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 one thing people aren't considering is how remote work makes people more easily substitutable. Why live in SF if you can live in a small Colorado town? Why pay for a remote developer in SF when you could pay for a remote developer in Arizona? Why hire in the U.S when you can get a good dev in South America? There used to be a geographic monopoly on labor, but making remote the norm moves us away from that.
Maybe that's a good thing, as it will make NYC affordable, but NYC is also experiencing huge budget shortages from the drop in land value. I suspect these will only get worse over time in all major U.S cities.
I don't really understand why (relatively) over paid US Software Engineers are so keen on remote work. The inevitable conclusion is the rapid decrease in salary paid.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I get the impression that a lot of companies still see remote work as an opportunity to hire Bay Area caliber talent for Iowa or Philippines local salaries. And then they're surprised to find a shortage of good developers applying.
The reality is (thankfully) finally coming around to the idea that you get what you pay for. A remote dev who can code his way out of a paper bag and effectively communicate that he has done so is a rare and valuable commodity. Offer to pay accordingly, and you won't have trouble attracting them.
Why would anyone employ a remote worker who demands a US salary when the same remote work can be done in any country with cheaper cost of living and consequently lower salaries?
If you have to be on-site, you're only competing with locals. If you're remote, you're competing with the world.
I worked remotely for a long time and am very much in favor of remote work. But I am uncomfortable with this idea that hiring remotely means you're going to get the best of the best, and not really pay for it, or rather pay for it by "letting" the developer work remotely. You're not getting someone on, I dunno, Yehuda Katz's level for $80k because they work at home.
You're probably in the Bay Area -- and if you don't want remote developers you're shutting yourself off from all of us who wouldn't move there no matter how high the compensation.
I've seen 3 general schools of thought on remote pay:
- its a global talent pool, so in raw dollars everyone should be on a level playing field (ie, compete for SF Bay wages no matter where you are in the world since that is generally the top wage market)
- market rate for your current location (ie, whenever you choose to reside, you get paid an amount that provides a comfortable standard of living there, somewhat influenced by what local wages for your role would be - we won't round down if you're in a place where dev salaries are unusually low relative to other industries, but we will round up a bit to be competitive if you're in a market where they're high)
- "remote is a perk" so take less pay in exchange for the freedom
Personally, I currently work at a shop who is doing the second version and everyone seems happy enough with it. I'd never work somewhere who was trying to pitch remoteness as part of the comp package, and I think there are only a handful of companies out there who peg their wages to the most expensive markets in the world (I generally see this kind of position pushed by self-branded "expats" who want to metaphorically live like kings in cheap areas).
Unfortunately there are a lot of companies who have decided they're going to go remote as a cost-savings measure, and that cost-savings mentality permeates everything about the business - including trying to sell being remote as a perk with value and lower wages to go with it.
There's an interesting downside about remote work that most articles don't talk about. Pay.
The brutal fact is most companies simply re-brand outsourcing as "Remote" employees. Case in point, a few years ago, a DIY website builder (a company with a name of a coniferous plant species which I won't name directly) contacted me for a "remote" position.
I passed all their tests and we eventually went to the salary negotiation stage. I agreed to this interview in the first place because I read online they paid really well for their employees, particularly in the US (Bay area).
So, when we were discussing the pay, I threw in a number that's common for the Bay area employees and what seemed very, very reasonable for me. In fact, my current salary was almost the same, just so to make it clear to you that I wasn't trying to take advantage of them or anything.
Immediately, the founder got offensive and told me, "What? Are you serious?? You live in Asia (I was living in Singapore at the time, which already had better pay as opposed to PH), for our employees in Philippines we pay 1/3rd of that and I can still get the job done. Why would I want to pay you that salary?" I told him, "Well, this is what you pay your Bay Area employees, don't you? Besides, my experience more than matches the job profile and requirements and my test results just proved to you I am more than capable for this position."
His answer? "But, you don't live in the Bay area". I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. Since then, I very very carefully ask anyone who uses the word "remote" a LOT of questions, qualify them if they really know remote isn't the same as outsourcing before even going into the interview.
I would have happily agreed to a lower salary if it was fair enough. But, asking me to go down to 1/3rd of my price because of where I lived in seemed ridiculous to me. In the last 10 years, I've lived in 7+ different countries and 35+ different locations within them as I'm that sort of person who likes to travel and explore new cultures. Basing my salary or worth based on where I'm from, where I live in at present seems the most ridiculous thing to me about remote work.
As the devils advocate: Why not? The competition for that employee is largely local offers, remote is a small part of the overall market. Plus many other companies hiring for remote do local adjustments too, they just aren't public about it.
This all sounds weird for me to say because I certainly want devs to get paid, but this is the reality of the situation
It's interesting that a lot of people in this thread seem to assume that the end-goal of remote working becoming mainstream and some inherent sense of fairness is that everyone ends up being paid SF wages in the end. But basic economic theory says that if remote working becomes the new standard, you should expect the salaries between high and low COL to average out. So somewhere between SF and an Asian sweatshop... let's say a Berlin developer salary. That's not great for the SF developers, and also why SF is one of the last places I would expect remote work take off.
Companies that want to hire remotely rarely publish wages online for this exact reason. They get called out for being "cheap" and "I can make X times more in SF". Yes, but most companies in the world are not looking for and can not compete for SF developers with the FAANGS in the first place. When the company is not in the Bay Area, them posting a non-SF salary is not trying to screw you over, hiring you was never on the table. Unfortunately they cannot say simply that in the job ad without calling down an epic shitstorm.
I think tech workers that believe that remote is more productive really fail to grasp the enormous company incentive to have all workers remote if it were so, as it would be cheaper tax-wise, operational wise, legal wise, etc.
If it were that good, software engineering in the US would suffer the same fate as manufacturing: it would disappear to cheaper foreign workers and only specialties would survive.
The counter point is that this will also likely result in depressed wages, as companies realize they don't have to price in local factors such as rent or commute. We can't discount the externalities which are then offloaded to the worker as well such as computers / monitors, home offices, internet caps etc.
For a large band of workers I think remote work makes sense, but for entry-level developers and/or people on the lower end of the spectrum I think it might be a harder sell.
It's interesting how many commenters read "remote" as "contract" or even "overseas". There are lots of developers outside of SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. that would relish the opportunity to still live their suburban/rural lifestyle and avoid a lengthy commute.
One advantage for companies in big cities is they can usually hire these remote employees at a discount. It can get a bit hairy when two remote employees doing the same job are paid differently, but that is already the case in many situations.
The other obvious advantage is that companies that hire remote employees have an almost unlimited candidate pool. Even if a company chose to limit hires to their own country, the only group they cannot hire would be candidates unwilling to work remotely. Based on my discussions with thousands of programmers over the years, I'd suspect this is a very small group.
reply