How many companies are 100% distributed? (Research Summary)
[post updated 1/9/18, originally posted 2/2013]
One common question about The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work is how many other companies are primarily distributed, with a majority of employees working remotely. WordPress.com is among the most well known, with over 200 employees all working from wherever they like on the planet. But how many others are there?
Here’s are some companies we’ve identified. If you know of others please leave a comment, and note how many employees the organization has, and what % are distributed. You can also read the FAQ of questions about the book, many of which are about remote work trends and WordPress.com’s example.
- Basecamp (formerly 37 Signals)
- WordPress.com/Automattic (245 employees)
- Genutec
- GitHub (100 employees)
- Kalypso LP
- MCF Technology Solutions
- ProofHQ
- Treehouse
- Copyblogger (source)
- YouNeedABudget
- StackExchange (50/50)
- MySQL (70/30)
- GrantStreet
- SoftwareMill
- Mozilla
- 10up
- Devrix
- Art & Logic (70 employees)
- AsmallOrange
- LullaBot (35 employees)
- AppendTo (23 employees)
- UniversalMind (65 employees)
- Basho (115 employees, 50% remote)
- ScrapingHub (60 employees)
- UpWorthy (37 employees)
Related:
- Inc.’s list of 125 mostly or all remote companies [new]
- A similar list, crowdsourced
- Traditional companies with liberal telecommuting policies can be found here.
(First edition of this post written by: Shawn Prenzlow)
You are missing all the Linux distribution companies. RedHat (which is public) and Canonical for example. Both are quite globally distributed, though Canonical seems to have far more distributed employees (at least as a percentage of the total) than RedHat.
You also forgot Mozilla. I’m not sure whether its employees are employed by the foundation or the for-profit side, but they certainly make a lot of money and many of them are fully remote.
Thanks Jack. Do you know of any references on distributed work for any of the companies you mentioned?
Redhat list “many remote employees”, but their job page is centered on jobs at specific offices:
http://jobs.redhat.com/locations/
Here’s an employee’s take on Canonical:
http://beuno.com.ar/archives/114
Canonical’s job postings are pretty good about listing remote positions (and most seem to be remote). RedHat isn’t as much. Often you have to click through to the listing to find out if it allows remote even though it specifies a location.
Mozilla operates almost entirely openly, so poking around may the site may net you some good information.
While my employer is far from being truly distributed, many projects are. At one point all 5 members where sitting in different cities. And working from home is not frowned upon, so that adds to the distribution.
Who is your employer? :)
Grant Street Group (www.grantstreet.com) is about 80 employees (give or take) and the entire development team (25+) from the CTO down is distributed. About a third of the rest of the company is also distributed, including the CEO.
IIBA is a non-profit professional association, but other than that we meet your criteria (29 employees distributed across the U.S. and Canada, no physical head office).
I work for a company that is 100% distributed, but we don’t meet your criteria because there are only 7 of us. I wouldn’t characterize us as anything close to a “home-based business” though.
Thanks for mentioning your company. The criteria is soft, but it’s useful to know company size.
Art & Logic software development has been fully distributed since its founding in 1991. We have around 70 developers/designers/QA/etc scattered around the US and Canada. There is a physical office in Pasadena where the bills get paid, but other than that, we’re fully disaster-proof.
IMO, fully remote is awesome. Fully co-located is awesome. (I prefer the former). Mixing the two creates the weird dynamics and tensions that make a lot of people wrinkle their noses at the idea of remote workers. When your company’s culture and shared space is completely online, there’s less opportunity to develop any kind of an ‘us vs them’ problem.
I think you are right. The border is the most likely area of conflict. Often the conflict takes the form of the co-located people feeling that their remote counterparts are making things more difficult for them and non-colocated people feeling less integrated with the rest of the team. Best antidote for such problems is to clarify the expectations early on. To me the clearest rule of thumb if there’s a single non co-located person in a team, the whole team should work as a dispersed team.
SpiderOak https://spideroak.com
One of our competitors is fully distributed, but they don’t advertise this to their clients because they’re concerned with the perception. I don’t want to “out” a competitor, but I can confirm that in my industry (HR services) the bigger players love having prospective clients in to their offices to demonstrate their size and stability.
