DEV Community: Lola Baltaeva

How did a Front-end Engineer from Moldova Get a Job at California Startup in Two Weeks?

Lola Baltaeva — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 20:59:41 +0000

Hey, I'm Ksenia, Co-Founder of 6nomads!
It's Halloween, and I'm launching a series of investigative interviews with talent who have found work using our platform. What's the connection to Halloween? I don't know; I think I just needed some reason to start (and to do an homage to Scully!).
So... I will reveal to you the case files and how it ended!

In truth, we are curious to know how things turned out for our candidates months after their employment, and also we want to inspire others with their examples, to show that talent can and should always look for the best places for growth.

Well, as a bonus, we also expect to subtly hint that on 6nomads, looking for cool IT companies to become a part of them is almost always fast and always super convenient and effective.

The case files

In the third year of University, Alexandr M. got a job as a developer in an American company with a branch in Moldova, worked there for 3 years, learned everything he could, and began to look for a new job for growth, scrolling Stack Overflow, GitHub jobs and local job boards sometimes.

"Once I scrolled my Facebook feed and saw ProductHunt post about a new product. The words "remote" and "startup" immediately resonated. This is exactly what I wanted to try, because there is not much choice in Moldova, and if you're going to grow, you either need to look for a remote job or move. Startups also attracted me because of the lack of bureaucracy.

So I decided to try, filled out the form and... forgot about it. The company where I currently work, wrote to me almost two months after I registered on 6nomads."

Alex had three matches back-to-back with companies on our platform. Two interviews were unsuccessful, but the third was an accurate hit/shot. Alex liked a startup, YC alumni from Silicon Valley, which build a new modern social network.

"I liked even the test task. It was a real work task that the guys had already solved. I also immediately liked the attitude during the interview. You know, there is often a feeling that the purpose of the interview is to make the candidate fail. But this time, there was a meaningful conversation between professionals, it was felt that the guys really want to hire a developer for the team."

The entire hiring process at 6nomads took less than two weeks with a test task and two interviews. And then the offer and rapid onboarding.

"I was immediately added to all the chats of our messenger — it was super convenient that the onboarding took place inside the product itself. They gave me access to Notion, GitHub, then the team leader began to throw tasks on bugs, and I quickly figured everything out."

Two weeks later, Alexandr was invited to St. Petersburg (Russia) to meet a big part of the development team in person. And a month later, to Tel Aviv for the entire team one-week meeting. The teammates had a chance to know each other, communicate live, have some rest, and participate in strategy sessions and team-building activities.

A few months later, we talked to Alex to find out how he copes with the remote work, the new startup, and a contractor's status.

— What do you like about the new style of work compared to the office?
— Flexibility. I can start working earlier, leave the computer for personal business during the day, but finish tasks in the evening. I like that the team focuses on results; no one tracks your time. If I complete my tasks on time, everything is OK. Mutual trust is something really cool.

— How to maintain motivation while working remotely?
— The team motivates most of all, the responsibility to my teammates. Our company also uses this tactic: if a new feature is going to be launched, one person is responsible for it. You just understand that no one will do it instead of you. This is not like when you can get lost between tasks in a large team in the office.

— Our interviewees often say the same thing: there is a greater risk of burning out while working remotely. Do you feel that?
— What is burnt out may never burn out!

I overworked at the last job at some period and realized that this is not OK. Since then, I just treat the tasks adequately.

I like that our CEO at the meetings often talks about mental health, physical activity, and how to keep yourself in good shape.

Also, there is another common practice in our team: you can take the day-off, and it really helps. If I feel the need, I take one day-off, and the next day I'm super productive.

— What new have you learned in your new place since the beginning?
— Here, I began to think more about top-level solutions, about the architecture of the entire application on the web and in the mobile version, not just about the code.

— You are hired to the company not as an employee, but as a contractor. Does this make you feel like a "second-rate" member of the team?
— Absolutely not! I don't care what I'm called from a legal point of view. The main thing is the attitude inside the team.

With "full-fledged" employment, there is an illusion of some guarantees, but in fact, you can also be fired at any time, or the company may go bust. I understand that something can go wrong in a startup, but in the IT-sphere, it's difficult to worry about finding a job if you are worth something.

— Do you want to move somewhere for a cool project? Or do you like your hometown and its combination with remote work for a foreign startup?
— I have three cats, so I will have difficulties with logistics!
I'm actually open to different future opportunities and do not rule out moving, although now I'm very comfortable. Our prices are low, and with the salary, you can get in an American startup, life became really good.

— What personal qualities do you think a developer should have to work remotely successfully? Is this work style suitable for everyone?
— I think everyone should try it. The main thing is just base responsibility. But can an adult, a professional, not have it? I've heard that it happens on a remote site, people just disappear and don't get in touch, but I can't understand how this is possible.

P.S. If you want to track current remote offers relevant to your skills and find gems, I also recommend you to use the 6nomads bot, which doesn’t even require registration.

Originally published at 6nomads.com, a platform where talented developers and tech startups find each other in the shortest possible way.

Interview With the Creator of Fairytrail, the Dating App For Digital Nomads and Travelers

Lola Baltaeva — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 07:05:37 +0000

“So why build a dating app for remote workers and travelers? Why not just build a travel buddy app, VR travel solution, write a book, or create some travel documentaries? Because online dating is a disliked solution for a real human need.
I’ve worked in consumer electronics, social gaming, FinTech, B2B SasS, ride-hailing, marketplaces, on-demand delivery, and health tech. So why something as dirty as dating? Dating has had a bad reputation because you have all those horrible fake dating apps.”

This is a quote from an article, written by Taige Zhang, Creator of Fairytrail, the dating app for digital nomads and travelers. “Some kind of new Tinder? Ugh…” you think. Don’t jump to conclusions. Tinder is for those who are bored, says Taige, for those who are ok with endless swiping. But his app Fairytrail is quite another thing. With a different business model.

We talked to Taige to find out what makes dating different for digital nomads, what makes Fairytrail different from Tinder, and what kind of societal shift we are on the verge of.

“You can get into and out of a relationship, it doesn’t really matter. We are looking to build a community.”

Hi, Taige! How is Fairytrail going?

It’s going very well. Our user growth is increasing quite well, our retention numbers are remarkable. We have about 2000+ active users now and surprisingly, we have 60% women on our platform, with 52% of our user base being fully remote. I’ve spoken to a doctor who has a telemedicine practice, writers who can write anywhere, contractors who can work anywhere. It’s really awesome. On the other side, 42% of our users aspire to be remote. So we have over 93% of our audience who are either remote or want to be remote. It’s really targeted, very niche, very exciting.

Our retention numbers for this last cohort is 40–45% after the first week. And within a month, it’s still 30%+, so it’s really good.

That said, we don’t want it to be sticky for too long because that means we’re failing. We want it to be sticky initially to help people have successful dates or get into relationships.

Later we want to keep them engaged with our other offerings such as Campfire, a non-dating social group. Every nomad has their passion, business, and goals, so the group is more for socializing and the mission is really to help one another achieve their dreams.

Nice. So, tell me a little bit about yourself.

So… I spent most of my career in product management, building things that people want in companies, working with great people to build things like ridesharing products, grocery delivery, social games, marketplaces.

And for one of the jobs I had, I was traveling a lot. I was always on the road and I was traveling two to three weeks per month, it was really intense and I became single. So I started using dating apps and… these apps didn’t really work for me, because every time I would match with someone, I would be in a different city. So it was almost impossible to go out on dates.

But what ended up happening was sometimes we would start messaging and we would jump on a video call and if it went well. What surprised me was the women would sometimes say, “Hey, if I came to San Francisco, could you show me around?” or “Hey! Do you want to meet up in New York one of these weekends?” And I’d say, “Yes”. This didn’t happen just once. So, I thought “Wow, this is insane. People are willing to travel for a first date. And when I actually did it, it was immensely fun.

Just imagine traveling, going to a new place, doing something fun and you do it with someone you like. So it’s an awesome experience. No one’s really doing this.

So I started validating this idea and it turns out there is a pretty big interest. And the beauty of why this app works now but couldn’t have worked 10 years ago is because 10 years ago, online dating wasn’t mainstream, now it’s mainstream. It’s the number one way couples meet.

