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3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

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Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#81

Post by Plasmoid2000ad »

crandycodes wrote: post #5

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB befor…

But are they top paying?

Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying"

Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#82

Post by NeverFade »

stoilt wrote: post #68
NeverFade wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers? Do you really think the average pers…

Do you think if everyone works remotely and companies can hire from all over the country (or the globe for that matter) you will still get a salary that you'd get in SF? I'm pretty sure this will push down the salaries, so you probably won't end up in a "quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home", but a quiet, medium-crime suburb, in a decent home maybe.

Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job?

As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.

Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much. Maybe you won't make the $300k you used to make in SF, but $200k gives you a damn big home and high quality-of-life in most of suburban Texas - especially since you won't have to pay crazy California income taxes.

You also won't have to deal with crime if you can go literally anywhere in the country. There are thousands of small towns and suburbs that have effectively zero crime while not being very expensive. In general, most serious QoL problems disappear once you can choose to live anywhere.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#83

Post by Mashimo »

cblconfederate wrote: post #42
jayd16 wrote: post #21

I don't think we'll really know what the future holds until people start coming back to work. When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.

> start coming back to work. Hint: they won't. When the office is half-empty, it's useless, people might as well go back home. Remote is a self-reinforcing loop, office isn't

Most of my team wants to come to the office and is always super happy when they find a reason to do so. "Oh, I have to test this mobile device which only works in the office, can I come in today @ $manager?"

And currently I am at the office together with one other person. Beats being alone at home. At least a few days per week. It's always so fun to be at the office with my coworkers and I am looking forward to them all coming back.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#84

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

NeverFade wrote: post #80
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, easy to say but unless you're in the top percentile of highly sought-after specialists in a hot area, you're not making a dent. The problem is, due to the hype of tech careers, free education, easy immigration and lack of VC funding in (most of) Europe, there is an oversupply of entry to mid level talent and a shortage of good companies, so if you refuse to bend over to each company's bullshit then it's no prob…

> When I was living in Munich it baffled me how some companies there could get away with paying experienced people only 50k and still run a successful business and not have everyone straight-up walk away from them. I heard before that the European tech scene sucks, and my only advice is: relocate. Pay in Switzerland for example is more competitive. Incidentally, one reason I heard for low pay in Germany, specifically…

You heard wrong, it's just an internet myth. Difficulty of firing people or high taxes are not the main cause of low pay in Europe.

The main causes are: lack of VC funding, lack of innovative disruption and entrenchment of traditional businesses with old-fashioned boomer MBA mentality that consider tech as an expensive cost center and devs as replaceable factory floor cogs that should be offshored whenever possible, risk adverse investor mindsets, complex bureaucracy, fragmented market with various languages, laws and cultures that make scaling a product/service nearly impossible, a broken EU-grant funding system where the focus is producing documentation instead of successful products/services and an overabundance of low- to mid- level talent due to hype, free education and easy immigration.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the pay in Europe, I'm complaining about the shitty SV practices that some entitled employers here adopt but without the compensation because "If Google does it then it must be good so we should do it too, who cares if we pay only 40k/year vs 200k+, we deserve only the best hoop-jumpers and nothing less."

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#85

Post by Mashimo »

glandium wrote: post #61
ludston wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution that everyone goes on Zoom, regardless of whether or not they are sitting next to each other. Pretend the team is fully remote, but still take advantage of organic, local interaction to skill up new developers. We were coincidentally doing this in my workplace 6 months before COVID took off.

How well does echo cancellation work in these cases?

You unmute when it's your turn. The other person mutes.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#86

Post by cblconfederate »

Mashimo wrote: post #83
cblconfederate wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> start coming back to work. Hint: they won't. When the office is half-empty, it's useless, people might as well go back home. Remote is a self-reinforcing loop, office isn't

Most of my team wants to come to the office and is always super happy when they find a reason to do so. "Oh, I have to test this mobile device which only works in the office, can I come in today @ $manager?" And currently I am at the office together with one other person. Beats being alone at home. At least a few days per week. It's always so fun to be at the office with my coworkers and I am looking forward to them…

> Beats being alone at home.

That's because they live alone at home, probably because they moved recently / immigrated / forced to live in bad cities. Post-pandemic, they will be able to move to a place where they are not alone. I think they'll take that option rather than alone at home/only social in the office.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#87

Post by ck425 »

NeverFade wrote: post #55
groundCode wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they might. And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. Overwhelmingly the developers in my organisation are happy to work remote forever. Deliver people, product people, design people all seem to want to be back in the office. Upper management as well.

