless_ they open a local office in that country which is a
major PITA.

I have a US company and trying to build a remote team as "employees". Going
crazy trying to figure out how to set this up other than the usual option of
"pay them as freelancers and let them do their own taxes". Not everyone is cut
out for that and not able to attract good talent.

~~~
joshpadnick
We[1] are a fully distributed team and also ran into this problem when we
hired our first team member outside the US. There are lots of players[2][3] in
the "Global PEO" market that have corporate entities in multiple countries and
will handle payroll and benefits for you, but caveat emptor, these solutions
are shockingly expensive. The average cost was 18% of the remote worker's
salary (!), which I personally considered insane.

We ultimately went with a company[4] that had a different model where they
connect you with a local PEO in each market and present a common UI on top of
all the disparate local PEOs so that you get a company that specializes in
just that country, but a common UX no matter how many countries you work with.

I liked the model, and more importantly, it was a fixed fee and much less
expensive, and they published pricing. Disclosure: We made the decision to go
with them, but haven't started working with them yet.

[1] [https://gruntwork.io](https://gruntwork.io)

[2] [https://www.globalization-partners.com](https://www.globalization-
partners.com)

[3] [http://globalpeoservices.com](http://globalpeoservices.com)

[4] [https://papayaglobal.com](https://papayaglobal.com)

------
DoofusOfDeath
From the comments so far, I'm hearing that your prospective clients would
benefit from knowledgable consulting to help them navigate _multiple_ issues:

\- Which payroll companies, if any, will be the best solution for handling
international (or even just inter-state within the U.S.) payroll / tax issues?

\- What communications technologies and practices work best for various team
geographies / network-connection-quality / local-hardware setups?

\- What's the optimal frequency, duration, structure, etc. of whole-team face-
to-face meetings for teams that are typically distributed?

\- What management training is most helpful for managers of all-remote teams,
or of teams where only some members are remote?

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Another comment about consulting services: Client executives might really
benefit from a clear (and accurate) presentation of the different levels of
remote-team-collaboration quality that are available at different per-employee
price points.

For example: At ($10k initially + $3k/year) per employee, you're likely to
avoid problems A, B, and C, but still run into D and E occasionally, depending
on team size, using recipe $FOO.

At ($20k initially + $10k/year) per employee, you avoid problems A-D, using
recipe $BAR.

------
sontek
Payroll is the biggest issue. You have to pay taxes in any state your employee
is working. This gets expensive and time intensive as you start filing annual
reports and paying taxes in 4 or 5 states.

~~~
amorphid
When I ran a business, having a tax preparer really helped with this.

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I'm confused by people saying they have problems communicating across the
internet due to conference software. Gamers have been running 40-people fully-
coordinated real time raids and a company can't manage to run a meeting
online?

How people have problems every day with the conference software? If you do,
buy a dumb hardware that you use only for conferences (I think a raspberry
could work too?). Or join 2 minutes earlier than your meeting and run a sanity
check.

Connection will drop once every 10 meetings, but so people will get
distracted, or sick.

------
j45
Startups often don't know how to hire let alone hire and manage remote, and
quite often, remote workers aren't always the best at it too.

What could work quite well often is more challenging... Some things that have
made it easier for me:

\- Dedicated PeopleOps person - this person's job is only to make all the
tools work together better for everyone. Jira, Slack, integrations,
notifications. People should be able to open requests to remove remote
friction of using multiple tools, etc.

\- Start with real-time remote (everyone who works is awake at the same time)
has gone a long way. Plus or minus 2-3 time zones, no more. That way,
especially in the beginning, everyone is available to work at the same time.

\- International payments, in the beginning, is easier to start as a
contractor via a service that takes care of it like Upwork. Once you know you
have a winning candidate, it's worth figuring out that new jurisdiction.

\- Onboarding - should be collaborative, hanging out on slack. Make candidates
join your infrastructure during the trial period to confirm that in fact, they
can use your tools.

