Great initiative!
It seems like remote working is becoming more of a thing lately, which I think is aweseome, after ~7 years in the it-business I've made myself the promise of never taking a mandatory 40h/week inside-the-office-job again. So kudos for helping getting remote offers out there.
That said, I always cringe when I see the "employer confidential" flag on job postings...
I for one would never apply for a job (or even make the first contact) at an anonymous company. The demand for engineers seems to be high enough for me (anyone) to at least be able to check out the work of a potential employer before making contact.
Glad you like it. I've been working independently for about 5 years now and never plan to go back unless it's something really special (maybe SpaceX's Mars project :). Even then I'd want to be able to work remotely.
Point taken regarding company anonymity. Seems a lot of people have issue with that. I added that "feature" in just because I saw it on other jobs sites (e.g. authenticjobs) and felt that not having it would exclude certain potential companies from posting an ad. On reflection though, I agree with you that knowing which company you're applying to would be better so I'm going to make company information mandatory from now on.
Happy to say that as of now no new "Company confidential" job ads will appear on the site (existing ones will still remain until they expire). Company name and URL are now mandatory.
I applied for an anonymous company once. It was also a remote job. They had this website with all kinds of stuff about how great they were, based on a survey of their employees. But no real information.
Their application was one of the more onerous, asking all kinds of questions, but I put up with it. It took me about an hour to complete.
The promise made on the website was "once we get your application, we'll send you an email with info about the company".
Well, I got an email... and in it was several more questions, plus the comment "we're in europe so we're used to paying european salaries, are you willing to work for less? How much will you work for?" ... but no information about the company.
Won't be doing that again. They basically just wasted my time.
At the same time, some companies that formerly embraced remote employees have decided that it's better to have them under one roof. Recent notable examples: Yahoo and Reddit have told all of their remote employees to relocate or find a new job.
It's management instinct to want to see people. IF they can't see you, I think they feel that maybe you're slacking off. (Of course, the manager never sees you when you write a bunch of code in the middle of the night because you didn't get any real work done in the office.)
These changes, particularly in the Yahoo case, reflect poorly on those managers in my mind, not on the concept of remote work.
The ideal programming environment is effectively remote- every engineer in their own office, with multi-party audio or video (e.g.: google hangouts) for collaboration.
If your primary cost is engineering staff, why would you make them %50 less effective when they're working and on top of that take 2 hours out of their day each day for a stressful commute?
If your primary cost is engineering staff, why would you make them %50 less effective when they're working and on top of that take 2 hours out of their day each day for a stressful commute?
Because the engineers are not the ones doing the accounting or managing. The accountants and managers do. It's similar to how social events tend to be planned by socially-focused people, which is how a shy and/or introverted person can end up being dragged to a noisy bar for their birthday.
I think it's more about cultivating culture. It's almost impossible to build culture with 80% of your staff working remotely on different timezones. There are ways around it but it's just way better to see your team.
I disagree. Denying that online cultures exist is just as silly as denying that quality software cannot be written by remote people. You've just posted to a very distinct culture.
All of my remote gigs have had very different cultures. People communicated, friends were made, etc, etc.
Yahoo was a bit of a freak case. They literally had NO way of telling what people were doing. I don't mean 'they didn't have a system that monitored every keystroke', I mean they had NOTHING. Not even a way to say "did this person complete some problem tickets?" Not sure what happened with Reddit, I hadn't heard of them getting rid of remote workers. Odd because Reddit is exactly the kind of site I would expect to benefit massively from having pretty much the entire staff be remote.
That said, I always cringe when I see the "employer confidential" flag on job postings...
I for one would never apply for a job (or even make the first contact) at an anonymous company. The demand for engineers seems to be high enough for me (anyone) to at least be able to check out the work of a potential employer before making contact.