Have you guys considered hiring someone to work remotely?

We were hiring for sales and office personal. We posted on Craigslist.

I wrote the ads and sifted the resumes. I put a basic math test in the posting because if they couldn't follow the basic instructions we didn't want them. Also, the job interview included a basic math test, so of they couldn't accurately answer the question, I already knew they couldn't pass the test.

Despite this effort, the success rate was still under 1%.

That's incredible.

It wouldn't be so surprising for a test administered to the general public. But for an applicant pool made up of developers (they claim, at least), I'm shocked.

Good news, though. I know about this guy that's building a new type of job posting engine. Apparently it's written in Clojure. I heard it's gonna be awesome

I actually work remotely.

But for now we're small enough that we'd like to avoid it for new people. Working remotely carries a bunch of extra problems. Its not so bad for me since so far I've known everybody I work with from before we started working together (plus it was a condition of mine right from the start) but for someone new we're worried that its hard to manage them and hard to create a good corporate culture.

dave, what kind of company and how much does office personal make (and where are you at)/what is office personal? Not looking for a job, just curious about jobs in general.

PM if you don't want to post it publicly and if you don't want to PM I won't be offended either :P

If you're looking for web developers I'd be willing to shoot you my resume/portfolio. Graduating from UCF this fall and I'd love to make it out to NY.

The math test was nothing more than reduce numbers by 40%. I'm shocked that the general public couldn't do this with whole numbers: if you are selling a $6 @ 40% off, how much are you selling it for? The answers I received were astonishing.

The company let applicants use a calculator as well.

I can't say how good my project will turn out, LOL.

I'll definitely take a look at your resume. If you're just web - we probably aren't interested right now. We're a small company with a pretty complex backend system and right now we need people that can contribute everywhere.

That being said we're willing to teach some parts of that if you're strong in other areas.

I'm not comfortable releasing this information event though I don't work there anymore.

I live just outside of Ann Arbor, MI. In my local classified ads there are 55 total jobs posted; none in software development. There are 6 positions posted on stackoverflow within 100 miles of where I live.

Thankfully, I'm not looking for a job.

The reason I asked is that your predicament reminded me of this article:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3064-...remote-workers

If you don't already follow the 37s blog you should check it out. Lot of interesting/insightful articles there.

I've been working remotely for a little over two years now. About 75% of that time was where I was the only remote worker and about 25% of that time I was part of a team of 5 where we were in 4 different places.

To a certain extent they're right. I can do my day-to-day job easily while being remote. But what they're missing is that communication is harder and you have to work a bit more to make sure that you're not being misunderstood or missing something. You have to work hard at keeping the remote person in the loop. And most importantly you have to work hard at building the company culture you want. All of that stuff is non-trivial and extra important when your company is half a dozen people and every person's input really matters.

Can you cover my daily commuting expenses... from Australia?

Thanks for the tips. That is basically the approach I am taking.

For the record, I think this is probably the style I'll go with (I'm quite partial to the periwinkle blue )



ftr, none of that is the content of my resume, just a someone else's I "borrowed".

I will probably keep the "Key skills" section, follow it up with "Tools" (i.e. any relevant IDE or other specialist software, etc), the "Work experience", then "Education" (mostly as jjshabado suggested)... I think the tricky part will be keeping it concise and relevant to the position.

Yeah, this is also important ldo. In fact, I get the feeling a simple one page resume highly tailored to the position might be a better path... and I think I'll try and put together something like this too.

i.e. have my "java-ish" type skills resume, my more "microsofty" technologies ones, my "web" type one, etc.

One thing I def don't like about the sample I posted above is that the dude has included basically everything he has ever done in the "skills" section... e.g It seems unlikely to me that including both .net and java in your skills is going to make you any more attractive when the job you are applying for will probably be one or the other. That said, I guess I use both in my current role, so I suppose obviously "it depends".

The market in Australia seems reasonable right now... although this is basically the first time I have looked in 7 years, so I don't have much to compare it with. ...but there seems to be a decent mix of senior and less senor jobs and decent salaries (senior roles up to around 110k).

If anyone cares enough to compare, this is probably the most popular job search site in Aus.

http://www.seek.com.au/

I think you're right on this.

I've never worked remotely to the extent that you have, but I do have experience supervising employees (non-IT job) who were located > 200 miles away, and the communication issue you mentioned was certainly a challenge.

Also, perhaps it's a result of my professional experience, but I'm somewhat inclined to be suspicious of others. I just don't know how comfortable I'd be with hiring someone to a position that requires access to sensitive data when they're located on the other side of the map.

Actually, while I'm here...

Super long-shot question, but does anyone have any experience in working with/for google? Specifically in Brazil? Obviously if you believe all the hype it seems like the God of all jobs, but you know... when something seems to good to be true...

I guess I'm looking for things like:

- are the conditions/environment really as "cool" as they make it out to be?
- pay rates?
- visas for foreign workers? (ftr i'm married to a Brazilian, but we live in Aus, so I don't have/never had Brazilian residency. I speak ok "conversational" Portuguese, but my technical/professional language is probably sh*t. I've never worked there. The position I see they are advertising at the moment requires fluent English though, so I figure I will get by with language).

I know a couple of people that work at Google in the US but have never worked there personally.

I've heard generally good feedback about working there and they definitely get nice perks. But its not a dream land and at least one person I know ended up on a ****ty project that they didn't like. I think it took them ~6 months to get off of it.

Anyone got a DNS provider recommendation? We use ZoneEdit, but they just had our site offline for over 24 hours. Second time this year! Is Amazon good?

Yep, do Route53. IM me if you need help with any of it, I've got all our DNS there.

Oho, I'll have to check into that. I'm using Dyn but it's a little pricey.

Keep in mind 37Signals is a company that sells communication tools for development teams that most likely have at least some remote component. So of course they are going to hype it up.

That being said, I see more and more of the industry going remote.

That's an outstanding point.

they definitely downplay the problems with remote.

+1

That being said there's a point to remote work for knowledge workers namely less interruptions=more work gets done. As long as the people are sufficiently selfmotivated they should be more productive just by not getting interrupted by a coworker walking by asking them about sports or the dreaded meetings and so forth.

I worked remotely for 2 years as a research assistant/programmer and absolutely *loved* it. I was insanely productive and the flexibility of schedule was excellent. If you are a social person, you may struggle with it, but as an introvert it was pretty much a dream working setup.

At the beginning I struggled with separating work/life and worked way too much, but I mostly got that sorted out after a few months. It also really helped that I had worked with my boss for 2 years prior and we had a really good relationship.

Honestly I can't imagine working remotely if I didn't already know the people I was working.