Secondarily, we have remote work. So what does remote work enable? Living pretty much anywhere. If your job doesn’t limit you to one city, why does your dating app limit you to one city? So, that’s the premise.

If you get into a relationship, then it’s very easy for you to move. You don’t have to find a new job just to be together — you just buy a ticket. So that’s kind of the golden opportunity we see. And we’re really helping digital nomads and people who are highly mobile be able to explore the world in a people-first manner.

Online dating is now mainstream. In fact, online is the number one place couples in the USA meet as of 2017. Currently, 39% of new couples first meet online and experts predict that to increase to 70% by 2040.

Do you work remotely right now?

I’m based in San Francisco, and I work remotely with my team. We have a developer in India and we have a marketing person who is in New York. Then we have another person in San Francisco, one person in L.A., so that’s our distribution.

But the funny thing is we’re all doing this part-time because we’re not a big company right now. So it’s the five of us. We have two fixed meetings each week and ad hoc calls.

Do you use any product management tools, software to make your life easier?

We use Trello mostly, so we have visibility on what everyone’s doing. But unlike product management or development, Trello doesn’t work that well with marketing. So we’re thinking about using Asana.

Ultimately what we found to work really well is Google Docs, which has our weekly plan and all of the weekly goals, and every week we review the goals and if we’ve achieved them. We also have a standup in the middle of the week to just check-in and help each other out.

Every week we have one regular meeting where we share data. We present whatever data we own, the metrics we own, so we make sure that we’ve hit our goals. And if we haven’t hit our goals, at least own up to it.

Is it hard to combine jobs? I guess you have a full-time job and you’re running this project.

Yeah. It’s really hard. It means we have to prioritize things much better because of the limited time and I guess resources, too. And also in terms of meetings, I would say once you have a regular meeting that’s fixed, it’s really good. And we used to have people who weren’t that punctual. And so that is something about the culture we had to change, and we’ve changed it, and now it’s amazing because everyone shows up and we can have productive meetings because we have such limited time together.

Are you currently using the app by your team?

Yes. As a product person, if you’re building something, you have to use what you make. That’s the only way. If you don’t live in your product, it’s not going to improve. So everyone on the team has an account and everyone uses it.

One of us is in a relationship. He just wrote on his profile “Hey, I’m on the Fairytrail team. I’m here for research purposes.” He’ll still get matches, so people still want to chat with him.

Have you some cool, awesome stories from your users? Tell us about one couple, maybe, and at the same time about how everything works, how the processes are built inside.

We had one couple that went out recently, the girl was from New York, the guy was from California. They matched on a destination that they later changed, and within our app we give recommended adventures. So how our app works is that we facilitate an online experience to offline experience. We want people to have awesome adventures with someone they like.

So how it works is you sign up, you match with someone you like, and before you can talk, we’ll give you recommended destinations and tours. You pick the places you want to go to. And your match picks the places that they want to go to.

If you overlap, we’ll connect you to talk. At that point, you can talk about going to that place or getting to know each other better. And the beauty of this app is that you don’t need to go on a physical date, it saves you time and money, because in San Francisco, going out for drinks is like $40. Maybe you have to take an Uber, maybe you have to pay for the other person. They say the average date is $102. So it’s super inefficient. What we allow you to do is to have video calls as a first date.

A first date is mostly to just check out the person. Does this person look like their picture? Is this person fun to chat with? Is there any chemistry? Does the conversation flow? The second date is when you actually are yourself more, you relax, you have fun, you get to know each other in a more normal way. We allow you to actually skip that first offline date, have it over video call and then go on an amazing adventure, that you want to go on anyways, with the person you like.

So back to that couple. They actually matched in Quebec and then decided to go to Denver instead. So we helped them, they booked an AirB&B experience through us, we also helped with hotels and flights. We mostly monetize on trips, so we’re incentivized to help our users get dates.

Why would someone book through you rather than going by themselves?

There are actually three really good reasons. The first one is we give you a price guarantee: instead of paying your fee to Expedia, you pay the fee to us. We have the same price, you’re not losing any money, you’re just getting convenience because you don’t have to type in all that stuff yourself, it’s annoying.

Secondly, we do identity verification. Both users send us their government I.D., so we have it on file in case something happens and we also verify it with their social media. So you know exactly who is going on that trip as well.

And thirdly, you deposit your money with us before we buy the ticket. Because what if you buy your ticket and your match doesn’t? Your money is at risk. So we actually take both payments before we process and issue tickets.

So we did that for the couple, they had an amazing experience. The reviews are really amazing. And even the travel guide who took them on this adventure was like “Oh, my goodness, it’s such a cool app.” And then he joined the app.

Yeah, it’s a really cool idea. Do you think the future of dating should look like this?

It’s the beginning of the future. If you think about innovation in dating, has there been much innovation in the last 5–10 years? I mean, Tinder was innovative because they took match.com and made it mainstream. They made it convenient. But since then, there hasn’t been much innovation. Also the biggest problem with Tinder, I would say, is how superficial it is, it’s just based on looks.

There’s also a misalignment of interest. Tinder’s key metric is matches. But do you really want matches or do you want awesome experiences with someone you like? We’re more like Lyft. People want rides, and Lyft is incentivized to give them rides. People want dates, and Fairytrail is incentivized to give them that.

Also, Tinder has about 60 million users, but how many of them are actually in your city? Less than 1%, I would say. So if you’re in a small city, you’ve got very limited options.

You said that this is the beginning of the revolution of the industry. What are you expecting?

The first thing we can give you is a 30x increase in your dating pool. Since the first date is virtual, you can be available in all the cities in the US at the same time or even in thousands of cities around the world. That’s how you get a 30x increase in your dating, because everyone on this app is open to meeting people in other cities, and if they get into a relationship, they can easily move.

Secondly, video call dates make dating cheaper and more efficient. How many times have you gone on a date and within 10 minutes you’re like, “Oh, my goodness, this is a waste of time.” We can remove that pain point by letting you jump on a video call to figure out if you like that person with minimal costs and maximum convenience.

And the last thing is you actually get a much better offline dating experience. I would say dating is kind of a chore. But when you go on awesome trips with someone you like, that’s the best. That’s what we’re trying to deliver.

Fairytrail lets you date someone in a super social, low stress environment. Even if it doesn’t work out, you’ve had an awesome experience, learned about yourself, and traveled somewhere amazing.

That’s cool. What do you want to achieve this year?

The first step is getting people onboarded and signed up. We’re pretty good in terms of conversion. Then the next step is to get people matched, and that’s what we’re trying to optimize for right now. Once we have enough matches and connections, we want to get people to do more video chats. And then maybe by the end of the year, we’re going to focus more on getting you out on trips, because there’s no way to optimize step 4 when step 2 is the bottleneck.

Yeah. Have you thought about making digital profiles of your matches, including videos with the description of themselves?

We thought about it, but we’re probably not going to do it for a while. Just because people don’t like making videos of themselves for dating, Coffee Meets Bagel actually tried that. They did a huge push for people to make video dating profiles of themselves and didn’t really take off. Tinder has played around with that, they have these little videos you can incorporate into your profile, but they’re more like boomerangs, not like, “Hey, this is who I am.”

So if none of these companies have been able to pull it off, we’re not going to do it. And honestly, our value proposition isn’t it. Our value proposition is the type of people you’ll find in our app. They are different from the people on Tinder, who are there because they’re super bored or they’re looking for something casual, our users are super passionate about travel and they’re also highly remote. So if your lifestyle is very remote and you want to travel the world with someone — our app is great. And if you want to meet the most people, the most diverse kinds of people, location independent people, you’re not gonna find them on Tinder, unless you swipe a thousand times, you might find one, but it’s hard.

Again I want to highlight that we aren’t just building a dating app, we’re trying to build a community of like-minded people. And so for every person, we get on Fairytrail, we’re actually getting that person to join Campfire, which is our social community. And the social community is really a way for nomads, world citizens, remote workers, to help each other with their goals. So the mission of that group is to make dreams happen: we’re here to like help each other with business and with life goals. You can get into and out of a relationship, it doesn’t really matter. We are looking to build a community.

