The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. – bradv 🍁 04:35, 23 April 2020 (UTC) reply

List of remote companies

List of remote companies (  | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – ( View log · Stats)

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There doesn't seem to be a good definition of what "remote companies" actually are (we don't have an article on it either), making this a list without clear inclusion criteria. Is it a company without headquarters (like some companies here), or companies with "a lot" of teleworkers (but which percentage?), or something else? Many, many companies have some teleworkers, some remote aspects, this is rather standard nowadays (and certainly now). Is Uber a remote company? It isn't teleworking, but it is a company where most employees never see a building owned by the company or meet their bosses. Fram ( talk) 15:38, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Companies-related deletion discussions. Fram ( talk) 15:38, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Comment - the criteria for inclusion is that all of its employees must be working remotely (not partial remote workforce). This list includes only such companies that have 100% remote employees. Störm (talk) 16:06, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
  • And the evidence that this is true for these companies is...? e.g. SUSE: [1]? I would expect companies matching your definition to lack headquarters, only having an official address (for legal reasons) without any actual presence there. In any case, we don't have an article on the concept as you describe it, which seems a rather arbitrary and hard to verify one to use as a list inclusion definition (I notice companies self-identifying as "remote companies", but that's not really sufficient I think). Fram ( talk) 16:21, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU ^(T) 17:07, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Comment. Without remote company existing as more than a redirect to this list, it's hard to tell what should be included in this or whether it's WP:OR. Unclear if this is actually a substantive or notable concept. Note that article creator has also created Category:Remote companies, so that should probably be nominated at CFD as well. postdlf ( talk) 19:12, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
• Delete. I don't see evidence that this meets WP:LISTN, and is impossible to maintain due to having scant documentation and sources about what constitutes a company with a 100% remote workforce. The inclusion criteria aren't clear at all. For example, GitHub is owned by Microsoft, which is definitely not remote, and GitHub itself has a headquarters. Where do you draw the line? ~ Anachronist ( talk) 22:00, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply
• Comments: Does not seems to pass WP:LISTN. There is coverage at WP:LISTCOMPANY. I also have a problem with the definition of "remote companies" and the inclusion criterion. This is covered by Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lists#Stand-alone list articles, that it should include a lead, and is subjected to the content policies (Sourcing). The lead is necessary to provide information relative to the subject, without falling into "The dictionary definition trap", and show it is not just an "an indiscriminate collection of information" or original research. At this point it would seem a WP:Hey or WP:SAVE would be required. Short of this I am leaning towards "Delete", so ping me if any improvements result. Otr500 ( talk) 22:42, 7 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Keep per the significant coverage in reliable sources.

  The subject passes Wikipedia:Notability#Stand-alone lists, which says, "One accepted reason why a list topic is considered notable is if it has been discussed as a group or set by independent reliable sources, per the above guidelines; notable list topics are appropriate for a stand-alone list." I will show below that "remote companies" has been treated as a "a group or set by independent reliable sources".
  
  Sources

  1. Johnston, Katie (2019-10-03). "Who needs an office? Companies ditch headquarters and connect workers remotely". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     1. "according to FlexJobs, a job-search site whose workforce is fully remote."
     2. "But putting the entire office in the cloud takes some getting used to.  Zapier, a Web-services company with a San Francisco mailing address and 250 employees scattered around the globe, including several in Boston, faced skepticism when it started raising funds in 2012."
     3. "The cloud services provider Egenera recently moved its engineering team out of its Boxborough office and made its workforce 100 percent remote."
     4. "When Kate Criniti, the Lexington-based chief legal officer for the all-remote health care technology company Redox, visits her mother in Connecticut, the only co-workers who notice are the ones she video-conferences with regularly."
     5. "Robert Glazer, the Needham-based founder and chief executive of the marketing agency Acceleration Partners, is careful about hiring “raging extrovert” types who say they work better around other people. Most of his 160 employees are located within an hour of one of 10 hub cities to make it easier to gather employees together — though there are no offices."
     6. "said Becca Van Nederynen, head of people operations at Help Scout, a fully remote software company founded in Boston that pairs up employees for “intentional water cooler talk” via video calls."
  2. Collas, Aurélie (2019-05-17). "In France, Companies Make The Move To 100% Teleworking". Le Monde. Worldcrunch. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     1. "Each Whodunit worker — they are 10, soon to be 15 — logs in from home."
     2. "A pioneer in this area is the website development company Wordpress, which closed its head office in San Francisco in 2017 and converted all of its employees to teleworking."
     3. "In the full-remote galaxy, some companies have never owned any office, even at first. BoondManager is one of them."
     4. Among the perks mentioned by these companies, the easiness of recruiting, the savings in rent, the possibility to grow fast. O'Clock, a "wall-less" web developing school has gone from four collaborators to 46 in just two years."
  3. Evans, Jon (2017-08-13). "Not even remotely possible". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.

