Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find remote jobs in Europe?

I am one of these managers in Amsterdam with an international team of 10 people from 8 different countries who still writes code. My desire is to have a team that gets the job done. The most effective way for them to do this IMO is to have them sit together so that they can discuss issues they have immediately.<p>We are seeing effects of less effective communication of teams sitting just a few desks apart.<p>Remote work has great benefits for the remote worker - and having been one I know them as well. The downside is that when you&#x27;re building something complex the communication overhead is too big.<p>Another thing is that remote workers in vastly different timezones provide a time window for architectural discussions which can be too short. So they are never there when you need them and can only work alone.<p>I prefer to give my team members flexibility to run their personal errands and family issues but to have them on-site to have the shortest group communication paths possible.

I am entrepreneur (also studied engineering) in Europe. I have only worked remotely most of my life.<p>Main problem is bureaucracy. The US is a big place and it is United from West to East Coast.<p>In Europe, once you start making lots of money, every country you touch wants your money. So if you hire a French guy the French gobertment will love to tax YOUR ENTIRE business based on their socialistic views of the world, even when you are located in other country. Rinse and repeat with any country you touch.<p>Instead of focusing on the tech side of things you have to make an incredible effort with bureaucracy alone.<p>The advantages of remote working are very clear, but so are the disadvantages: People can goof all day or do the laundry, take care of the kids at the employer expense. The employer could also abuse taking extra hours of the employee for free.<p>For neither the employer or the employee to abuse each other or just being productive when nobody is watching you(directly, of course I know what my people are doing even when I am not in front of them)a series of techniques has been developed . It takes practice, effort and time for people to get used to it.<p>But yes, once you try it you will never want to go back. You can never eliminate the need to meet your coworkers from time to time(once a week or month) though.<p>Most business in Europe are old and big, they do what has been proved to work(in a pre Internet world) for decades. They move slowly, but they move.<p>Big companies operate over the principle of &quot;nobody ever got fired for doing what used to work&quot;. When they see success examples of other big companies doing remote working, they will follow. But today only a few jobs, like programming or personal assistants could be completely done remotely.<p>My advice is to create your own company and to take advantage of this problem, you know in the business world we call them &quot;opportunities&quot;. As remote communications improve this is going to explode.

I have asked myself the same question some time ago. I believe it comes down to (as some commenters below have already mentioned) the following, ordered by decreasing importance:<p>1. Legal issues: Hiring people across borders is a nightmare for both the employer and the employee when it comes to social deductions, taxes, health insurance, applicable labor laws, etc. And if you hire people <i>within</i> borders, many European countries are small enough that they could just as well commute to your office (maybe that&#x27;s also the reason why more remote work is available in Germany and the UK, being larger countries, as has been stated below).<p>2. No Silicon Valley: Let&#x27;s face it - most American companies will expect you to show up at the office every day just as they do in Europe. The exception are primarily the tech startups, and in the United States there simply are a lot more of them than in Europe.<p>3. Worker protection: I think hiring remote workers is inherently more risky than hiring on-site staff. You will have less control over your employees, you might even have less control over the hiring process (no on-site meeting), etc. In the United States, you can just try it - hire someone to work remotely, see if he or she can deliver and if not, just terminate the employment and go back to hiring on-site staff. In many European countries, getting rid of employees once you have hired them can be quite challenging and requires solid proof that they are not delivering what they should - and to make matters worse, getting that proof will also be much more difficult if they are working remote with less oversight.<p>4. Language issues: Yes, many people in Europe speak English (more or less fluently). Nevertheless, following conference calls in a language that is not your native language will be more challenging than following a face-to-face meeting, so language barriers become more pronounced when interacting remotely (at least in my experience).

