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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

One thing would be helpful is listing or explaining the criteria you used to call these "remote companies". One company that has onsite locations with teams that are remote or allows remote work frequently is going to be different than a company like Gitlab which is basically entirely remote.

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Thanks, yes! I've been struggling with this! I have considered company to be remote when they are looking for remote team members (posted a remote job on the Internet) or they have members in more than one city without having offices in all of these locations.

I've been visiting a lot of "our team" pages lately! The degree that these companies are "remote" varies a lot, yes! A lot of them are just starting out to be remote and are looking for their second remote team member or something like that.

Obviously it's far from perfect and I've been working on this as a sideproject for a few past months. It's interesting topic for me though! I too work remotely and I see more and more companies going remote which is very cool. I'm much more productive coding from home than going to office every day.

Also, you have a good point with this "entirely remote" Gitlab example. I've been thinking about how to ask this from companies – how remote are you? I guess % is one option, but it makes it too complicated I think ("we're 60% remote"). I currently have a checkbox:

Remote first – hiring and working from all over the world instead of from a central location (found this from remoteonly.org manifesto although they have this as "remote only")

and you can find companies based on that. I think that's enough. Probably I don't care to search for companies who are 30% or 50% remote, but I would like to to know if they are in a "remote first" mindset or not (office + two remote devs). Also, this % changes all the time!

So I have been thinking about terms "remote first", "remote only" and "partly remote" and I don't have definitions for them really :)

For example, "remote only" maybe shouldn't definitely mean that there's really like no office at all – think Doist for example, I think they have an office but I would call them "remote only" or "entirely remote" as majority of the people is spread accross the globe: https://remotehub.io/doist

All ideas and suggestions would be really helpful on how to differentiate these remote levels!

Hello, Community Advocate at GitLab here. Thanks for creating this base and adding us there.

GitLab is 100% remote company [1] with 500+ team members in 50+ accross the Globe [2].

Could you please also update this info at [3] since it states 11-50 employees. Almost forgot to mention that we have the team-pets page as well :)

[1] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/

[2] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/

[3] - https://remotehub.io/gitlab

Thanks! Updated to 501+! I would also add GitLab locations so they would draw out on a map too. I see a list of 51 countries / regions on GitLab's website, I wonder if there's a list of cities as well or I'll use these 51? Oh and you can get access to edit profile on https://remotehub.io/hire-remotely

I think it would be TOP 1 on RemoteHub when I would add all cities!

Is the only option to add cities one-by-one via "edit company>cities>add city"? The list is a bit long, ~260 cities in total.

Wow, so much! Very cool! Yes, it's currently the only option, but could you please send me the list and I will add them myself. You can email me hello at remotehub.io

I would probably need to find photos for these cities anyways, so it would be better for me to add them myself!

Thanks!

That's so kind of you. I've reached out to you via community@gitlab.com. Thanks again!

Nice reply. It isn’t necessarily a straightforward measurement as you hint in your post. My first absolutely naïve approach to this would be a ratio of the count of employees who work the majority of their time in office locations to count of employees in the company who work in those locations less than X% of the time, where X must be a number less than or equal to 50. I think it’s pretty universally understood that if you work onsite in a company office for >= 50% of your time you cannot be construed as a remote employee.

Just thinking now I can come up with several flaws to that approach but it might be a nice starting point for some iteration.

There is also "Remote (Must live in America)"

This is another good point, thank you! I have a "hiring region" for remote companies to fill in, but I have almost zero info about this for now.

Also, not really sure how to fill this in exactly. Currently I have some checkboxes like "Europe", "North America" etc which is ok I guess.

I would like to make this searchable, so let's say I can specify my city and see companies that hire in this region.

Again, suggestions would be helpful!

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