Already more than 4.8 million American workers describe themselves as digital nomads. 68% of millennials are more interested in a job that can be done remotely. Google Trends tells a similar story of growing interest in the digital nomad (DN) movement. Some have estimated there will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035.

Nice. It’s really exciting how the remote lifestyle can change everything we do, including dating and things like that.

Exactly. We’re so mobile now, and technology has made it so convenient to just jump on a video call with someone anywhere and just feel connected to that person or buy a cheap plane ticket. Planes are gonna get faster and cheaper. AR and VR are going to get better. We’re going to feel like we’re next to each other while being apart given what’s coming down the tech pipeline. We’re at the beginning of a big shift in society. Our world is going to be more mobile and interconnected than ever before. I believe remote work will change society as we know it.

Originally published at 6nomads.com, a platform where talented developers and tech startups find each other in the shortest possible way.

How to Manage a Team of 43 Developers in Different Time Zones

Lola Baltaeva — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 13:53:35 +0000

In this interview, CTO of Scentbird Andrei Rebrov told us why leaving large, successful companies for the sake of uncertainty could be a good idea, how to attract 43 serious IT specialists to a beauty project and going about organizing the work of a remote team scattered from Belarus to Hong Kong across time zones.

At 6nomads, we help IT talents to get a remote job in the best companies and select interesting projects for their professional growth. We decided to launch a series of interviews with the CEO's and CTO's of international companies about hiring and managing distributed teams to talk about their successful experiences with remote work, although it still remains unpopular.

The first interview with Andrei Rebrov, CTO of Scentbird — a service selling perfume by subscription. This curious New York startup with Russian roots grew from 400 subscribers to 250 thousand and received $24.4 million of investments with 43 employees from nine countries in Scentbird's IT department today.

— Andrei, tell us first about yourself and how you got involved in Scentbird?

— A pretty popular question: how after Aerospace University, did I start pouring perfume samples. The story is simple. I lived in Samara, where I graduated from University with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science.

In my third year, I started working in IT companies. I worked in Magenta Development, where I dealt with logistics services for taxis in England, collectors in Russia, and trucks in the United States. I was developing, and I really liked it, but I wanted something more.

I've always been lucky, surrounded by smart, talented people, and I was looking for those with whom it would be possible to grow. My first boss introduced me to Habr, the second introduced me to open source and Linux, and I wanted to keep going.

Therefore, when I graduated from University in 2011, I began working in Moscow at Luxoft two weeks later. While there, we dealt with a giant bank named UBS. Again, I was with a good team and project managers.

But, when you work in a big company, you realize that you can be as cool as you want, do cool things, and still, somewhere five levels above you sits another "Director of something", who decides how the product will look in the end. As a result, there is no feeling that you benefit people.

We did corporate-level projects for the bank's employees, so, there was never a goal to make a successful commercial product. This created certain questions; I wanted something different, I wanted to work on a faster team.

I had already become interested in Agile technologies when I was living in Samara. I met the guys from Scrumtrek, they invited me to join their team, said there were two big contracts, and I needed to decide if I was ready or not. I said, "Yes", and I have never regretted it.

When I left Luxoft and joined Scrumtrek, it felt like I got to "Star Wars", like supersonic speed was turned on and I could only see the flashing lights around me. The team was small, all decisions were made very quickly. But, what I liked most was the opportunity to make mistakes that were helping you learn, to understand what was wrong.

We were engaged in consulting, implementation, audits… At one point, I was naturally beginning to get questions like, "If you teach people how to develop software, why don't you do it yourself, start your own startup?" Quite a reasonable question. I began to study what was happening in this arena, incidentally got to the hackathon, the organizer of which turned out to be my future co-founder, Sergey Gusev.

Two months later, he wrote me a letter: "We are looking for a technical founder for our recommendations-based startup that will sell perfumes online. We need a mathematician-programmer who will be able to do both— write the algorithm and support the development."

These were huge options to weigh: on the one hand — a stable job in Moscow, a good salary, the opportunity to become a Junior partner, on the other — an unknown startup in the States about perfume. I chose the latter. I didn't look back.

That was more than five years ago, and since that point, all have been moving forward.

— How fast did you start growing?

— For about a year, we tried to start but had not yet been registered as a legal entity. It was 2013, in 2014, we found an accelerator in New York; we were still just four founders. it took money to hire a team, but there was no money.

The accelerator gave us $40 000. We spent this money very safely for a long time, then received money from our first investor — $100 000. First, we hired one employee for marketing and one for support. We, ourselves, received a minimum wage, just enough to pay for rent and food.

The first developer was hired in December 2015. I found him on a social network through acquaintances. He still works with us. A year later, we hired two more developers. Then, we began to grow rapidly, and now there are 43 people on my IT team.

— Did you hire the first developers for the New York office?

— No, remotely from the beginning. To some extent, this was due to savings, because hiring in the CIS is much cheaper. The second reason is cultural. I needed people, who would understand me quickly, to whom I could say very clearly what I needed, including passing on obscene lexicon for a quick explanation.

— What is the stack of your developers?

— Back end development — Groovy/Grails. Quite specific, but we have been able to hire a lot of Java developers, took a lot of guys from enterprise, banks.

Large companies provide the necessary experience, understanding of what processes should take place in the company to make it work steadily. Not as it happens in a startup — wham, bam, and on to production. When there is a business that can quickly give money, you understand what processes are needed.

Front end development (we use React JS) is one of the most difficult to hire for because the stack is very young. It's difficult to find the best practices, people who understand these practices and can justify them while having an adult look at technology.

Specialists often pay attention to one technology, instead of maturing to the understanding that any technology has its pros and cons. Strong specialists own the technology effectively and can always explain one, know what else is on the market, follow that.

We have two people in Data Science and will expand it this year — that trend is heating up. In this direction, it is very difficult to value the skills of candidates, because many know how to make cool algorithms, but the value of the algorithm is worthless until it is tied to a certain business.

So, I test what people think about the business for which they are making algorithms. The specialist has to explain the business problem and the list of metrics, otherwise, it ends up being 'cool' mathematicians that enjoy the algorithms themselves, but do not achieve any profit.

Another specificity is QA. In the market, there are either people who are engaged only in automation or those who are engaged in manual testing. I am fundamentally looking for people who do both: who are used to first getting the user experience, communicating with analysts about requirements, assuming the cases when the user will make a wild combination of steps (because that is exactly what happens in real life, which is why everything breaks) and only then automating all of this. These are testing, Analytics, communication, and development skills at the same time.

— The stack is quite rare. In this case, it is more surprising that you managed to create a long-term effective team. Maybe you have a powerful HR brand or offer mountains of money? What do you attract the candidates with?

— Definitely not HR brand yet. Every time I answer the candidates' question, why do we need so many programmers and what are we still coding, selling perfume online is very simple, they say.

I have to take a close look at our HR brand this year: I will participate in conferences, talk about what we do from an engineering point of view. People are used to contacting with ordering pizza or buying online only as users, but, the backstage, all of that is not visible, yet is insanely interesting.

How do we find people? The market is changing. I really like Daniel Pink's book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us". He says that for some types of work including development and all creativity, money is a motivator only to a certain level. As soon as people have a financial cushion, other motivators come to the forefront:

1. Autonomy (the ability to make decisions and not dependant on the office or boss).
2. Mission (to belong to something greater).
3. The prospect of becoming an expert.

The market is moving in this direction. Now, it is absolutely real to work from anywhere in the world — there is a technological opportunity for this, but most employers are not psychologically ready, yet.

There are two very illustrative examples. WordPress closed its office in San Francisco, and the team is completely distributed now/ There's a great book about this by Scott Berkun, "The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the future of work".

The second example,...

Full version originally published at 6nomads.com.

How to Hire Engineers Like inVision, GitLab and Automattic Do?

Lola Baltaeva — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 21:54:53 +0000

While everything is screaming about YOU-KNOW-WHAT-19, we decided to release our new research. Why now? At least because it does not contain a single word about the virus. Do you need more reasons?:) The pandemic will end (hopefully sooner than predicted), but our findings will be useful for longer than the quarantine to-do lists.

