Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 147 posts

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

#111

Post by teh_klev »

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…

What's "CoL"?

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

#112

Post by erik_seaberg »

teh_klev wrote: post #111
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…

What's "CoL"?

cost of living

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

#113

Post by atomashpolskiy »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #72
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…

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 au…

Sure. Icome tax is paid by the employer, it varies from around 25% to more than 30% depending on place and personal conditions. Public healthcare is fine, and I also pay for a private insurance. Bureacracy is so-so, and reportedly got worse with covid, though my employer helped me with the adaptation, so everything went smooth (spent 1 month in total to settle everything for everybody). Also, all family members are granted visas with the right to work, at least when you hold a "highly qualified professional" type of visa yourself.

I understand that this is not very informative, but I'm still new here, and most of this stuff is similar in most places in EU.

Realistically, the only things to worry about are money and the lack of jobs. The latter will hopefully be solved by remote becoming the norm in IT, and the former depends heavily on personal conditions. E.g. if my wife worked, it would be much easier for us. If I had a different attitude towards saving and investing in the past, it would be much easier for us. And so on and so forth.

There are quite a few rich people here, and their lifestyle is awesome. Weather is good throughout the year (20-22C and clear skies with bright sun now, and February is the coldest and harshest month here), sea and mountains provide lots of opportunities for leisure and sports, birds and flowers and scents everywhere... Weirdly, I feel like I'm back in my childhood, when everything was so bright and fascinating. Completely forgot how it feels after having been deprived of all of these things due to living in a big industrial city.

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

#114

Post by petercooper »

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #106
NeverFade wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So that's the catch though. A $400k wage in SFBay for Microsoft (which I've never heard of for a regular position) won't just translate to anywhere else in the world. When starting salary in SF for Microsoft new college hire might be $120k+, in the UK it's £40k. I realize you are specifcally talking about relocating to work remotely only within the US, but what I'm getting is that today Microsoft pays wildly differen…

I am more than ready for my thoughts to be considered economically naïve, but I wonder if it's to do with the ability for labor to move?

In the US it is easy (from a legal POV) to move between California and Texas or vice versa so an American employee would probably move to California if a much larger salary depended upon it. If an employer doesn't really care if someone is in any particular location within the US, they may nonetheless feel happy paying what they valued the employee at if they did force them to move to California, say. Of course, they may also attempt to pay less, but that's a risky strategy since the employee could just as easily then request to move to the expensive location.

The UK worker earning 1/4 the wage does not have this freedom. Very few UK workers can move to the US (or any other economy than Ireland) and so the market rate for developers in the UK is very specific to the UK. Only a fraction of the best developers who both want to leave and be able to leave. There's a certain local demand and supply and the salary has found its natural resting point, protected by a moat of visas and regulations.

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

#115

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

atomashpolskiy wrote: post #113
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 au…

Sure. Icome tax is paid by the employer, it varies from around 25% to more than 30% depending on place and personal conditions. Public healthcare is fine, and I also pay for a private insurance. Bureacracy is so-so, and reportedly got worse with covid, though my employer helped me with the adaptation, so everything went smooth (spent 1 month in total to settle everything for everybody). Also, all family members are g…

>Completely forgot how it feels after having been deprived of all of these things due to living in a big industrial city.

I feel you and I'm planning a similar move myself. Thanks for the detailed info.

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

#116

Post by mgkimsal »

amatic wrote: post #105
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…

How is the international remote scene? Does it exist in big (top paying?) companies in the US? To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies?

> To clarify, can people outside the US be hired to do remote work for US companies?

It's often called 'offshoring', I think. I know plenty of US companies large and small that hire remote workers. It also doesn't seem like it's a net win in most cases that I've seen, but people generally don't set themselves up to re-evaluate their decisions 3, 6 and 12 months later, nor have the willpower to reverse the decision if it's not working out as expected.

To clarify, I have seen remote workers outside the US, working for US companies, be a net positive/win, it just hasn't been the norm.

By 'net win', I'm meaning the original goals - more work getting done at a lower cost at the same or better quality in the same or reduced amount of time - panning out. Usually the timezone and cultural differences are bigger hurdles to overcome than anticipated. You often need more US-based resources dedicated to managing the remote team than originally planned. To counter some of those, you can hire more experienced overseas talent, but that's a higher cost, eating in to the anticipated cost savings.

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

#117

Post by shuckles »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #109
NeverFade wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but in general, if you need to fire employees regularly, then your hiring process is broken. The way I look at it is that it's far too easy to fire people in the US, and this also leads to pathologies.

Counter-point: one of the “obscene” pay companies mentioned in this thread builds its entire culture around firing people regularly.

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

#118

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

shuckles wrote: post #117
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but in general, if you need to fire employees regularly, then your hiring process is broken. The way I look at it is that it's far too easy to fire people in the US, and this also leads to pathologies.

Counter-point: one of the “obscene” pay companies mentioned in this thread builds its entire culture around firing people regularly.

Sure, and they are the one that makes the least money :)

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

#119

Post by anonyxyz »

axaxs wrote: post #20
nexthash wrote: post #4

Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current…

Yes, but not the utopia devs in big cities want. They're in for a rude awakening when they realize people with way more talent will do the job for less, not only in the US but worldwide. And I don't mean typical outsourcing bodyshops, but truly talented people in say, the midwest US or eastern Europe.

As someone who has interviewed many candidates for location independent tech work, my experience is that true talent is in the minority.

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

#120

Post by conanbatt »

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…

By the same process, you can also hire a 15 year of experience software engineer from europe or south america for 80k a year, and doing it as a contractor would also mean no payroll taxes.

In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe.

But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were fully remote, and it might just stay that way.

Post reply on HN