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I live outside the United States, and I would like a to find a job I can do from home.

Employers mean many different things when they say a job is "Remote". Usually they seem to mean one of the following:

  • We offer "Telecommute days" as a perk, but you'll still need to live in the right city.
  • You can work from anywhere ... in this country
  • You can work from anywhere in these N countries, where we've the taxes/regulations figured out.
  • You can work from anywhere in these N timezones because we still work very synchronously.
  • You can actually work from anywhere. (Usually this only applies to contract work.)

In many cases it is ambiguous what kind of job is on offer from the job posting. Only slightly better than that is when that information is buried at the bottom of the posting.

If I could tell what kind of job is being offered from the labels at the top of the posts and in search results, that would save me a lot of time. Even better would be being able to filter on these criteria!

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Thanks for your suggestion :) we did a couple changes to let employers add a timezone to their listings and add details if they're needed.

We are monitoring their usage to better understand what kind of structured data (that we can filter) would make sense to collect.

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    I wish I'd known to report employers misusing the remote label as described in the first scenario. In the past I've had similar experiences to what OP describes with "telecommute days" - people concerned I didn't live in London when I applied for jobs labelled remote :(
    – StackExchange What The Heck
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 21:50
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    Approximately 0 remote job postings I came across honor this, I agree we need more specific labels.
    – Tomáš Hübelbauer
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 21:58
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    "explain why that's a wrong use of the remote tag" Both as a general principle and since the employers are your paying customers, wouldn't it be better to adapt the system to the way they're already using it then to try to explain to each one that they're holding it wrong ™?
    – jscs
    Commented Nov 16, 2017 at 22:15
  • For the timezone restriction, I don't see why one would forbid to work at night for a remote position: some people are married to barmaids or nightshift nurses, so their life is in sync with a nocturnal rhythm and it may justify the search for a remote position. So it could be that we may not want add the timezone restriction.
    – Cœur
    Commented Nov 17, 2017 at 4:12
  • @yochannah is there anything unclear about it? maybe we need to make it clearer what we mean by "remote"?
    – g3rv4
    Commented Nov 17, 2017 at 13:11
  • @JoshCaswell yes, I'll bring this up to our planning sessions. I was trying to explain what's the status quo (and what should be done with employers that don't treat the tag as we expect them to)
    – g3rv4
    Commented Nov 17, 2017 at 13:13
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    @gr3rv4 - I thought remote was clear, personally, in the way SO intended. Maybe percentages would help? e.g. up to 100%, up to 20% (e.g. one day a week) and so on.
    – StackExchange What The Heck
    Commented Nov 17, 2017 at 22:30

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