We selected 9768 software engineers of established remote companies list and analyzed the available data about them.
It turned out, for example, that:
— 41.4% of these developers live and work in the United States and 58.6% are scattered around other parts of the world.
— As for founders, 76% of them live in the US.
— And only 3 companies on the list don’t hire engineers outside the US.

While processing data, we came across a lot of findings, interesting for both employers and engineers, as potential employees of the analyzed companies, and tried to answer questions like:
— What affects the hiring?
— Which hub countries have become favorable hiring locations?
— Is there any correlation between the origin of founders and the region of their hiring?
— Whether the US developers are still indispensable in our globalized world.
And many others.

Here we are going to talk briefly about the main observations.

What are the important priorities to consider when hiring employees from other countries?

А. Time zones: Most of the established remote companies work asynchronously

Time zones and their spread affect the management style and communication system. Therefore, first of all, you have to decide: do you prefer synchronous work or are you ready to move to a new level and build asynchronous communication in the company. This means committing to being timezone-sacral or timezone-agnostic. Both approaches have their pros and cons and your choice should be based on the needs of your company and its characteristics.

B. The average salary in the region: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys

We want to warn you against delusions: do not think that hiring remote employees is just about extreme cost cutting. As The Remote Work ROI Calculator V0.95 can obviously show you, it does cut costs, however, getting a qualified developer from a country with a low cost of living for their average local salary is no longer possible. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. PayScale data shows that remote workers actually earn more than their physical commuter counterparts.

C. Cultural aspect: Mono or multi, Trello or Toggl?

In the process of communication with our clients, we found that even distributed leading companies, who have noted concern when it comes to the small number of women in the IT-sphere, underrepresented groups, and unequal opportunities are willing to hire only American engineers. Surprisingly, there are just 3 companies that hire only in the United States on the established remote companies list.

Trello engineer recruitment chart:

Toggl engineer recruitment chart:

Some may think that ‘The bigger you are, the braver, and more distributed you are’. There is no such rule. As you can see from many examples in the research, the spread of a company’s geography has nothing to do with the company size.

D. Level of English proficiency in different countries: Low or fluent?

Since development teams communicate in English (as the vast majority of founders come from the United States), then English levels also become a critical factor in hiring. Regardless of synchronous or asynchronous communication, mutual understanding is necessary.
However, becoming a programmer means knowing English better than the national average, listed in the EF English Proficiency Index. We have seen this as a result of many interviews with candidates from different countries on our platform.

E. The origin of the company founder: Immigrants’ hiring superpower

76% of the founders from the list live in the United States with 56.4% of the founders being American born. Immigrant founders are predictably more successful at hiring outside of the States.
It is quite logical that everyone, first of all, hires employees in the market they know best — Americans in America and Indians in India — in the country, where founders have their own network, understanding of the peculiarities of hiring and its legalities. This knowledge allows immigrants to hire people outside the USA confidently and bypass their competitors.

F. The competitive environment within the country

The level of competition for specialists speaks volumes for the hiring side. If the competition is strong, it will be difficult and expensive to hire a specialist, if there is no competition at all, then most likely the IT market in the country is quite weak.
The idea of the level of maturity and competitiveness of the internal IT market can be formed on the basis of several indicators:
— Presence of large local IT and Internet companies
— Concentration of remote-jobs
— Representation of branches and offices of world IT leaders in the country
— Number of developers in the country

Where should you hire from?

We can not give an exact answer, just like we can’t guarantee that you will become as successful as other companies. However, you can use the collected data to make a decision for yourself.

How to legally hire remote employees outside USA?

How to deal with the legal aspect of hiring from abroad, you decide for yourself. We will only give two opinions, two ways to solve this issue. Though, there is no other way. Hire full-time employees or hire full-time contractors. That is all.

We certainly don’t consider freelancing or outsourcing and do not advise you to do it.

Bonus: Portrait of a remote developer

After we compiled our research, we tried to use it to create a “portrait” of a remote developer. We analyzed the profiles of employees of the companies from the list and found:
— the average age of technical specialists is 34.3 years,
— 83% of them are men,
— 17% are women.

Digging a little deeper, we analyzed the universities where the developers from our sample studied. For the skeptics out there, who believe that remote work is suitable just for unskilled non-core staff, here is a worthwhile statistic: 23% of engineers from established remote companies studied in the top-100 universities.

Also, there are a lot of graphs and numbers in the research, looking at which you can draw your own conclusions. By the way, we would be glad to receive your feedback. Maybe you work in one of these companies and see that we are wrong in our conclusions somewhere? Be sure to write to us and we will share updates with others.

How Do Remote Developers Manage to Be Productive?

Lola Baltaeva — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 12:44:26 +0000

What we learned from the experience of communicating and interviewing numerous remote developers:

Remote work is not for everyone.
Everyone has their own life hacks with a daily routine and motivation.
Working remotely can be difficult, but we have not met anyone who would like to return to the office.

You can read about how devs come to the decision to work remotely, how they find remote jobs and manage to work from home, for example, in this interview. Now we want to talk about how remote developers usually organize their life to cope with tasks and deliver on time, and also about the most popular life hacks that we have heard from them.

There is no universal scenario of daily routine. It all depends on the team, on its commitment to synchronous or asynchronous communication, on your personal characteristics, time zone, and out-of-hours affairs and preferences.

What common for most startups that have assembled remote teams is a focus on results, rather than monitoring the hours spent in front of the computer. This means that managing yourself is an extremely important skill for a remote dev: now you will not be spurred by the sight of working people around, the desire to finish a piece of code before lunch or before the end of the working day.

Here are 6 things to do if you want to be productive while working remotely:

1. Try to determine your productivity hours

Remote work makes you get to know yourself better. If you look at yourself carefully, you can make great use of your individual characteristics and, for example, use some hours for routine tasks, and others for solving problems and creative thinking. You probably know when it’s easier for you to focus: for some it’s the beginning of the working day, for others it’s the middle of the day, and still others work most productively at night and shift their schedule to do this.

2. Stick to the schedule

Yes, remote work is about freedom and flexible hours, all right. But you will greatly improve your dailylife if you develop your own system, get up at the same time, allocate a fixed period of time for lunch, set aside a certain time for sports or picking up a child from school. The predictability of the schedule brings stability and calm, but this does not prevent you from making your own adjustments if they are required, and working late in such cases. It is important that such cases are exceptions, and exceptions require rules.

3. Learn to end a working day

This is also related to setting up the system, but it is important for the remote developer to realize that the work must end, even if the computer is always nearby, and no one is kicking you out of the closing office. An interesting project, passion, and the desire to do more often play a cruel joke. You need to give yourself time to rest in order to be stable/long term productive. Be sure, the absolute majority of CTO would rather see in their teams those who consistently deliver good stuff, than those who choose the path of an unpredictable superhero, who does a very large piece of work for a couple of days without sleep, and then disappears for a week (although they manage to find an approach to such people too).

4. Separate work and home spaces

And this also follows from the system. It is extremely important, if you work from home, not to turn your entire life into work and your entire home into an office. Separate time for work and time for rest: it is not necessary to be in touch 24/7, to respond to messages in work chats at night, this “heroism” is not valuable. Divide the space into “work” and “home”, do not work everywhere: at the kitchen table, on the sofa, in the chair. It will be much better if the work is concentrated at the desk, then getting up from behind it, you will distance yourself from work too.
It will be perfect if you can allocate a separate room for work, as Scott Dawson did:

“I think the biggest mistake is to not have a space that you can close off. Having space that enables people to come bother you when you don’t want to be bothered. I shut my door, because my family is at home and the shut door is a signal that I’m busy. I open it when I’m free.

If you think you can work remotely on your living room couch and can deal with the distractions that arise, that’s great. But I think more often than not, people need a dedicated space where you’re in work mode. Once I leave that space, I’m not in work mode anymore.

I have a dedicated office that I can literally leave physically. During my evening, I’m not staring at my computer and I’m not hearing the email comes in. I am achieving a work-life balance by having a separate workspace. I think those are really key to staying power with remote work.”

For artificial separation of work and home spaces, people also use such a classic life hack: be dressed as if you are in an office or coworking during work (yes, even in shoes), and at the end of the day change into sweatpants, your favorite t-shirt, slippers and feel you are at home. This disciplines and sets the right tone.

