I am not consistent with my Youtube. 🤷‍♀️ My approach has been to follow the inspiration and obviously, I can't find the time for it among all the other things.

As I was beating myself up again for not being able to find the time for editing over the weekend, I came up with a hypothesis. 💡

I'm going to try to `hire myself` and I will try to treat Youtube as my part-time 5/7 job. It will spend at least 2h daily working on my content for 1 month and I will prioritize that over other things. 🍀

I handpick cool remote jobs that I share in my Telegram channel.

I try to select companies that are trustworthy, that have funding and are considering international candidates.

I prioritize jobs that are open for people from outside the US, Canada, and EU, Singapore and Hong Kong as well as within those states.

Here are my most favorite resource where I hunt for these jobs:

• Web3 Jobs https://web3.career/
• 500 startups https://jobs.500.co/jobs
• 4day Work Week https://4dayweek.io/remote-jobs
• welfound by AngelList https://wellfound.com/jobs
• ProductHunt Jobs https://www.producthunt.com/jobs
• Andreessen Horowitz Portfolio Jobs https://portfoliojobs.a16z.com/jobs
• F6s https://www.f6s.com/jobs
• Getro https://www.getro.org/jobs
• People First Jobs https://peoplefirstjobs.com/jobs
• LandingJobs https://landing.jobs/jobs
• MIT Startup Jobs https://jobs.orbit.mit.edu/jobs
• NODESK https://nodesk.co/remote-jobs/
• WeWorkRemotely https://weworkremotely.com
• Stackoverflow https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?r=true
• Startup.Jobs https://startup.jobs/
• Hacker New Jobs https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
• EU Remote Jobs https://euremotejobs.com/jobs/
• RemoteOK https://remoteok.com/
• Remotive https://remotive.io/remote-jobs/
• Workable https://jobs.workable.com/
• Skip the Drive https://www.skipthedrive.com/
• Work With Us https://workwithus.io/
• Twitter, search by the needed title, skills + remote job https://twitter.com

I’m Russian and I’ve lived in Russia most of my life, I’m also into IT doing software testing so I think I can point you to the right direction. Below is the list of currently most popular Russian job boards to advertise your open positions:

HeadHunter https://hh.ru
This is the most popular job search platform in Russia with 47.97 mln monthly visits according to SimilarWeb stats. It is sort of LinkedIn but it doen't have the social feed. It is comparable to the CareerBuilder https://www.careerbuilder.com/ or Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.com/in the US.

Habr Career https://career.habr.com/
Russian IT community blogs that runs their own job board. Similar to https://dev.to/, also popular among other post-Soviet countries. Many Russian IT companies maintain a blog there. 27.50 mln total monthly visits with 67% of them from Russian users according to SimilarWeb data.

Yandex.Rabota https://rabota.yandex.ru/
This is a job board by the Google of Russia. Similar to Google Jobs but it is dedicated job board where you can actually post the openings. Yandex is the largest search engine with 3 bln monthly visits according to SimilarWeb.

Github jobs https://jobs.github.com/
Although international, it is quite popular with Russian developers. SimilarWeb doesn't allow viewing the region stats but I've head about it in the Russian speaking IT community.

Djinni.co https://djinni.co/jobs/
A Ukranian job board with 1.5% of visit coming from Russian. Total monthly visits are 518.00K. Ukraine has got got really stong IT professionals. 1.5% of Russian users using this site are 99% remote-oriented so potentially they are your target audience too.

Telegram channels
Telegram is very popular in Russia with roughly 30 mln monthly user. I recommend checking out channel dedicated to posting jobs. The price is usually very affordable compared to the job boards and the conversion rates are comparable given that it is easy to share posts in Telegram. An example could be the channel that I maintain. It's called Remote Ever After https://t.me/remoteeverafter. You can DM me to and I'll be happy to share them with my audience.

Let me know if this is helpful and happy hunting!

Find remote jobs in tech companies
https://t.me/remoteeverafter
My personal Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/dina.kazakevich/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinakazakevich/

So recently I got feedback from my manager that I need to learn to detach from the team and the product and not try so hard. My first reaction to this kind of feedback was an intention to quit. Just quit and move on, find a team that will need my hard work, my attachment, and passion. But this time I decided to step aside and calm down before I take any action. So I started researching and analizing the words of my manager.

