Launching Refactoring Jobs 🔥
And some thoughts on the future of hiring, communities, and remote work.
Hi everyone! As anticipated by a few recent posts, today I am launching a dedicated job board for Refactoring subscribers.
And without any further ado, here it is! 👇
📋 How does it work?
The board only features remote jobs in Engineering and Product roles.
Right now it includes ~100 jobs from companies I hand-picked among those who offer a great remote experience. They are all great positions, I can't stress this enough! I curated them personally and will continue to do so.
Subscribers are able to submit new jobs in two tiers:
💼 Standard Jobs — are visible and searchable on the board, for 30 days.
⭐ Featured Jobs — sit on top of the board and get promoted in the weekly newsletter issues, for 30 days.
The board is free to use for applicants, while companies pay a fee to submit new jobs. This allows to keep the jobs quality high, and it also makes for a healthy business model for the newsletter 🤗
Until July 16th, subscribers have access to an early bird pricing that is 50% off the regular one!
You can also subscribe to the board, and you will receive new jobs directly via email.
I am really excited about this launch. I am confident it will unlock tons of value for everyone following Refactoring.
This confidence is backed by two major beliefs of mine:
🎪 Communities are the future of hiring
🏡 Remote is the future of knowledge work
Let’s see them both.
🎪 Communities are the future of hiring
A few months ago I wrote an article called The Three Hiring Channels. There I argued there are three main sources of candidates when it comes to hiring:
☕ Network
📋 Job Boards / Aggregators
🎪 Communities
As an employer, you can evaluate these channels on two factors: Reach and Context
Reach: the more people you can reach, the more people you have the chance to convert into employees.
Context: the more context people have in advance into your company, and the more you have into them as well, the easier it will be to find good matches.
How do these channels fare on reach and context?
☕ Network
Network is people you know and can contact directly.
You already know these people and whether they are a good fit or not. Likewise, they already know you, what you stand for, and possibly the company you work with.
This is the channel with the highest context — it brings the best chances of match. But this is also the one with the lowest reach:
There is a hard limit to the number of people you trust.
People in your network are often peers, which restricts the positions you can hire for.
📋 Job Boards / Aggregators
Regular boards draw from a large pool of people, but have low signal to noise ratio, both for employers and prospective employees.
This channel comes with the highest reach and the lowest context, for both sides:
If you are an employer, you are in the position where applicants are total strangers — they don't know neither you nor your company. You often end up receiving a high number of candidates with a small share of actually good ones.
If you are a prospective employee, many job posts are just bad and you have to spend time filtering out a large number of unattractive companies.
So, if your network doesn't scale and job boards are hit or miss, is there a better way?
🎪 Communities
Online communities bridge the gap between Network and Job Boards. As hiring channels, they allow for good reach, while also providing good context into people and companies. How?
Communities are made of people who share something together, and stand for the same things.
If you read Refactoring, chances are you might be curious and empathetic, but also pragmatic and data-driven. You care about tech, people, and you love learning and growing your skills.
You are probably an engineer, a manager, a founder, or a beautiful mix of these.
Companies who put their jobs on the Refactoring board should know they will find these kind of people, and people should know this is what these companies are looking for.
If we are able to pull this off together, we can create real value and impact the careers of many.
🏡 Remote is the future of knowledge work
This might not seem a particularly original take, but I want to spend some words on it anyway.
For all human history, where you live has largely determined your work opportunities. Work has always been local, which in turn has created vast inequality between areas where more or less value creation happened.
You see this both at a country level — with richer and poorer countries — and within the same country as well, with the striking difference between how rural areas and large cities have been able to draw people.
Remote makes work global for the first time — where you live no longer affects your access to work. This is one of the greatest empowerment shifts in history.
When this happens at scale, so many things change:
🤗 Diversity — it is easy and natural to build teams who are inclusive of people from different countries and ethnicities.
❤️ Work–Life balance — you are able to organize your work around your life, instead of the opposite. Prepare for non-linear workdays.
🎯 Focus on results — productivity is judged on your output, as opposed to the time you spend working. This is particularly important as knowledge workers seem to function more like sprinters than marathoners.
🧘♂️ Health & Wellbeing — the lack of commute gives back workers ~25 extra days a year to do other things, including hobbies and taking care of themselves.
✍️ Written over spoken — majority of communication becomes written, and companies focus on documentation. The most successful workers will be great writers.
⭐ Weekly Featured Jobs
Here are the jobs featured this week!
Hatch: VP, Mobile Engineering (Remote)
Gearflow: Full-stack Software Engineer, Marketplace (Remote)
Foster: Founding Lead Engineer (Remote)
Zapier: VP, Platforms & Labs (Remote)
Solv: Full-stack Technical Lead (React) (Remote)
Hubspot: Director of Engineering, Fintech (Remote)
Browse many more open roles (or add your own) on the full board 👇
📚 Resources
Here are some resources that have shaped my thoughts on this:
📑 The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work — an incredible survey conducted by Microsoft on more than 30,000 people in 30+ countries. Tons of insights on remote, collaboration, wellbeing, and more. You can't miss it.
📑 Predictions on Remote Work — Chris Herd makes his 10-year predictions on the future of knowledge work after surveying 2,000+ people. Very interesting to understand how remote impacts society at large.
And that’s it for today! See you next week with a new article. In the meantime, feel free to reach out here in the comments, via email, Twitter or Linkedin! I read and reply to everyone 📬
Hey, I am Luca 👋 thank you for reading this far!
Every week I read tens of articles and draw from my own experience to create a 10-minutes advice about some engineering leadership topic.
Subscribe below to receive a new essay every Thursday and put your own growth on autopilot!