Some, however, note that they do a great job without getting out of their pajamas, and some even out of bed. Maybe you are this unique instance. If not, do not forget that coworking is invented not without reason, and most companies encourage employees to use them and compensate for the cost.

5. Provide yourself with a quality workplace

Everyone we’ve talked to emphasizes that building a great workplace with everything you need is the first thing you should do if you decide to work from home. There are already a lot of things (like laziness) that interfere in your work process, so additional annoying factors such as the slow internet, an uncomfortable chair or a bad monitor can become crucial.

Yes, now you will have to take care of providing yourself with everything you need, and there will be no one else to blame for bad coffee either.

6. Chin up and maintain your self-motivation

It’s hard to get bored being a part of a cool project and team, but there are all sorts of days (magnetic storms, Mercury in retrograde:). In these cases, you need to be able to cheer yourself up.

First, remember there is always a stand-up, team meeting on the horizon, and you don’t want to let the other teammates down.

Secondly, when the work just doesn’t move, try to work at intervals using the Pomodoro Technique. This technique is quite grandfatherly but still works. This way you can involve yourself in the process, stop waiting for a break, turn off the timer and continue, having caught a working-wave.

Thirdly, when the work is not progressing because you are stuck in a difficult task, can not find the solution, it is useful to think about the problem with someone’s help. Call a teammate, tell him about the impasse and reveal your thoughts in detail, often in the process of explaining the problem to another, you come to a solution by yourself. If there is no opportunity to talk to a teammate (he is busy or it is a deep night on his continent), any other victim — your child, dog or rubber duck — is suitable for this purpose. The main thing is that you have to formalize and utter an idea. As Albert Einstein said: "If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself."

Our other interviewee uses a different technique:
“If there ever is a problem that I just can’t solve, I go and take a bath. The pressure disappears, my brain starts working differently. I’ve had days where I’ve had to use this method twice.”

This is the life of remote developers with a hot bath in the middle of the working day:) If you decide to try it, take these tips into account and look for selected jobs in tech startups around the world here.

Liam Martin: 5 Golden Rules of Hiring Remotely

Lola Baltaeva — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:40:17 +0000

Liam McIvor Martin is a Co-Founder of Time Doctor, a time tracking software for remote teams. Time Doctor helps individuals and organizations to be more productive, to stop wasting time and finish what is important to them instead.

The same way Liam's speech is going to help you to become incredibly inspired and ready for action right now. Liam gives ready-made clear advice and explains why this is important and what it gives his own company.

Well, to make sure you start reading, here's a quote: "Basically, there is no quantitative data currently that shows that remote off-sites actually work. We may find in the future that team retreats are actually not effective at all. But as of right now, since we have a whole bunch of extra cash, we basically do it. And the reason why we have so much extra cash is because we have a remote-first organization."

Honest and inspiring, isn't it?
Go ahead and check out the recording of Liams's presentation at our Remote-First Conference here.

I want to start off by actually talking about something that my buddy, Steve Monroe from Hubud, actually talked about at our conference Running Remote about three years ago. It was this word that I had never heard about, which is "KAROSHI", a Japanese word. I spent the better part of two weeks literally going through this, the history of this word. It's a very interesting phenomenon.

Let me give you a couple examples of "KAROSHI". These are examples of "KAROSHI". Does anybody have any ideas as to what that word means?

I'm sorry, but basically "KAROSHI" is a Japanese word, which literally means death caused by overwork or job-related exhaustion.

And this is not just a small phenomenon. Throughout the 2000s, one person died of "KAROSHI" almost every 2 days in Japan. It's actually a really scary phenomenon there.

Here are, basically, the medical causes of "KAROSHI".

I see a pretty interesting correlation, which is anyone that works more than 159 hours of overtime in a month usually ends up dying of "KAROSHI".

So it's a pretty clear correlation to me. If you look at GDP per hour worked for Japan versus the United States, it's actually almost exactly the same. But the Japanese work twice as much as Americans. So literally, Americans are twice as productive as the average Japanese person during their work week. And this comes down to a base assumption, which is work equals productivity, and it does not.

WORK ≠ PRODUCTIVITY

I am the founder of a tech company that specifically measures this type of data. So we're going to get into that.

But before I get into all of those details. My name is Liam. I run two tech companie — Time Doctor and Stuff.com, I also run Running Remote, which is a conference on building and scaling remote teams. We have employees in 38 countries all over planet Earth. I've been doing remote work for 15 years, since was called telework or outsourcing as well.

I'm Canadian. Canadians do two things: either play hockey or choose figure skating. The second variant was much more interesting than getting punched in the face. And that actually ended up taking me to a competitive level, but not making it to the world podium at the Olympics ended up taking me to McGill University. Basically, that was kind of the second stage in my life.

I was gonna become a professor at McGill University. And after seven years of grad school, I gave my very first class. It was about 300 students. And that ended up with about 150 and the worst academic reviews in the history of McGill's department in about 250 years.

This is just one of those student comments:
"Worst prof at McGill. I think he enjoys watching everyone fail. Not super helpful or nice to students... Just horrible."

I remember walking into my supervisor's office. And I said, "I don't think I'm very good at this." And he said, "No, you're not." And then I said, "OK, so what do you think that I should really be doing with my life?" He said, "You got to get pretty good at this lecturing thing because you're going to be doing it for the next 10 to 20 years before you get to do anything fun." And so with that said, I literally threw a master's thesis under his door and I was out into the real world. And what I learned from that is I really liked teaching, but I did not like lecturing. So that actually ended up in my very first remote-first business, which was an online tutoring company, grew that to about two hundred tutors throughout North America and Europe.

But I had encountered a "karoshi" level problem. I remember going into my dentist's office, I was complaining about a chipped tooth. So I opened up my mouth and the dentist gasped. It's never a good idea when a health professional gasps when they're looking at you. So he asked me, "Liam, which tooth are you talking about? You've chipped all of your teeth."

He actually thought I had pancreatic cancer, which is the only thing that you can get from chipping all of your teeth within a year.

And so after figuring out it wasn't fourth stage pancreatic cancer, next stop was to my therapist. And my therapist said, "You're in a state of PTSD level stress. You either need to basically relieve your stress or shut down the business." I was working 16 hours a day at that time. And this was the way that I got out of that stress and why. Now I teach about remote work so much, because it was so important to fundamentally changing my life.

So with that said, a super important rule of hiring remote — make sure that no one including yourself is dying of "karoshi".

RULE 1: HIRE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO WORK REMOTELY

Rule number one is actually to hire people who want to work remotely. So where do you find these people? Use full-time remote job boards, the remote-first job boards, remote-focused platforms. So the candidates that are floating around, they are actually already in the same mindset that you are currently looking for, which is hiring someone in a remote-first capacity.

This is just a photo of some of the dev team doing, like, sand dune buggy races in Dubai. Here's the support team in Boracay. Here's, I think, the marketing team in Bohol. So we do these team retreats every single year. We actually have one single team retreat where everyone flies into one location per year. That's up to you, because it's very expensive.
...

Full version originally published at 6nomads.com.

How to Carve Out Your Own Niche in the Industry

Lola Baltaeva — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 14:25:59 +0000

“At times, it seems that we came with the excavators to the site, where everybody is still digging with shovels.”

CherryHome is a smart system for elderly care that uses computer vision, recognizes people using a digital skeleton, assesses dangerous situations, notifies family members or caregivers about them, and sends daily reports about users to their relatives. Crunchbase, Forbes, VentureBeat and many others have already written about CherryHome, so now our turn has come.

CherryHome has three co-founders: the founder of 33Bits Development Studio, winner of TechCrunch Disrupt 2016, Maxim Goncharov, Managing Partner of Gagarin Capital fund, Nikolay Davydov, Ex-head of Mobile Department at Yandex Stas Veretennikov. The Ex-Head of Solar Product Engineering and Pilot Operations at SolarCity/Tesla, Benjamin Heng has become the fourth frontman of the company.

