Nicolas Pessemier, 44, has just left Silicon Valley to settle in Reno, Nevada, in "full remote" (the jargon of tech for full teleworking, editor's note) on behalf of Hopper, a flight comparison site. Fired by Google, which announced 12,000 job cuts recently, he had no trouble finding a new employer interested in his software developer profile.

"The +full remote+ gives you the opportunity to decide where you want to live, and if, in two months, you change your mind, you will be free to do so," he says from his new home, which also serves as his office.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Jordan Pittier, 35, is a developer for Gorgias, a French-American e-commerce support company. He also works from his home in Grenoble, in the Alps, saying he has chosen a setting "more conducive to family life" than Paris.

"I talked to my boss about my move, it didn't change anything for him because I was already working from home completely," he says.

With teams scattered in Grenoble, Belgrade and Toronto, Romain Lapeyre, the founder of Gorgias, finds himself from San Francisco at the head of employees in several time zones.

"The choice of +full remote+ allowed us to accelerate our recruitment process for engineering and product functions. We can thus access a larger talent pool," he describes, with a hybrid organization, mixing total or partial teleworking depending on the region.

Job offers without candidates in a digital sector in full revolution: faced with brain shortages, tech companies compete to attract talent, even if it means employing them in total teleworking, sometimes on the other side of the world © Timothy A. CLARY / AFP/Archives

This trend is at the very origin of the creation of the American company Remote, founded in 2019 to connect companies "wherever they are based, with qualified people, all over the world," says Marguerite Monrose, head of France and Benelux at Remote.

The company, which employs a thousand people in 70 countries, operates itself in total teleworking, from accounting to human resources.

Hire cheaper

So no more coffee and chouquettes with colleagues, it's time for meetings via interposed screens. The trend is not totally new in the tech professions, but it has gained momentum since Covid. And the many waves of layoffs announced by Gafam do not change anything, according to industry specialists who see it as a way for companies to stand out in the hunt for talent.

"I had several job choices after leaving Google, and for me, the option of total teleworking was an important argument," says Nicolas Pessemier.

So no more coffee and chouquettes with colleagues, it's time for meetings via interposed screens. The trend is not totally new in the tech professions, but it has gained momentum since Covid © Martin BUREAU / AFP / Archives

This organization of work also makes it possible to recruit at much lower salaries. For example, according to a report by the American firm Gartner in 2022, a data engineer (data specialist) costs $ 17,400 in annual salary in New Delhi against $ 187,000 in San Francisco.

The advantage is also administrative, explains Cyril Dupouey, of the consulting firm Meritis. "Before, the company did all the steps to bring an employee from another country, with all the administrative delays. Thanks to the +full remote+, the paper barrier has shattered, everything can be done remotely, even from a great distance," he says.

"We used to see a brain drain, for example from Europe, Africa or Asia to the United States. Today, with the rise of teleworking (...) talents remain in their countries of origin," adds Marguerite Monrose, of Remote.

But the method also has its disadvantages, such as the difficulty of integrating junior employees, a corporate culture that is more difficult to transmit or very staggered schedules.

A pitfall experienced by Jordan Pittier, who once managed "a team of employees located in Paris, Quebec City, Bucharest and Seattle: we had a ten-hour time range from East to West. It was tiring," he admits. In response, the sector began to recruit according to time zones, for more fluidity.

© 2023 AFP