EllisLab (http://ellislab.com) makers of ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter are 100% distributed.
Coffee & Power http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/coffee–power-258-guys-in-a-garage/10793
I’m going to love seeing the whole list and seeing Scott’s thoughts.
…and for history.. in the old days when Verifone was independent, they were described as a chocolate chip cookie org design (everyone where they needed to be and an office address just for the SEC).
My employer, Opscode, (www.opscode.com) is distributed. While we do have a company headquarters in Seattle, much of the company resides across the United States. I believe this is the same type of setup that GitHub has, where they have a company headquarters but most of the company lives else where.
However, I can’t tell from your post however what you mean by distributed. Does having a headquarters that is a physical office disqualify a company, even if > 50% of the company works remote or doesn’t have to come into the office if they don’t want to?
We’ve been struggling with a precise criteria. For this list we’re happy to be loose. Anyone who thinks they’re distributed by their own definition is good enough :)
Then Opscode counts.
Guess I should back up my assertion about my employeer by linking to the careers page where it says it doesn’t matter where you live (ironically, you need to scroll down to the section about Seattle to read this)
http://www.opscode.com/careers/
Also, your link for GitHub in the article links to Genuitec.
Thanks Mark. Fixed.
Balsamiq, the mockup-software maker, is distributed, although they are a few shy of 20 people.
http://www.balsamiq.com/company
Hi Shawn & Scott,
I work for a company called You Need a Budget, and we’re totally distributed. I live in Australia, the lead developer is in Italy (and Texas occasionally), the Boss is in Utah, along with his PA (who works from home) and the COO. We have developers in Pakistan, Scotland, Switzerland, and Maryland and Nevada in the US, as well as teachers and QA staff in Canada and various US states (Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona, and possibly New York as of next week). Oh, and our UX/UI/Designer/Artist is in California. I think that’s everyone…
http://www.youneedabudget.com/company/team
I think we have 19 people, but that should go up by one in the next week or so, so we will hit your criteria then ;)
And if you are interested in checking out the method and software, let me know, I’m more than happy to hook you up with a copy – we’ve got plenty of use out of your output to make it more than worth our while :)
Cheers!
I don’t know if IBM would qualify, but their Global Services division allows remote work). I don’t work there, I just know a few people who telecommute.
Masterworks (http://www.masterworks.com/) is a for-profit company of ~100 with employees working from our Poulsbo and Seattle office, 5 other states + Mexico.
Check out Smiley Media (www.smileymedia.com), where I work as Product Manager. We have people all over the globe.
We are not 100% distributed at Collective (www.collective.com), but we do have a healthy mix in Engineering. Our headquarters are located in NYC, but we have developers working remotely from Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia and Florida in the states and internationally from Canada, Austria and India. I am the VP of Engineering and work remotely myself.
Percona is a brilliant example.
The obvious one that comes to mind for me was MySQL, pre Sun acquisition. At the time of acquisition, there was an official HQ, but essentially every engineer worked remotely from home.
Depending on your definition, Sun Microsystems may also have met the criteria prior to the Oracle acquisition. At the end, about 55% of employees were working “flexibly” which was defined as not having an assigned office and working at 2-3 days a week at home.
In my own case, I was officially based at the large Sun campus in Broomfield, Colorado. In reality, I was “home based” in Lyons, about 45 minutes away, and supporting teams in Boston, Belgium, Prague, St Petersburg, and Menlo Park. Some of those were engineering teams sitting in an office, but even then, there was a fair bit of work from home behavior. Only about 5 of the people I supported, out of a team of ~800 were actually in Colorado, so it was exceedingly rare that I actually went to the office I was officially based at. (In contrast, I spent 10x the time in Menlo Park.) It became so extreme that the HR community in Broomfield (of which I was a part) implemented “work from work” every couple of weeks in which we’d all agree to go to the office for the day and then out for happy hour to maintain some semblance of community.
So, was I “distributed” or part of the campus? Depends on your definition. Any job listing would have suggested that I was part of a multi-thousand person campus. My personal reality was of being a distributed employee operating as a “digital nomad”.