My opinion based on my experience in France is that the workplace is more about appearing to be working than to actually do something useful.<p>So if nobody can see you working because you&#x27;re not in the building you&#x27;re not contributing to this illusion of work being done.<p>Where I &#x27;work&#x27; I have a manager that has to invent some crazy projects just to keep me occupied. If he didn&#x27;t do that I could work half a day every week and be done with it.<p>In my Visual Studio projects folder I have a bit less than 100 projects. Maybe 3 or 4 are actually needed by the company, 20 are test or toy projects and the rest nobody has ever used these programs past their presentation (not because they&#x27;re not good but just because they&#x27;re not needed).<p>I find it hard to stay motivated (and this is quite an understatement !)

First of all not everyone is suited for remote work. Remote work often means working from home (co-working space maybe) which makes it rather difficult to engage in social activities. While co-working spaces might make it easier it&#x27;s still more difficult. Also not everyone has the self-discipline and while you might argue that people also go to the office and browse HN all day others feel more motivated working in an office. Additionally the communication is way different. Emotions get lost in Chats and Skype calls. Last also due to bad audio quality.<p>Yes remote work can be good and advantageous for some, but it can also be bad.

I think any answer to this question will be speculative and opinionated. People have their experience and they have their preferences. The interpretation of one is based on the other. It&#x27;s like the open plan vs offices debate that springs up on HN every so often. Mostly what we have is personal preferences justified with &quot;facts.&quot; In reality I don&#x27;t think we have that kind of understanding of what makes people work well. Reality is complicated with short term and long term effects, feedback effects and adaption.<p>Those qualifications aside, I think (A) coding is uniquely well suited to remote work and (B) transitioning to remote work as a major way of working is a long cultural transition that companies will need to grow around. They&#x27;ll only do that if it&#x27;s advantageous enough and the process could take a generation.<p>Coding is well suited to remote work because it can be parceled effectively with clear responsibilities and deliverables. It&#x27;s like journalism in that sense. If you need to produce 2 articles a week and the articles are the output of your work, then it&#x27;s easy for everyone to understand that you did in fact contribute two articles and form an opinion of their quality.<p>The parts that are hard about remote working is structuring a culture that is able to cooperate without physical presence. Physical presence is a key feature of how we interact. Online discussions are different to face-t-face discussions. People travel international at great expense and inconvenience in order to do business face to face. It&#x27;s subtle buts adds up to a lot.<p>Maybe we are getting better at remote communication and collaboration. Maybe the ways we work can adapt to the environment of remote working. But, it&#x27;s a cultural shift.<p>Remote work is strange in the same way that remote parenting, remote dating or remote friendship is. At the end of the day, the relationship that will come out of a remote marriage will not be the same as a regular marriage. That may be OK for remote working. I am sure that some companies are making it their advantage, but it&#x27;s not a simple matter.<p>TLDR: If a company that exists in a building today decided to transition over two years to a company where people work from home, the company would probably fail. The transition is hard.

Isn&#x27;t the point of having a remote job to not care where the company is registered? Assuming you are in Benelux Area, what&#x27;s the point of looking for remote company from Benelux Area?

You&#x27;re most likely looking in the wrong place. The usual customary recruiting channels are setup to be usual and customary.<p>You need to find the remote job boards. Oh, and networking, networking, networking.

That would be a great opportunity to question your premises.<p>If nobody does what you have identified as the clearly superior way, either everyone is an idiot. Or you may be wrong.

