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Comment by chapium | Hacker News Reader

Remote work is fine if you dont mind being pigeon holed into one range of tasks, paid well relative to your cost of living, have no career advancement, and want to wear whatever you want at work.

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I’ve been working “distributed” (per the article) for about 17 years. My range of tasks has been across the board (engineering, support, presales, ops, etc). I’ve had quite a bit of career advancement (although I don’t really care about titles).... and I get payed CA salary while not living in CA.

Just wanted to post so folks understand there is a range of opportunities out there... you just need to find them...

I think that last sentence is the key: "you just need to find them." You'll work harder to find career opportunities that fit with the distributed lifestyle, but for me it is worth it because of all the non-career opportunity that comes with it.

I've been distributed/remote for almost 10 years and my experience hits all the same points you made. I also have no doubt that my choice has limited my career. But career is just one scope of life. Not commuting to an office has afforded me the time to exercise more, see my children every single day, participate in their lives in ways that would not be possible otherwise, eat healthier, spend time with my aging parents who come to see my children at least once a week, and on and on.

I have a very hard time believing a real CA salary is being paid to remote workers. For engineering at leading companies, seventeen years of experience would be over 400K TC. However, I could believe someone paying a remote worker on the low end of entry-level compensation of around 120K for remote work.

It's not at all hard to believe some people are receiving CA salaries (and note, your 400k TC line only applies to a relatively small group of companies and senior positions).

On the other hand, I agree it is unlikely for the majority of remote workers. Depends a lot on your skill level and how rare/in-demand it is I suppose.

Ska's spot on here. We're not paying high end CA wages to _everyone_; however, our remote employees are making _much_ higher than the norms in most of their areas. We require a lot of breadth/depth for the main remote position. If you were to look at glassdoor, comparably, or paysa .. they would suggest this position for our company pays on average of 145 to 150k salary (w/o bonus / RSUs .. which would significantly raise that num obvi).

At most places the "talent is your #1 resource" is bullshit. Ours is not and is a key to us being profitable (it's actually rolled into our comp model).

This is largely accurate most items but there are exceptions for when the whole team is remote. Where I work, the entire software department is remote, we are scattered all over the world and it works great. When everyone is remote, issues of lack of career advancement aren't much of an issue as they have to choose someone to lead projects and that person is going to be remote.

I am relatively new to remote work so I am still adjusting but I find that for me the negatives are that I actually work more hours as its harder to gauge how I am thought of without face to face time and the lack of real human interaction can lead to feelings of isolation. Working to get past that. I currently live in a city but am planning on moving to a cheaper area and taking my higher urban salary with me which is great. Even thinking about just traveling every summer with my family, as long as I have internet connection I can work and get paid and I have the unique opportunity to show my kids areas of the world they would never see.

This is not the case for any remote worker I know and I've been 100% remote (and working with other remotes) for 12 years. We all get paid way more than the going rate in the town we live. All have moved up considerably in the engineering world. I work with more than one remote VP, have worked with a handful of remote heads-of-X-department. Either my world is filled with just lucky people who break outside the norm or you don't at all know what you are talking about.

Hi, I'm a life-long remote worker. I went from freelancer, to junior employee, to senior employee, to founder/cto and I'm now on my second startup. This spanned a variety of tech jobs and even some non-tech ones. Career advancement is absolutely possible as a remote worker. (In my case, spanning multiple companies, but I do not believe it's zero even if you stay at the same company).

Um... where do I sign up? Because that sounds like the perfect job for me.

(Edit: I'm not actually looking to change jobs right now, so don't take the first sentence literally and start sending me positions. But I'm contemplating a move out of state next year, and if that happens I'd be seriously tempted to look at remote work.)

Anecdotally, I am the main dev for a very small remote business, and I've done quite a wide range of tasks up and down the LAMP stack, from deployment automation to server admin to developing software projects to fixing CSS to doing "sales engineer" work.

My actual work experience has been quite deep in a lot of those areas, though obviously not as much as person that only does those things with their career.

That's a function of the scope of my interests and the size of the company.

I am 100% fine not "advancing", because there is no "advancement" to be had at a small firm. We just get pay raises and more days off. I dunno what else I am supposed to want.

And I certainly wouldn't be allowed to play banjo if I had to go into an offie.

My experience has largely been the same. I get to work on a little bit of everything, and occasionally get to dive deep into different areas as the need arises. And the pay follows.

I'm working remote for 4 years and I had the impression to be truely free and successfull you have to work on your own career advancement.

Most people regularly job hot for one reason or another. In such a situation their are very few reasons not to work from home.

"No career advancement" is actually just fine for a lot of people, particularly older workers.

People should not underestimate the value of getting an "urban" salary in the sticks, it can be the equivalent of a huge relative pay increase.

One day someone will figure out how to be a salary calculator for remotes and this benefit will go away as employers will try to tailor the salary for local cost-of-living.

Large MNCs and the like already do this today. Their HR departments likely have tools to calculate cost of living globally. Or they have local partners who do it for them.

I didn’t end up working for them for completely unrelated reasons, but one company I was considering a few years ago used the US government pay scales for locality-based supplemental pay.

They were unrelated to the government, but I think one of the original founders had military experience so they went with what they knew. Not a perfect solution, but an easy one.

Do you think it was beneficial using the government scale? Or do you think the salaries were lower?

Sorry, I should have been more specific. They used the US Government locality pay supplements to determine a percentage that you got in addition to your base salary, they did not actually use the pay scale itself.

Have you looked at Gitlab's salary calculator?

Not a great example. They just pay low period. Their target is 50th percentile. That's hardly going to result in a big paycheck relative to most SF startups, let alone the big companies.

I know their pay isn't good but it is calculated based on where one lives and is similar to what the parent-post mentioned.

This was discussed fairly recently. There are some oddities to the calculator. For example, the entire state of Oregon and the entire state of Massachusetts are on a single pay schedule even though there are enormous CoL differences between the main urban areas and the rural areas of those states.

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