Ask HN: Highest paying remote companies?
I have 10 years of FAANG experience (Senior SWE). I'm looking to move closer to my family and my current team isn't very remote friendly so I'm looking for a change. What should I be looking for?
The most important job boards seem to be https://weworkremotely.com and https://remoteok.io. Many jobs posted on the monthly "Who is hiring?" Hacker News post are for remote positions. A few years ago I built an index of "Who is hiring?" posts with a search by location and technology: https://hnhiring.com/search?locations=remote
Edit: given you're FAANG you might find facet useful: https://www.facetdev.com/
Are there any people here who are US citizens but living abroad that have applied to these companies? What was the response?
* You don't depend on it for all of your healthcare, it's an additional extra so that you can get some level of coverage for non-GP visits (as well as easier access to private hospitals).
* It's not provided by your employer, which is the most major difference. You can quit your job and you still have your healthcare. You also aren't scared that a new employer won't hire you because you happen to be sick and need healthcare.
* Because the government can push down prices of drugs and treatments within Medicare, it's also not prohibitively expensive like it is in the US.
I'm pretty sure I mentioned most of those factors in my original comment. Also, you can choose your doctor under Medicare. You don't need private insurance for that (the primary benefit of private insurance is you get coverage for nonessential healthcare and easier access to private hospitals).
My company administers hundreds of remote workers in over fifty countries. A significant proportion of our clients and employees (in developed countries outside the US) ask us to provide private medical insurance. It's not as big a deal as the USA and not as likely to be a deal breaker when accepting a job, but it's actually quite common in many countries.
I suspect though it’s mostly familiarity with laws/customs and that by being that remote is sufficient for them to achieve their hiring goals.
1. Admin overhead - You need to setup presence in all the countries you have employees in. This costs time and money.
2. Timezone overlap - It's somewhat common wisdom that remote teams need to have overlapping timezones (no more than 3-4 hours out) to be effective. US vs EU difference is just too great (+8 hours from west coast of the US).
Source: I work for a US based company as a full time remote employee in the EU. Applied to many places that told me US only, despite very good qualifications. This one I got into because they have a lot of EU teams.
For that reason, many non-US remote workers are technically contractors.
What about a subtler case? You begin working as a US based employee, but after enjoying your work and proving your mettle, you take the risky choice to move abroad without informing your company? Or, you have a US based apartment but periodically for a month here and there operate abroad unannounced?
Additional wrinkle: while the expectation is more clear informally, it's not clear to me what US based employment is from a legal standpoint. Is it merely filing your taxes from a US based address?
In the very slight chance you are already doing this (cannot tell), you need to come clean with your boss immediately, preferably face to face.
TLDR yes you can get rid of an employee easily but the costs vary depending on with cause vs without cause.
(Even worse, you can get stuck in these golden handcuffs as your expenses catch up to your income, leaving you in a cycle of one miserable job after another)
Seems they've exhausted all the local golang talents and are focusing globally now.
FAANG pays 200-300 total comp for new grads, these days. My new grad friends who land at Facebook and Google are getting 140-160 base salary, 70 or 80 in bonus, and around 80 to 100 in RSU vesting in the first year. Pay is bonkers right now!
Outside of scenarios involving very specific specializations, everything in my experience (with several FAANG companies) leads me to believe what you're saying about the $200k base figure being met at the entry/mid level is strictly false.
The total compensation packages at FAANG are exceptionally strong - you can realistically see $300-400k. But that will more often than not consist of ~$180k in base salary with an additional $100-200k between annual RSU grants and target bonus.
Don't get me wrong $210k in base salary absolutely happens. My own base salary is just north of that and I'm considered senior level in NYC. But it's usually not the case. Of the FAANGs, you're most likely to see that happen at Netflix, followed by Google and Facebook. It's unlikely at Amazon and Apple. When you do get a base salary like that (at the senior level), it typically follows that your RSUs will be commensurately smaller. If not, it's probably the case that you're actually above senior level (lead or principal).
