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For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

economist.com

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Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#421

Post by cudgy »

Cookingboy wrote: post #419
cudgy wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The fact that even in this day and age, we still hold major online videogame tournaments in person shows you how important meatspace is.” This is likely because the prize money is significantly funded by the tickets sold to the “meatspace”.

>This is likely because the prize money is significantly funded by the tickets sold to the “meatspace”. Absolutely not. The prize money was exclusively funded by the sales of in-game battlepass, which is purely digital.

Well money has to come from somewhere to pay for the event itself. Regardless, this is a poor contra-example of why remote activities are less effective than in-person.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#422

Post by portpecos »

sbacic wrote: post #387
higeorge13 wrote: post #112

Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there. For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.…

What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have grea…

Sounds like a giant sucking sound of programming jobs departing to lower waged labors. Then higher waged laborers will need to lower their wages to compete.

Economists call that a comparative advantage and a net win.

If you’re claiming an equilibrium point will be reached, then I think the equilibrium point will be $40/hr for Senior, $30/hr for Mid, $20/hr for Junior.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#423

Post by wheelinsupial »

Leherenn wrote: post #291
rytis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the actual numbers. It's the WHY. How come the company was ok to pay X when the employee was coming to the office, but now that the same employee is WFH (and thus may be saving some dosh) they are only entitled to 0.85*X? Presumably the said employee was producing a value of Y (where Y may have been > X). Has Y changed? If yes, then it's fair to do the reduction, but I doubt that is the case. It might…

The value you produce is just the theoretical upper limit of how much you could get paid. If you could measure this value accurately, then it would make no sense to pay you more than that. It has little bearing on how much you actually get paid, that's based on the market rate. They pay you less, because presumably by going remote you're changing the market in which you're based and your value in this new market is l…

I see the argument that developers should be paid more because the company has some profit per employee that is a multiple of the employee’s wage.

From an employee perspective I understand how there would be room and desire to receive more money. However, I have a difficult time understanding why a company would want to pay more. Perhaps I’m a sucker, but in our engineering economics course we went over costs associated with projects. Typically when hiring on new employees to projects you want them to provide a return on the salary.

If the salary is increased to then absorb the profit the company makes on that employee, then there is no point of hiring the employee because the company isn’t getting anything from them anymore.

If a product line ends up breaking even, then companies look to see what can be done to reduce costs or increase prices. Why would employees be any different? What am I missing in these arguments?

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#424

Post by DoingIsLearning »

dang wrote: post #418
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed I don't want to sound like a 'get out of my lawn' kind of person but I am increasingly noticing an overlap between submissions on HN and posts on r/worldnews. Again I think for the most part the moderators are doing an amazing work but there is definitely a risk of just becoming another frontpage of the internet instead of sticking to the original ethos of submissions about 'anything that gratifies one's intel…

Comment about this from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28122734 From my perspective the baseline is pretty stable but the fluctuation around it has a fairly large amplitude. That makes for phases when certain types of story are more or less represented than others. If there were significantly more worldnews stories now than in years past, I'd be surprised. That's certainly not our intention.

Indeed I have no real hard data on this, could very well be just a sort of Baader-Meinhof situation where the headlines that are common in both here and r/worldnews end up jumping at me more immediately.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#425

Post by sbacic »

portpecos wrote: post #422
sbacic wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have grea…

Sounds like a giant sucking sound of programming jobs departing to lower waged labors. Then higher waged laborers will need to lower their wages to compete. Economists call that a comparative advantage and a net win. If you’re claiming an equilibrium point will be reached, then I think the equilibrium point will be $40/hr for Senior, $30/hr for Mid, $20/hr for Junior.

I'm not so sure. Obviously, more competition means lower prices, but software has proven very resistant to that bit of conventional economic wisdom, with a few exceptions of course (namely, places with very high CoL).

