14 karma · joined September 24, 2019
1- You are not testing candidates, this means vast majority of your hiring decisions are based on either resumes or interviews. You can't scale your hiring process without objective test results. You are not fully leveraging remote working if you are not testing rigorously.
2- You are not covering the 'trust' element of remote work, I'd suggest you start using a time tracking tool for yourself first, then start using it with your colleagues. You'll be surprised by the number of optimization opportunities.
3- Hiring people without testing and expecting them to perform great is not really remote working. Without productivity data, you don't have much to optimize. My personal model is identifying rockstars, turning their business behavior into model calendars and running a compliance program for increasing the average team performance in any team.
4- You missed the firing part, how do you handle that?
Wish you the best of luck in business
In Ukraine for example, knowledge workers working remotely for US and Western European companies are actually one of the highest-earning social groups. Same for Egypt, Brazil, Russia, and Turkey. Local economies are benefiting from the USD flow and more importantly, the knowledge/experience flow.
I genuinely believe that there's no such thing as "engineers/designers/etc from X country is better than Y". There are only skilled individuals and the competition for hiring them will be brutal in the next 5 years.
Five years ago, it was almost impossible to find a great software engineer from emerging markets for a remote position. They were literally asking "are you guys some sort of Nigerian scam?" People started to believe that working remotely is actually possible and paying much better than their shitty local average.
I must say, I really enjoy your smart questions, thanks for the great convo buddy.
Long answer: I'm looking at it from a different perspective, why people have to live in SF? The cloud-wages concept is mostly applicable for knowledge workers, I agree, and it's a limitation. Pay-rates should be decided based on objective test results and skills. I strongly object to the "vanishingly thin" part. For setting the average, I think market dynamics will do its job and find a range that is lower than insane SF rates but still super attractive for people who happened to live outside of the US and capable of getting the job done.