
Ask HN: What companies are truly remote-first? - procrastinatus
What companies have committed to be truly remote-first (no hybrid-model companies or ones where leadership is non-remote)?
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0x54MUR41
There are GitLab, Automattic, Zapier, and Mozilla according to Amur Software
[0]. They define the companies that are on the list with this method.

> To qualify as a distributed company work must be done primarily online and
> in a remote-first, remote-friendly fashion. Periodic employee meet-ups or
> corporate retreats are okay, and having office location(s) is okay, but
> leadership and corporate decision-making cannot run out of a centralized
> face-to-face headquarters while some percentage of employees opt-in to
> working remotely.

Recently, they released a new list of distributed companies for 2020 [1].

[0]: [https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/what-are-the-biggest-
distr...](https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/what-are-the-biggest-distributed-
remote-first-companies)

[1]: [https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-
companies](https://www.amursoftware.com/biggest-distributed-companies)

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scottporad
Automattic (aka Wordpress.com) was remote first since 2008, at least.

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dmlittle
Zapier, GitLab and Hashicorp are a few that come to mind. I believe Hashicorp
even has a rule were for a given team you can't have 3 or more people in the
same city.

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PopeDotNinja
What's the reason for that?

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dmlittle
My understanding (and personal opinion too) is that hybrid teams (half remote,
half onsite) don't tend to work well. Most likely, the remote portion of the
team will be left out of a lot small impromptu discussion that happen within
the office. A solution is to force all conversation and discussions to happen
via Slack/email but that makes a lot of small discussion not happen as the
activation energy might be too high. Ultimately if you have a small portion of
your team geographically removed from the rest of the team they might end up
being left out a bit.

For example, let's say you have a team of 5 people, 4 people live in city A
and 1 person lives in city B. It might be the case that the 4 people in city A
meet up every week in person. They'll eventually form a closer working
relationship with each other potentially leaving the person in city B out.
Hashicorp's decision might be to try to prevent these kind of situations (for
what it's worth I've heard about this Hashicorp rule by talking to people but
I can't find anything online about it).

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diehunde
I think Elastic (the company behind ElasticSearch).

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oldsj
Ad Hoc (Modern US Government Contractor) adhocteam.us

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johnjungles
Mattermost

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markholmes
You Need A Budget

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mjrbrennan
Discourse!

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atmosx
scrapinghub is fully remote.

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claudiug
basecamp

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sqs
Sourcegraph is all-remote:
[https://about.sourcegraph.com/company/remote](https://about.sourcegraph.com/company/remote).

