Downsides of remote hiring are very understated
Love this site. Thanks for putting it together! We follow most of these concepts at Gruntwork. However, I think the "disadvantages" section is understated. In the spirit of transparency and honesty, there are a few other drawbacks that should be called out:
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Hiring in multiple countries is much more complicated and expensive due to the need to meet the legal, tax, and HR requirements in each. You either have to establish subsidiaries in each location or pay PEOs, both of which take lots of time and money, and are especially hard for small startups. Mitchell Hashimoto, one of the HashiCorp co-founders, has a terrific write-up of all the complexity this entails: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563
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Working remotely makes it harder for some people to stay focused and motivated. When you're sitting next to a team and everyone is working hard, this can happen automatically; but when most of your work is done alone, it's easy to get distracted, bored, or lonely. I know the current website calls out loneliness a bit, but I'd emphasize it more; remote work is not for everyone.
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When a team is spread across many time zones, in-person time is rare and tricky to schedule. This makes it harder to bond, have complicated conversations, do pair coding, and so on.
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When you work in an office, you have lots of serendipitous conversations (e.g., at lunch, in the hallway), and a lot of bonding and important ideas come from these seemingly unimportant chats. With remote work, these sorts of things are much more rare. Yes, you can do video calls, but those typically need to be scheduled (so they aren't serendipitous), and that's especially tricky across time zones.
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Celebrating wins is trickier as a distributed team. If people are thousands of miles apart, you can't just take everyone out to lunch or to a fun outing. You can't even do so much as a high five or a pat on the back. Verbal and written praise help, of course, but aren't quite the same thing.
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You may save money on a central office and commuting, but some people don't want to work from home (either due to distractions or too much mixing of work and home life), so we pay for co-working spaces for some of our employees, and they still commute to those.
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Bonding over video chat and writing is hard. We share plenty of laughs via video calls, but it's just not the same as spending time in-person. Therefore, we fly everyone in the company out to a common location a few times per year for in-person work (recent trips for us have included Iceland, France, Ireland, and a few places in the US). These trips help a lot with team bonding, and we have lots of fun and do lots of useful work while we're there, but it costs a fair bit of money, takes a lot of planning, and can be complicated for employees who have to make plans with family while they go away.
Despite these drawbacks, I think in net, remote work is still worth it, but it's important that future founders/managers that read this website have a clear picture of the trade-offs!