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3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

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Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#31

Post by fullstackwife »

crandycodes wrote: post #5

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB befor…

I also believe in remote, but it's not like remote is 100% effective for all teams, and with all kinds of leadership.

Remote work at scale is relatively new, and it will be evolving - you don't know the direction: good, or bad.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#32

Post by NeverFade »

onethought wrote: post #29
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I know companies where management have refused work-from-home PRE-COVID have struggled to deal with their whole company forced to work from home because of lockdowns as they were unprepared. As soon as restrictions were lifted here, these same companies forced workers to come back into the office... and now only a few weeks later, we’re in a lockdown again. In a digital world, and being the primary workers in t…

I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?

Is it "fair" for many workers to work in hostile and dangerous environments like oil rigs or policing high-crime streets, while SWEs sit in comfortable climate-controlled offices?

Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#33

Post by busrf »

giantandroids wrote: post #12

It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skill…

Unfortunately the CEO of the large streaming company based in Los Gatos has strongly negative feelings about remote work even after COVID: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-re...

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#34

Post by NeverFade »

fullstackwife wrote: post #31
crandycodes wrote: post #5

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB befor…

I also believe in remote, but it's not like remote is 100% effective for all teams, and with all kinds of leadership. Remote work at scale is relatively new, and it will be evolving - you don't know the direction: good, or bad.

Yes, many employers would rather that we physically commute to their offices every morning. They'd also rather we worked 12-hour shifts and got paid minimum wage for it.

However, as the talent crunch keeps getting worse, and CoL and local income taxes keep obliterating pay raises, employers will have to find ways to reward the talented senior employees they're all competing for - and it won't be simply paying them more to work on-site in ultra-high CoL locations.

As more employers offer remote work options, the remaining employers will have to match - or risk losing many of the best candidates, especially senior engineers who aren't going to try to raise a family in SF or Manhattan.

Also, once the process kicks into high gear, it will be hard to reverse; engineers will move to suburbs in states like Colorado, and it will be very hard to get them to move back to extremely expensive areas like the Bay.

Arguably this is already happening during this pandemic. I know many engineers who moved to remote locations with no plans of coming back.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#35

Post by NeverFade »

MattGaiser wrote: post #24
jayd16 wrote: post #21

I don't think we'll really know what the future holds until people start coming back to work. When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.

Yes, everyone on Zoom is fine. Half in the room and half on Zoom has never been easy and I am not sure how that will be solved going forward.

If WFH becomes fully accepted, I don't think many employees will choose to commute 30-60 minutes to spend their days at the office instead of staying home with their spouse, kids, and pets.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#36

Post by aste-risk »

what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart (https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#37

Post by aaomidi »

aste-risk wrote: post #36

what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart ( https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html ), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?

Cheaper market probably

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#38

Post by NeverFade »

busrf wrote: post #33
giantandroids wrote: post #12

It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skill…

Unfortunately the CEO of the large streaming company based in Los Gatos has strongly negative feelings about remote work even after COVID: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-re...

Netflix having employee-unfriendly policies is nothing new: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency...

This is very much in line with their traditional approach.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#39

Post by adenozine »

aste-risk wrote: post #36

what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart ( https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html ), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?

Bonuses, seasonal differentials, benefits, vacation time, excellent managers who don't micromanage might all be reasons people stay there. I don't work there, but I've worked for less than I'm "worth" before because of reasons like those.

10% pay cut, but 5wks vacation instead of 2? Sign me up. I really landed an offer like that once, I felt so lucky.

It all just depends. It could just be bad statistics or something like that too, it's all quite hard to actually quantify when there's so many non-numerical factors (insurance, commute, social, etc)

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#40

Post by Cthulhu_ »

aste-risk wrote: post #36

what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart ( https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html ), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?

How much international employees do they have? The US, especially the SF area is probably the highest paid location, most of the world has much more reasonable wages.
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