The startup was launched in 2016 in California, where after TechCrunch Disrupt Maxim met with the fairy godmother of all Russians coming to the Valley, Nikolai Davydov, who immediately offered to support his idea.
CherryHome managed to attract $6.9 million in funding, to build a distributed team, become recognizable in the Valley, and interest Panasonic and Fuji, to save one grandparent and change the elderly care industry.

Maxim believes that companies with “fruit” names are lucky in the Valley (CherryHome is named after Davydov’s dog), we tried to figure out what helped CherryHome besides luck and “Valley magic”, how a distributed team functions, what path the project has overcome from the origin of the idea to today, and what drives the creators trying to connect grandparents to artificial intelligence.

CherryHome Team

Stas, how did you join the project? Why did you decide to leave a successful career for shaky ideas?

Stas: I met with Maxim when he came to St. Petersburg. While eating burgers, he told me about the US and Nick, how he offered him an investment, barely heard the idea. Max himself did not know whether it was true or not. At exactly the moment Nick called, his suggestion turned out to not be a joke.

Maxim asked me to join him, and I immediately said: “Yeah, let’s go!” The project was a challenge for me — much more difficult than my work in Yandex.

And how did Ben join you? What attracted him?

Stas: Nick and Max organized an event to attract people to the project; then there was Ben. His children go to the same school that Nick’s children do. They met there. Ben listened, decided to invest, and also offered to help with his expertise in hardware. As a result, he became a full-fledged part of the team, goes to the office, and is responsible for the whole hardware-department.

Maxim: We realized that money needs to be involved in such relations. But, that money doesn’t always have to come from you. When money comes from a person, they are also interested in the success of the project.

Ben was attracted by the fact that we are very fast. Usually the cycle of bringing hardware-products to the market — a few years, but we got the first customers after about a year. He liked our results in our computer vision, so he wanted to participate in the project.

How many people are on the team today?

Stas: The team consists of 26 people from Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi, Kiev, Kharkov, and the USA.

How did you get them together? What difficulties did you face?

Maxim: The first two employees we met at a conference. We listened to how they explained the problem of determination the behavior of drivers inside the car: if they fell asleep or is were talking on the phone. We told them about our project and people joined.

Stas: The problem with hiring was that today’s ML engineers, barely out of universities, already consider themselves great specialists. But they have almost no knowledge of classical computer vision algorithms. We understood that we needed excellent specialists with a wide range of knowledge both in ML and in classical algorithms. We wanted to build technology at the junction. We managed to find people with 10 years of experience in Computer Vision and PhD’s. They liked our idea and immediately joined the project.

Why did you hire mainly in Russia?

Stas: There is an opinion that there is a good pool of programmers in Russia. We also hold this opinion.

What about the difference in the price of specialists?

Stas: Specialists of such a level who work with us, cost much more here, and large corporations, which are difficult to compete with, enticing them by throwing money.

Many still do not see the fundamental difference between a freelancer and a full-fledged remote employee. How do you feel about hiring freelancers for a distributed team?

Maxim: A freelancer does not know how to play on a team. Therefore, we would rather give preference to someone who has had experience in a corporation.

What rules and traditions do you have within your distributed team? Any personal discoveries?

Maxim: We try to hire people stronger than ourselves, because they can teach us new things. But a person working remotely can open up and doesn’t hesitate to teach others, unless you create the right atmosphere with a high level of trust.

On a team, we have a rule: if you can use a camera, use a camera. There are meetings where we all connect via video, and this tradition seems to have brought positive results. For many millions of years, people have communicated, looking at each other. If you often see a person’s face, you begin to believe that they belong to your tribe, and there is the evolutionary mechanism to protect our compatriots within us.

How did you build the management of your distributed team? On the principle of “trust, but check”? What’s more important in your case?

Stas: There is no particular strict control. Delays happen for family, household reasons, but they do not want to let down colleagues and quickly make up their part of the work.

Maxim: The responsibility of teamwork is magic. The head sometimes is not even necessary to make observations. We do not want to implement any strict rules and systems of punishment, on the contrary — we try to maintain friendly relations.

Looking for a direction and transformation of the product

How did the product come to what it is now? What ideas did you have to give up?

Maxim: We started with a few ideas, taking care of the elderly was among them. But we refused it: we underestimated the market and thought that doing it was not such an interesting idea. Then we moved on to the automation of smart homes. We realized that it was very expensive and yet no one really needs it. Then, we made a security system, which was supposed to reliably determine who is who, and turn on the alarm if an uninvited guest came.

We quickly realized that the achieved accuracy did not allow us to do it. There are technologies whose accuracy is close to 100%, and any quality of facial recognition is incomparable with a pin code. Besides, we wanted to control the whole house, which meant installing cameras in every room: the system was very expensive and did not work perfectly.

Our next idea was family members being able to act as assistants. We wanted to improve the lives of family members by telling them what was happening at home. Here we are faced with many problems, and the pilot project realized that spouses don’t always want the other to know everything about them. It was difficult to build a product around this idea. Then we decided that there are two categories of family members, those who want to know everything about each and for whom it doesn’t cause any conflict, — children and elderly. Usually, everybody shares information about the kids to everyone in the family and everyone is glad. The same story is true with the elderly.

In the US, children under 12 years old cannot be left alone (for us, with our mentality, it seems at least strange). If you leave an 11-year-old child at home for half an hour — it’s against the law. Therefore, babysitters are very common here.

We decided that we can make a monitor to control babysitters and the kids with them. But children do completely different things and if, for example, the child fell, in most cases it is not a problem. It was extremely difficult to describe all the cases that we had to take control of.

Adults do similar things every day, anomalies are easier to identify. We launched a pilot project with caregiving agencies, found out that hiring a nurse to be with an elderly person 24/7 costs $20,000 per month. We thought that we could reduce the cost of the service, and chose this direction as the main target.

It is important to understand that this is only the direction of the product, but our technology allows a lot. In everything that concerns the analysis of behavior in small rooms, our technology is the most advanced. In general, the technologies that are used in this industry are very outdated. At times, it seems that we came with the excavators to the site, where everybody is still digging with shovels.

Product promotion and competition

Who promotes your product? How does Cherry get into users' homes?

Maxim: Nick is more engaged in the promotion, well, I am in terms of the vision of the product.

Switching from B2C to B2B helped us a lot. Caregiving agencies already know the problems of their customers, understand what they need and how to sell it. This is a huge advantage, because we do not need to explore the market from scratch. We came to the territory where the rules of the game had already been set...

Full version originally published at 6nomads.com.

6 Best Remote Work Conferences to Attend in 2020

Lola Baltaeva — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 11:14:54 +0000

Until recently, it seemed that remote work is something completely new and fresh. Today, for many, it is daily life.

Now there are a huge number of articles, podcasts, interviews, blogs on various aspects of remote work. And all the same, there are many disputes, myths, misconceptions around. Remote evangelists can argue about whether asynchronous or synchronous work is more productive, whether it is necessary to turn on the video at team meetings, and many other things.

The phenomenon is still young and cannot be said that it was finally formed when the main tools on which remote work is based appeared quite recently.

It is all the more interesting to observe the evolution of the idea of remote work, as from the idea of the future it has become our everyday life, with its problems, difficulties and, of course, advantages.

For those who want to understand the topic seriously and prevent a lot of mistakes the founders of remote companies have already learned from, we recommend choosing a suitable conference (there are not so many of them yet), so that in a short time to absorb the intense flow of information and get down to business, being armed with actual knowledge.
We have selected 3 offline and 3 online events for this year so that you can make plans based on them now (some conferences will start very soon).

Offline events

Nomad Summit

17–21 January, Chiang Mai, Thailand
7 speakers
$179

“It’s the ultimate place to learn from highly successful professionals and network with hundreds of like-minded people who share your goals and vision. Come learn, grow and meet your future business partners, employers, mentors, and best friends.”

You can still book your tickets and go to Thailand for a portion of the sun, mango shake and active networking in the traditional havens of digital nomads.

We especially like one of the speakers — Stephanie Smith — for her blog. Even if you don’t go to Thailand, be sure to check out her inspiring website. The topic of her speech at the conference is “How Anyone Can Learn to Code and Build a Product Less Than 1 Year”.

