How Digital Nomads (Remote Workers) Went From Niche to Normal When GitHub launched in 2008 as a digital repository of code for programmers, its handful of employees communicated mostly through instant messenger. There was no office. “Chat was our office,” GitHub founder and former CEO Tom Preston-Werner said in a 2013 interview with PandoDaily. In the beginning, GitHub’s team of remote employees was a cost-cutting strategy. Over time, however, Preston-Werner began to see the setup as a tactical advantage. Hiring from everywhere allowed GitHub to recruit beyond the narrow swatch of talent congregating in Silicon Valley—a geographically diverse group that, naturally, had a global scale. “[It] forced us into this distributed mentality,” he said in that 2013 interview. By allowing its engineers and employees the flexibility to work from around the US and the world, GitHub’s setup has turned out to be a precursor to a movement. Cutting your overhead — and getting more talent for your money — by letting people work from wherever they want? That’s just a smart money move. Read more at http://ift.tt/2hbYB6g
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