There are so many different ways of going about finding your first remote developer job. I want to show the myriad of different ways that developers can find remote work. I went around the web searching for remote developers and I asked them how they found their first remote developer job. You’ll be surprised to see how some of them ended up getting hired as remote developers!

My desperate attempt asking for quotes.

Work at a company and slowly become more remote Freelance to Full-time Helpful contributions to hired employee Don’t underestimate local events Job boards are still very relevant

Work at a company and slowly become more remote

This is something that I thought might be harder to achieve, but apparently, it’s fairly common.

That being said, it is more difficult being the only person working remote at a company. You’ll often get left out of promotions and become forgotten, especially if the team never meets personally. It shouldn’t be a problem if the company is remote-first or they already have many remote employees.

“My first remote position wasn’t planned or found on purpose at all. In 2011 my Dad was having health issues and my company at the time, Meebo, was kind enough to let me move back home and continue working remotely. After they were acquired by Google I was allowed to continue working remotely for a limited time and ended up deciding to leave rather than move back to continue with them. Since then I’ve only focused on remote jobs when searching for one.” @tristandunn

“My first full remote job is my current one. I’m a front end engineer in a unicorn . Things are going well, for now.

Things went progressively as there’s only one other full remote employee on 400+ spread in 5 offices.

I’ve been with them for 2 years now, started working from home from time to time, then more regularly, 1 day a week, 2 days a week to 4 days a week… Until 6 month ago when I had the talk about full remote since I wanted to move away from the city where the office I was based in was.

So I now have moved ~250 miles away from the office (in the UK), I haven’t been back yet. I think I might go back for a couple of days next year somewhere but that’s about it.

Now I’m advocating for flexible work and try to change the company to consider being remote first instead of remote friendly. (see remote first article by Zach Holman

The most important things are the communication skills, the trust and motivation to get shit done on a daily basis on your own.

If you’re looking for remote job boards, there’s remote|ok that is pretty good. If you’re into programming, you can filter offers on stackoverflow.com/jobs by remote offers only (in perks IIRC).”

cmdalti

“I’m currently still working my first remote job as a software engineer in the advertising industry, mostly working for huge AAA gaming clients.

Three years ago I moved from where I grew up in Washington state to Washington, DC for it. Last year I got homesick for the PNW, so I got a job offer back home for half the pay just to get home. My boss counter offered with working remote. So now I’m working from home in WA on East coast hours in a city that has half the cost of living of DC.

Later next year I’m going to be dropping to freelance so I can get some serious traveling in now that I’ve saved some money.” jimmygle

“I am a developer and I know this works for a lot of developers:

Build a good relationship with a company or agency first. Do this by working in their office. Get to know the people you are working with personally, build trust.

Then ask if you can work remotely. This way you do not have to work for pennies on Upwork.” cutemachine

“My first remote work have been mostly with companies I’ve worked in the past. They just reached out to me, If I wanted any freelance work. But later on I increased my business network with a help of Upwork.



Still to this day, Upwork bring me a lot of new customers.” @5katkov

Freelance to Full-time

Not the most reliable way to find a remote job, but if you’re freelancing already, then it doesn’t hurt to show a quality of work that makes them want to take you on as a full-time employee.

“My current job I got after being found on a freelancing platform. I did a good job of the project and they then offered me to come work in their office, worked there for a week or two and they then offered me a full time position; however I have to work two days in the office – the other 3 are remote.” Maverick2k

“I landed my first paying remote “job” on a website called oDesk, which I believe is called Upwork now. It paid $10/hr USD and was web development work making UI changes to existing websites. I would bid on countless jobs on oDesk, but it took a while to actually land my first one. Once I landed my first one and received positive feedback from the customer, I started getting traction. After that, I increased my rates after every job I won, until a larger company took notice and provided me with full-time equivalent contract hours for about two years.”

@ColinMTech http://fullbit.ca

I was never really looking for a remote developer job but I ended up here anyway and its the best decision I’ve made. I don’t have an academic background, I took a few college credit classes in the IT field and then dropped out. I had already been really experienced with programming because I was doing it since I was about 14-15. Apparently, no good paying jobs want to take the risk of hiring a self-taught developer with only a high school diploma, so what I did was start creating side projects and publish them to Github. I then hopped on to Upwork.com and did a few freelance contracts and got professional experience from there. Eventually, I came across a good paying contract. I finished up the contract and the company asked if I wanted to work for them full time as a remote developer and of course I said yes! /u/Jarmahent

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Helpful Contributions

Help people out, take part in the community, contribute to open source. You’d be surprised how many opportunities come out of just being helpful and participating in communities.

People helping each other… really.

