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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

NeverFade wrote: post #88
Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are they top paying? Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying" Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?

It's incredibly easy to compete with "top paying" companies once you offer remote work, due to huge gaps in taxation and cost-of-living. Let's do the math: $400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net. Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by NeverFade »

ck425 wrote: post #87
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…

You're comparing a terrible commuting scenario to a great remote scenario. You're also looking at this from the perspective of someone with an established family. Of course remote looks better! There are more commuting scenarios that living in the SF (or London or NYC or insert major city here) with a long commute and crazy house prices. I live and work(ed) in a medium size city where a mid-level engineer can afford…

> Moving out to a suburbs gives me a bit more space but not much else. It also comes at the expense of being further away from everything and having to drive everywhere. There's a lot of room between everyone in the same dense massive urban areas and everyone going full remote from the suburbs.

Remote works lets you choose where you want to live and work. You can stay in the city if that's your thing, or move to the suburbs.

I don't understand comments that pretend as if remote work is going to force everyone to "work from the suburbs". Remote work is about more choice.

Incidentally, remote work will also make cities more affordable, so folks like you who enjoy them will benefit tremendously.

Remote work doesn't limit your choices, that's what office work does.

Remote work greatly expands your range of options.

> Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc.

Areas that are very dense in tech aren't ideal for dating. Tech is male-dominated, so if your preferred partner is female, you will find dating in Silicon Valley quite challenging.

With remote work, you could choose a city that offers better dating prospects.

Yet another win for remote work.

Literally any particular thing you'd like to optimize for: dating, meeting new people, staying near existing family and friends, raising a family of your own - remote work gives you far better and more numerous options.

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

#93

Post by goatinaboat »

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…

> You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is dying to go back to their offices in SF

In the real world, once a company becomes self-sustaining no one with real decision-making power cares about productivity, they care about amassing more power, even at the detriment of the organisation. Those games are infinitely better played in person. I don’t like it any more than you do but that won’t change these facts.

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

#94

Post by [deleted] »

NeverFade wrote: post #82
stoilt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job? As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India. Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much. Maybe you won't make the $300k you used to make in SF, but $200k…

[deleted]

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

#95

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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.

I like that idea. Plus it still allows for multi tasking during meetings...

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

#96

Post by hobos_delight »

GGfpc wrote: post #69
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?

This depends on the hiring manager and the org - I'm hiring for a couple of roles in Australia and have explicitly marked them as remote (in AU).

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

#97

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

tafox wrote: post #73
atomashpolskiy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you feel poor at 1.5x the local average, imagine how the pople making 1x that or below must feel.

BTW, why do you feel poor if you don't mind me asking?

PS: I'm also a dev in Austria now. You can reach out to me for a post-pandemic coffee if you want, would be cool to meet another dev. My email's in my profile. Cheers!

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

#98

Post by NeverFade »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #84
NeverFade wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You heard wrong, it's just an internet myth. Difficulty of firing people or high taxes are not the main cause of low pay in Europe. The main causes are: lack of VC funding, lack of innovative disruption and entrenchment of traditional businesses with old-fashioned boomer MBA mentality that consider tech as an expensive cost center and devs as replaceable factory floor cogs that should be offshored whenever possible,…

I know people who worked in Europe, and Germany specifically, and they all said it's much harder to fire employees in Germany (and Western Europe generally) compared to the US.

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

#99

Post by seanmcdirmid »

angarg12 wrote: post #28
dejv wrote: post #7

This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they m…

Not to beat that dead horse, but I agree. During COVID I transferred to a team based in the US west coast. My manager was happy with me working remotely from England, which has been great since I was able to move to the countryside where cost of living is much cheaper. However I'm still getting paid about half the comparable salary of my colleagues over there just because of the location. Yes, I know, in the US healt…

Salaries in the UK are less than the USA, or even China. I remember a friend moving from Beijing to Cambridge (for a well known big Corp) had to put up a decent struggle to keep his salary from being cut to local levels. I don’t get why UK salaries are less than most other major dev sites.

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

#100

Post by seanmcdirmid »

r_c_a_d wrote: post #79
novok wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Try organizing a meeting with attendees from Beijing, Redmond, and Cambridge. Ya...it doesn’t work.

India is the absolute worst for the USA because they are almost 12 hours off.

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