Later that week I stumbled upon a curious statement - an article by an office worked who's gone remote during the pandemic. He was saying that WFH is full of distractions that lead to low productivity which in its turn leads to self-punishment by overworking. I think this is my case.

I have to confess now, I feel like I’m not productive enough, like I’m not using my full potential and capacity to do the work that I do and I punish myself for this by overworking and putting in extra hours without logging them. I used to log all of them but then it wasn't welcomed by the company that I worked for so I continued overworking but just didn't log all the hours.

I must say this is not a healthy habit. I've been thinking that it is because of some external factors that keep me distracted but now I think it is all in my head and I think I'm addicted, addicted to work, I'm a workaholic. This has started affecting my personal life, my family, and my health and now the work itself. I'm thinking of ways to resolve this and meanwhile I want to share this article with you

It talks about the risk of work addiction and the factors that it depends on in different demographics. People with higher work addiction risk compared to people with low work addiction risk have twice the risk of developing depression and poorer sleep quality which in its turn affects the overall health. Please be safe and take care of yourself and the people around you!

• Why low salary expectations from a contractor should alarm you?
• What arguments can help you convince your boss to raise your salary?
• How low-paid hires may harm your business and any tech company?
• When it is safe to hire low-paid contractors from cheaper locations?
• What it takes teams to become really efficient?

TL;DR: tired of seeing the the same job opportunities on job boards? Try using Google Search operators and my hacks with it, here is a step-by-step walk-through

I'm writing this article to share one of the best hacks to find the latest job opportunities the exist out there. I’ve helped many developers to find new remote jobs but even they, very technically savvy people, tend to underestimate the power of this technique.

It can help you find job opportunities that are not advertised on any job boards. You can set up notifications for them and get to be one of the earliest applicants. Let me dive right in.

The technique is called “Master of Google Search Operators”. I call it this way. But when I mention it to people in the context of job search, not many people understand how to actually use it.

Google search lets you optimize the search results that are returned to you. I mostly use 5 operators: site:, “” (quotation marks), * (asterisk), AND, OR.

Operator site: lets you filter the search by a specific domain name so only the webpages with this domain name will be filtered out in your search like in the example below.

site:https://www.nytimes.com/*

Operator * is a wildcard sign that can replace any part of the website meaning that if you use it after a domain name, it means that the domain name can be followed by anything, literary anything, any set of characters. You can use it to wildcard parts of the URL words, or phrases. You can put it anywhere in your search phrase. This examples brings back webpages with ~/blog URLs:

https://*.com/blog

Operator “ ” restricts the search to the results that contain a specific word or a phrase e.g. “remote job” will bring up all website pages that contain “remote job” words. Another example:

“javascript”

Operators AND and OR work like regular logical operators. If you search for remote AND javascript, the search will bring back all webpages that contain both of the words. For python OR javascript — you will get all the webpages that mention either “python” or “javascript”, not both of them.

"dream job" AND "remote"

Companies often place their jobs only on their own websites and you have a very low chance of finding them unless they share the links on their social media or third party job boards. Google Search operators can help you here too even if you don’t know the company exists. For their careers page, companies usually use URLs containing careers or jobs. So we can filter out a whole lot of career pages by using site:operator and wildcarding company domain part in it. I recommend to not only use job titles but also keywords including technologies, frameworks, and tools that you work with.

"javascript engineer" site:https://careers.*.com
"devops engineer" site:https://jobs.*.com
"react native" site:https://*.com/jobs
"node.js" site:https://*.com/careers
"kotlin" site:https://*.com/hiring

Another hint here, most of the tech companies don’t bother with maintaining their careers page and prefer to outsource it using specific tools. This makes finding them easier.

Here are some examples of these tools: Lever, Greenhouse, Workable, Recruitee, Jobvite. Their URLs all have  similar format containing company name.

site:https://jobs.lever.co/<COMPANY>
site:https://<COMPANY>.recruitee.com/
site:https://apply.workable.com/<COMPANY>
site:https://boards.greenhouse.io/<COMPANY>
site:https://jobs.jobvite.com/<COMPANY>/job
site:https://<COMPANY>.bamboohr.com/jobs/
site:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/<COMPANY>

We will wildcard the company name part because we want to see all companies who use these tools.

