I've worked remotely almost exclusively for 5 years now. For a handful of projects I've gone onsite for a day or two a week but those are the exception.

The key is to build your reputation and network like crazy. Get to know everyone you can. Work to become the guy for technology X. And get out there and pitch on remote projects and ideas that you do come across. Once you knock those out of the park, word gets around, so people will start coming to you. Even you can't do the project (skills, time, etc), try to make a solid recommendation for them. You'll still score some points.

It took ~2 years for that to happen to me, but I rarely go out hunting for work now. I make my presence known regularly and the rest pretty well takes care of itself.

If you're soliciting work, why on earth wouldn't you use your normal HN user name? I don't get it.

Perhaps they don't want their current employer to know they're on the market.

Kind of off topic, but I'm curious how difficult it is to get remote (non-contract) development Jobs these days? I'm not currently on the Job market, but in a couple of years, I plan to move back to the place I was born, and there are not many, if any, great companies to work with there for a software developer.

I guess what it boils down to me wondering if it is easy or hard to find remote development positions and going forward is it becoming easier to find remote positions as a software developer.

I'm going to be working remotely for the next year. I currently go into the office in the morning and work from home in the afternoon. A couple weeks ago I asked my manager if I could work from New York for a year and he said sure. I've been at the same place for almost five years now, in large part because of stuff like this. They know me and trust I'll do my job. It would probably be much more difficult to get a setup like this right off the bat.

We do consulting on dirty programming jobs. We have more work than we can handle, all of it remote. E.g. we do much of the heavy lifting on Teamspace (see sococo.net).

It took 25 years of working in and around Silicon Valley, until we can call on lots of folks with a personal reference. That got us started, but now we (3 guys) get cold calls from time to time as well.

Unless you already have a relationship with the employer, is a big pain in the butt.. the amount of noise vs signal in the web job market is enough to discourage anyone.

Very easy. The trick is to become irreplaceable at your current work, and then tell them you are moving and willing to negotiate.

But if you don't follow those steps, it's very hard.

So from the responses, it seems like the idea is that you need to convince your current employeer that you want to work remotely. That certainly seems like a good option, just not so good when you are trying to switch companies.

Thanks for the feedback guys, hopefully this will sort itself out in the next couple of years(when it actually becomes an issue)!

Mozilla's web development team uses Python and Django, and has several remote workers. I work remotely for Mozilla; my own team has workers in Mountain View, Toronto, Seattle, Vancouver, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Paris.

See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/careers/ and you can email me (see profile) if you have any questions or want an introduction to someone.

If that doesn't work out, I know Canonical/Ubuntu used to have a similar deal, and it looks like they still do:

http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_ISDFWD/

It would be great if this turned into a "Who's Hiring Remotely" thread.

I'm head of integrations at FreshBooks and I am looking for agencies to outsource projects to (PHP, Rails, and Python). Unfortunately, I am not looking for sole freelancers as I want the agency to manage the product management, design, implementation, testing, and validation. However, if you have a group of people you frequently work with who can cover all of that, then drop me a line.

sunir <-> freshbooks <-> com

I'm looking for a jQuery Expert / User Interface Developer to help me with a small project (paid), working remotely. Email dk401 [at] cam.ac.uk

Is that paid work? http://tomcarnell.com/

used to work for free?

I am working as remote consultant/developer for like 4 yrs now. Once you get a good reputation in any sphere looking for new projects isnt a prob anymore. I specialize in Rails/ajax/push/e-commerce and don't really advertise my services for last like year, while have stable deal flow and even employ team of devs that help me. However I work onsites from time to time when needed.

For me personally, there was a stretch from 2004 to 2008 when it was really easy to get remote work. This allowed me to travel and work at the same time, which I loved. Businesses were desperate for people with good web development skills, at that time.

Then the recession hit, and everything changed, at least for me. The remote work vanished. I can still find good paying work in New York City, but its all the kind of work where you have to go into the office everyday.

My guess is that the kind of work that can be done remotely has moved to countries that have very low wages. The kind of work that remains is the kind of work that can not be done remotely (or so the client feels, due to considerations of security or firewalls or the need for cross-functional team integration, or for the need of internal training of other workers who are suppose to learn skills from you).

I am looking hire front-end designers. Not sure if HN is the right place, but if you know anyone, please feel free to have them contact me at <my HN username> at gmail.com

Ditto

<my HN username> at gmail.com

I work at On-Site.com and my understanding is that we're willing to hire remotely for the right candidate. The OP is probably not what we're looking for, though -- we're a JRuby on Rails and JSP shop (plus jQuery, which he does know), and we'd need somebody who knew both if they weren't going to spend time physically present (in Mountain View, CA) to get up to speed.

Well, if anybody is hiring remotely: I'm a sysadmin-turned-coder with around ten years of Ops experience, most of which I've spent learning how to automate things. So I'm fluent in Ruby (and Rails), JavaScript (and jQuery), as well as anything that might need to be done on a Linux box.

If it sounds like I might be able to help you out, shoot me an email: don at madwombat dot com

We're looking for short-term remote Rails help implementing faceted search using solr/lucene or websolr.

I'm looking for sproutcore work or any front end dev

Check out http://quicksnippets.42horizons.com for a small example and contact details

12 hours away - are you in the Northern or Southern hemisphere? (Just out of curiosity). There doesn't seem to be the same remote outsourcing trend here in the Southern hemisphere.

Here in South America we are mostly on the same time zone with the US (+/- 3hours) so there is quite a bit of remote work going on.. Since I got here I've met people doing HTML,php,python,sql and some Java for companies all over the US.. I also know of a few large US companies (fortune 100) who are opening big offices over here. Also, countries like Chile & Argentina are given big incentives for startups to move over there.

If you need design/front-end coding hit me up at davide {at} 39inc.com

(as a company we actually do more than just design, but the design part is what i'm personally taking care of)

I am looking for rails and JQuery people for remote gigs. You won't be getting rich off of it but get in touch if interested - bswootton@gmail.com

Shameless plug: if anyone needs a quality assurance engineer - feel free to contact me, I'm currently looking for a remote QA job.

contact me username @ gmail

sent email

I am looking for remote android gigs..

My linkedin and visualcv with demos can be found at links at bottom of my blog: http//mobilebytes.wordpress.com