We have 15 people in 3 states. One employee is outside the US. Everyone works from home. We have clients all over, but mostly near DC, which is not anyone’s definition of nirvana :) http://www.staffingadvisors.com
My current employer, Pat Deegan PhD & Associates LLC is 100% distributed. There are 8 of us currently (only 2 engineers).
Percona seems largely distributed (ex-MySQLers) http://www.percona.com/about-us/careers/percona-lifestyle
My team at Cisco has a combination of offices and individuals spread across San Jose, San Bruno, Austin, Tennessee, Florida, London, two cities in Ukraine, Tokyo, Sydney and probably a few others I don’t know about. While we do in fact have an office presence available to most employees, we mesh well with several employees who do not have a conventional office, and simply work from wherever they are. We are, in a sense, a hybrid model which values the traditional opportunity of having offices but which has also successfully incorporated the remote work lifestyle.
I am presently at work from my home office in Sunnyvale, near San Jose. I think for a company like Cisco, finding value in remote work is, to some degree, eating our own dog food in terms of security, network, and collaboration products and services. (Not too unlike Automattic. ;)
We are 100% distributed at SoftwareMill (www.softwaremill.com).
Actually, the company is distributed from the day of its establishment and we are soon 20 people – all working from their homes. We develop custom software solutions for clients from the US, Australia and Europe.
We are located in 8 different cities across Poland. Some of us have moved abroad temporarily (UK, Germany). Our graphic designer is currently in Mexico travelling and working at the same time (according to the idea of slow travel).
We meet regularly in person. Every month we spent together one or few days doing different things. Recently, we’ve had a trip to Berlin. Previously we’ve been baking cookies, playing CS or having a photo session.
Also, we have developed our own technique for effective and fun online company meetings. Every day all of us (20 people) join for a call of around 20 minutes. We start by reporting what the current moods in all of the projects are. Additionally everyone answers a random question (e.g. “What have you learnt recently?” or “Tell us a funny story from your childhood”). This works really well for keeping everyone up-dated while really socializing.
You can listen to our CEO being interviewed about working in dispersed teams here: http://www.wideteams.com/2013/02/20/episode-71-tomasz-szymanski-of-softwaremill/
Remember the Milk (www.rememberthemilk.com) is “work from anywhere.” They have employees throughout the world, were founded in Australia, but now based in San Francisco.
However they too are under the 20 employee mark. But they’ve been successfully doing it that way for over seven years.
Another (non-tech) company is YouNeedABudget.com. Not sure how many employees they have. But they are rather small as well.
Mozilla, as mentioned, is interesting. I write about the for-profit MoCo side and do not know the Mozilla Foundation. MoCo has an official policy of no HQ because they have offices world-wide. In practice, Mountain View was the obvious HQ until their CEO decided he’d rather work from San Francisco. They opened a small office in SF and saw a flood of people sign up to work out of the SF office. Surprise! So they leased more floors in SF, closed a floor in MtV, and rebalanced their office space based on where their workforce prefers to show up. Some jobs require face-to-face contact (ex: the IT staff sometimes needs physical access to stuff to fix it) but many jobs do not, and that is the metric for whether you should show up a lot, a little, or work entirely remotely as many engineers do. There is a new hire section for Mozillians that details how to work with remote coworkers and how to work remotely yourself. It even gets into practical tips like: get up at the same time every day and take a shower, as you will feel like you are at work more and be happier overall. Every employee is required to have video chat software installed. I worked for a team that was half in SF, half in MtV, with one remote employee. MoCo offices of any size have space for people to drop in and work. The MtV and SF folks would frequently switch where they worked for a day based on what was convenient (catching up with the rest of the team, other meetings scheduled near by, even social plans.) When you never really know where everyone else will be on a given day, it’s just as easy to vidyo in from home as from an office. People would go to the office because for a given project, they were more productive there. Plus… maybe it’s just me, but I liked my coworkers. I liked being around them. We brainstormed well together, and I did better work for talking with them at a whiteboard. But when it was time to focus in and just grind stuff out, nothing beats going into a cave at home for a few days. And that was cool too. We were all connected over IRC, at minimum, so it’s not like you couldn’t find people if you wanted to. My team didn’t have major time zone issues, but lots of MoCo groups do, especially with the community members who contribute patches from all over. When I was on skype at 6 am or 11 pm, I sure wasn’t heading into an office first. Bottom line: I loved working there. The flexibility was certainly part of what I loved, but it was a symptom — the whole organization is just unusually sane. Very little process for process’ sake, very little friction, and managers think they’re paid to help their employees do their best work rather than try to exert top-down control. It all flows together.
