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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

#71

Post by francis-io »

NeverFade wrote: post #32
onethought wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fair has nothing to do with it. We want to remove risk from as many people as possible. If you can do a job from home, do it from home.

Lets not put people at risk just to increase "fairness".

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

#72

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #51
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain and Italy are Western Europe by post-WW2 geo-politics, but a better definition would be to say they are Southern Europe which, by developer pay, is even worse than Eastern Europe that most devs there have long moved north to the point where I doubt they're many left there.

Hehe, I, for one, moved to Spain (Costa del Sol) from a high paying location. Working remotely for a US company through a Spanish outsourcing company and getting payed peanuts compared to what I earned back at home, not to speak of US salaries (though my pay here is still 2x average local salary). Heck, although I'm basically living paycheck to paycheck right now, I could not be happier with my decision, life is good…

My point was that of young talented native Spaniards and Italians leaving for greener pastures abroad (Netherlands, Ireland, Scandinavia, UK, Germany are full of them)

I'm sure there is an endless supply of techies willing to move to Spain and Southern Europe just for the weather and the beaches, regardless of pay.

If you don't mind me asking how do you find daily life there and dealing with taxes, healthcare, the authorities an bureaucracy in general?

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

#73

Post by tafox »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #51
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain and Italy are Western Europe by post-WW2 geo-politics, but a better definition would be to say they are Southern Europe which, by developer pay, is even worse than Eastern Europe that most devs there have long moved north to the point where I doubt they're many left there.

Hehe, I, for one, moved to Spain (Costa del Sol) from a high paying location. Working remotely for a US company through a Spanish outsourcing company and getting payed peanuts compared to what I earned back at home, not to speak of US salaries (though my pay here is still 2x average local salary). Heck, although I'm basically living paycheck to paycheck right now, I could not be happier with my decision, life is good…

Sounds like me. Moved to Austria, feel incredibly poor... but still making 1.5x the average local salary in my mid 20s.

Weird experience.

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

#74

Post by NeverFade »

joshuamorton wrote: post #65
NeverFade wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 citi…

I believe you express an opinion that is shared by many people who are simply comforted and reassured by the status-quo. Additionally, you work for Google, which has been quite stringent about keeping all work on-site. You'd like to keep your job, so cognitive dissonance induces you to conclude - without much evidence - that this status quo is The Best of All Worlds.

Working full-time from the office is a condition that was created due to certain historical preconditions. In particular, it was a good fit for industrial work, and indeed the modern urban office environment is rooted in the industrial revolution.

It is not at all necessary in our modern world. If you want to live in a big city and commute to a shared workspace every day, you can do so. However, there are so many other options available, and I dare suggest you shouldn't declare them all inferior before trying them.

Overall, onsite office work binds you to exactly one option, remote work allows you a huge freedom of choice - and that is categorically a positive thing.

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

#75

Post by alfiedotwtf »

francis-io wrote: post #71
NeverFade wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fair has nothing to do with it. We want to remove risk from as many people as possible. If you can do a job from home, do it from home. Lets not put people at risk just to increase "fairness".

This, so much. Can’t have us flatten the curve if we’re all jammed packed on public transport!

The Victorian government’s messaging here has been along the lines of “if you can work for home, please do it”, and fines can be issued if you force workers into the office when unnecessary... but from what I’m hearing, workers aren’t raising alarm bells

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

#76

Post by jillesvangurp »

I've been working with and running remote teams for a few years. It takes some getting used to but basically it can work. And when it doesn't work, it's usually for the same reasons that local teams can fail. Which is of course a combination of communication issues, management issues, and sometimes simply not having the right people on your team.

Communication issues get amplified in a remote situation because you are dealing with cultural issues, timezone issues, and often poor tooling. And even when it works well, a video call just isn't a substitute to being in the same room. A key lesson here is to simply rely less on this and push your processes in a more asynchronous direction. E.g. having scrum related meetings over a video meeting is even more painful than having them in real life. They are inherently synchronous in nature. Going asynchronous reduces meeting pressure. We have a lot of tools to support that these days. Most of which came out of the OSS community which out of necessity tends to favor asynchronous processes because remote is a defacto reality in pretty much most of them.

Another lesson is that once you get used to this actually being a workable situation, hiring locally at greater expense becomes harder to defend. Basically it levels the playing field and your premium rate is going to be more related to what you can do then it is to where you are doing it.

When there are lots of qualified people willing to work at a quarter your rate, maybe that is going to be a challenge long term. In reality it's not so bad; you get what you pay for also remotely. Worse, you actually need a certain level of maturity and skills to compensate for people being remote. So, that biases rates to the premium end of the spectrum. But still, expecting San Francisco rates just because you are based there or used to be based there on a remote project that also has people from India, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, would probably not be long term sustainable. You can literally get an entire team for those rates and it wouldn't be that bad of a team.

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

#77

Post by saiya-jin »

NeverFade wrote: post #60
doteka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of even the developed world is nothing like SF. In particular, for most people outside major capitals buying a house and raising a family is very doable. > spending all day every day in the comfort of their home This may sound good to you, it definitely doesn’t sound good to an extrovert. If that was my prospects for the rest of my life, I’d likely shoot myself.

> The vast majority of even the developed world is nothing like SF. For American workers, most tech hubs are SF or very similar to it, in terms of CoL. SF, LA, Seattle, Manhattan, etc. > it definitely doesn’t sound good to an extrovert Engineers tend to be introverted.

America (as in US) is cca 5% of the world population. Engineers can be introverted, their managers (and their) not so much.

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

#78

Post by BJBBB »

But for some on-site hardware jobs, demand seems to have increased (anecdotally?).

Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand.

Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp.

I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.

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

#79

Post by r_c_a_d »

novok wrote: post #53
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…

Even in a remote world, it's still pretty painful to deal with large timezone differences. I don't want to work with people in india if I'm in the america timezone set, and if they could choose, people working for american companies in india would probably feel the same. Similar with european offices. NYC, Brazil and SF can all interact with each other well enough. So even if the software world was remote, I still th…

I agree. When I worked in London for Nokia I tried to keep to Finland time where possible, as it made things a lot easier. Then they added teams in India and China and it became a nightmare.

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

#80

Post by NeverFade »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #67
NeverFade wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

> 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.

I heard before that the European tech scene sucks, and my only advice is: relocate.

Pay in Switzerland for example is more competitive.

Incidentally, one reason I heard for low pay in Germany, specifically, is that it's very hard to fire people.

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