\- Read - there are lots of companies building healthy online cultures. STudy
and follow them.

\- Weekly WOS video call - 1/2 hour every week for everyone to have 1-2 to
minutes to share what they're working on.

\- Run all meetings as if they were remote. Everything gets scheduled on
hangout, etc, in case someone needs to hop on.

There's some good handbooks out there for remote working too that have been a
treasure trove. If I can find a link I'll update this post.

------
jlisam13
I have been working at GitHub for almost a year, which is a remote first
company. I would say challenges include:

\- Solitude (at first it's not an issue) \- Asynchronous communication.
Learning to read and write effectively. \- Team collaboration work
(designing/brainstorming). It's very difficult to explain ideas through
<insert name of video conference product>. To solve for this, GitHub allows
employees to meet each other as long as there is a business need. On top of
this, we hold summits very often, where the team gets to meet each other in a
location for a week. \- Internet and great conferencing hardware (GitHub
provides a great budget for both Internet costs and hardware).

But I would say the most challenging part is __Trust __. Trust in your
manager, trust in your organization, trust in your company, and trust in your
peers. Without Trust, there is no way to build a remote friendly company. How
are you going to micro manage someone who is working in EU while you are
sleeping in the US? Obviously GitHub is not a perfect place, but I would say
that there is a mutual understanding among employees to trust each other and
to communicate effectively.

~~~
gnulinux
> To solve for this, GitHub allows employees to meet each other as long as
> there is a business need.

What do you mean by "allow". Is it, in general, not allowed for employees to
meet each other in remote-first companies, but GitHub notably allows it? Or
did you say it that way to emphasize they must meet only for business needs
and not for anything else. If so, why? Would you be able elaborate on that
sentence?

~~~
jlisam13
As in GitHub will cover all the costs (flight + hotel + other expenses)

------
ethanjdiamond
Can I ask a question? I personally have never been in a relationship with
remote workers that has been more than 70-80% as effective as having everyone
co-located.

What are some examples of companies that have been successful using primarily
remote workers? I don't mean companies that Hacker News considers do remote
work "correctly". I mean companies who have grown to around the nine figure
mark without a co-located team?

~~~
ericabiz
WordPress. Matt Mullenweg has given frequent interviews about how their
"remote-first" culture works. Here's a starting point of articles and
interviews he's given:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=matt+mullenweg+wordpress+rem...](https://www.google.com/search?q=matt+mullenweg+wordpress+remote+workers)

------
cimmanom
None of the above. Few engineers (or other individual contributors) have the
operational maturity to work effectively remotely. Few managers have the
skills to manage remote employees. Few employees have the insight and
communication skills needs to work as effectively with remote colleagues as
with those who are present. These issues magnify the larger and organization
gets.

------
celestialcheese
Payroll 100%. When we started hiring people remote it was the biggest
surprise, and most headache.

Trying to figure it out on your own is irresponsible at best, so it boils down
to hiring a local CPA or tax attorney in each state/city you hire in to go
over the implications of bringing someone on in that city.

If the person is right, it's worth the cost, but it's a large, unexpected
time-suck.

~~~
krallja
This problem is already fairly well solved by professional employer
organizations like Justworks, Paychex, Extensis HR, etc.

~~~
Kiro
And if you're hiring someone in another country?

~~~
krallja
I don’t know what the best answer is. We currently treat international
employees as contractors.

------
randycupertino
Remote tech is unreliable. Our company spends tons of money on conference
software, and we still all sat around for 20 minutes of a wasted meeting today
while they couldn't get a weird echo out of the dial-in. There's always
something- we can hear you but we can't see you. We can see you but we can't
hear you. The slides are showing but the video isn't working. The video is
working but the sound has a weird echo. Everything is working, but someone
forgot to put themselves on mute and you can hear the driving noise.

Even when everything works perfectly, there is always a lag or a missed
connection due to miscommunication or timezones.

In short, it always kinda sucks, is a drag to deal with even with the best
tech and we just get more done with our in-house teams.

