That sounds dreamy. 40+ hrs a week of required butt-in-seat time is bizarre and depressing.
I'm happy for you. I tried remote work for 2 years and now I'm happily going back to working in an office next Monday. Can't bear the loneliness anymore. I don't have much of a social life to begin with, so I really need some actual human face-to-face interaction in my job.
I'm at year 2 and I don't see myself going back to an office. It is nice getting out of the house, but I never want to commute again (read: Los Angeles traffic) and I don't like people expecting me to be in a certain place at a certain time.
Sounds cool, but is the salary ~SF Bay Area?
I thought the question was about happiness?
Wasn't there a study published recently showing that money really does buy happiness, up to a certain point of diminishing returns?
The one I recall being referenced is from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman (of Thinking Fast and Slow fame):
I can attest that I was much happier at $80k than I was at $30k, but not much happier at $110k or $140k, less happy at $155k, miserable at $175k (becoming director of engineering). Now I'm at $200k but it's the remote part that makes me happiest.
wow, that's an amazing salary for remote. what company?
The company is Surge, LLC (https://www.surgeforward.com), and they offer developers for hire. It is 1099 contract work with at least 40 hours a week guaranteed.
Just curious, what tech stack do you use?
You get matched to projects based on skill set. I only advertised myself as PHP and Node, so that's what I've been assigned to (75% node/angular/mysql, 25% PHP/angular/mysql).
Depending on where he or she is working from, you don't need a ~SF Bay Area to enjoy the same quality (if not better) of life.
For reference, I live in the suburbs of Los Angeles so prices are lower than in the Bay area. I make $200k and my wife makes $100k working part time as a registered nurse. Flexible schedules mean we can spend lots of time with our daughter and travel quite a bit.
You make 200k as a developer?
Senior developer with experience as a former director of engineering, but yeah, $199k last year, tracking for $205k this year.
Nice job! Good to know it's atleast possible to break the 120k-ish mark.
Software engineer starting salaries in companies like Amazon/Google/FB etc are close to 100k or more. So breaking that mark as an engineer is very much possible.
he's a contractor, it's different.
I was at $155k as a W2 software engineer at my last company...that seemed to be a ceiling for engineers in Los Angeles. I had to become a director of engineering to get to $175k.