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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

I've worked remotely for 10+ years and I have one piece of advice. Ignore these policies. Live wherever you want and demand whatever salary you think you're producing at. If FB wants to leave high productivity labor on the table, let them. If any company has any kind of policy that stops them from hiring you, that's their problem. We've been in a seller's market for software development labor for nearly 20 years. Stop pretending like these arbitrary rules are your problem, it's theirs. They can't limit you. They can only limit themselves.

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Great sentiment, but it's just not a workable position.

These guys have massive resources at their disposal, and they will crush a handful of 10x'ers if that's what it takes to get what they want.

For goodness sake, Facebook has a bolo list complete with real-time location tracking. Writing "F--- you, Mark" will land you on that list [1]. They view themselves as a quasi-government [2].

If we don't act through Congress to control powerful groups like Facebook, our personal and professional lives will be less free and less fulfilling.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac...

[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/9/17214752/zuckerber...

This is only a problem for you if you really want to work at Facebook for some reason.

I'm with you, but FAAMG sets the tone for the industry. There is a corporate Overton window, and Facebook is an important "thought leader".

I used to feel like I was limited by those "thought leaders" too. Except I lived in an low COL area, where the inertia is towards a lower salary. Once I started working remotely, I learned I wasn't bound by those ideas anymore.

Considering your name is "Consultant32452" - and not "RegularEmployee32452" - I presume you do consulting. How much are you earning? You said you're not bounded - so I am presuming you're at like $400k+/yr as many FAANG engineers are. Would you still get that if you turned into a regular IC instead of a consultant? I don't think everyone who goes remote wants to be a consultant (or can be).

Yes, I'm making about $400k this year. People are willing to go hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to go to prestigious schools, move away from their friends and family clear to the other side of the planet for these kinds of work/income opportunities. Conversely, I have a high school diploma and remain close to friends and family. I think people are more adaptable than you give them credit for. Sure, not everyone is going to figure out how to make it work, but not everyone was going to get into MIT and then work at FB either.

I'm wondering if your experience is even remotely translatable for random FAANG employees. I don't know what kind of consulting you do or how these people would translate into such positions where they can really keep earning their large compensations.

Your points about moving and college have nothing really to do with the discussion at hand - do they? If staying in whatever place you are is what you wanted then good for you. Many people don't like where they grew up or the people they grew up with. I'd also hesitate to imply that your experience with a high school only education and the employment opportunities that came up is going to be anywhere near common.

I'm not doing anything particularly special. Most people might more accurately describe what I am as a "contractor" rather than a consultant.

The points about moving and college are about people shaping their entire lives in such a way to be successful and meet their goals. The landscape might change a bit, but people don't stop being willing to hustle and adapt to the changing landscape.

I think probably the best thing that happened to me is I didn't have all of these mythologies about what I was allowed or capable of accomplishing drilled into me by the standard path that most people take. I imagine if you've invested your whole life in the understanding that the way to "make it" is to graduate from a top tier university and take a very narrow set of employment opportunities, it would be hard to escape that mental prison. But that's all it is. The hiring committees at FANG might reinforce that mental prison, but you don't have to deal with them. If you went the conventional path and got those fancy credentials, it's not like it will be harder for you to make it out here in the non-FANG world than it was for me. It'll probably be easier.

$150 Oklahoma == $400 FAANG

In HCOL locations, after 10-15 years of high pay work, you end up with a massive equity in your property (assuming you weren't renting), often enough to just retire in 99% of the places in the world. You don't get that in Oklahoma.

In Oklahoma you also build a bunch of equity in your home. What's even better is you don't have to sell your home to retire and move out of California. You just retire. You already live in Oklahoma in your dream house that is paid off.

You also have a 10-15 year head start on creating realtionships/roots and don't have to leave all your friends behind.

no, that's not true. $150k is $150k, and even tho the CoL is high in the bay area, getting $400k can get you further in a shorter time.

If you were able to save a percentage of your income, then that percentage is going to result in a higher amount for the FAANG salary.

This is why I evaluate my estimation of my savings rate with that position and location, not salary. Everyone does a minor version of this with taxes and rent. I just take that to its conclusion and only measure a YoY delta in savings.

Quite.

An example, is buying a house.. and rent pricing reflects purchase price.

If you buy and pay off a house, you have "spent" that salary in both locations. However, when you retire, you have property worth a LOT more in SV.

So while the "take home" pay, after expenses is the same with 150/400, the equity is massively different.

Don’t give up on the perpetual dance between employers and employees. The tension between companies wanting to commoditise their staff, and staff wanting the opposite and in some sense be a business of themselves.

FAAMG? When was N swapped for M?

If it hasn't already, it should. Microsoft is way more influential in tech than Netflix.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cheems

ok fam

I'd like for this to be the truth, but I fear with the power a company like Facebook has that they may start the trend and other companies will follow them soon.

And really don't want to work for any of the "next facebook" startups or companies that parrot every practice they read facebook may do.

Maybe not if you demand the optimum dollar.

Instead, consider the set of jobs offering at least half of a FB salary. Choose the one that seems most delightful and liveable. It probably won't be Facebook.

(How? Cut your spending to the bone. There's more to life than money.)

"Cut your spending to the bone. There's more to life than money." seems contradictory to me. Every time you cut spending deliberately, you add monetary constraints that make more of your life revolve around money.

Some changes require more of your attention than others. For example, eliminate cable TV. It's a one-shot effort, and then you never think about it again. A lot of saving are just not buying things: a second car, a motorcycle, a vacation, etc.

Some people are competing with local labor. Others are competing with global labor. Which situation benefits you strongly depends on your ability to demonstrate value to the employer.

It isn't just supply that is global but also demand. If you demonstrate exceptional value relative to supply globally, then buyers of your skills must also compete globally.