> We’re taking home lots of money every year. We’re paying our employees incredibly well. We pay them top 10 percent salaries in the industry, San Francisco rates, even though we’re not based in San Francisco. We have amazing benefits. We have all these things because we’re independent.
https://www.recode.net/2019/1/23/18193685/venture-capital-mo...
There are Remote Open Engineering Positions right now. You can check them there.
I'd go for well-established US companies which use something you are an expert in. Then I'd try to pull a remote deal out of the negotiation.
When I was last looking for a job, I applied to several remote positions in the hope I might get one but was unsuccessful in all of them. In general, I found it a lot more difficult compared to the local companies I spoke with. I don't think it's anything to do with my experience, but I suppose you are competing with the world rather than your local area.
Edit: Besides many companies look for previous remote experience. So it's hard to get a remote position without having had a previous remote position.
Fo example, I am a machine learning scientist / engineer currently based in Prague. The ability that I would be able to easily find a remote job definitely increases my negotiation power which would other way be quite limited in Prague because there are not as many great local options in my field here.
Don't both depend entirely on where you're based?
I do wonder how people get their foot in the door with a good remote company. Did you just get lucky when you were first hired? Did your communication skills have to shine a lot for them to hire you?
After that I joined Toptal and got a couple of projects through them.
IMO Toptal is not a bad choice to get started in remote work, although long term it's better if you find your own work.
Zapier goes over their hiring process (https://zapier.com/jobs/our-commitment-to-applicants/). It lines up with what I've experienced in that technical assessment is valued to the company, but more than anything they value ones ability to communicate and articulate in the interviews. So much of working remotely is trust and that is pulled out in different ways during the interviews.
It's also true that many companies try to get away with cost-of-living adjustments, but you can find plenty of companies that don't do that. So they can just keep looking until they find a great offer.
Why would I work 40hrs @ $100 when I can do 10hrs @ $400?
When you're a contractor, you can earn a lot of money for short-term projects, but it gets a bit boring after a while. You're more of a mercenary with no long-term interest in the project. I've also found that the projects are usually very dull. If you join an existing project as a freelancer, then the code quality is often very poor and there can be a lot of technical debt. (YMMV.)
So sometimes it's nice to join a team and have a vested interest in the project, as a co-founder or an early employee. (I've been a freelancer working 10 hours per week for the last few years, but I'm now thinking about a full-time remote job at a startup.)
Consulting is fun, but if you're going to take it seriously (e.g. paying off the mortgage on a house and saving for retirement), then you have to put in a ton of hours over a few decades. That means working on a lot of really boring and tedious projects (and maybe a few interesting ones.) I'd much rather join some startups and get a few "lottery tickets", or build my own projects and support them with part-time consulting work.
I've not had an employer concerned about the number of hours I work in a given period in a long, long time. They're concerned about productivity. Whether it takes me an hour each day or twelve hours each day, if project goals are being met and I'm making them money, they're happy.
But they don't have the same experience and skills. Are you suggesting that all workers with X years in X technology are interchangeable?
I completely disagree. Employment is a two-way marketplace - I'm looking for an employer, and employers are bidding on what I'm selling: time, knowledge, and experience. They are bidding against not only employers local to me, but with all remote employers as well. They're free to choose someone else to work for them and I'm free to choose someone else to work for.
"Competitive local rates" are appropriate for people whose choices are local. As a developer, my choices are global. Those are very different markets.
I live in Harrison, Arkansas and I make significantly more working remotely than I could make locally. When negotiating salary at my current job, I recall my exact statement to this effect: "I'm not expecting an offer with a base salary equal to what you'd be offering me if I were in Santa Monica - but I'm also not willing to accept an offer that's the same as what I could make working for a local company. I'm confident that we'll be able to meet somewhere between those numbers."