> And we might be in a hacker news bubble with our wish to stay remote. You really think that outside of our "hacker news bubble", everyone is *dying* to go back to their offices in SF, to the rat race of getting raises every year to barely keep up with rising housing and general living costs, and never having a hope of buying a house or raising a family, even as senior engineers? Do you really think the average pers…

You're comparing a terrible commuting scenario to a great remote scenario. You're also looking at this from the perspective of someone with an established family. Of course remote looks better!

There are more commuting scenarios that living in the SF (or London or NYC or insert major city here) with a long commute and crazy house prices. I live and work(ed) in a medium size city where a mid-level engineer can afford a decent flat 10-25min walk into the city centre with lots of walkable local community areas and green space. Moving out to a suburbs gives me a bit more space but not much else. It also comes at the expense of being further away from everything and having to drive everywhere. There's a lot of room between everyone in the same dense massive urban areas and everyone going full remote from the suburbs.

Additionally not everyone is settled down with a family. Many of us are still at the stage in life where we're (in normal times) going out, dating, going for drinks, going to events etc. For those of us at this stage the idea of moving to the suburbs is hellish. Sure an extra room would be nice but otherwise it's boring as hell.

What I've not heard discussed enough is the middle ground. If remote and distributed teams start to work better why not distribute teams across more offices in medium sized cities where we can get a trade off between both worlds. Or change the office concept to something where lots of folk work from shared offices. I'd love to go work for a FANG but I'd hate to move to London. If there was an option to work for FANG from my local WeWork office and there was a critical mass of other tech professionals doing the same that might be a good trade off.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#88

Post by NeverFade »

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #81
crandycodes wrote: post #5

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB befor…

But are they top paying? Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying" Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?

It's incredibly easy to compete with "top paying" companies once you offer remote work, due to huge gaps in taxation and cost-of-living.

Let's do the math:

$400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net.

Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From an employer's perspective, that means I can offer 25% lower pay and be more than competitive with top paying companies in my field - if I offer a remote option.

This gap will only increase, as states are constantly planning ways to squeeze more taxes out of their major tech hubs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2021/12/31/calif...

I therefore believe these economics will drive remote work adoption.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#89

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Mashimo wrote: post #83
cblconfederate wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> start coming back to work. Hint: they won't. When the office is half-empty, it's useless, people might as well go back home. Remote is a self-reinforcing loop, office isn't

Most of my team wants to come to the office and is always super happy when they find a reason to do so. "Oh, I have to test this mobile device which only works in the office, can I come in today @ $manager?" And currently I am at the office together with one other person. Beats being alone at home. At least a few days per week. It's always so fun to be at the office with my coworkers and I am looking forward to them…

I think it is age based: younger workers crave the social interaction they get at the office, older workers see a huge advantage in getting more family time (and handling things like taking the kid to school) by working remote. Not universal of course, but I bet there is at least a correlation.

Re: 3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

#90

Post by stoilt »

NeverFade wrote: post #82
stoilt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think if everyone works remotely and companies can hire from all over the country (or the globe for that matter) you will still get a salary that you'd get in SF? I'm pretty sure this will push down the salaries, so you probably won't end up in a "quiet, zero-crime suburb, in a nice big home", but a quiet, medium-crime suburb, in a decent home maybe.

Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job? As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India. Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much. Maybe you won't make the $300k you used to make in SF, but $200k…

> Companies are already hiring nation-wide. How many SFBay employees were born there, and how many relocated from all other parts of the country for a job?

Yes, but employees had to relocate to the Bay Area so companies had to pay that level of salaries. But if people can work from whatever cheap location then why would any company keep paying that much?

> As for global: global competition has been upon us for decades now. Most big tech companies have foreign offices in countries like India.

Sure, and they get paid on Indian levels. I am also not from the US, I work and live in Europe but both my current and previous employers are big American tech companies with HQs in the Bay Area, and guess what they pay here? Standard European salaries that any other local company does. Maybe a couple of percent more, but nothing outstanding, definitely not close to Bay Area level salaries. And that is exactly the point I'm trying to make here: companies adjust the salaries considering the cost of living of the area their employees live in. If you move to a cheaper place, that will definitely have an impact on your salary.

> Finally, you are mistaken if you believe pay will drop so much.

Well, time will tell. I hope you'll be right there.

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