How to get a remote job

There's a recent trend of widely dispersed teams working with the help of the Internet and communication technologies that run on top of it.

A couple of books have been published on this topic: The Year without Pants and Remote. The former is a narrative of a former Microsoft manager's work for Wordpress, which has a globally distributed workforce. The latter is a justification that could be used to try and sell remote work as a concept to management or a work team.

I'm currently working mostly-remotely for a Silicon Valley employer. Here's how I did it.

First, I used the Modern Job Hunting Hacks techniques I describe elsewhere on this blog. Often this is all that's required; in particular many recruiters ignore the 'I am only looking near Seattle' flag and send job listings from other places. For jobs that look interesting I reply "I can't move but could go for a month and then work remotely" and sometimes this works, as in this case. It's always worth a try.

Until I got this job I also started scanning two job listing sites: We Work Remotely and StackOverflow. StackOverflow has a very useful allows remote checkbox and generally more listings than We Work Remotely, though the latter is growing and has (currently) a higher proportion of non-programmer jobs than does the other site.

There are also niche sites for specific skills/interests, for example Django Gigs.

Caveats about remote jobs: you have to create your own structure and your own opportunities to socialize. For an extrovert this can be like being sentenced to solitary confinement! Get out there and have lunch with a friend!