The Shifting State of Remote Work | Hacker News Reader

The Shifting State of Remote Work

yac.chat

111 pointsemiliowav45 comments

> One explanation is that Buffer’s sample population may have changed over the years. However, Buffer sampled well over 1,000 employees in each annual report and doesn’t provide any indication that their sampling technique meaningfully deviated from past years.

Sampling technique might not have differed or it might have. I did some deeper diving on the stats because I have a hard time believing remote shot up drastically like it makes it seem and that it suddenly pays great...

2018: https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/

2020: https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020

Compare 2018

> Most of the folks we surveyed work in the software industry (26%) followed by IT and Services (20%) and Marketing (19%). Only 5% of respondents work in Education and 8% in Media and Publishing.

To 2020

> Forty-one percent of those who took the survey work at organizations in software space. Other industries include: IT and Services (19.5 percent); Marketing (8.7 percent); Other (7.3 percent); Financial Services (4.6 percent); Media and Publishing (3.6 percent); Education (3.3 percent); E-commerce (3 percent); Medical and Healthcare (3 percent); Consumer products (2.3 percent); Travel and Tourism (1.6 percent); Non-profit (1.5 percent); Government (0.6 percent); and Law and Legal Services (0.6 percent).

Do we think that software suddenly had a 50-100% rise in engineers working remotely in 2 years? Maybe - but, personally, I'm skeptical. Seems more likely that the way they sampled their population changed.

And it's almost like the increase in software engineers reporting directly correlated with a rise in wages. Go figure...

I'd be interested to know how this compares to the number of total jobs that pay over $125k. How much has the overall market increased?

According to DQYJD, a full 21% of households are now making more than $125k per year [1].

It doesn't seem that absurd to me for 25% of remote workers to be earning $125k when close to 15% of the general population might be making that much -- especially depending on what the definition of a "remote" worker is...

[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

I would be interested to see how they qualify respondents with respect to "remote." If it was in the report, I missed it. Presumably there has to be some floor higher than "I travel a quarter of the time" or I work from home Fridays.

I do see something of an increase in the number of tech people who can reasonably be described as working remotely but that does seem a big change in a couple of years. (Though it's not just software engineers but senior people in tech generally.)

Even “I work from home Fridays” would be a relevant bar I think.

It wouldn’t be allowed, or technically unfit (no access to critical tools) in a lot of companies I’ve seen 10 or even 5 years ago. Someone “working from home” would be considered traveling and lose most of the work resources.

Fair enough. For many of us in professional tech jobs today, it's easy to forget just how normed working from home now and then has become. In my first longtime job in the computer industry, I would travel some but the expectation was absolutely that I'd be in the office if I weren't even if the weather was crappy, etc. For one thing, if I weren't in the office, I was pretty cut off from routine communications like phone calls, network access, and so forth.

I'm not sure I'd consider one day a week working "remote" but it does point to an expectation of a lot of flexibility for many professional jobs even if they're not technically remote-first.

But isn't that what they're saying? Different kinds of jobs are commonly remote work. I don't think they were implying that the same jobs suddenly got better-paying.

But then the presumption is that software engineering just shot up a huge amount in 2 years as a total of remote workers.

To me - that seems suspect.

Or that a bunch of other professions dropped out by a huge amount.

I think remote work is best suited for pretty senior people who don’t need much coaching. So that may shift salaries up a little.

A while ago there was a small discussion in another thread about onboarding remote junior and I got the impression that nobody really knows how to do that well.

Yep, this. You don't hire interns, grads, and juniors for remote work. So automatically the average salary is higher for remote work when you limit it to mid level and above.

Right, and in my experience at least a lot of remote workers are not people who are hired for a remote job but a senior(ish) person who negotiated with their employer to transition to being full-time remote, even if the company doesn't explicitly allow or support remote work.

Right. I work with a lot of people (and am one myself) who were hired into an office but are reasonably described as remote, whether or not 100%, now.

Do most companies even do real coaching? If a company believes their senior people no longer need it. They do not understand coaching.

Coaching senior people is different. You can coach in small increments. Somebody who is new needs to understand the tech, current implementation of systems and all their quirks and also needs to understand how the company works. That’s a lot to teach at once.

Remote work doesn’t equate with being hands off or having no coaching.

This is not a pleasant scenario, but some companies will stick monitoring tools on their employees environment, and it becomes the equivalent of the boss sitting behind you but in remote form (then again it won’t mean much for productivity, but almost nobody understands optimizing for productivity anyway)

On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. The real missing bit would be the white board IMO.

“On the coaching part, being able to share screens is the most important part I think. From there, there is only a small handicap in doing it remotely. ”

It’s not that simple with somebody new. If you sit next to them you can see much better whether they are just working through a problem or are stuck and frustrated. With remote people it’s much harder to tell. If my boss doesn’t hear much from me for a week he knows and trusts from my track record that I am working on something difficult but with new people you don’t know their personality and how they they deal with difficulty.

You are totally right in that there needs to be some prior knowledge of the person to work better remotely. I think it can be done up to a point by a first one or two day of meeting physically and getting to know where and how the person will work, to get a frame of reference.

I also hear that full remote teams usualy do in person meetings at least once or twice a year to ”recalibrate”, on top of there daily or bi-weekly vidro team meetings.

Perhaps the message here would be that making remote work well is not trivial and takes time, money and people knowing how to manage these teams. It shouldn’t be seen as the “lazy” option.

