I work remotely from outside Boston, a friend at work is remote from Argentina (I find the parallel to the article interesting). I make more than he does by a significant amount (very roughly similar to the salaries in the article).
I actually don't know what would happen if I moved to Argentina. I presume my salary would get dropped. Maybe not.. depends on if I can convince someone else to give me an offer at my previous salary for remote work... but then what of my Argentinian friend?
I think all developers should get offered the same amount independent of location. As remote work takes off (and I think it will...), this will become the norm. Why? Because of how market works. If Google will pay me 170k to work from my house, then smaller companies need to start competing with that.
Ironically, the big companies are still way behind on this. I work at Canonical... our devs are all fully remote. I have people from nearly every continent working on my project. There's very very little friction to remote teams, except sometimes you need to talk to someone who's asleep. But that honestly is not usually that bad. You keep close teams in similar time zones and everything just works out. We use hangouts and irc and email... hell, the disincentive to have useless meetings probably saves us more time than we spend working around the relatively small problems remote work introduces.
(also, I'm kinda glad to get away from whiteboarding crap... a whiteboard is not a good tool for pretty much anything in development... a shared text window is almost always superior)
FWIW, I work for Canonical, which is also all remote work, and I got a reasonably big pay bump compared to my last job at an office. Yes, of course someone in Argentina is going to get paid differently than someone in New York City. I don't know how it works at other companies, but at Canonical, you're paid a competitive salary for companies in your area. So, for me, that means companies in the Boston area. I certainly didn't take a pay cut to work remotely. Obviously, what you get paid is different from company to company, but I doubt many companies would be successful in hiring quality engineers if they didn't pay as well as office jobs. Remote work is definitely a big plus, but at the end of the day, it doesn't pay the bills (it does save some money though - I don't need to get a $250 monthly train pass or pay gas/parking etc).
I personally find it strange how gleeful lots of US developers have been about remote work. It means our US salaries are going to be untenable and we'll be paid like the rest of the world. Why pay a Silicon Valley salary when it's remote anyway and 1/4 the price to get someone from elsewhere?
I think this is a quite common story, or at least I've heard it a few times now so it feels that way:
(1) Senior, important developer decides they want to change locations.
(2) Boss can't afford to lose them.
(3) So boss let's them work from wherever they want.
This of course leads to natural correlation between working remote and skill, which would further correlate to earnings.
Replacing a good software developers is non-trivial.
That said, to quote from the analysis:
Even once I control for various observable factors (including age, experience, hours worked, size of employer, programming languages, and more), fully-remote software developers earn 9.4% more than developers who never or only rarely work remotely.
I imagine working remotely is a very competitive because there are proportionally fewer jobs than jobseekers and many jobseekers live in low cost areas (Montevideo and Manila vs Manhattan for example).
How have supply and demand equilibrated?
Remote developers, what are you paid? Managers, what do you pay remote software developers?
I was lucky enough to get a great remote job that was happy to pay me as if I lived and worked in SF, but let me live anywhere I wanted to in the country.
Remote devs that have this arrangement definitely take home more money than their peers who live in more expensive zip codes.
I personally would prefer to working remotely (at least 4 days a week) unless my commute is less than 15-20 minutes but executives put significant value in seeing people working from the office. If they'll decide to save (offices are not cheap) and hire a remote developer what would stop from hiring around the world? Developer salaries in developed countries (and especially the US) are much higher than world average.
Working from office you compete with candidates in the same city or in the same country if willing to relocate. Working remotely one have to compete with the whole world.
Right. Both sides of this debate have been disingenuous.
The remote-or-bust crowd always seems to assume salaries would stay the same. Most, not all, but most software development jobs don't require specialty skills. If the job can truly be done anywhere, why would we assume the answer will be to pay SF salaries all around the world?
The must-be-in-office crowd tends to ignore that most of the time remote work mostly is fine. Yes, everyone has an anecdote of this going horribly wrong. But they ignore that minimizing costs as first priority is not going to yield optimal results. And a lot of those horror stories involve bottom rate outsourcing operations.
There exists a world in which outsourcing/remote covers most needs but pays less than we're used to in the US software industry. It's neither the penny on the dollar model of traditional outsourcing nor junior devs making 500K TC in theo there extreme.
Well there's a major difference here. Paying a dev overseas $50,000 a year instead of $180,000 a year could be well worth it even though you incur losses in areas like coordination, community, and communication.
But paying devs $180,000 a year to sit alone 20km away from each other, while they slack and zoom doesn't have the same cost/benefit ratio to consider. You still lose the benefits mentioned above, but don't save anything on costs.