I&#x27;ll give some reasons from personal experience (and I think it&#x27;s a global thing, not just European).<p>I pitched a partially remote team to a previous employer in Singapore and they were reluctant to try it initially.<p>First, they didn&#x27;t know what remote meant (except for that time they outsourced something to a cheap country and it was a costly disaster). So, had to spend some time explaining that. Not rocking the boat is quite valuable when you&#x27;re busy and worried - just keep doing what you know.<p>Second, a contractor is not an employee - contractors are services you buy piece by piece, whilst you &quot;own&quot; an employee (not pretty terminology but unfortunately often true) and you can milk that employee with a potentially infinite return on your finite investment. Is this a stupid thing to think, yes, but nevertheless I encountered it.<p>Third, it&#x27;s about control. It&#x27;s possible, but harder to micro-manage remotely (and in practice no sane contractor will accept it without extreme compensation).<p>Fourth, it&#x27;s also a hell of a lot easier for a &quot;consultant&quot; to &quot;end the contract&quot; when he&#x27;s fed up with bad management, than for an employee to move his entire life yet again (metaphorically if not physically). A consultant benefits from having had many &quot;clients&quot;, an employee is hurt by too many moves. These &quot;traps&quot; make an employee more pliable and invested emotionally (at least in managers&#x27; eyes) so the managers prefer employees.<p>Fifth, IP. Employee contracts usually sign over everything. Remote contracts, being for services, have more opaque IP agreements. This also applies to a lesser extent to security - that remote dude is working on a foreign network, foreign machine, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not saying these are desirable things, but these were my conclusions from experience. YMMV, different businesses have different cultures, etc. If you want to change your internal culture, I think these are the issues&#x2F;fears to address.<p>We ended up getting remote jobs because the test we put up for the job ended up not getting a single application locally, but dozens from all over the world. About half the folks who passed relocated, the rest stayed on remotely.<p>I&#x27;m now running my company completely remotely. We have a mailing address in London and Hong Kong and work from home. I see almost no reason to get an office. Unfortunately we&#x27;re also not hiring because we have a long waitlist of nice candidates that we will hire (remotely) as soon as we clear enough revenue. Maybe that&#x27;s the case for the other remote businesses.

I couldn&#x27;t agree more with jmnicolas - the situation is pretty similar in France, Switzerland, Belgium and Austria. There is some &quot;hope&quot; in UK and Germany, where they really expect to have something done.<p>There was a guy (can&#x27;t remember his name) who said that US is the only place where you can put US guys, Mexican, Chinese and ... (whoever) and make them work together. In Europe this is not the case, probably because of historical reasons and as a result of the last 30 years of immigration policy (especially the french-speaking countries).<p>My other theory is that Europe is left behind US in the technical area. If something is top-notch in USA, it will &quot;come&quot; in mainland Europe in 10 or more years. For e.g. now the MBA is hot trend.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve been working remotely for the last 4 years.

Based on working in the Benelux this is what I see:<p>- Requirements are often given on a very high level, you will need to be aligning with business owners and other teams on a daily basis, communication is easier with all these people in the same building. (i.e. you won&#x27;t be given a clear package to go off and work on on your own).<p>- If there is an existing team that you will be joining then the other team members will start asking why they are not allowed to work from home. (The reason for that is that in any large org they are needed for communications with other teams on a daily basis)<p>- If you are a contractor what is to say you are not working for another client? Much easier to keep an eye on you in-house.

I&#x27;ve had the discussion several times in the past with different managers, and it keeps coming back to &quot;person in chair&quot; as a metric for whether work is being done or not. It&#x27;s always a matter of trust, or lack of it, that an out of sight employee is getting work done. I don&#x27;t think that argument has any validity. If you don&#x27;t trust your staff to actually do their job you have bigger issues, and if you can&#x27;t measure them any better way than whether they&#x27;re sitting in a chair in an office, you can&#x27;t measure them at all (person-in-chair time does not correlate with productivity in my experience).

True. Although I have a mediocre GitHub profile, I receive about ~ 1 job offer (well some are interview offers) from recruiters every 1.5 - 2 months. Every single one of them was about relocation (UK or DE).<p>I&#x27;m not interested in relocation. If I could find a team that work with technologies that I like, I would accept a &#x27;lower salary&#x27; just to work part-time (~15 - 20 hrs&#x2F;week) remotely, then I would seriously consider joining, but that&#x27;s not the case in Europe, apparently.

I disagree with many of the assessments.<p>From what I see around me, there is a problem where internal communication channels and communication culture is not mature enough to support remote work.