I know people do it and I was junior at a much different time in terms of communications, etc. But I can't really imagine having spent the first 10 years or so of my career working primarily remotely although I've been basically doing that for a long time now.

It’s not surprising given that those who are able to dictate their desired setup (remote work in this case) can command higher salaries. Would be nice to see the graph of years of experience + salaries for remote vs onsite workers.

At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF.

I’m doing well as a remote worker, but I’ve been browsing job boards and many advertised ranges are about half of what I’m currently earning. It needs to get better.

Yeah, companies that want remote employees really need to drop the COL thing and pay everyone similar rates. At an old job, I was getting $120k doing remote work in a high COL area, and we were looking to hire another team member. Did a bunch of interviews, found someone who was a perfect candidate, and was more qualified than all of us currently on the team. The project manager wouldn't hire him because he lives in Detroit and wanted $125k, and they said that someone living in Detroit doesn't need that much money.

> At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF.

Would be an example of someone not dictating their setup

Agreed. Any remote company that adjusts salaries based on location gets a hard pass from me.

I think its perfectly reasonable to do this. As someone who would love to be a remote worker as long as my total comp package is acceptable to me, I don't really give a crap if they are paying someone in SF 25% more.

I would more look at compared to local jobs in my area.

For example, my job, my years of experience, in my area (Midwest USA) is roughly $175K on a W2 salary. If that same position is 275k in NYC, but I'm offered it at $175k, sign me up!

I'm sure they would pay me the $275k if I moved to New York...but not living in New York is worth $100k a year to me.

While true, you're going to miss out on some percentage of applicants that are willing to interview a bit more to get a non-adjusted rate. This might be fine if you have a good hiring funnel, but if you're a scrappy startup, this could be challenging.

Also, you will likely end up with a slightly higher churn rate (since smart employees will continue interviewing to see if they can get a higher salary from a place that doesn't adjust based on cost of living).

It's a perfectly reasonable approach to take as an employer, and if you can make it work, all the more power to you.

Totally reasonable to do it just not someone dictating salary

In your case you don’t want to move out, in my case when I move back I’d like to receive the same pay since I’ll be doing the same work

It does have an oddly... socialist flavor for the context ("To each, subject to their needs...").

Salaries being literally dictated by geographical market rates is the opposite of socialism.

You missed both the joke and the point. But that's OK, so did everyone else.

whoosh :-)

I work remote so I have more free time.

No commute, can work from many places, can do chores between work, etc.

Same. I was offered a promotion at my current job, but it would require being on site at different locations. I turned it down because I get paid well enough to work from home, plus I get an extra 2-3 hours of free time every day since I don't have to get dressed or deal with traffic.

I "lost" a few promotions because working remote too.

Still worth it.

The change isn't especially surprising. Given that the survey allows for even <50% remote work to be factored in, I expect that there's been an increase in the number of better compensated/more senior people who work remotely as opposed to being primarily contractors, support staff, etc. The article speculates about this but it seems pretty obvious among a lot of people I work with and know.

Anecdote - Talked to a highly paid contractor from Nasa the other day. He said he's been working in-office 30+ years and just this month was allowed to work full-time remote.

Renaissance of remote work approaching imo.

Agree with @bradlys' comment: This just suggests more highly paid people are being allowed to work remote, vs. remote jobs being paid more.

Given the expansion of high paying roles across geographies, this could be driven almost entirely by FAANG opening engineering / R&D centers in other cities like Denver / Dallas, etc.

Also 'remote' could be laxer standards for these same companies on going down to Mountain View / Menlo Park driven by commute and traffic. Many of my friends commute 2x a week, passing the 50% threshold for remote work, even though I wouldn't consider Menlo Park / Mountain View to SF 'Remote'

To be honest, of course. If remote work is paying substantially better it's because higher paid people have jobs that fit under some technical definition of remote.

To your example, I don't work in the Bay Area but I'm theoretically in an office about a 30 minute drive away. However, I gave up my desk and only go in for meetings sometime. I'd definitely self-report as Remote even though I technically aren't.

I wonder if some of it is just changes in attitudes. Lots of people in tech and elsewhere (e.g. sales) have long spent very little time in their offices even if they had one. I wonder if they consider themselves Remote today when they wouldn't have in the past because they were technically in an office.

I've been looking on and off for a few months to see what the remote market is like. It's rare to find senior dev jobs paying >130k and even rarer to find local jobs that let you be remote a fixed number of days a week. It seems at least around here you would need to take a good pay cut to have a remote option.

Anecdotal, but myself and two other people I know at two other places work "mostly remote," meaning commute once a week or less.

In each case, we started by commuting full time, and added remote days after some months. Also for all of us, we have a good number of co-workers that go into the office most days.

I found the same as you, in that looking for positions specifically billed as remote positions, the money is really not there.

The good news is that remote jobs are growing by the day. Remote.co is doing a good job at snagging high quality jobs https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/

It occurs to me that, in at least some cases, employers don't want to have remote workers (fear of loss of control), but will accept it if they cannot fill the position otherwise (e.g. there are no available programmers in our town).

So, it will be interesting to see what happens when the next labor market downturn comes.

Remote work is all about trust. Find good talent that you don't have to micro manage and you'll see that the output is 2x what the input used to be. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're left alone and not interrupted by meetings and a distracting workplace

True story https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/05/21/he...

I would love if sites like levels.fyi had a checkbox for remote work. Since there's few stats out there: $150k base, $50k stock ($200k / 4 years), no bonus. Focus on front end, 5 YOE.

Haha, I'd love to have this as well, sign me up for a job like this :)

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