Remote workers don't build up any social capital and so are always the first
to be laid off.

------
doozy
After working remotely for over a decade for multiple companies my conclusion
is the biggest issue is finding managers who grok remote working.

If the person in charge doesn't know what he's doing the rest doesn't matter.

Regarding your options:

1\. Hardly any different than on site. 2\. Not an issue at all. 3\. Huh? 4\.
For some.

~~~
redundo_twa
Do you have any suggestion on how to spot a "bad manager" in that regard?

My recent experience left me a bit scarred.

------
jiveturkey
0\. bandwidth

There’s no solution as good as yelling across the room or walking past the
desk. chat is a poor substitute for all the reasons everyone in this boat
knows.

The best way to get this to work is like that one company did (saw it here on
HN): have everyone in the company work remote for a week.

------
jasonlotito
We hire remote.

None of these are big problems. The biggest problem we have is communicating
effectively with people in various time zones, and making them feel apart of
the team. Video conferencing is still an area that is lacking in this area.
I've yet to find a service that meets all our needs. Right now we are using
LifeSize because it's the best we've found, and still fairly annoying.

The problem really isn't on the "hiring" end. It's how to work as effectively
with remote people as you would with people in the same office. When you
introduce friction with remote, it causes problems. That being said, I think
it's a worthwhile problem to solve.

Not sure this helps, but this is our biggest struggle right now.

~~~
epynonymous
i do not work for zoom, but lately our company switched to zoom after using
webex, skype, skype for business, polycom, cisco. hands down zoom has been the
best solution for video conferencing, works really well.

~~~
fernandotakai
totally agree with you on zoom -- also, zoom's slack plugin makes starting
meetings quite easy.

------
Analemma_
I can't remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but someone once made a
really good point: that the incentives are strongly skewed against hiring
remotely.

Think about it: the benefits of remote work go mainly to the employee, but the
drawbacks (harder to communicate, harder to evaluate productivity) fall
disproportionately on the manager. Since the manager is the one making the
hiring decision, they don't hire remotes.

So to give a really broad answer, my suggestion would be "change the
incentives so managers will hire more remote workers". That could mean
internalizing costs of on-site workers, better communication tools, etc.

------
BasHamer
Pay late stage startup employees & new-hires to keep a time diary, and see
where they spend time with coworkers. Then do the same w/ people not working
at startups. I guess that startups have more "non-work" time spend together.

Joining a startup is different than a 9-5 commitment, it means joining a
tribe/family. So if the office people leave for a 2-hour lunch before spending
a late night in the office, how does a remote person "join" that? Being part
of the family means you are there for the leisure as well as the work.

------
poulsbohemian
I work frequently with startups / early-stage companies and have not found
remote to be a legitimate problem or any different than the experiences
encountered by established companies with regard to working remotely. Managing
international payroll, or frankly even dealing with tax and regulatory
differences among the 50 states is likely something many startups would be
willing to outsource. Just dealing with several states was a burden, plus the
administrative costs of a payroll service felt like a lot for the service
received.

------
souprock
Security is the big problem, even if not international. You essentially have
to connect computers with trade secrets (source code, CAD files, etc.) to the
internet, which is a big no-no.

If you go international, then you are probably dealing with a legal system
that is stacked against you. The government probably even intends to divert
your trade secrets to fully domestic (relative to them) companies, and will
apply pressure to "your" employees (who may even be government agents) to make
it so.

------
jedberg
#4 is the most pressing. I have a fully remote team, and we try to make sure
as much communication is asynchronous as possible. But sometimes, you just
need a few people to work together in real time.

And right now that means dealing with a terrible video conferencing experience
and not having a good shared whiteboard solution.

If you could figure out a way to realistically replicate "a bunch of people
around a whiteboard", then I will pay you money for your product.

------
ellyot
We have been working remotely from day one. It was difficult at the beginning
and can feel harder sometimes, but once you get used to it it works. The team
meets also every few months in beautiful places like Italy or Spain and spends
a few days together. This is how we get over problems like "isolation".

Our set up has partly brought us to create ellyot.com that allows you to find
inspiring workspaces globally and network with like minded people.

------
alexxtomsk
Everybody speaks here about communication. With the rise of enterprise
messengers like Slack it's becoming easier.

For example, bots like [http://tatsu.io](http://tatsu.io) or
[http://standuply.com](http://standuply.com) help running standup meetings.

I think remote work will become more and more popular in the future despite
its challenges.

------
macinjosh
I'd say #4. I am remote and my company has a hard time providing, tracking,
maintaining, and upgrading the gear employees need to do their job. It
currently involves a lot of manual data entry, trips to the UPS store by both
HQ staff and remote employees. Especially an issue when the person who is
ordering gear doesn't understand the gear or the needs of the employee.

