How to find a remote job (Practical tips)

Thu, Oct 12, 2017

Many of you probably know that for the last 10 months I’ve been working remotely at Tendermint. A few days ago a friend of mine asked me to give him some practical tips on how to find a remote job (being a software developer). I’ve told him that it’s not so different from searching for a desk job. However, I did give him a few recommendations that I wanted to share with you guys.

1. Learn a language

In most cases, it is English, which I think is the most widespread language in the world. But it could be German or Spanish, depending on the country. Your English does not have to be perfect, just enough to pass the interview and for daily communication (Slack, emails, Github, maybe Skype calls once in a while).

2. Write a resume

One or two pages are usually enough. You’ll need to write your contact details, work history, and education. Other sections like “Skills” or “Hobbies” are optional.

A few basic rules:

no age, sex or religion
if you have any gaps, please tell what you were doing (even if you were surfing on Bali ;D)

Resume examples: 1, 2.

One thing I noticed just recently - candidates, who have the “Highlights” section have a higher chance of catching an interviewer’s attention. Do you have any contributions to the language you are using? Or stdlib? Maybe you won some contest in the past or maintaining a popular open-source project? This is how it might look like:

Highlights:
- contributor to Go language (https://github.com/golang/go/commits?author=XXX)
- Maintains Magic Wand tool (https://github.com/XXX/YYY)

People who are reading your resume also may find interesting if you have “Career objective”. It can be a sentence or two outlining your current career goal(s).

3. Invest in your resume

If you want to increase chances of being hired, my advice would be to invest some of your free time and do something (see some ideas above). By something I mean something you can add to the “Highlights” section or the “Projects” section.

4. Github

Do you have a Github account? Of course, you do, everybody does! Do you have some repositories in it? And I am not talking about forks. No? Well, my advice would be to go and write something. Some ideas:

implement some search algorithm in Rust (why Rust? because it’s cool!)
read the Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks by Paul Butcher and solve the Dining philosophers problem.
pick something from Coding Interview University
write your own editor http://antirez.com/news/108
write your own interpreter https://interpreterbook.com/
write your own OS https://os.phil-opp.com/
write your own shell https://github.com/kamalmarhubi/shell-workshop

5. Practice your pitch

Almost on every interview, you will be asked to tell a little bit about yourself (pitch). It’s a very good idea to write it and practice telling it to your friend or in front of a mirror.

6. Find a job

Here is the list I was using the last time:

Good luck! And do tell me if I missed something in the comments.