In this type of work, having coffee and sweets with colleagues is a thing of the past, and meetings via screens have replaced it. This trend is not entirely new in the technical professions, but it has gained momentum since the Covid pandemic.
Faced with a shortage of brains, technology companies compete to attract talent, but work is happening remotely, and employees are sometimes on the other side of the world.
Nicola Bessimier recently left Silicon Valley to live in Reno, Nevada, for a fully remote job (aka “full remote”) for flight comparison site Hopper. After his dismissal from Google, which recently announced the layoffs of 12,000 jobs, Bisimier had no difficulty finding a new company interested in benefiting from his software development skills.
“The +full remote+ gives us the possibility to choose the place we want to live in, with the freedom to change it if we change our mind after two months,” Besimier recounts from his new residence, which he also uses as an office.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Jordan Pettier, 35, works as an IT developer for the French-American company Gorgias, which operates in the field of e-commerce. He also works from his home, in Grenoble in the French Alps, which he describes as a “more family-friendly” setting than Paris.
“I talked to my boss about moving my residence, and it didn’t matter to him because I work completely remotely,” he says.
With teams in France, Serbia and Canada, Gorgias founder Romain Lapierre finds himself from San Francisco at the helm of staff in different time zones.
“Choosing full remote work allowed us to speed up the hiring process for engineering and product development jobs. We can therefore benefit from a broader pool of talent,” says Lapeer, with a hybrid organization method that groups full or partial remote work depending on the regions.
This trend prompted the creation of the American company “Remote”, which was founded in 2019 to connect companies “wherever they are, with qualified people, everywhere in the world,” explains Margaret Monrose, who is in charge of the company in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
The company employs about a thousand people in 70 countries who also work remotely, from accounting to human resources.
Cheaper hire
In this type of work, having coffee and sweets with colleagues is a thing of the past, and meetings via screens have replaced it. This trend is not entirely new in the technical professions, but it has gained momentum since the Covid pandemic. Also, the many waves of exchange announced by major technology companies do not change anything, according to specialists in the sector who see it as a way for companies to distinguish themselves in the search for talent.
“I had many career options after leaving Google, and for me, the possibility of working entirely remotely was an important factor” in choosing a new job, says Nicolas Bessimier.
This organization of work also makes it possible to hire at much lower wages. For example, according to a report issued by the American company “Gartner” in 2022, a data engineer earns $ 17,400 annually in New Delhi, compared to $ 187,000 in San Francisco.
The advantage is administrative too, explains Cyril Dupuy of consultancy Meritis. He says, “Before, the company used to take all necessary measures to bring in an employee from another country, with all the administrative delays that entail. But the possibility of working remotely completely broke the barriers associated with administrative procedures, and now everything can be done remotely, even from remote regions.” Too far.”
Margaret Monrose of Remote adds, “We have previously witnessed a brain drain, for example, from Europe, Africa or Asia to the United States. Today, with the emergence of remote work talent (…) they can stay in their country of origin.”
But this method also has its drawbacks, such as the difficulty of integrating junior employees, the company culture that is difficult to transfer or the schedules that are too staggered.
Jordan Pettier experienced these obstacles when managing “a team of employees in Paris, Quebec, Bucharest and Seattle”. “We had time differences of up to ten hours from east to west. It was tiring,” he says. As a result, the sector began hiring according to time zones, for more smooth work.
