Comment by dripton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dripton | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten two solid leads leading to interviews through "Who's Hiring" posts, but didn't end up taking either job.

Company 1 wanted me for a remote position, but wanted to pay me about half my market rate. This is a casualty of the salary dance -- everyone is so busy hiding their numbers that sometimes you get too far into the process before you realize there's no way to make the numbers line up. If they'd listed a salary range on the original post, or I'd given a salary range in the initial contact, it would have saved everyone time.

Company 2 brought me in for an interview, then went silent for a month, then re-contacted me to resume the process after I'd already taken another job. They're a small security startup, and were really busy due to a security emergency that flared up while I was interviewing, and I slipped through the cracks. Understandable in that case, I guess, but good engineers are rarely on the job market for long, and if you're not able to focus, you will have a hard time hiring them. (Unforgivable in a larger company that has full-time recruiters and HR people, which doesn't mean it doesn't happen all the time.)

Company 1 wanted me for a remote position, but wanted to pay me about half my market rate.

Is it possible to get anywhere close to a Silicon Valley salary on a remote position?

~$100k is not unheard of

Sure, I always pay everybody the same (for a given position). I.e. paying for the job done, not for the needs. Else what do you take into account? "This person has no kids, so needs less cash." "This person has a vacation house; clearly need to cover those expenses". I always prefer local so if I'm hiring remote it's because of some skill I can't find locally. I want them to be a happy, productive employee, not to feel that they are getting a lesser deal.

I also have a "no salary negotiation" rule since I do a lot of negotiating, while most people don't. If I'm hiring two Scala developers, why should one get paid more because they possess better negotiating skills when what I actually need from both of them is good Scala programming skills?

(Not hiring at the moment -- at new company none of us are drawing any pay yet).

Yeah, I tend to agree that location is BS to use as a way to try and save a buck. Everyone's cost of living is different, and even in a local area can diverge dramatically.

If you've filtered for basic competency where you can be sure you're not being BSed about their basic capabilities, I think I as a hiring manager would predict a slight correlation between better negotiating skills and better programming (and other) skills that I actually need them for. Often better negotiating is just asking for a higher-than-average price up front because you know you're worth it, because you know you're probably more skilled than the other person, and you know that in all likelihood you'll be contributing beyond the official bullet-points of your role -- i.e. your "given position" on paper is the same as the other person but you're doing a lot more.

Of course many places just need average skilled programmers, and if you can fill your roles with good enough people at a cheap price that's good business. But the general assumption that everyone implements the same Cog interface so they should get paid the same, while fair, is incorrect -- just like everyone has a different cost of living, I've never come across two identical devs nor two identical (except maybe on a short piece of paper leaving out a lot of details) dev positions. I think cutting out the possibility for negotiating better than others will also cut out the skilled-and-know-it batch from joining you unless they're super passionate about the product for some reason.

>I also have a "no salary negotiation" rule since I do a lot of negotiating

From the other side of the table, this is a red flag for me. In 100% of my anecdotal cases of seeing this (admittedly only like 3), the pay was way under market rate, and there were people who worked there that did have negotiated salaries, and were paid a lot more. I think lots of other people have this connotation, too.

Although negotiation skills may not be valuable to you, I'd like to point out that negotiating can be a valuable skill for a developer.

I frequently negotiate with clients over requirements and implementation details. I can save a lot of development effort by negotiating away a detail that ramps up the complexity of a feature significantly. Often the client doesn't place much value on the particular detail that makes my job a lot more difficult, and is quite willing to accept the alternate approach I propose.

Some developers don't even try to negotiate that sort of thing, and end up doing a lot of work that doesn't provide much value to the client.

The Seattle area seems to have equivalent or better salaries locally or when the remote company is in SF. Might just be my limited view though. I know a guy in my company who relocated to France and took a lower pay, but I suspect if he had stayed in the US it wouldn't have gone down much if at all. There are a few others who transition into a mostly-work-from-home person, then full-time-work-from-home except occasional sync ups for planning or whatever, and then leave the city entirely for a cheap cabin with fiber somewhere nice (still the occasional meetups though). Not sure if their pay gets cut.

Anecdote: My current employer, which has employees in many locations, pays the same position differently by location. HR told me that Silicon Valley and Manhattan are both above Seattle, and that the DC area is at the same level as Seattle.

for a cheap cabin with fiber somewhere nice

Where on earth is that? lol

Sure, I've done it. But you're competing with a lot of people, so you'd better stand out.

In this case, it wasn't that the company wanted to pay me less for the same job because I was remote, rather than in SF. (Though some companies do that.) It was that they only allow remote work for a few positions, which happen to be lower-paying. They want to keep "core engineering" local, for communication or whatever. I can't really argue with that -- it's their company and they can run it how they want. But I'm sure not moving to SF and doubling my cost of living for a job that pays largely in lottery tickets.

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