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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

#61

Post by glandium »

ludston wrote: post #44
MattGaiser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The solution that everyone goes on Zoom, regardless of whether or not they are sitting next to each other. Pretend the team is fully remote, but still take advantage of organic, local interaction to skill up new developers. We were coincidentally doing this in my workplace 6 months before COVID took off.

How well does echo cancellation work in these cases?

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

#62

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

NeverFade wrote: post #56
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix and FAANGs in general can get away with employee unfriendly practices due to the obscene compensation they offer which provides them with an endless stream of talented candidates knocking on their door. The problem is, I see these practices slowly creeping in European tech companies, but without the glorious compensation to make up for them: i.e. companies wanting to put you through 3-6 rounds of interviews,…

I wouldn't consider FAANG comp to be "obscene", in fact many of the lower-paying FAANGs - Amazon, and recently also Google - are not paying much above market pay. Facebook has already committed to supporting more remote work, as has Microsoft.

Ok, but you missed my point, my point wasn't that FAANG pays best in SV, my point was that employee-unfriendly practices from SV, which pays best in the world, make their way outside but without the compensation.

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

#63

Post by NeverFade »

joshuamorton wrote: post #59
NeverFade wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers? Do you really think the average pers…

Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office, and I know a lot of people who get a productivity boost due to the dynamics of from-office work. Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits. There are also lots of people working from 1br apartments who can't wait to work from a space that isn't also their bedroom.

> Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office

Find a co-working space.

> Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits.

Remote work gives you the freedom to work from anywhere. That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.

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

#64

Post by NeverFade »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #62
NeverFade wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't consider FAANG comp to be "obscene", in fact many of the lower-paying FAANGs - Amazon, and recently also Google - are not paying much above market pay. Facebook has already committed to supporting more remote work, as has Microsoft.

Ok, but you missed my point, my point wasn't that FAANG pays best in SV, my point was that employee-unfriendly practices from SV, which pays best in the world, make their way outside but without the compensation.

Then resist this trend by publicly posting about it in your location, and refusing to work for companies that follow this trend.

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

#65

Post by joshuamorton »

NeverFade wrote: post #63
joshuamorton wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office, and I know a lot of people who get a productivity boost due to the dynamics of from-office work. Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits. There are also lots of people working from 1br apartments who can't wait to work from a space that isn't also their bedroom.

> Put simply: yes. I know a lot of people who enjoy socialization provided at the office Find a co-working space. > Heck, there at even people who like SF and city life on its own merits. Remote work gives you the freedom to work from anywhere. That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.

> Find a co-working space.

Alternatively, they can work for an employer who has an office and then they don't need to pay for access to a co-working space. Their choice to do so doesn't harm you, they simply value certain aspects of the job differently, much as people value vacation vs raw salary differently.

> That includes other cities. You can still live in SF if you want, or choose any of the other dozens of cities that provide more benefits for far cheaper costs.

Yes, but for the same reason as above, there are enough people who explicitly value the "conventional" office interaction that companies will continue to cater to it. It's often cheaper and more efficient for employees to do so.

I'll also as an aside mention that

> Engineers tend to be introverted.

Is in my experience false. The hn bubble is far more introverted, on average, than my coworkers at a major tech company are. If you are introverted, you may not spend a great amount of time with those people, but i don't think it's controversial to say that the majority of currently employed software engineers don't want to stay in their homes forever.

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

#66

Post by ck425 »

NeverFade wrote: post #34
fullstackwife wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> 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.

This is factitious comparison. Remote works great for a lot of people and it's undoubtable good that there are more options. But there are legit reasons for both businesses and employees to prefer working from an office. Office working isn't some ploy by evil employers to sweat every last drop of productivity from their employees at the employees expense.

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

#67

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

NeverFade wrote: post #64
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but you missed my point, my point wasn't that FAANG pays best in SV, my point was that employee-unfriendly practices from SV, which pays best in the world, make their way outside but without the compensation.

Then resist this trend by publicly posting about it in your location, and refusing to work for companies that follow this trend.

Yeah, easy to say but unless you're in the top percentile of highly sought-after specialists in a hot area, you're not making a dent.

The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no problem as they have 99 more candidates waiting in the pipeline and some will.

When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them.

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

#68

Post by stoilt »

NeverFade wrote: post #55
groundCode wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might. And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. Overwhelmingly the developers in my organisation are happy to work remote forever. Deliver people, product people, design people all seem to want to be back in the office. Upper management as well.

> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers? Do you really think the average pers…

Do you think if everyone works remotely and companies can hire from all over the country (or the globe for that matter) you will still get a salary that you'd get in SF? I'm pretty sure this will push down the salaries, so you probably won't end up in a "quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home", but a quiet, medium-crime suburb, in a decent home maybe.

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

#69

Post by GGfpc »

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…

Does Microsoft explicitly mark their open positions as remote friendly? Or is it a case of talking to the recruiter during the process?

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

#70

Post by NeverFade »

ck425 wrote: post #66
NeverFade wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

> 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. This is factitious comparison. Remote works great for a lot of people and it's undoubtable good that there are more options. But there are legit reasons for both businesses and employees to prefer working from an office. Office working isn't some p…

Remote work is a coveted benefit, subject to the same economics as other coveted benefits: employers will have to offer it as it becomes normalized, and offered by their competitors in the war for talent.

Similar to how office food benefits used to be extremely rare niche, and now are extremely common.

Not sure where you got "ploy" or "evil employers", nothing in my post implies those things.

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