The others sound like
“Starting and Selling a Million Dollar Online Business”,
“Financial Independence — Retire Early as a Digital Nomad”,
“How to Build a Fully Location Independent Business While Travelling the World and Building a Community at Sea” etc.

Running Remote

20–21 April, Austin, USA
30 speakers
$799

“Running Remote is carefully curated to teach you next-level, actionable strategies and tactics you can utilize the very next day to manage and grow your distributed team.”

Quite a big event, which will be held this year for the third time. The organizers try to make a show of the conference, entertain guests with activities, and then leave a large number of podcasts and videos. So at first, you can watch the previous interviews without going anywhere and decide whether you want to spend $799 dollars this April.

And here are a few speakers announced this year:
Wade Foster, Co-founder & CEO Zapier
Andy Tryba, CEO Crossover & Sococo
Sara Sutton, Founder FlexJobs & Remote.co
Lori McLeese, Global Head of HR Automattic
Andreas Klinger, Head of Remote AngelList and many others.

Nomad City

7–8 November, Auditorio Alfredo Kraus, Spain
€147

“We are a team of professionals sharing a common objective: making remote work accessible to everyone.”

Although the conference will take place only in November, you can already see the schedule, speakers and topics. You don’t have the opportunity to watch videos of past conferences for free, but you can buy individual entries on topics of interest to you.

Online events

It seems to us that conferences about remote teams should be remote. After all, if we are talking about a world without borders, about equal opportunities for talent everywhere, about an era where technology allows you not to travel distances for information or communication, then it is time for conferences to become suitable to these ideas. Moreover, all offline conferences like to claim that they are “the biggest” or “largest”, but what can be “bigger” than an event that is not tied to the location?

Remote-first Online Conference

14–15 January
12 speakers
$0

“Learn valuable insights and get answers on running and managing a remote tech team directly from industry experts.”

The nearest event, if you don’t like to put things off for later. Moreover, there are no stop factors: the conference is online and free. The speakers are founders of remote-first startups, creators of remote tools and HR managers of remote teams.

So different participants from the most different businesses, different origins, but all of them have one thing in common: the choice of remote and successful mastering of it. A special place among the topics is given to the problem of building and maintaining a culture in a remote company and its role in the comfort of employees and their productivity.

The Virtual Working Summit

October

“Featuring short audio interviews with inspiring virtual leaders, at a time to suit you, one per day, it also gives you the chance to interact with the other participants online. This is a unique way for you to develop your skills without traveling. There is no charge to register to listen in to each speaker via the web each day.”

There is no information about the topic of this year’s conference, about speakers and exact dates, but you can register now so that you do not miss anything, as there are still very few online conferences. The theme of the last conference was “Making Virtual Working Work: a retrospective”.

The Remote Work Summit

14+ speakers

“The Remote Work Summit is an initiative to bring together 14+ industry leaders from multiple Fortune 500 companies, startups and agencies and talk about the challenges & frameworks to build effective remote teams, organizations & careers.”

We put this “event” on the list for 2020, even though all the videos are already on the record, and this is a kind of termless conference.
You can buy a Premium Pass and get access to more interviews and materials, or watch first what is provided in the free access. Although these interviews were recorded last year, they have not yet lost their relevance, and you can watch them at a convenient time.
COO of Doist, Director of Recruiting at Zapier, CEO of Dribbble, Founder of Product Hunt, Founder & CEO of Workplaceless, Head of Public Relations at Buffer and many others are among speakers.

If you know other worthwhile conferences/meetups/events — please write to us lbaltaeva@6nomads.com

Grow Up in a Small Village, Go Study in Finland, Lose a Laptop, and Become a Co-Founder of an International Company

Lola Baltaeva — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 15:52:35 +0000

We talked to Tikhon Belousko, CPO of Resume.io, about how he became a full-stack designer from a developer and co-founder of an international company with 4.5 million registrations from yesterday's student. More so, we asked him about what is more important: doing something cool or doing something unique.

Resume constructor, Resume.io is 3.5 years old. Printing a resume on the service costs $2.95 with about 250,000 new users registering for the service per month. Tikhon does not disclose the company's income, but easily shares his life's philosophy — you just need to be a nice person to live a good life. So far, it seems that this ideology has been trouble-free.

"In Finland, my laptop was stolen. I had to make money to get a new one. So, I started freelancing"

Tikhon, tell us first about yourself, about how you got to the Resume.io project?

I studied Programming in the city of Rostov-on-Don at the Institute of Mechanics and Mathematics.

I mean, I attempted Programming. When I started university, my classmates had already known how to do a lot of things. I looked at them and thought, "One day, I will be able to do all of this, too."

I got a computer quite late in high school. However, I did not have a computer for the first six months of university until my parents moved to Rostov, too. I lived in a dorm and did my homework on campus.

Even at that time I was already interested in the visual part of what I was doing. Even when we did practical tasks I thought, "What interface would be suitable for this?" At that time I did not know that there were people who specialize in interfaces. I thought that programmers did it. Why would there be someone who only designs?

While studying, I got a job in the company Smartomato. They helped restaurants to make websites and organize deliveries. In Smartomato, there was no designer (there I actually understood that they do exist). It was a great reason to get into design. I could think and draw what the features would look like. However, the primary focus in the field had always been development, design only secondary.

This is still happening. In our team at Resume.io there is already a designer, but I often still do the design myself and write code for it. For example, now I am rebuilding the Resume.io blog.

After my bachelor's degree, I applied to St. Petersburg Academic University, but failed the interview. Then, I was sad for a while and decided to do my master's in Rostov-on-Don. I chose a "Computer Science" focus — a dual degree program. So, I could study abroad in Finland for a year and get a second degree there.

I have always been interested in international experiences. Throughout my childhood and primary school years, I lived in a small town, Yegorlykskaya (110 km away from Rostov-on-Don), with a population of 17,000 people. There were only three schools. I thought I knew everyone there.

At that time, I had no idea how people lived in big cities, worked for big companies, how everything was set up there, so I had a kind of thirst to see how different life could be.

In Finland, I was at a cafe on my birthday and my backpack, laptop inside, was stolen. I had to make money to get a new one. So I started freelancing, mostly on Upwork. Upwork is so specific that in a short period of time you can do a lot of things, because first you take on a bunch of contracts in a row and then you have to keep up with everything. The projects you do there may fit while you're at uni, but they don't last.

In the meantime, I did a test task for Mathrioshka, the group there did data analysis of urban environments. They took me, and in the end, I did my scientific work with them: we analyzed the accessibility of transport in Moscow.

While I was doing my research, some dude wrote to me on Upwork. Like, "I have an idea, let's do it together." Well, I explained that I couldn't take any work, because I was overloaded at uni until the end of the spring. I rejected his message, and he couldn't write to me via Upwork. But a week later, he messaged me on Skype and said he was willing to wait until I was free. It was Menno, our Resume.io co-founder from the Netherlands.

When I returned to Rostov, we got in touch and he told me about his plans. He wanted to build a spaceship that would not take off in a quirky way. I proposed building a plane first, which would huff and puff, but fly. He liked the plan.

Since I am engaged in both design and frontend, we just needed somebody for backend. Thus, I invited my friend Alexey Taktarov, our third co-founder and CTO now. Alexey, by the way, can do frontend and even design, too. At the last meet up he talked about design, which is quite rare for a technical director.

Over the summer, we launched the first version and got our first paying customers. At that time, Resume itself had not yet paid off, but we realized that we had created something working, something that could even make money.

Why did Menno pick you out of a lot of developers? Why was he willing to wait?

Good question. I haven't asked him, by the way.

Well, I'm pretty nerdy. I'm sure all the things you do need to be done carefully. Such features can not be appreciated when you're a kid, but come in handy when you've grown up.

In geography class, we had an assignment to draw warm and cold currents on contour maps. I spent a lot of time drawing straight arrows, just like in an atlas. The next day I show the teacher, I get maximum points, and then the dude with arrows somehow drawn with a pen gets the same. Well, something like this apparently happened at Upwork in April 2015, when Menno messaged me.

That's how I feel about everything. If we do Resume.io, then our service should be the coolest. If I'm making a portfolio, I'll look at the best examples. Often what is beautiful is actually just neat. I'm not a designer who does super original things, I'm someone who does functional and neat. That's how I designed my portfolio. I also had good reviews.

