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Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

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Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#241

Post by closeparen »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #97
tayo42 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are being cheap. Software engineers are only providing 200k dollars worth of value? I find that hard to believe.

Salary has never been about the value you provide. It's about the cost to replace you. Companies will never pay you more than you cost to replace.

Cost of labor bounded above by the value of the activity. Businesses that are not FAANG scale cannot afford FAANG-level talent even if it would be necessary for something they want to do. They just can't do the thing. Or try to do the closest analogue they can with the people they can afford. Maybe hire heavy-hitting consultants for a short time to put them on the right track.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#242

Post by JambalayaJim »

Zetice wrote: post #104

Not only do I despise remote working, I'm leaving the industry entirely as a direct result of working remotely, in favor of getting a law degree. I'm just beyond sick and tired of my default mode being, "Stare at screen to solve problems." I want to work with people, solve problems with people, help people. None of that is what most engineers in software prefer, and I'm tired of trying to force it on them for the app…

I'm sure this depends on your specialization; but much of the legal industry has become remote heavy as well. My partner is a lawyer in commercial litigation; the vast majority of her client meetings and court hearings are done remotely.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#244

Post by glimshe »

tayo42 wrote: post #60
Invictus0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cannot get work... at the price they want. Plenty of low-paying remote jobs out there

Companies are being cheap. Software engineers are only providing 200k dollars worth of value? I find that hard to believe.

~200K, inflation adjusted, is historically the salary of a competent senior software developer in the US. Give or take depending on location, so you can expect around this for remote (which doesn't suffer the same labor shortage pressure of some regions).

A friend of mine told me he joined Microsoft right out of college in 1998 for 35K/year + 10% bonus. This is around 70K-80K today. As a Senior II Software Engineer at Microsoft in 2014, I made around 180K total comp, which is around 230K today.

In the past 3-5 years we've seen incredibly distorted job markets. 500K is a salary you often see for CEOs and Directors of "normal companies". It's an incredible salary that puts you in the top 1% income in many states.

I'm not saying software engineers don't deserve a lot of money, and by all means, let's try to get as much as we can, but I'm just saying that the past few years have been abnormal and we're seeing the correction now.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#245

Post by esafak »

Zetice wrote: post #104

Not only do I despise remote working, I'm leaving the industry entirely as a direct result of working remotely, in favor of getting a law degree. I'm just beyond sick and tired of my default mode being, "Stare at screen to solve problems." I want to work with people, solve problems with people, help people. None of that is what most engineers in software prefer, and I'm tired of trying to force it on them for the app…

Become a consultant

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#246

Post by bamfly »

baristaGeek wrote: post #190
bamfly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> low-paying For high values of "low paying". $150-250k TC, instead of $300-500k.

Exactly! It just makes the job market much more perfect. $500k at scale is an economic squander.

To be clear, I'm not complaining about FAANG/finance comp rates. Anyone taking a bigger paycheck instead of that money going to capital is doing god's work (plus, building a foundation for future capital innovation, if you want the pro-capitalism slant on it—more people with investable capital and more people with cushion to try to build a business is very good). You should absolutely take every dollar you can wring out. They wanna spend stupid-money, see if they'll give you "stupid + $1". All day long.

Just putting things in perspective. "Bad" developer pay is still really good.

(of course, there's a worse tier of pay for developers and sysadmins under that one, but I don't think there's a lot of remote work in that tier that isn't also offshored work—in-person, though, yes)

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#247

Post by Aurornis »

baristaGeek wrote: post #231
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can imagine the difference between hiring one single developer to work on your application vs. hiring dozens of different developers each to handle some small part of it...and it's still worse than that. Typically the person "hired" is the senior and the person doing the work is _extremely_ green.

Oh yeah, if you're talking about dev shops, don't hire dev shops (the "hired" VS extremely green person phenomenon you're talking about happens in these kinds of companies because their incentive is to sell hours/men, instead of actual value). Do your diligence, and your technical/communication/leadership interviews to make sure you're hiring the right person. And if it doesn't work out after 2-3 months, fire the per…

> It happens in all formats of work whether it's remote, hybrid, or onsite.

You're not wrong, but it's missing the point.

It's so much harder and riskier to do this onsite that it's not very common. Why anyone would try to do this onsite instead of getting a remote job to do it is beyond me.

With remote, a group of people can defraud multiple companies at the same time this way. They can do it all remotely, which means they can do it without stepping into the legal jurisdiction of the company.

Remote opens the doors to so much more fraud. There is almost no comparison between someone doing this on-site and someone from a foreign country scamming companies as their job.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#248

Post by baristaGeek »

Aurornis wrote: post #235
baristaGeek wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accent aside (if they can't be understood at all they're obviously not qualified): What's the difference between a foreigner with an accent in your onsite team VS a foreigner that's remote in US timezones (LatAm)? Why just open the job for US-remote? Compliance? Deel/Remote can help you with that. Security? It applies if you're working on defense software, but other than that...?

> What's the difference between a foreigner with an accent in your onsite team VS a foreigner that's remote in US timezones (LatAm)? If I give someone in the US access to my code, systems, and, inevitably, customer data then I have a lot of legal recourse against that person if they do something bad. They have a lot of incentive to be careful and follow the rules. Their desire to maintain their reputation and avoid l…

Run a background check, sign confidentiality and DP agreements and hire someone who sells you trust. Again, something you would do in any given modality of work.

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#249

Post by pixelatedindex »

vvpan wrote: post #121
zer8k wrote: post #28

> on HN The most important subtext. There are engineer friends of mine laid off from remote companies that, almost 5 months later, cannot get work. These aren't braindead seatwarmers either. The software engineer market has shifted under our feet DRAMATICALLY. Any software engineer with a position should try to keep it for as long as they possible can.

Yeah, this is all anecdotal, but I'll add my 2c - been in the business for something like 15 years and was looking for work in May. It has never felt deader, remote or onsite. Usually recruiters are beating down your door. This time not even friends could get me any interviews. The way I got a job was by writing some technical articles and establishing a relationship with a very energetic VC person. I asked him if he…

How do I get myself out there to make these connections? I can make connections with coworkers, but I don’t know how to expand beyond my circle (like meeting VC folk)

Re: Remote work on HN: Who is hiring? – 69% jobs in 2023 are remote

#250

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #160
Aurornis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turns out to my surprise I like going into the office, but definitely not every day. You're not alone. The internet likes to talk about remote work as the only acceptable arrangement, but that's mostly because it's biased toward people who like socializing via internet comment sections. The number of people who actually like going to the office (either part or full time) is far higher than you'd expect from reading…

> The number of people who actually like going to the office (either part or full time) is far higher than you'd expect from reading Reddit and Hacker News. I think most people like an office setting. Even remote work proponents like myself enjoy the office every now and then. The problem is really two things. 1.) The commute is brutal. If you live in any decent sized city and have a family, it's likely that you are…

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