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Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

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Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#221

Post by kileywm »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #196
Scarblac wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite sure the five weeks he mentioned don't include official holidays. In the Netherlands it's also five weeks on top of a number of official holidays, and we gave the lowest number of those in the EU (7 iirc, some of which may be weekend Sat's in some years, like Christmas now). Of course good companies typically don't offer only the minimum.

In France you get 5-8 weeks of vacation that are counted in addition to the official days off. In general you work 272 days a year and the rest is vacation and days off (this is also the reason we get a different amount of days off every year). I have about 40 working days off, of which the company can choose the dates of 10.

272 days is very high. Full time work in the US with 0 vacation (typically is 10-20 days) and 0 company holidays (typically is 5-15 days) is 250 days. Perhaps you mistyped?

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#222

Post by visaals »

I found this article to be pretty enlightening about the nature of of the software engineering job market, which should help you figure out what companies can afford expensive developers.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

If you're okay with a little risk, it's probably easier to join a remote series S-ish startup where you get a solid base salary (130k-180k based on your experience) and where the stock could be worth anything from 0k/yr to $100k+ per year. I would highly recommend only joining these types of companies if they have technical founders who have worked in BigTech and understand the value of high quality engineers and maintaining a good engineering culture (aka blameless post mortems, predictable deadlines, no-overworking, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#223

Post by wpietri »

amacasubstack wrote: post #15

My main trick has been to specialize in things that all companies like a lot (AWS, js, python), jumping gigs, and leveraging Remote Contracting networks [1]. To get to ~200k remote salaries is hard, but not impossible if you make clear what kind of business leverage you bring and what responsibilities you can take. In addition, you might not actually need such a high Remote salary if you choose to live in cheaper tow…

Wow, I love the preamble there. So nice when successful people don't do the "I am a self-made man, I started out squeezing loose hydrogen and oxygen atoms to create my own water" routine.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#224

Post by treeman79 »

boppo1 wrote: post #200
treeman79 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When young, I was asked to take over reporting for a couple weeks while someone went on vacation. It was a full time position that required 7 solid hours a day of work. I had the position fully automated by the time person got back. Thankfully they took it well and they got more interesting assignments. 2 weeks of my time saved several years of salary for company. I did this many times.

How do I reach this level of confidence in programming ability?

Automate everything. Regardless if it saves time or not. Pickup a good scripting language. Ruby or python.

Spend time with business people on “why” they are doing something.

Learn Excel.

After awhile you will be incredibly good at highly useful business process stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#225

Post by shiftpgdn »

Rastonbury wrote: post #207
jollofricepeas wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in the Midwest. I’m seeing two strategies that are friends are using to get to $250k+ right now and much more… 1. Several have left for left/right coast former startups companies that are publicly traded. Their base comp is $160-180k but they are also receiving a large pool of equity that vests in tranches of $75-100k a year. 2. With everything being remote, several senior engineer friends are working tw…

Wait two fulltime 250k+ jobs?

I think that’s a remarkable exception rather than a common occurrence.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#226

Post by necovek »

Rastonbury wrote: post #207
jollofricepeas wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in the Midwest. I’m seeing two strategies that are friends are using to get to $250k+ right now and much more… 1. Several have left for left/right coast former startups companies that are publicly traded. Their base comp is $160-180k but they are also receiving a large pool of equity that vests in tranches of $75-100k a year. 2. With everything being remote, several senior engineer friends are working tw…

Wait two fulltime 250k+ jobs?

I would gather they are referring to two jobs that in total sum to above 250k a year.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#227

Post by elbows »

jerrygoyal wrote: post #124

Many commentators are suggesting exploring a freelance/contract role instead of a full-time job to make $250k. Now, If we do the math you should be charging ~$125/hr working 8hrs 5 days a week to annually make 250k. You need to charge even more if you plan to take leaves. My question is where do you find these generous clients? From what I've heard even the top paying freelancing sites like Toptal don't have clients…

In my experience (doing consulting/freelance work for a few years now), you have to get away from "freelance" kinds of jobs into "consulting". The terms are not well defined and there's a lot of overlap. But generally consulting seems to imply jobs where the client is relying on your judgment and you're responsible for the project as a whole. Freelancing is more about doing narrowly-scoped pieces of technical work.

Sites like Toptal mostly offer freelance type jobs, and there's a lot of price competition among freelancers.

For consulting work, clients don't think twice about paying $200/hour, even when the actual technical work is pretty straightforward. Higher rates are definitely possible if you have specialized skills and/or find the right clients. But you can really only find these jobs through personal connections.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#228

Post by srb4 »

intuitionist wrote: post #197
rco8786 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly untrue. I’m sorry that your particular company saw a 60% decrease in stock price over 3 years. But this is not the norm for any reasonably healthy company.

I think many people on HN may be too young to remember the early 2000s, when you’d kill someone for your stock price to be down only 60% over 3 years, but it absolutely happens to good companies too.

I thought I was going to be rich with my first job at a startup out of college but the dot com bust basically made it all worthless. Stock is great but cash would have been better.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#229

Post by nickjj »

karmajunkie wrote: post #190
mypalmike wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to reduce your tax load is to contract through your LLC, pay yourself a salary from that, and get taxed as an S Corp. It helps to hire an accountant who knows how to handle most of this for you.

yeah i was coming here to suggest this. LLC with the S-corp election will save you ass-tons in taxes. the paperwork isn’t worth it until you get to around 100k in consulting income but from there on you can basically cut your SE taxes in half (although technically you don’t pay SE taxes with this setup, you’re paying yourself as w2 so their employer taxes)

> yeah i was coming here to suggest this. LLC with the S-corp election will save you ass-tons in taxes

Where did you hear that? No accountant I've ever spoken with mentioned it's worth setting up an LLC to save money on taxes as a typical set up where you're a solo developer who runs their own tech business.

I mean, paying yourself less of a salary through an LLC is going to result in paying less income tax but it's not a system where suddenly you're paying way less in taxes AND you get to keep the remainder to do as you please right now as if it's some type of easy loop hole.

There's also regulations around single employee LLCs around all profits being taxed as income for the owner.

Re: Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

#230

Post by alisonkisk »

intuitionist wrote: post #197
rco8786 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredibly untrue. I’m sorry that your particular company saw a 60% decrease in stock price over 3 years. But this is not the norm for any reasonably healthy company.

I think many people on HN may be too young to remember the early 2000s, when you’d kill someone for your stock price to be down only 60% over 3 years, but it absolutely happens to good companies too.

It happened 1 year in 20, after an incredible run up, and good companies recovered.
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