  4. Said, Carolyn (2020-01-31). "Where in the world are GitLab's workers? Anywhere". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     When people seek out GitLab’s address, they wind up at a UPS store in downtown San Francisco where it has a mailbox. ... GitLab ranks among the largest all-remote companies in the world. ... Other all-remote companies with more than 500 workers cited by Murph — all in the tech sector — include WordPress developer Automattic, talent network Toptal, software maker Elastic, digital product-design company InVision and app-automation maker Zapier.

  5. BasuMallick, Chiradeep (2020-02-06). "IBM Cancelled Remote Work, but Why Are These Companies Embracing It". HR Technologist. Ziff Davis. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     Here are three companies that have taken remote working a step further. In contrast to IBM’s no work from home mandate, Buffer, Zapier, and GitLab have a 100% remote workforce.

  6. Jee, Charlotte (2018-06-04). "Companies without an office: here's why startups are going remote". TechWorld. Archived from the original on 2020-04-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.

     The article notes:

     1. "Social media management company Buffer shut its San Francisco office in 2015 after finding its rent cost more than marketing, advertising or health insurance."
     2. "'We just pay for a virtual office which provides an address, a mailbox and someone to answer the phone. If we need offices we hire them by the hour,' Andy Clark, managing director of Commerceworks, tells Techworld."
     3. "Trust is a crucial element to making an 'office-less' company work, according to Zapier cofounder and CTO Bryan Helmig, who has worked with a fully remote team since launching the firm in 2011."
  There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow the subject to pass Wikipedia:Notability#General notability guideline, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".

  Cunard ( talk) 10:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Comment: I rewrote the article.

  The article previously had 0 sources. It now has 15 sources.

  The article previously did not have a clear definition of "remote companies". I provided a clear definition of what "remote company" by writing, "Fully remote companies are companies that do not have a physical office where employees work and may have a mailbox as their headquarter. Their workers have the option of either telecommuting or working from somewhere else. Many fully remote companies employ workers in numerous timezones."

  The article no longer violates Wikipedia:Notability#Stand-alone lists. It instead now clearly passes Wikipedia:Notability#Stand-alone lists.

  Cunard ( talk) 10:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Pinging Otr500 ( talk · contribs) who wrote, "At this point it would seem a WP:Hey or WP:SAVE would be required. Short of this I am leaning towards "Delete", so ping me if any improvements result."

  Cunard ( talk) 10:43, 14 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• Keep: Per ping, article issues were addressed. Otr500 ( talk) 18:07, 14 April 2020 (UTC) reply

• @ Cunard: you have now written an article on "remote companies", which includes a very basic list: this basically shows that the original list had poor or no inclusion criteria, with multiple entries not even included any more. It would have been more logical to simply create the article Remote company with the current contents, and delete and redirect the poor list. Fram ( talk) 07:30, 15 April 2020 (UTC) reply
• Keep- excellent work from Cunard, should have been done by me. Störm (talk) 19:41, 15 April 2020 (UTC) reply
• Keep Nice one Cunard, good work at spotting how to fix this article and going ahead and fixing it. HighKing ⁺⁺ 14:22, 16 April 2020 (UTC) reply
• Keep per Cunard analysis. There are enough reliable sources to cover the topic. If you pay attention to the topic, you'll notice that remote companies usually refer to fully or partially distributed teams with work from home employees. It applies to companies that would otherwise have offices. Obviously it does not apply to construction companies, for example. Working on the field is not the same as working from home. -- MarioGom ( talk) 21:10, 20 April 2020 (UTC) reply

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.