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Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

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171–180 of 414 posts

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#171
post #20

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities. My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies: South East England, outside London: 1x London: 2x New York: 3x San Francisco: 6x On making hay: A friend of mine is currently…

Yep people who work remote from a low COL area will benefit now and will benefit possibly even more once market pressure would start ramping up. Whilst everyone wants to get paid as much as possible getting paid period is even better. If you have a competitive advantage that would increase the likelihood of them making you an offer by asking for less because your housing costs only 50-25% of what it would in SV you’l…

My firm works with a huge telecom company, some 15 years or so.

The first time i saw them going from central to decentral i was line :why? My colleagues, working longer with them, where like : meh its not the first time.

They go from central to decentral every five or so years for two reasons : getting rid of old workers, and hiring cheaper new workers.

They will probably do the same every few years..

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#172
post #81
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

You’re ignoring the fact that people take up space.

Every single cabin in the woods running off solar used to be an area with trees.

EDIT: And don’t even get me started on those cabin dwellers buying cats and letting them roam the forest like the invasive bird and mammal eating machine that they are.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#173

Recruiting is proving insanely difficult right now. We are based just outside of London and have been offering "local remote" (1 day in week office generally) for about 4 years now. Candidates were always hard to attract (salary and office location) but offering remote work 4 days a week really helped. Now, that perk is now a norm so access to even remotely (no pun intended) skilled candidates is next to impossible.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I’d drop the one day a week in office requirement and make sure you’re paying market rates (e.g. £100k+ for mid level devs). Lots of good people looking to go fully remote right now.

£100k for web dev does not happen outside London in UK. Barely half that.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#174
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I’d drop the one day a week in office requirement and make sure you’re paying market rates (e.g. £100k+ for mid level devs). Lots of good people looking to go fully remote right now.

Possibly. Although the surveys I've seen show something like 75% of employees want to come into an office at least one day per week. Of course 25% is still a lot of people and opens up options considerably for someone that doesn't want to live near a city or at least near your city. Monthly team off-sites are also an issue if you don't mind paying for some travel/hotel.

This is a definitely a polarising issue. Some devs prefer to come in to be social, some prefer the office environment and others prefer it at home for the flexibility or are just more productive at home (me included).

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#175
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that employers aren’t going to become less picky when switching to remote; likely, they will become even more picky and will want to improve their employee base since the supply has increased and that will be possible where it wasn’t before.

It doesn't matter. The top 1% of a large pool is still bigger than the top 1% of a small pool, so competition increases for the same number of jobs.

However, a company that was previously land-restricted to only the 98th percentile (top 2% minus top 1%) now has access to the top 1% and will be trying to compete, so there are actually more jobs available at the top.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#176

What does it take to work for this kind of company though? I have about ten years experience, been focusing on frontend for the last few years. I have never worked at any of the big names and I have a bachelor degree that’s not in CS or mathematics but I’m a decent developer in my opinion: I write clean, testable code. And yet the major tech players always reject me before even a screening call. Which makes me think…

I'm was a full stack dev with a similar self-taught background but only 5 years experience and I just started as a Google SRE last year. Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

> Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

How so? Did you meet people there that were part of your recruitment process, or for another reason?

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#177

I just hope the home office trend doesn't lead to an urbanization of the countryside. I'm from a charming village that was overtaken by ugly and expensive developements during the past 20 years because people from the nearest city realised it was within commutable distance. I die a little inside every time I see someone oneline saying "I can't wait 'till X area has better internet so I can move there", understand "I…

Only the best rural locales will see an urbanization. There is likely to always be a hierarchy to human growth since people like to be around other people, in general.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#178
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why there's a split between what taxes get paid by your employer and what taxes get paid by the employee - in the end, the employer pays all of them anyway. I'd like to know exactly how much money an employer would have to pay for a given amount of money landing in my bank account in a given time period.

The reason is politics. It's easier to raise taxes that are invisible to voters.

It's also a very strong lever that is not very well understood by the general public and can be used to stimulate growth in a particular area without sounding like the government is subsidizing the industry directly.

For example in Quebec the government waves a sizable chunk of taxes if the employee works on "research". With research being voluntarily defined very loosely so video game development falls into that category. The goal was to draw Ubisoft, EA, Unity, etc... in Montreal.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#179
post #81
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

There's not enough tax base to support infrastructure like installing broadband, repairing and winter upkeep of roads and electric grid, fire stations, hospitals. Even businesses like nursing homes which one expects would benefit from lower property costs do not prosper due to lack of population and supportive medical services. Lower COL areas are net users of tax revenue from the country due to inefficiency, cities are net generators to the country.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#180
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. The top 1% of a large pool is still bigger than the top 1% of a small pool, so competition increases for the same number of jobs.

However, a company that was previously land-restricted to only the 98th percentile (top 2% minus top 1%) now has access to the top 1% and will be trying to compete, so there are actually more jobs available at the top.

You are forgetting that for each "land restricted" company that had 0% 99th percentile hires locally available there was x companies having more % somewhere else for it to eventually be an distribution.

There is no way you can filter out top 1/100 candidates anyway.

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