”kotlin” “senior” site:https://jobs.lever.co/*
”node.js” “junior” site:https://*.recruitee.com/*
“redux” “remote” site:https://apply.workable.com/*
”react native” site:https://boards.greenhouse.io/*
kotlin OR java “remote” site:https://jobs.jobvite.com/*/job
”remote” AND technical writer site:https://*.bamboohr.com/jobs/*
”remote” AND javascript site:https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/*

Other similar services:

site:https://*.applytojob.com/apply/*
site:https://www.comeet.com/jobs/*
site:https://*.pinpointhq.com/en/jobs/*
site:https://*.hire.trakstar.com/#content
site:https://*.breezy.hr/p/*
site: https://*.applytojob.com/apply/*

Note the Advanced Search page (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) that provides search options not available in operators. They help you:

• filter by language (e.g., find pages only in English, Chinese, Russian, etc.)
• date (filter by time)
• usage rights (filter by Creative Commons license)

Google also allows configuring alerts in a way that when a new job posting is published by a company, Google will notify you as soon as it indexes it. So you can stay on top of job opportunities at all times and be one of the first people to apply to them. To set your alerts up, follow the instructions below.

• Change the sample searches I shared above to suit your preferences
• Go to the Google Alerts page https://www.google.com/alerts
• You need to log in using your Google account
• Now enter your search string e.g.
  javascript OR node.js “remote" site:https//jobs.lever.co/*
• Hit “Show Options”
• Configure frequency, region, and email you’d like the notifications to be delivered to
• Hit “Create Alert”

I also recommend creating a new folder in your inbox to filter out these notifications to to prevent your inbox from cluttering. This option is really powerful because you can configure the search to deliver any sort of job postings to your inbox as soon as they are indexed by Google, you can even configure it to include a specific company website and you can also use these tips to refine your searches in your daily life.

If you are interested in learning more about Google Search Operators and how they work, you can check out this detailed list by Daniel M. Russell. It can help you improve your daily search skills.

Thank you all for being with me, inviting your friends to join us and I hope this tip is useful!

With the spread of COVID-19, many people lost their office jobs and will be looking for remote opportunities. It is quite easy to fall prey to internet scammers who want to exploit that. There are trivial scams and those that are pretty elaborate. Here is a list of most trivial online scam types you need to be aware of when looking for an online job.

Email and social media spam. Messages promising instant and large earnings. They can be phishing attempts as well aimed at stealing your account credentials. Beware of the risk when you open these kinds of messages and if you are sure they are spam, send them directly to your spam folder resisting the temptation to peek inside.

Invitation to interviews with no application. If your resume is publicly accessible with your email or other contact information visible, you might see spam messages inviting you to interview for a job that you haven’t applied for. It’s really important to avoid posting your contact information publicly and to keep track of the positions you apply for. For this, you can use a free Trello job board that I used myself https://trello.com/b/wR6XNXOL/job-search-modified.

Money deposits or requests. Non-trustworthy online broker services like playing with this kind of offers, they promise you over 450% yield or more which sounds really tempting. Remember any upfront payments, deposits etc. are a solid red flag to alarm your consciousness. If their promises were true and so easy, we would have all become billionaires long ago.

No contractor agreement. Trying to convince you to trust them without signing a contractor agreement or if they have come up with some kind of excuse like “you not having work permit in the country”, “additional taxes”, etc. Having no contract or other legit evidence of the terms of collaboration you risk not getting paid. This is a major red flag. Even having no legal work permit for the country where the company is registered, you can always sign an individual contractor agreement. Have a lawyer read through the contract terms to identify possible pitfalls. Feel confident to negotiate the terms if you have any concerns.

Rushing and urgency. Some scammers will rush you into agreeing to work with them, using urgency as an excuse for not having any contract, terms signed, etc. When seeing urgency on the customer end can be signaling of bad planning and management on their end. Consider if you even want to work with this kind of professionals.

