How digital tramps have evolved from exotic to ordinary

Companies are tightening their belts and expanding the area of ​​employment - this year, and in subsequent years

When GitHub launched its code storage for programmers in 2008, a small team of this project communicated mainly through instant messaging. They did not have an office. “Chat was our office,” said GitHub founder and his former CEO, Tom Preston-Werner, in an interview with 2013.

At first, the GitHub team consisted of remote employees for reasons of economy. Over time, Preston-Werner began to perceive this state as a tactical advantage. Ubiquitous hiring allowed GitHub to recruit people outside of a narrow group gathered in Silicon Valley - a geographically diverse group on a global scale. “It left an imprint of distribution on our way of thinking,” he said in the same interview.

Three years later, GitHub became a leader in distributed work. Although the company has its headquarters in San Francisco, about 600 of its employees are scattered around the planet: 44% live in the San Francisco Bay area , 35% are scattered around the United States, 20% live in other countries. But, whether or not they are distributed, GitHub recently got rid of 5% of employees to concentrate on corporate sales. GitHub workers got the opportunity to work flexibly, both from the US and from around the world, which pushed the movement towards distributed work.
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With the increasing globalization of the US economy, we can expect that technical start-ups and big companies will be hiring people for remote work more and more quickly. There is already a whole group of techno-companies with a distributed workforce - besides GitHub, these are Wordpress, Basecamp and Genuitec. This trend, according to company directors and other experts, will develop in the near future - especially with the development of technologies that allow employees to communicate with headquarters without problems.

A bold prediction, but he has a lot of evidence. Investors are tightening their belts, and startups are already feeling that they are pressing out. As the Wall Street Journal noted that year, many believe the situation will worsen. Therefore, to create a business, the founders of startups have to spin. Lower costs and hire more talented people just by allowing them to work from anywhere? It is just a sensible money order.

The data confirms such conclusions. The number of remote access workers increased by 5.6% from 2013 to 2014, from 3.4 million to 3.6 million, according to Global Workplace Analytics. At the same time, in 2005 there were only 1.8 million such people - that is, in less than 10 years their number doubled. At the same time, analysts say that a typical remote worker is not a 20-year-old programmer: the average employee at a distance has graduated from college, he is 49 years old, and he earns $ 58,000 a year. 3/4 of all remote workers earn more than $ 65,000 per year, and income includes 80% of all US employees, including office workers.

This has not always been the case. A few years ago, business leaders questioned remote workers, considering that employees scattered everywhere worsen the corporate climate. Marissa Meyer, head of Yahoo and one of the most senior critics of remote work. In 2013, she banned employees from working from home. She was convicted of this, and she had to defend her decision in an interview with Fortune: “Remote work is not suitable for Yahoo now,” she told the magazine.

But everything has changed, especially in 2016. “I think that a new attitude to distributed teams has emerged as a tricky approach, and that start-ups have the advantage of hiring talented employees for little money,” said Megan Queen, general partner of the venture capital firm Spark Capital. She regularly collaborates with companies that do not find the people they need to compete for talents in California. They “connect to the flow of talent in Canada, they have a great support team in Arizona, and sales people in Austin,” she continues. “Now this is a company resource.”

Anne McCarthy, a programmer for the Automattic web development company that supports the Wordpress blogging platform. After graduating from North Carolina University in Chapel Hill in 2014, McCarthy began working as an employee in the distributed Automattic team. The company talks about its employees in this way: “We are a distributed company, our 514 employees work in 52 countries and speak 70 different languages.”

Using this structure allows you to satisfy McCarthy's passion for travel. She prefers to co-working renting apartments through Airbnb, although sometimes there are problems with wi-fi. Her international team told her about life in Greece and in Buenos Aires. McCarthy believes that her remote status is good for the company. Employees living in different places can learn about the needs of certain communities. This leads to natural diversity, unlike office workers living and working in one place.

Julio Avalos, GitHub's business director, agrees with this, explaining that hiring people from the same locality is often limited to similar views of employees. “In terms of talent and diversity, you are limited, and that means your product is limited,” he says. “To meet the needs of customers of different nations, companies need workers from different places.”

No one says that such a business is easy to create and maintain. During conversations with companies with distributed employees, GitHub, Mozilla, and Automattic, the managers listed a set of difficulties — these are communication problems, isolated employees, inefficiency. Overcoming distances requires a separate infrastructure to combat geographic diversity.

For GitHub, this means having to rely on chat and e-mail so that employees who do not visit headquarters feel united with the team. You also need to build your platform to simplify access to the knowledge base. For example, GitHub supports a virtual map, on which it is noted where and when employees of the company operate a globally digital version of an office map. Quin says technology development helps improve remote communication, although there is still a lot to be improved. “We don’t have the perfect video conferencing system,” Quinn describes today's toolkit for working with distributed employees. She advocates a bold prediction about what could be a new technology to simplify the lives of such teams. "It may be virtual reality."

If technology is not developed right from the start, teams may suffer from it, as communication and productivity fall. This is evidenced by David Slater, vice president of Mozilla. Mozilla’s distributed work flow naturally arose from a volunteer-based business model. The company employs 1,100 people from 24 countries of the world, while 43% of paid employees work remotely. This is not to mention the "tens of thousands" of volunteers from around the world. This means that volunteers work together with staff to provide their abilities, from programming to social events.

The company spends resources on making foreign workers feel at home in a cultural sense. For example, Mozilla allocates money for travel in order to personally meet other employees. Slater says that such experience is critical to maintaining corporate culture. There are also general meetings where all employees and a significant part of volunteers gather to help stimulate the relationship of the company's employees. “It's very important to record everything,” says Slater. These can be online postings made to share knowledge. “Our internal Wikipedia is becoming something like a water cooler, where you can chat,” he says.

But, although home-based work has its advantages, how to secure work if it becomes long-term? As we wrote in March last year, it is not so simple. For example, at Lyft, customer support jobs were transferred to less expensive parts of the country, including Nashville. Employees have fewer opportunities to advance in the service or get company shares. In general, they were considered consumable.

It remains to hope that truly distributed companies, in which managers and experienced workers work together with newcomers and support those who work from comfortable Internet cafes in the United States and abroad, can provide growth in other countries. Then we can witness a technical boom that doesn’t nestle within the San Francisco Bay borders.