In the Autumn that I returned from Finland, after we had already launched Resume.io, I presented at a conference with such a strange topic like "How to live?" or "How to be?", something philosophical. For an hour and a half, I talked about how everybody just needs to be a nice person to live a good life. They need to be kind, responsible, communicate properly with people, and stuff like that. Actually, I still think this way.

How did Alexey appear in this story? How did you meet?

We became friends in university, because we had similar views on being calm and collected and doing things neatly.

He was interested in JavaScript and enthusiastically told me what you can do in it. Then he recommended me to Smartomato, we worked together, spoke at meetups. Then Alexey created Code Hipsters — a community of programmers.

"We promised him that we would do everything the best way, and leave no trace of any competitors. So, we kept our word"

Why are you interested in Menno's idea? A resume constructor is not a rocket, but rather a new bicycle, after all.

I had trivial, selfish goals. I had just returned to Rostov, wanted to freelance a lot, still didn't have big plans. Remote work in Rostov is bliss. You work for people sitting in offices far away and they pay you in dollars, you pay just 6% in taxes, and live happily ever after.

When we launched the first version of Resume.io, the project didn't have the money to keep Alex and me full-time. We spent a year doing other projects until Resume.io became profitable.

How did you go from hired developers to co-founders?
...

Full version originally published at 6nomads.com.

Distributed teams — the future that’s already come for the IT-industry

Lola Baltaeva — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 15:38:28 +0000

Originally published on our blog.

At 6nomads, we have developed a tool that helps hire remote workers, because we firmly believe the future lies with distributed teams. We were very passionate about promoting this idea, but were met with undefeatable resistance in the face of seemingly progressive managers. You might relate to them more than you expect.

In part 1, Control-freak managers are getting in the way of evolution, we talked about: why there are so few valid startups, like good weather days in London; offices disappearing the way of the pager; and, finally, why specialists aren’t as eager to work in IT-corporations anymore, and how no combination of baristas and cats will fix that. We decided that all of these problems stem from the hard-headedness of leaders and managers.

This statement is supported by the comments under our first interview on remote work:

Ware Wow: Why doesn’t the article mention the long list of companies that turned away from remote work or severely cut it. Personally, I’m not sure you can really squeeze the maximum out of people if they’re working remotely. Yes, the choice of specialists is a lot wider, but they change the work so that it accommodates them.

Whitesunset: Why squeeze the maximum out of people?

but

Squeezing more words out of a copywriter per hour will not make anybody rich. On the other hand, if it writes a great ad slogan, success awaits.
— Remote

Gleb Kudryavtsev, evangelist of remote work and product-manager of the kid’s branch at Skyeng, believes: those, who are not able to control a remote team are not effective leaders in the office.

If you’re not allowed to work remotely, it’s a wonder you get any projects at all. If you’re so unorganized, why are you able to talk to clients, write text for ads, design new products, rate inquiries about insurance payments, or do taxes?
—Remote

Remote work is a test of quality for any specialist, not to mention manager.

The thing is, office lords are often deceived when they see a room full of people, sitting at desks (who have no problem putting on very serious faces while browsing Facebook), place too much importance on organizational aspects (key cards, meetings, bureaucracy, etc), while remote work focuses on the result, not the process. When the spotlight shifts from the work to the result, all the little mishaps of the management and the workers start to show. Work cannot be imitated, just like a manager cannot be talked around.

Fooling colleagues is a lot harder than fooling bosses. When talking to a project manager, who doesn’t really know every twist and turn of programming, programmers can turn what could have been a routine task that would take up a max of thirty minutes into the equivalent of a week-long expedition to the North Pole. However, if a programmer hears the same fairytale, the ploy will immediately be out in the open. Fooling colleagues while working remotely is a lot harder.
— Remote

David Tabachnikov, CTO ScholarshipOwl, for example, has completely rejected the idea of limiting workers’ vacations. His team consists of specialists from 19 different countries, each one of which has its own policy on the length of workers’ vacation per year. It was a little weird to allow some 16 days for a break, while others get 36. That’s when the company decided against limits altogether.

However enraged control-freaks may be, no one slacks off, because remote workers are completely results-oriented and care a lot more about the fate of their project. They, themselves want to be kept in the loop. It just so happened that, on average, they take about 20 days of vacation, in David’s observations, they still check up on work documents and chats.

The same thing was reiterated time and time again by Richard Branson, Virgin Group:

I put it like this: “You need to see how much people have done, not how long they’ve worked. If we don’t have a strict 9 to 5 work day, then why would we need a strict vacation regime?”

Alex Korolkov shows discipline in a different manner — he limits workers’ access to work tools for the time they are on vacation, as a last resort, he could disconnect a worker altogether if there is noticeable, albeit, voluntary exhaustion, in order to prevent burnout.

After reading articles about failed remote work experiments it might seem as though the main reason they were unsuccessful is the loss of effectiveness and sudden appearance of laziness in workers. In actuality, underperformance is not the issue, overworking is the true enemy.
— Remote

Aside from hiring the best specialists, there’s also an issue when it comes to keeping them, as turnover in IT is an unbeatable occurrence. On average, developers in Moscow change their workplace once every eighteen months. When we talked to leaders of remote teams about turnover, most of them could barely remember any previous employees. CTO’s are all for getting rid of those who are simply not up to the company’s standards, and think that is one of the keys to the success of a remote team, whereas strong specialists don’t leave these kinds of teams on their own.

First of all, they hold on to working remotely on a project that’s interesting to them: there are still few quality offers, and managers, who are willing to hire remote workers and pay them a competitive salary are at a very clear advantage.

Second of all, on these teams, developers feel their own contributions a lot more, and that is often the determining factor. If you are a manager and are still convinced employees lean towards a larger salary, you know nothing about your subordinates.

Daniel Pink, author of “Drive: what really motivates us”, declares that, for example, in a creative profession, money is only one small part. Autonomy (ability to decide for oneself), the opportunity to become an expert, and mission (to be a part of something big) are the real currency.

When you work for a big company, you understand that you can be as cool as you want, make cool jokes, and still, some five levels above you there’s always that “director of something or other”, who ultimately decides what the product is going to be. In the end, you don’t feel useful at all.
— CTO Scentbird, Andrew Rebrov

We are genuinely happy if while reading this, you didn’t see yourself as that control-freak manager, which are sadly the majority. It’s disappointing how they stunt the development of their own companies and entrepreneurship, encouraging young workers to seek work elsewhere.

Playrix is a Russian game-development company, that doesn’t add to those reasons and attracts the best into their workforce. Thanks to their choice of distributed teams, Playrix has become one of the top 10 biggest mobile game development companies in the world and has undoubtedly become leaders in the CIS, at the same time planning to be on the same level as Blizzard. Take into account, that they’re a team of about 1000 and are open to hiring the best, wherever they may be — that sounds like a plan, instead of a strong, but unrealistic idea.

At Playrix, all teams are distributed: they consist of remote workers and those, who work in an office. This allows us to have truly strong and unique teams. If it wasn’t for this, these people probably would never have worked together.

With the way things are, it’s important to give people more freedom. We believe freedom gives way to creativity and optimizes our results. That’s why our colleagues may work wherever they please, they’re not tied to a specific location. The same goes for their work schedule: it’s whatever they make it. It’s been a long time since we’ve stopped tracking the hours during which they work.
— founder of Playrix, Dmitry Buhman

Every entrepreneur knows that in order to be successful, you need to do something, that no one around you is doing: like hiring the best or trusting your subordinates, but not being hard-headed managers with a ridiculous need for materialistic power — it’s pretty mundane.

People have this unique ability to exceed your highest expectations and be completely responsible, if you let them.
— Remote

Too often do we see bosses, who, nostrils flared, try to convince us that remote work is a dead-end, that their project (which is just so different from everybody else’s) is fundamentally incompatible and how they simply can’t hire a remote worker, when they could spend another three months searching for a candidate on their street. We could give you a long lecture on the simple tools and advantages of such a step, but instead we could just ask a completely boring question:

Today, in the 21st century, is two workers writing code in two different cities so much more inconceivable than the same two workers doing the same on different floors?