Not googlable or hardly googlable. When considering a company to work with, google their company name or the CEO’s/HR’s name and try to investigate their background. Try finding their website, blog, twitter, some sort of digital evidence of the business being legit. If you can’t find anything, maybe it is worth asking them directly why? and consider them with more precaution.

Not googlable doesn’t always mean a scam. Not finding any evidence of their digital existence in the state business registry database or in social media doesn’t necessarily mean that they are scammers. Many young startups might avoid publicity to prevent unneeded attention, competition, and risks of being hacked, especially if they don’t yet have any proper security practices in place.

If you can think of any other trivial examples that people should be aware of, please let me know in the comments below and I will add them to the article. In my next post, I will give examples of more elaborate techniques scammers use in the online job market. See ya!

Telegram channel with jobs and chat https://t.me/remoteeverafter

Did you guys notice that Facebook added a Jobs feature in their app? I tried it out yesterday while hand-picking job opportunities for my Telegram channel and it seems cumbersome at this point because it discriminates remote jobs and remote job seekers. There is no filter for remote jobs and if you select a city it allows a max of 150 km radius for the search. I can’t search for jobs worldwide or countrywide, only citywide within the above radius which is so past decade.

Same if you are posting a job, you have to select a city to tie this post to. The problem is that by having this kind of filtering, they are not helping remote companies and remote workers find each other. They basically neglect the entire remote job market which is growing each year.

The same problem I saw on LinkedIn 4 years ago when I was searching for my first remote job but they seem to have addressed it by adding a “Commute” category just recently which made me go “dah!”

I’m really outraged that Facebook being an industry and business leader doesn’t show their awareness about the weight of the remote work market and what other companies are doing. Thus they discriminate and neglect the entire cluster of its potential users. I tried searching by “remote” keyword but the top 10 jobs were not even partially remote. I don’t see Facebook as often as I used to but this was actually their chance to bring me back to their platform and they wasted it by not adding this one damn filter.

I was a guest speaker a SEPA Business Club event sharing my remote work experience late in February 2020. Lots of questions were about remote non-technical opportunities. It is a known fact that IT-specialists can find remote jobs very easily but people talk less about remote work opportunities for non-technical professionals.

Remote work for tech people is a headline of the past decade but this new decade is enabling non-technical specialists of remote work too. The new trend is of all-remote companies, they have clients all over the world and they do their entire business remotely. Who wants to pay office rent if you don’t have to? Offices used to be a necessity when there were no tools for efficient remote collaboration, now we’ve got all the tools we need to work from anywhere.

There is a misconception that only technical people can work remotely. All tech companies each need a handful of non-tech team members to keep the business rolling i.e. to do hiring, accounting, management, sales, marketing, management and social media.

In fact, technical companies need non-tech field experts to grow their businesses and this is becoming our new reality where all the domains coexist, intersect and unite to produce a high-quality product to the demanding market. If you’re good at talking to people, negotiation, sales, finance, hiring, managing people — these are the top skills that the market needs.

I’ve created a list of some resources where you can find hot non-tech opportunities, I will be keeping it up to date with time adding up to the list as I discover more sources. Next time I’m planning to share the list of non-tech jobs that are well paid and allow professional growth and remote work. Comment below for the type of non-tech skills and knowledge that you apply in your remote job today?

• NODESK, Non-tech filter, free https://nodesk.co/remote-jobs/non-tech/
• REMOTIVE, All Other filter, free https://remotive.io/remote-jobs/all-others
• RemoteOK, Non-tech filer, free https://remoteok.io/remote-non-tech-jobs
• Flexjobs, Most Surprising Flexible Jobs — paid, https://www.flexjobs.com/jobs/surprising-jobs
• AngleList, Operations, Marketing, Sales, Management, Other filters https://angel.co/jobs
• WeWorkRemotely, Copywriting, Business & Management, Customer Support, Finance and Legal, Sales and Marketing filters https://weworkremotely.com/#
• F6s, Operations, Marketing, Financial, Accounting filters https://www.f6s.com/jobs
• EU Remote Jobs, Customer Support, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing, Sales filters https://euremotejobs.com/
• Europe Remotely, Marketing & Sales, Customer Support filters https://europeremotely.com/
• Working Nomads Administration, Human Resources, Education, Legal, Sales, Writing, Sales filters https://www.workingnomads.co/jobs
• Skip the Drive, Administrative, Consulting, Editor, Entry Level, Human Resources, https://www.skipthedrive.com/#browse
• Twitter, search by the needed title, skills + remote job https://twitter.com

