The golden age of remote work in Eugene

The national unemployment rate hovers at a near record low of 3.8 percent. The rate is even lower in the tech industry, with an eye-popping zero percent unemployment rate for many different tech occupations. Nearly everyone who is qualified is employed, and nationally there are millions of tech jobs still going unfilled. (For a glimpse of who’s hiring locally, check out February’s BlueChip.)

The demand for skilled talent and the increasing variety of work that is done online, including cybersecurity, development operation, and software development, has led global companies to be increasingly flexible about where people work. This includes working from places like Eugene, which might once have been considered an unlikely hub of the tech world. Not so anymore.

Working remotely from Eugene

InVision is a New York City-based company known for its digital product design platform. The company employs 170 software engineers, all working remotely from all over the world. Ryan Olds, a lead software engineer, is one of them. He’s representative of this very mobile workforce, people who can telecommute from anywhere that has a good internet connection.

Olds cites a number of benefits with this lifestyle choice: additional exercise, smaller carbon footprint, and a short “commute,” just a stroll, really. “When deciding where to live, being able to walk to work was a deciding factor,” he says.

That is just one of the reasons he chooses to live in Eugene, along with the wealth of cultural assets and other factors.

This all fits the Millennial (those born between 1980 and 1994) stereotype: Olds doesn’t own a car, and he doesn’t frequently need one. In fact, most of his weekly appointments are just a short walk from one another. To further support work/life balance, he keeps a small office on West Broadway, in one of the buildings recently connected to EUGNet fiber optic internet, a service Olds credits for making telecommuting from Eugene easier.

The common tools that remote workers use to communicate and collaborate with co-workers are primarily web based: video conferencing, instant messaging, and document management suites. Olds has all that here, at high speed.

But there are tradeoffs with working remotely. “You can’t be on the company softball team, no one is playing video games together, so social places like The Barn Light, where the tech community comes together, offer a sense of belonging for a lot of telecommuters and freelancers,” he notes. The Barn Light offers patrons coffee and world-class internet by day, and a good mix of cocktails, karaoke, and foosball by night.

Living in downtown Eugene makes it easier to access the area’s active nightlife, and there are an increasing number of local meetups and events that cater specifically to the region’s growing tech sector. Groups like Eugene Web Developers, Eugene Area Game Developers, and RAIN Eugene produce events downtown, and The Barn Light is home to a weekly tech meetup every Tuesday evening.

Working remotely for a company headquartered in Eugene

SheerID is one of the many Eugene-based tech companies that is hiring skilled talent remotely. Jake Weatherly, SheerID CEO, shared that he got comfortable with the idea of distributed teams while working at WebEx early in his career. WebEx was one of the companies that pioneered on-demand video conferencing; it was purchased by Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007.

SheerID, which develops technology that enables companies to instantly verify a customers’ eligibility for exclusive offers, has remote workers in cities in nearly every global time zone.

Weatherly cites a number of organizational policies that ensure that the company’s culture is able to transcend a digital divide. For example, all new SheerID hires are flown in to the Eugene headquarters for their first week of employment and on-boarding.

When they go back home, they leave with a full care package that includes an assortment of branded materials to decorate their remote home office. SheerID also has a default policy of “camera on” for all intra-company communication. The policy aims to build trust and confidence between employees.

A recipe for economic prosperity

By 2020, Millennials are expected to hit the mark where they make up 50 percent of the national workforce, and many of them are choosing to work for companies that offer location flexibility, gravitating toward places where a walkable lifestyle is possible and culture abounds. The new world of work is increasingly online, and it’s enabled by tools like video conferencing, which in turn requires infrastructure like high-speed internet. That’s a very strong argument for investment, because jobs will follow.

Eugene is already home to high-wage telecommuters, as well as many successful tech companies that employ them. Taking note of why that is, that’s important. Economic development professionals should continue to nurture all of the ingredients that are part of this recipe for economic prosperity. The timing is right to increase the variety of interesting, vibrant social and recreational places that inspire people to work and collaborate globally on new ideas in this golden age of remote work.

This story was originally published in the May edition of the Register-Guard Blue Chip