from Hacker News

Why Coinbase is now hiring remote engineers

by barmstrong on 12/12/15, 10:05 PM with 39 comments

• by shadow0 on 12/13/15, 4:21 AM

  Interesting. I interviewed with them once. Their interview process was pretty strange: after a technical round they wanted me to work full-time for them for a week as a next step. Wat? How do I do that if I have a job? Plus, it seemed like they pay their engineers way below the average. Not surprising they are having hard time hiring and had to move on to hiring remote workers.

• by millstone on 12/13/15, 6:54 AM

  I dislike working with remote engineers:

  1. Time zone differences are very real. A 14 hour difference only allowed for a brief window of reasonable real-time communication. Latency went from seconds to half a day.

  2. My project had a hardware component, and we could not easily assist each other with electrical or mechanical issues, or even things like firmware (e.g. "why won't this board boot?")

  3. Meetings were worse. Video conferencing often had technical problems, and we'd waste time trying to get it to work. Normal human interaction (body language, nonverbal cues, etc.) was lost. Remotes frequently interrupted, through no fault of their own.

  4. I came to resent the remotes for enjoying this unequal perk, one that inflicts a cost on the rest of the team. Why don't they have to sit in traffic and then in this noisy room with the rest of us? What makes them special?

• by drawkbox on 12/12/15, 10:46 PM

  But in the past year we’ve had a few engineers who needed to move (due to various life events). We didn’t want to lose them, so they became remote employees on our team. In some cases it worked really well.

  Remote work is a big part of the future in development. It is a big favorite of developers who are self starters, good communicators and deliverers.

  Over time it will take longer to build bigger things and people do indeed move in some cases every couple years for many reasons, doesn't mean they aren't as committed because they can't be within 2 hours of an office. Remote works biggest benefit is keeping a team of professionals on the team even if lives change and locations move, might even be a big advantage to those currently that can do it well.

  Every remote capable organization has better communication virtually and better external views of themselves. This is also key for working with clients/customers (almost always remote) and other offices (again remote offices in the same company). Remote work can even improve intra-office communication/information flow as many times even though you go to the office, you work with many people in the building or the building over remotely just closer in vicinity.

• by shawnps on 12/13/15, 6:22 AM

  I've worked remotely for the past year and it has by far been the most productive year of my career as a software engineer. I'm not sure if I will ever want to work in an office again. In my experience, when working in an office environment, people will interrupt you while you're in the middle of writing code. You'll be asked to attend meetings that are ultimately pointless. You'll feel bad about wanting to work from home or from a cafe. The amount of freedom and the feeling of finally being treated like a responsible adult that comes with working remotely is addictive to someone like me who just wants to code all day.

• by mpermar on 12/13/15, 5:00 AM

  In my view, onsite work is only good for two things:

  1. Team building. There is no doubt being around the office is good for socialising and creating stronger bounds.

  2. Stronger junior people or people that need direction. Many, many, many developers are only good when they have the superstars around. It's people that need direction and help. Having the stronger workers around make these other average workers stronger.

  If your team is made of superstars/hyper-professionals then there is no obvious reason not to be doing remote work. If on the other hand your team is mostly made of regular 9-5 workers, well, not doing remote work must just be the excuse for hiding some other bigger issue in the organisation.

• by iopq on 12/13/15, 5:44 AM

  "If you have a passion for bitcoin, a computer science degree, or experience with one of the languages we use"

  Doesn't mention which languages in the post. Am I supposed to know this?

• by ruffrey on 12/13/15, 4:41 AM

  I've had nothing but success working remotely on projects. It's all about having communicative remote people, having the onsite team use the same chat/screenshare/video systems. I can get so much done with absolute focus yet still come out for big meetings a few times per year. It gives flexibility to the onsite people to work from home occasionally, too. On a team with poor cohesion or a lot of strong introverts, it might not work.

• by phantom_oracle on 12/12/15, 10:49 PM

  Kudos to you for embracing the remote culture (partially).

  However, you should take it a step further and not "fly them out to visit HQ" but instead:

  Take the entire team out for some team-building and working from a different locale (you can stick to the US - as most remote-first companies do).

  Your company is not exactly the same as the next advertising-eyeballs SV startup, so perhaps getting out of the Silicon Valley hype-train and "pat each other on the back" environment, exploring a different area/wilderness will open your team up to greater innovation and lateral thinking.

  See Automattic for a reference-point of how to do it.

• by sanatgersappa on 12/13/15, 2:49 AM

  Great move. Love the 'self-starter' bit. People who need to be constantly monitored and told what to do aren't worth it, even if they're easier to hire.

• by zhte415 on 12/13/15, 9:24 AM

  This hiring practice far more suits an outsourced development system than hiring for a week per time.

• by navinp1912 on 12/13/15, 9:20 AM

  Can someone give similar hackerrank/job challenge + resume links for other orgs ?