I would like to share the ideas that helped me become location independent while being able to pursue a career in technology and maintain my income to support my lifestyle and family. Every time I meet new people and tell them that I am a digital nomad, they tend to label me as a freelancer. To me, this seems to be a major misconception about remote jobs having to be freelance jobs. So I would like to share some insights with those of you who are searching for a remote job but don’t know where to start and how to land one in 2020.

Costs of being a freelancer

First, let me sum up the reality of being a freelancer for you. Freelancing implies providing services to the public or companies on project-based terms, usually short-term. Examples of such services may include developing a website design, drafting legal service terms, localizing a mobile app. Those are usually one time jobs, meaning that when the project is completed, you’re no longer needed and you have to move on and search for another company or client that will be willing to pay for your services. This means that a large chunk of your time will be dedicated to selling yourself and marketing your services. Once you find your customers, you will also need to do the contract negotiation and all the required paperwork as well as customer support functions to maintain the relationship.

Here is the list of all the things that a freelancer needs to do to be successful

• Strong expertise in a field, otherwise nobody will need your services
• Doing blogging, social media to maintain public awareness of yourself and your services, building and maintaining your personal brand
• Maintaining your website and portfolio up-to-date
• Professional training to keep up with the market needs and to advance your skills
• Marketing your services and finding new customers
• Competing with vendor companies providing the same sort of services
• Contract negotiation to justify the prices you charge
• User research to understand the needs of your customers
• Sales either online via a website or in person if it requires pitching and presenting
• Customer support to respond to questions and manage expectations of your existing customers
• Tax and legal paperwork to not get in trouble with state authorities

Considering the above, how much time do you think is left for you to do the actual job after you have done the above? Not much, right?! And the sad part is that if you want to be a successful freelancer, you will have to keep doing these things over and over again to maintain your business. Another solution is to outsource most of the things but then you will have to pay people for doing this job for you. Not many people can afford this when they are just starting their remote career. This was my case, I know how discouraging and overwhelming it may feel when you don’t know where to start and if you really want to get on the hamster wheel of freelancing. So when I was looking for a remote job I realized that I want to do the actual work and minimize the metawork needed to find and maintain stable customer inflow.

Having worked for over 4 years remotely, I can definitely say that my first full-time remote job at a vendor company became a life changer…

The good news is that there is a way of avoiding or at least minimizing the above. For some reason, location independence of digital nomads is mostly attributed to people doing freelance jobs or owning some sort of business. Not many people talk and write about such options that allow minimizing this metawork while building a very successful career in international companies. Here is the hack — a full-time remote job as an independent contractor is a solution. There I said, support the post with your likes but for those who want more detail, I laid them out below.

And it doesn’t always have to be independent contractor terms, it’s just happened to be so in my case. There are plenty of companies willing to hire you legally, full time, with full social security package including healthcare and retirement benefits as well as paid time off, if you are legally authorized to work in the country of the company registration. But even if you’re not legally authorized to work say in US, Canada, or Europe, it is a common practice to compensate you for those expenses and provide the same time off as if you were a full-time employee. Examples would be Hotjar, Basecamp, Zapier, InVision, GitHub, GitLab and they compete with each other for the best applicants in the job market by providing the best terms they can afford.

I used to be longing for quitting my daily commutes, traveling all year round and not having to go out into the rainy foggy air in the winter every single weekday. A solution Google advised was freelancing or starting a blog but after several sleepless nights in attempts to type out some coherent thoughts I gave up on this idea. I had to support myself, I had rent to pay and I had to go back to my office cubicle to do the job I didn’t enjoy. But I didn’t give up the hope and finally, I landed a full-time independent contractor position doing copy-writing for a Silicon Valley startup which turned to be my life changer.

This means that a large chunk of your time will be dedicated to selling yourself and marketing your services.