~~~
st1ck
The gear is not computers, right?

------
purplezooey
They must be big, because it seems like every startup has to put their HQ in
the most miserable places like Mountain View or Menlo Park.

~~~
x0x0
We're a new b2b saas company. We just made this exact decision (to locate in
sfbay) and the decision not to hire remotely. Reasons to be here are basically
we have a deep engineering network for hires, we raised $300k from local
angels, most VCs we want to work with are local, and most of our desired
customers have their hqs here.

Reasons not to be here are the absolutely ludicrous cost of housing and what
that does to salary requirements.

But as a tiny company, execution speed is our single most important attribute
and we couldn't work out how to work remotely without damaging that. I'm glad
github and others have managed, but you have to wonder if they succeeded
despite being remote.

ps -- I've worked remotely before. It's really nice not to start every goddamn
meeting screwing with hangouts doesn't connect / lifesize hardware works great
but doesn't connect well to mixed hardware + laptop calls / multiple zoom
invites with different meeting rooms / go2meeting clients are shitty / etc.

------
iamcasen
Biggest challenge has to be timezones. Just due to the delays in
communication, and the difficulty of having meetings late at night or super
early in the morning.

I've found the most difficult type of remote work is highly collaborative.
Iterating on designs, on software, or ideas in general.

Anything that can aid in that type of remote work would be a boon

------
ejcx
I think the hardest part is the planning process and communicating rapid
change.

Startups and fast growing companies grow quickly and changes happen rapidly.
If priorities are constantly changing and communication/the planning process
isn't really robust you won't have remote people who are successful.

------
daurnimator

      - International payroll: often impacts tax situation
      - Adjusting to remote collaboration. e.g. no more walls of sticky notes; can no longer rely on water cooler conversations or "quick meetings"
      - Timezones

~~~
jstandard
These are more important barriers from my experience. The other areas
mentioned already have some type of incumbent solution in place.

Problems 1-4 only become real problems after the management team feels
comfortable with:

5) How are we going to integrate them into our workflow and team?

"Hire remote workers" has become an extended and rebranded form of
"offshoring". Folks learned some hard lessons from the offshoring days that
you can't just hire remote. Your organizational thinking and processes need to
be ready.

My take is, if you're solving 1-4, you're selling to companies who already
have some remote workers. If you're focused on companies with few to 0 remote
folks, you'll need something to help them solve 5.

------
legohorizons
What exactly is the pain with international payrolls? I don’t quite
understand..

~~~
jaimebuelta
Dealing with taxes and with contracts in different jurisdictions. Sure, some
people may be ok with working self-employed and handle all of that themselves,
but not everyone will do.

