Remote Teams: Feature Or Bug?
A founder’s thoughts on hiring
As the founder of a young startup, setting things into motion for your technical pipeline is one of the most important things you’ll work on. When you do, you’ll wade into the biggest debate of them all: hire a team in one place, or hire a team in many places?
There are pros and cons and what you pick depends entirely on who you are as a founder, what work you previously did, how deep your networks and your technical know-how are. Here at Wobe we’ve taken the decision to go mostly distributed. Here’s why.
I’ve spent more than a decade working and travelling across India. India made more sense for me, for personal reasons, than say, Vietnam, Philippines, Belarus, or anywhere someone in my position might end up. If you’re better connected elsewhere, good for you: no one size, or one place, fits all.
I have some experience managing dev teams in a previous life. Not completely a stranger to the idea of remote work, in the first company I founded and ran (a dev shop), we built and shipped websites, apps and games for government agencies and multinationals. Many people worked remote. I learned a lot from it.
If you use fairly new tools, like we do, there isn’t one single place with the right pool. We use Golang and React Native in production; have a fairly complex microservices architecture; based on a messaging queue system (you can read more about our setup here), it didn’t make sense to me to put all my hiring eggs in one basket. By being open to the idea of having some team members work from wherever they are, we are able to cast our net wider and be able to hire more people who fit the bill.
Speaking of fitting bills, hiring remote also helps us stay open to the possibility, one we very much encourage, seek out actively and try to instil across the organization: that sometimes, we have to be actively looking for someone who does not look like a typical engineer. We are very proud to have gender and racial diversity, even as the small and young team that we are.
Tech industry folks split down the middle on this question: local or remote? (Some of the earliest advocates are the good folks over at 37signals)
I prefer the middle ground here. (Caveat: this is my first time going about creating a hybrid remote / local team. I may share my learnings as I go.)
We now have the semblance of the beginnings of a locally based engineering team in Bangalore, headed by our VP of Engineering, Param Ponnaiyan. Our presence in this city gives us access to the engineering talents from the colleges here, as well as from nearby states. The desirability factor of working for a startup in Bangalore is also helpful for us to attract talent nationally. In May this year, we start our inaugural internship program out of Bangalore. I have high hopes this program will help us create a hybrid local/remote workforce. We have a number of other folks elsewhere, and the team is growing.
So who gets to work remote and who doesn’t? I’m still figuring this out as we go. We work in Asia, where the idea of entirely remote teams hasn’t fully caught on.
We start with this. As a rule of thumb, if you’ve worked in a remote setup before and have done so successfully, it would be easy to make that call. Or if your skill sets and your values align with ours, we want you in our team wherever you happen to be.
We’re hiring now for a Senior React Developer, and you can be anywhere. I want to hear especially from women, non-binary people, people of colour and anyone, really, who feels they don’t fit in a checkbox. You can email me personally at adrianna [at] wobe.io, telling me a little bit about who you are and why this is interesting along with your GitHub profile, and I’ll put you directly into our hiring pipeline.
