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?
Is it possible to get anywhere close to a Silicon Valley salary on a remote position?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where on earth is that? lol