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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

#381

Post by Hydraulix989 »

blub wrote: post #306
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…

This "can't code a for loop" is a misleading statement given the kind of interviews that are typical at e.g. Facebook. Even if that candidate could code a for loop and a while loop and knew the syntax of that programming language by heart and knew their algorithms to boot, it's more than likely that they would fail the interview anyway. Complaining about people that can't code loops emphasizes that the candidates are…

The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies.

A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.

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

#382

Post by Leherenn »

bogomipz wrote: post #362
cletus wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London. Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substant…

Thanks. I think I knew Google had an office there. I'm curious if you or anyone else knows if there are other interesting tech or startup shops there?

I'd say there are 4 main places in Switzerland: around both ETH (the most prestigious universities) in Zürich and Lausanne, with plenty of spinoffs, in Geneva (mostly finance) and in Zug (lots of crypto).

Zürich has all (most?) of the big tech, plus lots of start-ups. Lausanne is mostly just start-ups and small companies.

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

#383

Post by Hydraulix989 »

actuator wrote: post #115
nly wrote: 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…

Umm.. FANMAG pay the same comp for NY and SF. Roughly the same for Seattle too.

Seattle is both as expensive and as competitive of a hiring market as the Bay Area (there used to be a CoL delta but the gap closed after 2013ish, when Amazon and Microsoft stocks both went on a tear and Facebook expanded with multiple new large engineering offices there).

I say that as someone who recently left Seattle to move to the Bay pre-pandemic. Only miss the lower taxes, and certainly not the weather.

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

#384

Post by onion2k »

maldini94 wrote: post #310
onion2k wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Europe (geographically anyway, technically the UK isn't in Europe right now). It isn't trash but I'd gladly swap my job for a remote one that pays NY wages.

I believe you're confusing the continent Europe with the European Union. UK is certainly in Europe.

As a British person who has been living through Brexit for years now, I am acutely aware of the difference. When Brits talk about whether they're in Europe or not it's always with reference to the EU. That's the one that actually makes a difference.

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

#385

Post by xtat »

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…

pay for value not area code

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

#386

Post by xtat »

robinhood wrote: post #309

This will just end very quickly. Soon every company will do what Gitlab did: pay average salary based on your geographical location and call it fair. Markets will always try to find a way for cheap labors, and this is no exception.

I actually know a very talented guy that turned down a gitlab offer for this reason- their loss.

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

#387

Post by oblio »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #379
oblio wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Romania almost all salary negotiations, ranges, etc. are on net salary ("take home salary").

How do they know what your tax rate is? Especially in the context of "work from anywhere" as in OP, employees can have a wide variety of tax situations.

The tax rate is flat and there are no deductions. There are no local relative taxes (as in a percentage of your income), everything is in absolute values.

And if you're working from another country, then you're a fiscal resident in that country and you have to pay taxes there. But in that case you'd be a contractor or own a company, so that's a totally different story.

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

#388

Post by oblio »

cko wrote: post #378
oblio wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You poor soul, American living in Romania? How did this mishap happen? I'm guessing it was because of your (presumably Romanian) partner? :-)

Yes, Romanian partner it is. But it's pretty nice here, why do you call it a mishap and what is a better option? Portugal right?

Well, just out of curiosity, visit some local hospitals or make some appointments with doctors in state owned hospitals or clinics.

For better options, I'd say most of other Eastern European countries in the EU are probably better (except for Bulgaria), and also probably Portugal or Spain.

Just check out where the big Romanian diasporas are :-D

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

#389

Post by ubercow13 »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #308
ubercow13 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will happen to all the employees at companies who are not able to leverage them to create as much value as FAANG companies can? ie. every other company that isn't a global tech behemoth?

I deny your premise. All those companies can and already do leverage software engineering talent for the same multipliers or orders of magnitude impact on revenue that tech companies get out of it. They are just using rent seeking opportunities to disingenuously pay uncompetitive salaries and reap surplus for executive pay. Either those companies will get better management and leaders who successfully rebuild the bus…

On what basis can you claim that other companies can leverage engineers to make as much profit as Google/Facebook/Apple? Those are some of the most profitable companies in the world.

It's true that companies might have to adapt or fold, but many business models will not be able to adapt to produce the kind of leverage a global advertising duopoly can.

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

#390

Post by piva00 »

almost_usual wrote: post #304
2W2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already only do 10 hours of work per week in this pandemic WFH. No one seems to notice. I’m L6 at google. Why not double down and get two “full time” jobs. I’ve heard from my friend in BoA that he works less than 1 hour per day. TC: 800k

WFH where? Are you paying 400k+ in taxes? What are you doing with your time? I think I’d go mad if I only worked 1hr a day with these lockdowns.

There is so much stuff to do with your time if you don't have to care about money.

For me, personally, it'd be to invest time in making music, getting good enough in that as my taste is, I just need a lot more free time to practice it. Just like I had when I was a kid learning to program, I've only achieved it due to spending endless hours in experimentation and little projects without usefulness. It's something that is very hard to do, mentally speaking, when you are occupied 8 hours/day with work, I don't have capacity to spend another 4-5 hours/day with music. If I worked 1-2 hours/day I'd definitely have 8-10 hours daily to plunge into it, not only time-wise but my mental capacity would be much more free to put effort in it.

And that can be any hobbies or passions you have that work hours don't allow you to pursue, if money isn't an issue I'm sure you will find ways to fill your time with what you enjoy doing.

If you really enjoy work, well, then you have much more time to work on things you deem worth of.

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