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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

#361

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

gorgoiler wrote: post #33

You need to passively attract the attention of multiple potential employers with lots of money — either revenue or funding — and then let them outbid each other until you find your true maximum market value. That means getting found by sourcers (recruiters) without explicitly making contact with them. Recruiters are, alas, still prejudiced against active candidates when you are trying to claw your way up the seniorit…

Anecdotally, I got what the OP was looking for with only one offer. Didn’t need to pit any offers against each other, didn’t go through any external recruiters. As with any advice, YMMV but it’s completely possible to find a singular role that the OP is looking for with a bit of luck (and being skilled in your job as well).

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

#362

Post by aiisahik »

I'm CTO for a Series A startup. We have 4 engineers who are making $200k - $300k in cash (excluding options). They are all referrals with 10+ years of experience (in some cases 15+) and they also have deep technical expertise in specific areas we need: Payments, Banking, Data Engineering etc.

Your CV matters but your prior work relationships matter more. Ask yourself: who, among all the folks i have ever worked for would refer me to their current employer and say: "We really need to hire this person - pay them as much as we can afford".

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

#363

Post by newaccount74 »

throwawayboise wrote: post #324
jason-phillips wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever. My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do. 1. My role is to help the team. 2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position. 3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for them…

I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.) The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless…

> The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent.

I'm only 35, but until now I feel the opposite is true.

I've started to learn C, HTML, CSS, Javascript when I was a teenager more than 20 years ago. The knowledge and skills I learned then are still as relevant today as they were then.

Sure, there's flexbox now instead of tables, but the basic idea of HTML vs CSS vs Javascript is still the same, I can still make a basic website for a project in a few hours. Vertically centering something on the screen is still harder than it should be.

C now lets me declare variables anywhere, and there's a nicer syntax for initialising structs, but pointers work the same as they did 20 years ago. Knowing C is still as useful today as it was then.

My main focus for some years has been Mac desktop development. While a lot of new things was introduced in the last decade, it has all been mostly incremental changes, and even if you skipped a few years of progress catching up isn't that hard.

It helps to be aware of some general trends. I've read about async/await years ago when it was introduced in C# I think? and now it's coming in Swift. Sure, it's a slightly different way of thinking about concurrency, but one or two new concepts every 5 years should be doable.

Also, you don't need to learn everything. For example, the whole Reactive / Flux technologies with event sources and subscribers sounded really interesting, but I never really was able to get into them (you can probably tell by the fact that this paragraph makes no sense), and I'm doing just fine.

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

#364

Post by lr1970 »

willis936 wrote: post #309
lr1970 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why in God’s name would you list them both? It’s a resume not a deposition. In the US resume fraud is a thing. Some companies like telecoms selectively check resumes for accuracy. Resume fraud can be a fireable offense.

Is there a law mandating that all employment be listed? Omitting a high school fast food gig is accepted, why is omitting moonlighting not? It's not lying about education or employment, so I don't see how it is fraud.

Unfortunately, there is no clear cut rules about what constitutes resume fraud. Making up employment records is clearly a resume fraud. Omitting employment could be construed as fraud depending on the context. Omitting ice-cream parlor gig while in high school is probably OK. Working for Google and Facebook at the same time and omitting one might be not.

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

#365

Post by smrtinsert »

rco8786 wrote: post #149
jdright wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 years receiving vested stocks. If price stayed the same, it would be worth 200k. Today it is worth 80k. So no, thanks. Stocks are not worth unless you're FAANG

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.

Classic survivorship bias

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

#366

Post by ghaff »

eatYourFood wrote: post #347
ghaff wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends. In general I prefer charging by the task but that assumes a well-scoped and predictable task. That works for some things and not for others. Of course, there are a number of professions (law, accounting, etc.) where hourly charges are absolutely the norm. I've done some legal work and it was in some ways very nice to get paid whenever you were "on the clock."

I agree with Alan Weiss, lawyers are unprofessional and mostly terrible at maximising income. They charge 1:1 hours to fees which is a bad deal for a professional.

The legal work I did was for an expert witness case as a subject matter expert (not a lawyer). There is no way we could have/would have agreed to a fixed fee up front unless it was for a really outrageous amount. (Well, it ended up being a pretty outrageous amount anyway but there's no way we could have reasonably scoped the work.)

Most of the work we did in general was for specifically scoped deliverables and we actually tried very hard not to do day rates, much less hourly rates, but this was one case it really wasn't avoidable--and, of course, was the way the white shoe law firm operated.

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

#367

Post by zikduruqe »

throwawayboise wrote: post #324
jason-phillips wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I'm 50 and don't feel as though the sun has set on my usefulness yet. I'm definitely experiencing more demand than ever. My personal philosophy is similar and I very much love the work I do. 1. My role is to help the team. 2. Stay humble. There is always a better way to do something and we're very lucky to be in our position. 3. Practice not talking. Let others have the experience of figuring it out for them…

I'm 55. I'm tired of learning. I've been learning for 30+ years of professional software work, and none of it applies to any new jobs I might want to seek (I'm talking about specific languages, platforms, buzzwords, etc.) The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent. I can see that by the time I retire, the knowledge I have spent my adult life acquiring will be useless…

Same here. I've been in technology for 30+ years. I cannot wait for the day, I can close my laptop lid and just walk away. It cannot come fast enough.

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

#368

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

wpietri wrote: post #175
rco8786 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s overfunded they probably have cash to burn for a few years at least

If you spend more time at something doomed to fail, is that better or worse?

The failure rate of the average start up is heavily against you.

My outlook is that you will have to work through a few failed start ups before you finally build/find employment with a successful one. That being said, it can be soul destroying to see a product/system you’ve worked hard on to never go to market / go live.

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

#369

Post by rileymat2 »

eatYourFood wrote: post #345
wpietri wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a blanket statement, I think that's ridiculous. Hourly is a good choice for contracts where they are looking to buy labor. Which is a common model, because they often see contract labor as a substitute for employee labor. The other models you mention can be much better, but also require the contractor to have both particular skills and enough relationship power to make them work. I have seen well-meaning developer…

You can’t do hourly in London, the lowest you can go is a day rate, hours being 1:1 with fees is a great way to leave money on the table as a contractor. As a contractor you want to structure your deliverables on your terms so you can choose how the spend your time. Alan Weiss wrote a lot about this and his writings changed my life. Also, if you’re hourly in London you can’t claim to be independent and you’ll get sma…

> Clients should pay for value, not hours sat in a chair.

I think the implication is that if one party is capturing the excess value produced disproportionately, that is screwing the other side. Particularly if this occurs because of information that is asymmetric in negotiation.

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

#370

Post by rootsudo »

biztos wrote: post #81
Brajeshwar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe he do mean a US LLC, most defaults to Delaware or Nevada. It has become much easier for NON-US residents to form such entities these days. Doola (formerly StartPack, a YC Company) is a good option. Not affiliated with Doola but the founder is a nice guy. https://www.doola.com

IANAL but I was looking into starting a US consulting company recently, and one of the tricky things is you have to "foreign-qualify" (IIRC) your Delaware/Nevada LLC in California if you are going to do any business there, which for a tech consultancy is quite likely. Then your tax situation suddenly becomes complex and (relatively) expensive, in case that is related to your interest in Delaware or especially Nevada.…

It's 100% normal for cali companies to contract non-cali companies. Especially DE/NV corps.

As long as your corporate residency is in check, you file annual reports and pay taxes you are 100% in the clear.

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