SUSE (http://www.suse.com/), the company I work for, is pretty much distributed. While we have a HQ in Nürnberg and a development center in Prague, we have lot of people working from home permanently, in multiple countries (Germany, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Spain, USA,…). Employees working in normal offices also often work from home when they need or fell like it.
It works pretty well for us, largely because lot of work we do is on various open source projects (e.g. Linux kernel, GNOME,…), which are naturally distributed. This means there is a good communication infrastructure in place (IRC, mailing lists,…) and our developers are used to non-personal modes of communication.
We (A Small Orange) meet all of the criteria. We have an office in Durham, NC, but only a small percentage of our ~60 people live anywhere near it. Beyond NC, we have people in a bunch of states and several countries.
I own 10up, a high end full service web agency that is WordPress centric and services clients like AOL, Conde Nast, Time, Juicy Couture, Trulia, and EMC. We just hired our 23rd full time employee and are close to hiring our 24th. 100% distributed with employees all over the US across a dozen states. And very much for profit.
The company I work for, Intridea, meets the “Harder Criteria” you set out.
http://www.intridea.com/
We have employes mostly in the US, but also some in Europe and China.
Recently we did a project to highlight the time we save from not commuting.
http://yourtime.intridea.com/
We’re a company of about 35+ that I would say is 100% remote. We have developers in Argentina, Montana, Vancouver, Austria, San Diego, the Netherlands, France, etc. We have 3 small hubs – 7 people in NYC, 4 people in Victoria, CA and 4 people in DC. There isn’t one project or product team that isn’t working with remote colleagues. Most people in the hubs work from home at least part of the week. I appreciate the flexibility, but it’s challenging..especially when NYC internet can be..unpredictable.
Hey guys,
I love this post!
Had almost given up hope of the promised land ;)
Our company, Rocketgenius, is distributed. We are the developers of the premier WordPress form solution… Gravity Forms. While our entire company is not distributed, we do have an office and local employees, we have a flexible work environment and we also have employees who work remotely. Including several that are international.
Our company, WebDevStudios, is 100% distributed – a team of about a dozen, at the moment.
5 out of 5 of our staff at Rocket Lift (http://rocketlift.com/) work from home, spread across three different U.S. states. We meet criteria #2 and #3, and will meet criteria #1 betore year end if we sustain our current rate of growth.
I’m very interested in this research. Considering how much our approach to distributed work has been informed by articles on Auomattic, 37signals, and Github, I’m excited at how much more we can learn from the other companies on your list.
Please correct the link to SoftwareMill – it’s broken now. Thanks.
Fixed. Thx.
Lullabot is a completely distributed company. We’re almost 8 years old and we’ve got about 35 employees spread out across the U.S., Canada, Denmark, The U.K., Spain, and India. For people that haven’t heard of us, we’re a prominent Drupal agency known for our community leadership, culture, and tightly knit team. We’ve been responsible for GRAMMY.com, MarthaStewart.com, FastCompany.com, Tesla.com, Harvard.edu and many others over the years. We also running a Drupal training website at Drupalize.Me.
Our employee handbook has a huge section on all of the different communications technologies that we use as well as a section on culture and employee empowerment. In nearly 8 years, we’ve only had 5 people ever quit the company.
We have an office in Providence, RI near where Lullabot’s other co-founder, Matt Westgate, and I live. However no one works there on a daily basis. We mostly just use it for client and company meetings, meetups, and tech events.
We love talking about all the things that we’ve figured out about running a successful distributed company; how to create a tightly-knit team across distances; the relationship between culture, technology, and distribution; and even how to convince clients that you’re legit even though they can’t come to your office to yell at you.
http://www.lullabot.com
http://drupalize.me
I am a part owner and co-founder of LOI English. We give English classes online to students all over the world with 15 teachers, who are also distributed all over the world. Most of us have never met in person. At this point, I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
My startup https://www.workio.com/about/ meets one bonus criteria. The three cofounders are distributed throughout continents: Europe, South America and North America. The rest of the team (6 people) work from home and/or co-working spaces in different Cities.