Depends on the job of course. If instant communication is useful for the job, remote working is often inferior, as there is friction. For example training up a new employee is a great deal harder to do remotely, it&#x27;s much easier to shadow someone in person than via a screen share.<p>Also if the role requires some kind of client facing element, that rules out remote work.

I currently work partly remote: I go to the office for one day a week (8hr) and work the other 12 hours from home.<p>I like this arrangement as the day in the office also gives me insight into what else is going on, besides my immediate tasks. For example I may pick up on something that my coworker is spending a lot of time on that could easily be automated or a client request that may influence my schedule.<p>On the other hand the time remote gives me a chance to focus on harder issues.<p>What I like about the part-time aspect is that I can choose to just work when I&#x27;m focussed. If things are not moving as I like, I just stop working. This is also the disadvantage, because that way work spreads out over more days than it would if I would sit in the office.<p>In general I think the jobs are there, but you will probably have to know someone at the company that is already aware of your skills. Maybe first starting out as a contractor on a smaller project. (Assuming you would prefer a long-term job over contracting)

I used to love the idea of working remotely, but not anymore. I like working in a team, having the ability to bounce ideas off each other, make use of other people&#x27;s knowledge, ideas and skills. When you&#x27;re working remotely, you&#x27;re working much more on your own. It&#x27;s easier to get stuck, there&#x27;s a bigger hurdle to getting someone to look over your shoulder, and a bigger likelihood to just figure it out on your own, which may be educational, but can also take weeks when someone else might be able to help you out in minutes.<p>I was actually hired once to help out the lone Java programmer at the company who had been stuck for weeks. I sat next to him, asked the right questions, and within 2 hours, the problem had been solved. Just having someone there and ask questions or discuss options with; having someone to spar with, can save a lot of time.

You might want to start with filling out your Hacker News profile if you actually are searching for remote work.<p>Part of finding that kind of work is to do with marketing ;)

The theory that remote working is advantageous has the unstated premise that the thing being optimized for is wealth. In that theory, it makes sense to use methods that let people get their jobs done with minimum cost and distraction.<p>In reality, money is a weaker motive than power. When workers are on site, particularly in an open plan office, the boss&#x27;s brain receives reminders every hour of every day that he is wielding power over underlings. That&#x27;s not what everyone cares about most - but it&#x27;s the people who do care about that, who become bosses in the first place.<p>(In the West, it&#x27;s customary to maintain the fiction that it&#x27;s about money. Apparently in places like Japan and South Korea, they don&#x27;t bother with that fiction; you can spend your time in the office browsing Hacker News if you like, but if your boss is in the office seventy hours a week, you&#x27;ve got to be there eighty hours a week.)<p>As for what to do about it, as I see it the main strategies, in increasing order of difficulty and potential value, are:<p>1. Remember that remote work is not sensitive to location, and search the whole world for remote working jobs.<p>2. Become a contractor and look for clients who want goods and services rather than bosses who want underlings.<p>3. Start your own company and try to fix the problem for other people as well as yourself.

I think remote working works best when doing maintenance work on software. I can understand why companies don&#x27;t like remote workers when building new products from scratch.<p>I would like to emigrate in the next few years and work remotely for European companies and this is my intended strategy. Perhaps this is something you should try and maybe tell HN how that would work out for you.

Stop looking in a local area. Remote work is on remote work websites like wfh.io and remoteok. And upwork.<p>Also, this is a slow cultural transition as people learn about remote tools for collaboration and start to accept it. So within a few more years it will be different.

I know quite a few friend in Poland doing remote work... for US. Especially given higher IT salaries in the US than in Western Europe, it&#x27;t not that bad.<p>I do as well, but mostly freelancing contracts. The only thing that sucks is the timezone difference.

Anyone looking for a remote modern Perl job in Europe, email me at pete@perl.careers