
List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies - amursft
https://www.amursoftware.com/blog/what-are-the-biggest-distributed-remote-first-companies
======
notus
I was not a fan of Zapier's interview process. You're actually timed on your
project and you have exactly 2 hours to do it. I was ultimately turned down
after doing it because they said there were linting errors and they said I was
using hooks incorrectly. My usage of react hooks was straight from the
documentation and I showed my solution to several other people in the industry
and they saw no issue with it. I was under the impression the purpose of those
coding assignments is to deliver something imperfect but functioning and talk
about how to improve it.

The main problem I see with a lot of remote companies is that they seem to be
overloaded with applications to the point they are making strange decisions
about how to filter applicants. They also almost always require you to do some
type of project which is a big commitment if you're applying to a lot of
places. My best application experience apart from the one that hired me was
Duck Duck Go. They pay you to do the project and I feel that is a far better
approach. That way they don't have to feel bad about turning you down because
hey you get paid, and you don't feel so bad about not getting it because hey
you got paid.

I ultimately got a much better position at a fully remote company than I would
have gotten at Zapier so it wasn't a matter of me overestimating my worth
either.

I also found that a lot of the well known fully remote companies take forever
to respond to you, gitlab, zapier, and DDG were the most responsive and
communicative during the process, but I have some that I applied to 2 months
ago that are just now emailing me to set up video screens. Startup companies
tend to be the most responsive, I would get video screen invites sometimes
within minutes after sending an email out.

~~~
abcpassword
Salesforce wanted a THREE hour assignment before even discussing the role.
What a joke!

~~~
o-__-o
I said f that and still continued my assignment 5 hours later. When they asked
me about it I told them the truth, my family came home and I Had to stop. But
before I did I left documentation, tests to show my goal, and accepted failure
but I personally wanted to solve the problem. Instant hire, even though the
interviewers of that round sounded angry that I didn’t finish per the
instructions

~~~
mlthoughts2018
That’s super rare. Most places won’t even look at your submission at all if
it’s one minute past the timed deadline.

I remember doing a timed interview once when I was literally dealing with a
harrowing elder care / home hospice ordeal with an aging parent in the next
room from where I was coding the interview.

I remember thinking how myopic and un-human that company was (I had explained
a little of the situation, they seemed super uncomfortable to hear any more
about it, and basically said I could do their timed 2-hour thing like everyone
else, take it or leave it).

No room to be a human with a sick parent I guess, or kids or a whole variety
of other personal circumstances that make devoting hours of personal time to a
coding task a sincerely unrealistic request.

~~~
t34543
It’s really hard to know who’s telling the truth on both sides. When I’m an
interviewer I find this to be a big red flag. Some folks are addicted to a
struggle and have an excuse for everything. I don’t mean to diminish your
situation but I see it as a bad apple ruined the opportunity for you. People,
including interviewers, tend to be creatures of habit.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Why would a company be worried about whether someone is telling the truth
about an elder care (or any other) personal situation that renders onerous
take-home or timed assignments inappropriate?

If you’re trying to evaluate whether the candidate is telling the truth
something is very wrong. There is no reasonable reaction from a company except
to say, “you know what, people do have unusual and difficult personal
circumstances, and it’s unreasonable to create interview filters you can only
successfully devote time to passing when there are no other ‘real life’ issues
going on, since this unfairly biases us against otherwise good candidates and
makes us come off like we don’t offer pragmatic and realistic understanding of
the human condition” and then just stop having take-home / timed coding
assessments period.

It has nothing at all to do with that one candidate who alerted you to this.
Who cares if they are lying? The point is it’s possible they are not, and
overwhelmingly certain that the issue affects other applicants with these
kinds of circumstances.

------
kache_
I'm a recent hire for one of the companies on that list. It seems to me that
by allowing your company to hire from a much larger pool of candidates allows
you to be more selective for talent. The amount of talent that I'm exposed to
is incredible, something I'd never be able to experience in my own city.

There's a whole slew of unfamiliar problems that come with remote work - and I
believe that these companies are pioneering something that will become the
norm one day. Work life balance is a serious problem, as well as relationship
building. It seems to me that distributed companies have a hard cap on size
before the disadvantages of remote become too cumbersome. These problems
require creative solutions, and it's awesome to be able to contribute to it.
However, it's difficult for me to identify which problems are caused by the
remote-first culture, and which problems can just be attributed to the company
itself.

~~~
ttoinou

       Work life balance is a serious problem
    

Do you feel more compelled to work all the time compared to a regular office
job ?

~~~
kache_
Yes, but again, I'm not sure if this is due to the company I work for vs me
being remote. I used to work at a mega conglomerate - if I worked at 30%
capacity there I got 10s across the board on my perf review. Now the
expectations are different

------
mlthoughts2018
I really think remote-first still hurts workers over all, and is just taking
advantage of offering relief from atrocious open-plan offices.

For example, Gitlab’s “compensation principles” [0] are horrifying to me. I
could absolutely never work for an employer who openly acknowledges people who
provide the same value to the company are _explicitly_ paid less because of
location, in a situation (unlike with physical offices in different locations)
where there is no excuse for it.

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-
compen...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/global-
compensation/#compensation-principles)

Notably it’s not just about paying different rates to different locales. They
also actively adjust your salary if you move, even though it has no effect on
them at that point (they are already paying you a certain rate at that point
and don’t depend on your location). And they control the definition of
multiplicative factors that determine pay between locations (instead of it
being a negotiation), and those multiples are often ludicrously wrong (e.g.
NYC & London compared to SF).

~~~
amursft
If not Gitlabs, what do you think is a good policy for setting salary rates?
Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb. Maybe companies should choose a
salary that's competitive in any mid-tier cost of living American city and
leave it at that? I'm genuinely not sure.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “Paying based on SF/NYC rates seems ... dumb.”

Interesting! SF & NY based companies do it all the time.

------
bnt
Toptal is < 700 people. If they are looking at Linkedin for data, then it’s
probably freelancers (misleadingly) listing Toptal as their employer.

~~~
IshKebab
Yeah they say this:

> It’s a bit hard to tell whether 3,000 employees are a part of the TopTal
> freelance workforce or actually working on the core software platform of the
> company, but we’ll give them credit and say that they’re three thousand
> strong and a fully-remote, distributed company.

------
deepsun
Percona as well [https://www.percona.com/about-
percona/careers](https://www.percona.com/about-percona/careers)

~~~
amursft
thanks for mentioning! Added.

------
IshKebab
Wow how do Automattic have 1140 employees?

~~~
notus
Automattic is valued at 3 billion and just bought tumblr.