I know I’m late to the party, but I’d add WooThemes to this list. They are mostly remote and they have almost 30 employees now, I believe.
We’ve only got 8 team members, but we’re 100% distributed in 3 states. There are definitely some challenges with this model, and we’ve considered moving into an office. The advantages to the people doing the work are pretty compelling though. They consider it a valuable benefit.
Question to the community : are those companies actually hiring full time people with full time salary? or is there somewhere a model where salary is based on actual contribution (vs time)?
Check out Carl Smith’s (nGen Works) Jellyfish model. Here is a summary video along with additional links.
They do track time, but its much more contribution centered vs. the traditional agency model.
Speaking for 10up, our employees are full time salaried with benefits. For new employees, coaching on time management is probably one of our biggest focus points during the first few months. Some are not used to the idea that a full time work week does not mean “butt in a chair” from 9 am to 5 pm, but actual productive time, though most that love what they do adapt very quickly and effectively.
I work for a small SaaS company called Spotlight Software. Our team is 100% distributed and working from home. We have 4 management team members located in Phoenix, AZ and 1 of which will be moving to Oklahoma City, OK in April. We employ a team of 9 developers/designers/ and QA that are located throughout Mexico. We aren’t quite to the 20 employee minimum but we are the definition of a truly 100% distributed team and it works great for us. Check out our team at http://www.getspotlight.com/about.html.
Lincoln Loop http://lincolnloop.com/ is 100% distributed (we have no central office). Our 10 people are spread across 8 countries and 3 continents.
SkySQL Ab, a Finnish company founded in 2010, has over 50 people working full time and distributed over 13 countries (and 10 or so states in the US). All of us work from home with the exception of the corporate controller, who is based at our only office. Our CEO is known to turn up there now and then too.
We do meet in person now and then, and the next all-company meeting takes place in Lisbon in April.
We are 100% distributed Indian organisation over a team of 20 people+. Setting up our business has costed us almost no money so far.
Officially, IBM has about 40% of their employees working remotely (source: https://www-304.ibm.com/connections/blogs/gbs_australia/entry/teleworking_the_office_of_the_future3?lang=en_us.)
However, I met with a senior executive at IBM yesterday and he told me that as many as 90% of employees work from home at least partially.
Thanks for the comment. Do you have a link or reference for this?
Only the one I provided above.
Question about your criteria:
“Company size of 20 or more employees; Employees geographically distributed (for example, in at least several states or regions, if not countries)”
Do you include employees working from remote offices as “distributed employees” or just those who work remote as individuals?
Thanks, Mor
I’m not that picky really. Remote employees count as distributed if you think they do.
In this case most large companies would match the criteria. Even Yahoo has 20+ office locations around the country.
At oDesk (http://www.odesk.com), we have 250 full-time-equivalent freelancers located around the world that work for us every day, in addition to the 120 employees at our Redwood City (CA) office. Remote work is a huge part of our company culture, because our entire business centers on it (we are an online workplace). Not only do we have a more than 2:1 ratio of remote to on-premise team members, but even our HQ employees are encouraged to work remotely — every Tuesday is our company-wide work from home day, and many team members work remotely at least one other day of the week. As a result, we have outfitted all our conference rooms with big-screen TVs and Mac minis for meetings with Skype and Google Hangouts. One of our cofounders, Stratis Karamanlakis, has lived in Athens since the company’s founding and has always worked remotely.
The Numad Group–a communication and fundraising firm for nonprofits–is 100% distributed. The three principals who began the firm in 2011 have actually been working together for nonprofits, from wherever they lived or were traveling to, since 2005. We’ve seen creativity and innovation flourish with this model, and naturally, rack up hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles a year spending time with each other when it makes sense–and alongside our nonprofit partners when needed.
Hello!
I work for Site5.com, we’re a web host. We have over 100 employees now, every employee works remotely.
My company CardioSolv LLC is 100% distributed, but we’re only 5 people.
