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

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

#191

Post by ghaff »

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #174
ghaff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I expect those who can will seek out workplaces that conform to their preferences. Those who want a bustling office won't have that if none of their teammates comes in on a regular basis. And someone who lives a 2 hour drive from the office, much less someone who wants to move out to the mountains, will deeply resent teammates who constantly bug them to come into the office more often.

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

#192

Post by superbcarrot »

ghaff wrote: post #190
solosoyokaze wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying that new companies that were remote from day one will never be non-remote. They’re not going to go buy a bunch of office space and force their disparate workforce to relocate. All hiring has been remote the past year, that’s not really reversible.

Instead, they'll do like Basecamp and get people together a couple times a year. If you hired people on the basis of being remote and they're all over the place, if at the end of 2021 you tell them they all have to relocate to San Francisco, expect to hear a whole lot of big "Nope"s.

It shouldn't be some switcharoo that the company pulls off anyway. Every company that I've talked in the past year has clarified whether they are remote indefinitely or remote only while the pandemic lasts.

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

#193

Post by pxue »

mywittyname wrote: post #169
nhance wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've run a smart consulting business for 16 years now. I've watched over the years as many I've worked with have gone to FAANG. There may be opportunity costs involved, but there is no way FAANG can grab all of the top talent. Some of it is going to make its own way simply because they want to write their own rules.

You don't need to grab all of the top talent, just enough to keep them from coalescing into a threat. The few that slip by get acquir-hired in a few years.

Extremely relevant for Canadian talent pools. Bleed to SF/Bay area is real.

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

#194

Post by shankr »

samvher wrote: post #94
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

For many of the sibling comments discussing before/after tax: part of the confusion arises here because many European countries essentially have two steps of taxation. I work for an American organization as a Dutch person and have had to figure some of this out for my own contract situation. For the Netherlands, your contract will state a wage "before taxes". But the employer will play "employer's taxes" over this wa…

This works very similar in different parts of the world. You will hear lot of times CTC (Cost to company) being used when discussing salaries.

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

#196

Post by xtracto »

coldcode wrote: post #45

This is making finding people for our (large but non tech) company (not in a high tech area) very difficult; we never paid those kind of salaries (cost of living here is much lower) but now you no longer need to be local to work for us, so we have to compete with these high paying companies which our company cannot afford to. It takes the location requirements out of the picture entirely. This is going to kill SF and…

It is already happening in Mexico (in GDL where I live at least): The city has been a "tech hub" for a good 10 to 15 years with growing presence of technology firms (Oracle, IBM, HP, Tata, HCL, Cognizant, Intel, plus several small startups), paying roughly 1/3rd of the price per talent. In the last year, we have seen an increasing number of employees moving to remote jobs for American companies that decide to pay 1/2 the price per talent. This is a lot of money for locals and still a 50% saving for US companies.

The bad thing is that, the start-up culture that was being formed here is starting to disappear. I know several CTO or CEOs friends who lost developers because they cannot compete with those salaries (paying in USD) when they are charging in MXN.

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

#197

Post by rorykoehler »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #144
rorykoehler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why it will always be worth paying inflated salaries for FAANG companies. Taking all the top talent is a moat.

What makes you think their salaries are inflated and others are not lowballing?

I meant inflated relative to the mean. In principle I agree with your sentiment.

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

#198

Post by willcipriano »

sokoloff wrote: post #119
nly wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but until remote work is the norm it's a quality of life trade-off. Living in low COL area around London for instance is complicated by the fact that the entire commuter zone, for certain classes of housing, is basically priced at central prices less cost of commuting. If you want a comfortable family life, with a bunch of kids, then you're looking at a long commute. Housing in the UK is severely messed up thoug…

I think GP means “rent an address” somewhere expensive, claim you live there, and actually live someplace cheap, working remotely.

Similar to how Apple keeps all its intellectual property in Grand Cayman I keep everything I know about tech in the heart of SF.

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

#199

Post by cletus »

nly wrote: post #162
cletus wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop. Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't…

> London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't know. NY seems to be consistently more expensive judging by [0], particularly rent. Overall NY taxes are only 1-3% lower from my calculations, so I think overall NY'ers don't have it much better. The UK is also particularly generous when it comes to tax-advantaged investment and has state healthcare.…

I've lived in both NYC and London (although not in London for years now). Housing is a hard one to compare. Your link mentions city center and out of city center. I'm not sure what that means exactly.

The big issue with London is you have to go _far_ to get affordable housing and commute times are generally terrible. I'm not sure what the picture looks like now with Crossrail.

The thing about New York is yes, Manhattan is expensive (generally) but affordability within 30 minutes of, say, Midtown can be substantially higher. London doesn't really have that. You'll see charts showing commuter towns being X minutes from Liverpool Street, King's Cross, whatever. My experience with London was that those were... unrealistic. Or rather they assumed everything went right. And it almost never does. Particular if a transfer is involved.

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

#200

Post by techolic »

ornornor wrote: post #146

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…

Maybe try different channels, like working with a different recruiter or getting a referral? For the few times I've been approached in the last few years, recruiters differ by miles for how they prepare and present you.
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