~~~
atupis
Somebody should build startup which would solve payroll issues with remote
employees.

~~~
brianwawok
Is it profitable / worth the effort?

The US has 300 some million people. India has a billion some.

If you can't find an employee in those two countries, it seems you have other
problems? (or add 1 or 2 more if you want to spread it around).

Not that there are not great people in all countries. But opening your resume
pool from say 1.5 billion people to 3 billion people is unlikely to have a
huge benefit to hiring.

------
hkmurakami
Trust building/erosion and buyin/retention.

------
JamesLeonis
Co-located work is synchronous programming.

Remote work is asynchronous programming.

The great part of co-located work is that so much communication happens
organically. If you need something, or have a question, the answer is a desk
or two away. Processes can be ad-hoc and decided in the hallway or around the
water cooler.

At the same time, that organic nature turns on a company once it gets bigger.
The organic transfer of information takes time. In small organizations or
teams that time is small, but as the organization or team grows, the more
repetition is needed to propagate the same information in the system. Where
you used to answer a question once, it's now once a week.

The reason is because the ease of organic communication prevented the
organization from writing down it's tribal information. It took too much
effort! But as the organization grew, that slow organic information transfer
simply could not propagate tribal knowledge fast enough or redundant enough
like writing it down. Remote work is essentially permanent async work, but you
are also temporarily async at 3am and your servers are down. I hope your
coworkers wrote the production debug steps down, or you are relying on your
own memory. It also affects your new hires because they will have to enculture
themselves to the information and organization.

Remote-first policies see that, eventually, all companies require async access
to it's tribal knowledge. That's READMEs, Wikis, tickets, helper programs, the
accounting department, etc. Realizing that all corporations are eventually
remote (if only because you _will_ spread to another city, office, or
different floors), you spend the extra energy to build those tools so you can
look up your tribal information at 3am on a Saturday morning after drinking.
Those Wikis really help, yo!

It also adds a tremendous amount of visibility and accountability into what
you do. You have visible documentation and visible communication. Tickets are
filed for bugs, and others in a completely different office can check the
status. My drunk self can read the production FAQ at 4am before the hangover
sets in. The best part is you can hire remote workers, because your entire
process supports that asynchronous access to information.

In many ways these asynchronous processes add a tremendous amount of value to
your business, as well as offer the perk of hiring fully remote employees.

Why, given all of these benefits, would companies bother with co-location at
all? Well, to borrow from Behavioral Economics, I'd say they are making an
economically irrational choice to value _the show of productivity_ over
_actual productivity_. Management by visibility. I _do_ think management types
are incentivized to continue the _show_ , rather than the _substance_ ,
because their boss judges based on visibility rather than metrics. At the same
time, the fixes are spelled out above since they add that visibility into
processes (to an extent), but it takes a management that holds itself
accountable.

For another stupid geeky metaphor, businesses are highly parallelized
processes. A synchronous co-located organization has highly mutable
information sources, it's employees. To get information in such a system, that
it must acquire a mutex lock (interrupt the employee) to read information but
it's faster for both people. A asynchronous organization, through it's
explicit processes and documentation, allows for lock-free reads of
information but requires more overhead on the individual processes as well as
embracing some Eventual Consistency. In a small organization with few
employees/threads and few interruptions/locks, co-location probably is fine.
But as your employee/thread count increases, those locks and interruptions
exponentially explode and your whole organization can grind to a halt in
endless Slack questions and status updates: The Deadlock of Corporations.

If you are thinking about remote, consider tools that embrace asynchronous
access. IMHO this means any software that requires both parties to participate
at the same time is bad. I'm including Phone Calls, Slack, IRC, AIM, Email,
Hangouts, and others like them. You should never have to ask "Did you
see/read/notice my X?" as these tools encourage synchronous behaviors. These
processes are the Interfaces of your Organization. They increase overhead but
they pay dividends when your organization grows in headcount. The ability to
hire remote is a perk at this point.

------
Kiro
How does 2 normally work? Apart from invoicing as a contractor, can the
company actually hire someone located in another country?

------
rhspeer
Skill qualification and the more formal communication requirements.

------
fairpx
For us ([http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro)) it’s actually the off-
work connectivity. Slack, email, todo lists and all of the other tools make us
pretty effecient and productive. But I’d love to see how I can boost social
connectivity outside of ‘work’.

PS. We are hiring

~~~
misthop
Do you have a hiring page on the fairpixels site? I couldn't find one