This isn't an argument for or against remote work, but offshoring and WFH have important differences.
I think that it's cause and effect issue. Developers who've proven themselves to be reliable and experienced can 'force' their preferences onto employers. And they happen to cost more as well. I don't believe that going remote magically makes you able command higher salary.
Skeptical. Remote work increases the supply of available technologists across the board. That means more competition at every level - 10x or otherwise. If your whole team is remote, what exactly is the difference between someone in California and Chile?
Another thing not mentioned here is that employee productivity is a variable that is almost always invisible before the hire happens. Leonardo DiCaprio can command a premium because he is identified with the work he does. This is not the case for tech workers who's work is typically invisible. Suppose you are a 10x DevOps sorcerer. None of your potential employers will know that in advance, so they are all only willing to pay 1x salaries.
FAANG companies pay higher across the board, not because they want to, but in the hope that by overpaying 90% of their employees (relative to market) they will be able to attract top 10% candidates whose skills are hidden until after the hire happens. If they could price discriminate in advance they would.
This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they make a killing.
I didn't see an important point that I think is relevant for fully-remote devs and correct me if I'm wrong: On-site benefits. If you work remotely, you can't use several of the benefits a company provides so a difference in the salary is common as a compensation for those.
Same for healthcare plans and taxes. A lot of remote workers have to pay those, which in many cases are completely or partially paid by the company, so a bigger salary is needed.
I agree with this. The natural conclusion of “I want to work remote” is the equalisation of global wages. This is great for developing countries with highly skilled English speaking people and terrible for entitled software developers earning 2-10x their remote counterparts.
In the short term, with tons of well-funded or high-revenue companies struggling to hire, remote is a way to make your existing comp more attractive by opening it up to a new set of people and out-bidding their local employers.
In the long term salaries will likely equalize a bit, but maybe not that much. Even in today's tech hubs, the existing range of salaries is VERY wide. Not every dev in SF is making 300k+, and yet the FANG companies have been in an increasing comp arms race for several years.
Is anyone here concerned about an eventual "great salary reset" driven by remote work? Companies don't need to cover Bay Area CoL because they can get people from the midwest to do the work, so avg salaries go down. Then, they can get Canadians to do the work, avg salaries go down again. Then, they'll get Chilean software engineers to do the work, and avg salaries go down even more.
In the short term, we're having a fun little arbitrage event by working remotely with the top salaries, but why would that continue to last in 5+ year timeframes? Of course if you like in person work it won't be an issue, but I don't plan on being in an office for the rest of my life.
One of the corporate advantages of 100% remote is the business can pay your team whatever their local market rate is, this is usually a lot less than SF, Seattle, NY etc. Additionally, you can often avoid paying certain benefits if your team member is outside of the US.
This is a huge competitive win for organizations who are willing to organize around remote work. I personally am not sure how I feel about salaries weighted in such a way, partly feel like people doing equal work should be compensated equally since they contribute equally. On the other hand, potential employees are free to accept of turn down an offer and the market will continue to adjust accordingly.
Full disclosure; I've noted elsewhere on HN that I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview which made the position fiscally uninteresting. I swear I am not bitter :) - I just think that this aspect of the employment strategy is interesting and worthy of dissection as it is probably something we will see more and more with remote positions.
Google isn’t remote-only, although I bet plenty of people are angry that they do the same work as someone who lives near an ocean, but get paid less.
Here’s a question I had on GitLab’s policy:
Let’s say I move to SF for a few months starting out at GitLab. I then move back to a lower cost of living area, for family reasons. Is the paycut immediate, or is there some room for negotiation? Surely very few people are going to be happy have a loss of pay.
I actually don't know what would happen if I moved to Argentina. I presume my salary would get dropped. Maybe not.. depends on if I can convince someone else to give me an offer at my previous salary for remote work... but then what of my Argentinian friend?
I think all developers should get offered the same amount independent of location. As remote work takes off (and I think it will...), this will become the norm. Why? Because of how market works. If Google will pay me 170k to work from my house, then smaller companies need to start competing with that.
Ironically, the big companies are still way behind on this. I work at Canonical... our devs are all fully remote. I have people from nearly every continent working on my project. There's very very little friction to remote teams, except sometimes you need to talk to someone who's asleep. But that honestly is not usually that bad. You keep close teams in similar time zones and everything just works out. We use hangouts and irc and email... hell, the disincentive to have useless meetings probably saves us more time than we spend working around the relatively small problems remote work introduces.
(also, I'm kinda glad to get away from whiteboarding crap... a whiteboard is not a good tool for pretty much anything in development... a shared text window is almost always superior)
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