Advantages of a full-time job

Here are the advantages of a full-time job over being a freelancer. You don’t necessarily need to have a very strong expertise level to find a suitable job. There are plenty of companies willing to hire junior specialists to do such jobs as data entry and customer support that require being comfortable with using a computer, internet and fluency in English or your country official language. Those companies are even willing to provide paid internships and boot camps to train junior workers getting onboard to teach them their special ways of doing things. So the expertise bar can be lowered here in case of such position instead it is your soft skills that will help you win the spot. As long as you’re diligent, willing to learn and can communicate efficiently, you can try applying for junior positions that require minimum experience.

For companies, it is a long term investment. They can spend a month on training you but they will end up paying you slightly less than the market rate for about a year or two until you become more experienced and request a raise so it is a win-win for both in this case. In any case, your first remote job doesn’t have to pay well. It is your long term investment, it is the line in your resume that will work for you even in 10 and 15 years in the future. You’re getting your first remote job experience, you have a chance to pick up some basic skills to jumpstart your remote career and the company gets a loyal affordable contractor for quite a long time. Both parties benefit!

Finding a job in such a company and working there doesn’t require any publicity from your end so you don’t have to have a blog or be active on social media to apply for such jobs. In fact, when I landed my first remote job, I only had a LinkedIn account and a resume uploaded to a local job board where the company found me. The only thing I did is I made sure my CV on LinkedIn was updated and well written which is the key to getting noticed by recruiters. If you are a designer, software engineer, or an illustrator, etc. you will most probably need to maintain your portfolio updated as well as it will help you stand out from the other applicants.

As for professional training and development, when you are a freelancer, you have to own the expenses for your professional development. With a full-time position, even being an independent contractor, you can negotiate terms of handling training costs with your company. Most of the companies have an annual training budget for each team member and they are willing to cover up to 100% of the cost of professional training costs, workshops and conferences you attend. It is their investment into your relationship, companies have to compete for high-quality specialist by providing best terms to keep the team member onboard as long as possible so if you are providing high-quality services and show devotion and passion for the product they make, they will be happy to foot the bill for your training because it costs them less to keep you happy than to hire, train, and ramp up a new person.

Companies that allow remote work can be of two types: vendor type that sell services and actual product companies. Vendors usually provide services such as design development, testing, support, research, marketing, sales, legal, accounting, operations, recruitment, and whatnot. Product companies usually have a product of their own that they build and hire for specific positions around that product. For a freelancer, it is really hard to compete with vendor companies for prospective customers due to the range of services they provide and more often because of the rates that they charge. So in this case, becoming a full-time team member of either vendor or a product company can be a solution for you to avoid having to do with this competition directly on daily basis and to jumpstart your remote career.

A life hack for freelancers who would like to avoid sales and customer support metawork is to become an independent contractor at a vendor company that provides long term services to other companies. They basically hire you but then resell your services to another company at a higher or same rate and takes away such tasks as sales, marketing, customer management, operations, promotion, and contract negotiation. You basically can relax and focus on doing the actual work, getting the valuable experience you need to gain expertise in the field. With time you will want to move on, get promoted, get a better-paid job, or start your own project and you will need to learn to do all of the operational tasks but at least at the beginning of your journey, you will be able to prioritize working on your hard skills and getting the necessary experience to become more independent in your craft.

So to sum it all up, working as a full-time employee remotely can become a stepping stone for your location independence, it can also contribute to better professional development.

Having worked for over 4 years remotely, I can say that my first full-time remote job at a vendor company became a life changer, it allowed me to jump start in the industry I liked, pick up new skills, pivot my career to a more technical direction, and continue pursuing my career goals. I hope my story can help those who want to become digital nomads, are tired of daily commutes or are considering making a pivot in their remote careers or getting out of freelance business. It can also become a career saver for future parents who want to have kids without sacrificing their career progress, students who are willing to gain valuable experience in top industries and international companies.

I hope this blog post was helpful and has saved you hours of the time of hesitation and googling. I’m open to any questions and suggestions and I will be happy to hear from you! Hit me up in the comments below if there is any specific aspect of remote work that you would like me to cover in my future posts. Cheers!