At O’Reilly Media, we have several hundred employees. We have two principal locations in the US (Sebastopol, CA and Cambridge, MA), as well as in the UK, Germany, Japan, and China. Many employees (including me) work remotely even if they are in commuting distance of one of those offices. However, we have employees who work from home in the better part of a dozen states. (Off the top of my head, I can think of CT, NY, MD, WA, RI, CO, NJ in addition to CA and MA.)
In a small anecdote, one of my key employees (now over 30 years) was hired sight-unseen by email, and has worked from his home for all of those years.
You should broaden your definition, though. When you think about our business, it is really a network, with thousands of authors, conference presenters, outside conference chairs, many of whom spend substantial portions of their time in our enterprise, even though they are not employees. If you look at the total population that is part of this wider circle, it is almost entirely outside our principal locations.
I work for time.ly and we are distributed. 1 is in Vancouver, 1 in Toronto, 2 in Italy, 2 in bulgaria and 1 in lituania
Perhaps the original distributed company was IMDB. The creators didn’t even meet each other until the company was bought by Amazon in 1998. They met for the first time at a welcome party in a hotel near Heathrow, along with employees from Bookpages – the UK online book retailer Amazon had also just acquired.
Hey!
The MetaBrainz Foundation ( http://metabrainz.org ) is all virtual. We only have 5 contractors, but they sit in AZ US, UK, DE, EE, NL and ES. Recently I gave up the main office and moved to Barcelona, so we don’t even have a “headquarters” anymore. :)
Opscode has ~100 employees, and 50% remote workers
https://twitter.com/skeptomai/status/361601177634349060
About 40% of IBM’s employees work remotely, either from their home office or at a client site (not an IBM facility). As of mid-2013, IBM employs 434,246 employees…making the number of remote employees to be ~175,000.
Let me know if I can help. I’ve been remote at MSFT for the last 6 years and written extensively on how I deal with it, including my Persistent Portal.
Pythian (pythian.com) is a 300 person remote-database services company, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada that has employees working from their home or offices in the US, Canada, South America, Australia, India, UK and Macedonia. I probably forgot few places :) The geographical distribution allows them to offer 24×7 follow the sun services, with awake and alert employees answering the phone at any time. The company developed internal systems and processes that allows team to collaborate and transition work between locations and timezones.
Creative Commons is a distributed network of staff, volunteer affiliates, consultants/advisers, and contractors. Though its headquarters are in Mountain View, CA, its volunteer affiliates number 200+ and work in over 70 jurisdictions around the world.
More than 50% of the staff/contractors listed at https://creativecommons.org/staff work outside of Mountain View. Of the core full-time staff, 25% work remotely.
I asked on twitter:
buffer
mozilla
appcelerator
lincoln loop
eldarion
37signals
basho
heroku
CMGd (Cox Media Digital)
Rackspace
Rackspace must have changed it’s policies. As of 2008 remote work wasn’t allowed.
red hat
opscode eng > 50%
canonical
‘We’ are 100% distributed, but we refers to 1 person, me– the sole employee of my freelance/contractor web applications development company.
Peer 2 Peer University is a small (5 staff) non-profit organization that is registered in California, but completely distributed. Not only does every one work virtually, most of us are not based in one particular place, or at least not for very long. Our Tech Lead was hired in Durban (South Africa) is currently passing through Boston and in the process of moving to Santiago de Chile. Being open to very flexible work arrangements is one way we can compete for talent with better funded for-profit companies.
You might want to talk to Andy Singleton at Assembla (https://www.assembla.com/team). They have 40+ people in 20+ countries.
At Talko, we established a (near) location-free policy from day 1. In practice, now at 10 people, it has turned out that we’ve become distributed between 3 cities – Boston, Seattle, San Francisco. We don’t consider anyone to be “remote”, per se, because we don’t consider any one place to be the “center”.
The NROC Project, under the legal name the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, is an entirely virtual and distributed (11 states and counting) organization with more than 20 employees and about that same number of full or part-time contractors (including international) to round out the needed skills and expertise. The non-profit company, founded ten years ago, has always been virtual and is going strong. Of the various non-distributed and more distributed organizations I have been a part of in my career, the NROC Project is by far the most effective and functional, perhaps in part because the operating premises of being part of a virtual organization are baked into its DNA.
