And yet every single YC company job post is on site only. I've been watching the jobs section for about a month and I haven't seen a single remote job.
There really needs to be a culture shift in SV to support remote workers.
Well when the president of YC speaks openly about apposing remote work I think it's safe to say there's a huge bias to asses in seats [1]. That said I know of at least one YC alum that supports remote work [2].
I can't stress enough that remote work is not an organizational tactic. It's a cultural one. You must design and grow your remote working culture just as you would your product. Half-assing remote work and having 10 people in house with 2 people remote just doesn't work. It's in that scenario where I think remote work gets a bad rap.
There's a big difference between WFH and remote - in our office we encourage everyone to consider WFH and do it whenever it's appropriate, but you still need to be able to come in.
Most businesses are about turning the crank on the machine that makes them money. There you have relatively stable org charts, markets, products, cultures, and production processes. Need for information flow is modest.
Startups, on the other hand, are trying to discover or invent all of those things. The information flow is much higher. The very best communication medium we have is being in a room together, and a good startup makes great use of its high bandwidth and low latency.
At my last startup I looked for opportunities to hire remote workers for things, but rarely found them. The two I got to work were throw-away, low-priority code (e.g., non-critical-path prototypes) and Amazon Turk tasks. For the core work, though, it went best when we were all in one place.
There really needs to be a culture shift in SV to support remote workers.