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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

#351

Post by snapcore »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #70
throwawaywork14 wrote: post #43

The easiest way to make a lot more money… Get a job making 120-180 but 4 days a week. It is possible to do this. Make sure it is not an exciting company, but rather a corporate, slow moving one. Now you can pick up a contract making 100+ per hour. 15-20 hours a week. Do 4 hours of the main job. Do 4 hours of the freelance work. You’ll easily be making 250k. Another thing to note, as a developer you can solve a proble…

> The easiest way to make a lot more money… Finding two separate jobs that each pay median developer salaries while requiring only half-time input, working them concurrently, and then constantly finding new contract jobs that fit your criteria is not what I’d call “easy” FWIW, I’ve managed remote teams for a long time. It’s not hard to spot the people who are playing games like this to put in half-time.

The person probably is doing more work than they claim.

Is it that easy to spot people? I always felt like the baseline for work at my jobs was 2-3 hours a day of productivity + 5 hours of screwing around for most people.

There were always the outliers who seemed 2X-3X productive. Anyway, you would be still doing double the work of the lazy people.

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

#352

Post by treeman79 »

the_only_law wrote: post #297
treeman79 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if this stuff pays well though. I recall someone showing me a position at Jane Street (since this thread was discussing HFTs) with at was looking for a VBA developer to develop some sort of integrations between their APIs and Excel sheets I guess someone in the company loved. My first though was “there’s no way this is paying what you typically see for Jane Street developer salaries”.

Payed crap. It setup me up for success.

Learned more in demand stuff and my pay is top notch.

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

#353

Post by pgwhalen »

marstall wrote: post #168
zibzab wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that was an interesting read. Not sure I'm up for working in such a toxic environment, but the technical challenges seem very interesting.

indeed. > If they don't have an FPGA engineer, or have a very small team, they are not serious about finance, or they are just dumb. are FPGAs that core to Finance writ large?

No. A large majority of trading strategies don't require the low latency that FPGAs help provide.

There is some truth to this statement though, if such a firm is trying to pursue a certain kind of strategy - to compete on latency, some of your business must be in hardware.

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

#355

Post by mark_l_watson »

sidcool wrote: post #304
mark_l_watson wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep learning new tech. I would expect major retraining to be required much more often than even 10 or 20 years ago. Personally, I am a big fan of Coursera and eDX online courses, but any form of study is good. Someone from HN just emailed me about this HN thread, and I will make the same comment to you as I did in an e-mail: “”” Every morning first thing, I spend a minute or two thinking of everything that I am grat…

Thanks for your response. If I may continue to pick your mind, can you elaborate on what you consider new tech? Do you refer to new languages, frameworks, programming paradigms? Also, what is your suggestion for learning algorithms and data structures?

Examples of "new tech": common use of deep learning models in many types of applications and services, higher level web based tools for managing data and infrastructure, mobile devices that can do on-device deep learning model inferencing and sometimes even training, etc.

I like and enjoy several programming languages, but I don't consider new languages and frameworks to be paradigm shifting. Still interesting though.

As someone else here mentioned, there are so many new tech niches being created; learn one or two.

Having work life balance is super important, but I find that skipping watching movies or TV a couple evenings a week gives me plenty of off-work time to learn new stuff. My wife accepts that a few evening a week I don't join her in watching a movie after dinner (we sit in the same room, and she puts on earphones).

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

#356

Post by [deleted] »

atlgator wrote: post #339
damontal wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t prospective employers also able to check the credit agencies for salary information of applicants? I’d assume both jobs would show?

Income information on your credit report is self-reported. You will notice that your credit card company asks periodically if your income has changed. That’s where it comes from. It is also non specific, an estimate of total income from all sources not just wages on one job. Perhaps you are independently wealthy with multiple income streams. No one will no the difference.

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by pgwhalen »

cma wrote: post #246
lotsofpulp wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is stopping the buyers who can wait a day or two from placing limit orders. If the HFT firms are earning profits, it is because someone wants to pay them for the liquidity.

Low latency trading is so crucial to the economy that the market mostly shuts down at 4pm every day and takes weekends and holidays, adding 2^47 nanosecond delays every week without much outcry. And whoever wins by 20ns gets rewarded the same as the previous guy who was winning by 21ns. The magnitude of latency isn't rewarded, just coming in first, so more and is spent on less an less absolute improvements, none of w…

> Low latency trading is so crucial to the economy that the market mostly shuts down at 4pm every day and takes weekends and holidays, adding 2^47 nanosecond delays every week without much outcry.

To this I would say: grocery stores (which serve as a sort of middleman to a whole host of necessary goods and are clearly crucial to the economy) close overnight without much outcry.

(To be clear, I think grocery stores are far more important to the economy/society than HFTs, but I think your argument for why is poor)

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

#358

Post by SmileyJames »

hihihihi1234 wrote: post #287
guitarsteve wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree! At least in the US, this kind of total comp is possible at my employer (Datadog) and many other public companies, not just FAANG mega-corps. Typically you’d have to be “senior” or “staff” engineer, or get lucky and join during a period of stock growth. The pandemic really changed things to make remote work more viable. Previously many companies limited it to exceptional cases (long tenure in-person followed by…

How realistic is it to get hired fully remote at this kind of comp if you don't live in the US? I'm British and live in the UK and I'm pretty sure I have enough experience to be making these kinds of high salaries if I lived in the US. Relocating isn't an option for me, at least not in the next few years, but I wonder, am I a fool for taking a UK-based job? Should I find a remote position with a US-based company and…

I'm UK based. Just took a fully remote job at Couchbase. Left the BBC, which is attempting to reintroduce office based working, same role/title, 66% salary increase. Very possible, could even say easy.

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

#359

Post by lotsofpulp »

atlgator wrote: post #339
damontal wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t prospective employers also able to check the credit agencies for salary information of applicants? I’d assume both jobs would show?

Income information on your credit report is self-reported. You will notice that your credit card company asks periodically if your income has changed. That’s where it comes from. It is also non specific, an estimate of total income from all sources not just wages on one job. Perhaps you are independently wealthy with multiple income streams. No one will no the difference.

The work number (by equifax, a credit reporting agency) may report it though assuming your employer participate and gives them your pay and employment info.

https://theworknumber.com/

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

#360

Post by k__ »

ghaff wrote: post #233
username223 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How to make 1k a day? Write 2 technical articles. The going rate for a technical article written in ~4 hours is $500? That blows my mind. I'm not saying it doesn't happen -- I've only done non-technical articles -- but that it's hard for me to imagine it being profitable for the publication. 800-1000 words produced from scratch in 4 hours, including research, editing, and graphics, is going to be garbage one step a…

As someone who does a fair bit of writing, I'd say a 1,000 word article is more like 1-2 days depending on research (including perhaps attending an event/interviews), administrivia, editing, procrastination, etc.--and can certainly take more than that. Not that I'm generally working freelance, but I'd certainly expect around $1K as the bare minimum. Which, if you do the calculation, probably only translates to about…

Yes.

It's also a question of expectations.

I have many clients who publish anything I write without any questions.

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