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#426

Post by truffdog »

Clewza313 wrote: post #288
rytis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the actual numbers. It's the WHY. How come the company was ok to pay X when the employee was coming to the office, but now that the same employee is WFH (and thus may be saving some dosh) they are only entitled to 0.85*X? Presumably the said employee was producing a value of Y (where Y may have been > X). Has Y changed? If yes, then it's fair to do the reduction, but I doubt that is the case. It might…

Playing the devil's advocate here, why is it OK to pay a developer in India $3000/year when they could command $300,000/year in Silicon Valley? Also, unless they joined within the last year, the current employees signed contracts obliging them to come to work 5 days a week. If they wish to permanently move to working from home in their pajamas for 5 days a week instead, the company is basically saying "Sure, but that…

It isn't OK and has always been wrong.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#427

Post by oAlbe »

SynasterBeiter wrote: post #325
_wolfie_ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Czech republic, based on seniority and skill level I would say between ~$2.5k and ~$7k salary per month before tax. But you lose like a half to the various taxes.

That's why you're supposed to be a contractor at that pay level.

What's the difference with being a contractor? You still have to pay taxes, right?

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#428

Post by VRay »

Clewza313 wrote: post #288
rytis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the actual numbers. It's the WHY. How come the company was ok to pay X when the employee was coming to the office, but now that the same employee is WFH (and thus may be saving some dosh) they are only entitled to 0.85*X? Presumably the said employee was producing a value of Y (where Y may have been > X). Has Y changed? If yes, then it's fair to do the reduction, but I doubt that is the case. It might…

Playing the devil's advocate here, why is it OK to pay a developer in India $3000/year when they could command $300,000/year in Silicon Valley? Also, unless they joined within the last year, the current employees signed contracts obliging them to come to work 5 days a week. If they wish to permanently move to working from home in their pajamas for 5 days a week instead, the company is basically saying "Sure, but that…

IMO, it's perfectly fair and fine if they want to take that approach

Likewise, if I'm looking at an offer for $350k total compensation from Company X, and $300k from Company Y because they think my time is less valuable when it's remote, I'll probably go with the higher pay

Indian engineers who could do a $300k job in the SF Bay Area aren't going to just hang out in India making $3k a year for long.. sooner or later they'll get a lot more of that value they're generating. "This lazy fucking American who fixes the bugs my tests find is making 100x as much money as me??"

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#429

Post by Cookingboy »

velcii wrote: post #417
Cookingboy wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a ton of productivity to be gained for people who otherwise cannot be as productive working alone remotely, that’s something you seem to not realize. There is so much to measure how much an engineer contributes other than how many lines they churn out or how many PRs they merge. Things like training, mentorship, organizational level influences are critical to a company’s success. In fact, companies values a…

Yea, you can move goalposts all you want, but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water... All this romantic "oh I have to look you in the eyes" sentiment will disappear when push comes to shove, that it when you see your best people leave for com…

I'm not moving goal posts at all, I'm simply giving you concrete examples of things you cannot accomplish as well under full-remote. I never said you can't be a fully remote code monkey, and you may be surprised to find out that the "best people" aren't code monkeys.

> but the bottom line is companies that permit remote work are going to get the best talent, from all over the world, and those companies are going to blow the ones that does not allow remote work, right out of the water...

That's just simply not true. Plenty of companies have been allowing remote work since way before the Pandemics and no, they have not blown FAANG companies "right tout of the water".

The best people care most about the project they work on and the people they work with and also the compensation, only a very small percentage of people put remote work as their number 1 criteria when push comes to shove.

In fact, I know a ton of brilliant and driven people planning to leave remote-only companies because they prefer a different work environment. All the internal polls from everywhere I've seen states that vast majority of employees do not want full remote.

Re: For programmers, remote working is becoming the norm

#430

Post by lytefm »

sbacic wrote: post #387
higeorge13 wrote: post #112

Most HN posts always compare with FAANG jobs and salaries, while there is a whole different world out there. For instance, in Europe and especially low-paid countries in the south or eastern Europe, i foresee zero chance that top talent will stay in their countries to be given low salaries for jobs with local/low impact. These people are already working or looking to work remotely to companies in richer countries (e.…

What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have grea…

I doubt that a large amount of programming jobs will be outsourced to cheaper countries. Having a good understanding of the problem domain in the same language and time zone as the employer is extremely valuable.

I guess that local extremes for wages in areas with high living costs like in silicon valley will drop when it's possible to work remotely. But I don't see why rates would drop across the board as long as demand stays high.

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