CodeSourcery was 100% distributed. They were acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2010 into their Embedded Software Division, which is largely, but not 100% distributed. Everyone who was previously a remote worker with CodeSourcery could remain a remote worker. See also: http://www.zackgrossbart.com/blog/2010/10/code-sourcery-an-open-team-in-action/
Envato (envato.com) is a company with a large remote staff, I believe it’s about 50/50 at this point, though it used to be even higher majority remote.
I helped build out a job board for a startup in Austin. I have a huge spreadsheet with companies that hire remotely – many of them make up more than 50% of their overall employees through work at home positions. Most of them are Work At Home Customer Service (call center, inbound) or at home tech support positions. But there are literally hundreds of these type of employers across the country, hiring US Agents. I have so much information from the 8 months of research, it’s ridiculous.
In fact, I just wrote a post about this today and plan to expand this topic on my blog. I linked to this article – it’s amazing how many positions are out there and people just don’t seem to be able to find the information online.
Hi Sarah – Can you provide a link to your blog article? I would love to read it and learn more about your research. Our company is entirely distributed and we actually offer a project management solution specifically for distributed teams called Spotlight People & Project Manager. I’d be very interested in what you found out!
Hey Seth,
Sorry just now saw this comment.
Here’s a link to the initial blog post: http://sarahpressler.com/work-at-home-job-leads/
I’m about to write another one today with general information on companies that hire inbound work at home customer support technicians. A lot of people are comfortably happy earning $9-12/hr working on inbound customer support for big companies. But some of those companies have shady business practices and the turnover rate is SO high for these positions. I don’t know if it’s employees ditching these lower end jobs or companies who have little integrity.
Anyway – working at home is a super hot topic these days!
BTW – I’ll take a look at your software. I’m working with a distributed company now and we are having lots of discussion about how to manage our people and projects since experiencing some pretty positive growth this past year. Thanks for the blurb about it!
Thanks Sarah, I look forward to reading the blog! Sounds great – our website is http://getspotlight.com/. You can also check out our YouTube channel for some videos on how Spotlight works (we are still building out our library) at http://www.youtube.com/user/SpotlightPPM. Feel free to take a look and contact me directly if you have any questions. Thanks for the response!
Seth – that’s actually REALLY impressive software. Right now we utilize a wide variety of programs that each do something different. HipChat, BaseCamp, Harvest, GitHub, BitBucket, DropBox, SmartSheet, HelpScout… It’s a lot to keep up with and I keep thinking….there HAS to be a better way to streamline some of this. Things grew really fast – so I’m NOT complaining. But I’m just an organization nerd and I can’t help myself. LOL Spotlight looks very efficient – very well integrated. I like it. I’m going to have to look more closely at it over the next week or so. I’ve added it to my official task list. :)
Sarah – Thanks! We are on the exact same page as you. We wanted to build a platform that had all those types of features built right in to prevent the confusion and time that can be wasted using so many different tools at once. Obviously we use Spotlight for all our projects (we eat our own dog food) and we don’t use anything else but Skype for our team. And even better, we have Skype integrated right in to Spotlight :) Our development team does use some other tools for coding, etc though.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments after you take a closer look – you can reach me directly at seth.weedin@spotlightppm.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Our company http://Staff.com is 100% remote with 38 full time employees in 9 different countries
Wolfram Research has a long history of running a distributed operation.
Even our CEO, Stephen Wolfram, has been remote for 22 years. Of our current
workforce (of approximately 700), about half are based at our main office.
Some are in branch offices, and the rest are scattered around the world. We
quite often do projects where the people working on them have never
physically met
So exciting to hear of so many companies that have a distributed workforce. The company I work for has about 600 remote workers in about 10 states in the US. We are trying to expand our remote population so I’m curious if anyone has any advice or can suggest any research or articles that will help with managing employment law in many different states? How do you make sure your HR functions are up to date on the specific state laws for so many different states at once? Thanks in advance for feedback!
I would guess that Xamarin qualifies too, my impression is that they are quite scattered around
Scattered around makes it sound like they’ve been sprinkled across the planet :)