Let me tell you something I learnt myself about remote job positions:<p>- Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use stupid filters like "the right fit" - which most of the time equates to finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1 who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best)<p>- As someone reading your blog post, even I did not make it past your full email text. It's just too long for HR to even bother. A shorter, concise, "get in your face" email sometimes works better<p>- HR filters are the worst way to get remote positions. You said you have friends working for remote-first companies like Github and Automattic - that should have been your first method of entry to go direct to the team itself and not need to get through HR first - if you're a great programmer and your friends know it, they will gladly recommend you
Thanks for sharing, remote job hunting is challenging. Some constructive feedback:<p>TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies unless they're directly relevant to the position.<p>Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others applying to the same position.<p>These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals?<p>Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend less than 30 seconds on yours.<p>Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that stands out.<p>Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.
Not to sound impolite at all, but your cover letter sounds more like a dating site profile than a cover letter for a job. Overly personal, a lot of irrelevant details. Too friendly.<p>Let your resume, portfolio, etc. do the talking.
I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely. That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.
I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer something I always wanted to do.<p>The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks.<p>Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that.<p>Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.
I've been searching for a remote position for 6 months, and I can relate to OP on a lot of this post. Methods slightly different.<p>I feel like I'm one of a huge crowd and being ignored completely is very common, even when I surpass all of their requirement check-boxes boxes, then some.<p>I spend a good amount of time on each cover letter, research the company, and email the CEO or a lead developer on the team. I very rarely get a response, but twice I got to the first stage and then it's as if I was forgotten.<p>I'm currently employed in a non-remote position, and I would be able to get a new local job with ease simply because I can walk in and talk to someone. I have gotten offers already, but I have a good list of reasons for wanting a remote position.<p>I'm persisting, but it's getting a bit tiring going this long at it.
To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine and not a human ;p).<p>It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars).<p>It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it.<p>Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.
Greece and California are ten timezones apart. I just don't see how you're ever going to get past that unless you're willing to be nocturnal (and you tell the companies you're applying to you're willing to work during their daytime). You're competing for the job with hundreds of people in the same or adjacent timezones.
>> I took back like 3 offers which lead me to the conclusion that the market of the remote positions is highly competitive and it's really hard to find the job that you would be happy enough.<p>That's interesting, I'd love to hear from others who agree/disagree with that.
The cover letter should have more direct language and be mostly about your skill-set.<p>You can also reach out to recruiters at those companies you like rather than going through the official website application.
I’ve been working remotely for the last 3 years, including for one of the top rememoré-only companies. I’ve also did freelancing sourcing clients on my own and working through a recruiter.<p>One thing which is surprisingly not as oftenly discussed here are other criteria besides pay taken into account when making a choice between remote and non-remote.<p>I’d like to make an argument that remote work works only for a particular use case: when you need to execute on a particular vision with some strict framework of action. You’d need employees who are highly senior (therefore autonomious) and have great communication skills.<p>Probably the main reason why I’m considering to move away from working remotely is the lack of challenging projects. Even though I definitely improved my engineering skills by working on projects and reading up blogs/books, I’d learn much more if I had direct interaction with other engineers which is impossible due to constraints of communication medium in remote context.
I find this, and many of the comments here interesting. I've been working on a mixed remote/office department for a few years now and lead a team (remotely, with a 3 hour time difference) which is mixed as well.<p>I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate than other teams in the company.<p>I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's experiences with remote managers/team leads.
When we hired for a remote position we received probably 100x the applications as when we hired in San Francisco. The pool of labor is much bigger and much cheaper.<p>Now we're hiring a full-time machine learning instructor, and I can't even imagine trying to find someone in SF. Even remote is difficult, but at least there are applicants.
To me, there is one extremely insightful comment on the original post. The commenter asked what the timezone of the remote positions were and if that had an effect on the applications and hiring team.<p>As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the world (8-12 hours difference).<p>Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or GMT-7, depending.<p>I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are not (all) coding robots yet.
The phrase "I am obsessed with clean and efficient code" should be rewritten. Most developers will not want to work on the same project as you; they will not want their code picked over for imperfections.
The pitch is way too long and fluffy. The first paragraph is basically about how nice the beaches are. That immediately puts me off (I am not currently at the beach, and neither are my colleagues). It is always better to open with facts instead of phrases that sound like marketing talk ("amazing beaches," "passionate doer," "great fit," "really love," "personal playground.") None of these are meaningful to your job performance.
I'm not a developer, but I've worked remotely for a long time as a freelancer and full-time, remote employee.<p>Here's my two cents (I edited your email):<p><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lARgp1zybe6sIAAmx9QUs/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/15sEbo_WKI1q1z3aZ-lELZ0lA...</a>
hey @kostarelo! Recognize you from the Node.js slack group as you were one of the first one's to join (i'm justin :wave:)<p>Anyway, IMO alot of other commenters here have given some really good feedback, so I won't elaborate on any constructive criticism. But if you'd like to chat sometime about potential opportunities, send me a message sometime (email is in my profile, or as you know I'm always on that Slack group). I have a few decent people in my network I can probably send your way.<p>I appreciate the post, was a good read :)
I'm on the other side of that coin! Do you know how hard it's been to find someone that is good at SRE/DevOps & wants to manage ESXi/VMWare Boxes and SANs/Storage?