“It’s hard to say what my “first remote job” would have been as I’ve been working remotely in some capacity since the early 2000s. Back then I used to create flash apps and PHP apps for big record labels like Atlantic Records, Universal, Dreamworks, etc – those were always done per project. If I leave those types of gigs out of this response I’d have to say my first “full-time remote gig” happened in 2011 when I worked for Groupon. I was the second Android person on the team and Groupon was very small back then (they were only in 10 cities). How did I land it? I was writing an Android app and I was using an open source library extensively in it. The library was lacking a feature, so I created a branch and submitted a pull-request to the author of the project. He liked it, accepted it, and then did some digging around what I had been doing with Android. Fast forward a month or so and he emails me wondering if I’d be interested in doing some work for Groupon (that open source library maintainer happened to be the sole Android engineer at Groupon at the time). They needed help at the time and that was that. He said it was fully remote (he was remote too) and I was sold. From that point forward I’ve been remote 100% for various companies all over the world and only visited clients on site now and then to help build and grow the relationship with said clients.” Donn Felker

“It’s not my first, but I landed a position with Vue Mastery, a Vue.js-focused online school doing technical writing. They needed someone to write articles. I actually pre-wrote an article for them and told them they could publish it for free when I sent them an email applying for the job. They saw my enthusiasm and eventually bought me onto the team remotely. My advice is this: 1) Always send a personal email cover letter, rather than something copy-pasted. 2) Always show that you’re ready to start now and willing to do the work by doing something beforehand even if it’s small. Even if you don’t end up using it for the client, it’ll be a good addition to your portfolio.” https://remoteleads.io/ https://dericksozo.com/

Network locally

Just because it’s a remote job, doesn’t mean you can’t find it locally. Attend conferences, meetups, workshops and talk to everyone you know about your search. A good place to start is to look for developer related events on Meetup.com.

“I had this dream of staying in different cities and working from there. When I was looking for remote jobs, I got to know of BigBinary which was the first remote company I joined. I knew almost everyone there though Ruby conferences that I used attend. When I started freelancing as a remote developer, I got much of work through connections I had built in Ruby community in the past few years. I think being a Ruby developer and having connections in the community helped quite a lot in this regard.” @rtdp

Job Boards, Slack Channels, Reddit

Get better at presenting yourself in cover letters and resumes, and you’ll have a fair shot at finding a remote developer job through job boards.

You can try to look for remote jobs in traditional job boards like Remoteok.io, or join large slack channels and look in their job section. You can also browse through Reddit and find work there. One subreddit to look for remote jobs is in subreddits like /r/hiring and /r/skipthedrive.

RemoteOk.io – One of many remote job boards

“C#/.Net web dev, but only because that’s what I already knew. I switched over to Node/JS ecosystem recently just for the change. I’m a computer programmer, and I work full time remote, which lets me travel. Found my job by using saved searches for phrases like “remote developer” and devoting an hour a day to crafting cover letters and applying for jobs. Took about 6 months.” redditor

“Software developer. Employee/sub-contractor of a contractor/consulting firm for the VA.

Dice.com or the like? Took about 2 weeks. Just searching for the normal keywords + REMOTE. And of course hitting them all up and giving them priority over in person jobs like an in-person Rails position at a San Francisco Start up (ok pay, horrilbe hours, decent tech stack).

Interview well? Much better than their other candidates. They had a hard time finding someone because they were looking for a developer who knew 2 programming languages, and most only know one. But seriously, it’s super easy for any competent programmer to pick up another language like Ruby or Python, in addition to their main language. Their recruiter just didn’t understand that and thought I was their only choice in a long while (not that I was a bad choice, but they just didn’t understand that there are other developers who easily pick up new languages or know multiple languages and I had both on my resume so they really felt that they needed me).” XxNerdKillerxX

“I found both of my remote jobs on job boards. First was as a ReactJS/RoR developer. The second was as a RoR backend developer. I’m a self-taught programmer and worked at a couple of companies and freelanced before I was able to find that first remote job.” Lasa

“I just got my first remote job this year, so I am still there :).

I am a fullstack developer, and I love working from home. There are parts about every job that are good/bad, and that’s the same here…but there are obvious perks on top of those like the whole being remote thing. I also get to set the hours I work more or less, and that has been amazing.

I had been working 2 days remotely for all of my previous jobs because I live in the suburbs and the commute sucks.

I found it through either weworkremotely or remote.io.” oowowaee

It all started on UpWork (I wouldn’t recommend it anymore) and my rate was $9/hr. It was possible to see the proposed rates of all the people that have applied for a job at the time, and my rate was $2 below the lowest rate for that job. I’ve figured I needed to stand out somehow since I didn’t have any experience yet. I also had excellent scores on their stupid trivia tests, that showed on my profile. That probably helped somewhat. I think the thing that helped the most was the fact that I had some projects that I could show, even though I didn’t have any professional experience.

@shime_sh

So many ways to find remote jobs!

I wanted to show that there are many different ways to find your first remote job and I hope this post inspires you to try applying to remote jobs.

Let me know how you found your remote job in the comments below!

Want to know a couple of ways to improve your chances of landing your first remote job? Here are 9 ways to drastically improve your chances.