>Some people are competing with local labor.

Proximity might have been valued so highly that it felt like you were only competing locally, but I think this was just an illusion. You've always been competing with global labor.

True that they cannot limit you. Except working at a FLiNG company what I have noticed is (sadly) they dont really think much of talent unless you are a brand name (creator of any obscure framework we are stuck with and cannot get out of). Reality is given the normalizing nature of our interviewing processes (leetcode puzzles) without a Brand, a dev (regardless of experience) in the bay area is qualitatively "same" as their counter parts outside - except BA ones are a fair bit costlier.

What is FLiNG as opposed to FAANG? This is the first I've seen this version.

Hah sorry yes. Li=LinkedIn. Purely a compensation thing rather than any suggestion of any "elitism". I still can't get over how much in the bay area folks feel that "technical pride" at the Big Cos.

Ah, I see, thanks. Honestly I haven't thought too hard about who is included in the acronym / why. I know I've heard arguments about, e.g. whether AMZN should be in there based on size and influence vs pay, etc. I didn't know LinkedIn paid on that same level, that's interesting.

LinkedIn maybe? First time I've seen it too.

Ah, yeah, that seems like a good guess.

There’s only FAANG

Foursquare, Lidl, Nike, Globe and mail

Their loss. That’s GP’s point right? If there was a fair market, they’d lose out on talent that brings their business forward vs competitors.

So much this. There's companies out there that value output at what you're worth, regardless of where you live at. I'm almost certain that Facebook is one of those companies — when it comes to high output employees. Negotiate.

The counter to that is that there's people that live in cheaper areas that are willing to accept less _because_ their cost of living is lower. If a company can hire them instead of someone )with the same productivity) basing their expected salary on what people make in SV, then why wouldn't they? Following that logic, people living SV should start making less while people living in inexpensive areas should start making more; it should even out to some extent.

The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode. That doesn't make them bad engineers. But it precludes them from passing the incredibly one-dimensional assessment FANGs apply to engineers.

The hiring committees would throw fits if they had to consider hiring even the upper-end of talent in non-competitive markets.

These committees could be in for a reckoning if businesses realized they could be just as effective with mid market talent, because truthfully, not every problem that needs to be solved at a FANG needs a top 1% best-of-breed, (for example) 15+years-of-GPU experience engineer. Not every problem demands niche, hard-to-find specialty.

> The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode

I think this hits on a very real signal that is sent by someone being willing to relocate cross-country for work. I know people from college that moved out to the coasts to work for big name tech companies. They were probably "above average", but none of them were terribly noteworthy.

The thing they were willing to do that the rest of us weren't was uproot from the midwest and go to the coast.

That's a signal that you're willing to tie your self worth to your job in a way that is very valuable (exploitable) to a company.

Pretty much described every H1b-er in HN. Except prolly the body shop employees.

> The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode.

> not every problem that needs to be solved at a FANG needs a top 1% best-of-breed, (for example

I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not. The wording in the first sentence is that of someone being sarcastic, mocking the people who would actually use such language and/or expect such things. But the second quote sounds like you're being serious.

The difference between people living in high COL areas and low COL isn't how much they hustle. Some of the best people I've worked with are living in low COL areas, including one I was praising just recently for being a role model for others.

As a side note, if you're doing 100 hours of work a week, you're almost certainly doing a bad job at all of it. With the exception of a small subset of people, it's been shown that work quality decreases drastically when working long hours (for all the work being done, not just the work past the normal hours). Expecting your workers to put in those hours means you're aiming for sub-optimal, low quality work.

Next sentence following the first quote: "That doesn't make them bad engineers." You stated "Some of the best people I've worked with are living in low COL areas". I think we agree here.

The broader point with the first quote: People living in LCOL areas don't pull out all the bells-and-whistles to signal how absolutely amazing of an employee they'd be. Why? Because it doesn't matter in LCOL areas. If you went to a town in the middle of nowhere, and held everyone to the Leetcode hard bar, a smaller proportion would pass than in Silicon Valley. However, the hiring bar is lower in these areas as well -- therefore, one doesn't need to practice leetcode to secure employment in LCOL areas.

Re side note: I didn't say people do 100 hours of leetcode in a specific timeframe (one week was mentioned, but the GP comment didn't suggested that). Typically, interviewees Leetcode in preparation for FANGs. This preparation is done typically over a period of months.

That ignores why SV has a cost premium in the first place. High cost of living is pushed up because of the workforce not the other way around.

SF, and much of the rest of the Bay Area to a lesser (or greater, on the case of Marin) extent had a notoriously high cost of living before “Silicon Valley” was more than a small part of the South Bay.

It's more than tech work that has drawn people to SF, and that combined with supply restrictions that also aren't driven by the tech workforce have kept prices high since before the tech workforce showed up.

Going back to say 1950’s and it was still the workforce pushing up cost of living. Who those people are and what they are doing is a function of the time period, but people want to live there in large part due to the weather etc.

I don't see that as a counter. Yes, this might be bad long term for people staying in SF, and good long term for people outside of SF/the US. But individually you can look for opportunities in your own local market and get local market rates, or break that paradigm and look at other markets, just like companies are waking up to hiring employees in cheaper markets (beyond hiring consulting firms). Like everything in markets, there's always opportunities for the wise to take advantage of, on both sides

If demand for labor goes down in SF, and wages go down in SF, so will the COL.

Think about it from the angle of consulting rates as a remote developer. Would you charge a different rate to companies that operate in the same markets based on where you are at? Why would you accept a different rate as a FTE, then? You charge what you're worth, not where

The trouble is there are people who are highly paid because they are legitimately good at what they do. And then there are people who are highly paid because they live in an area where high pay is the norm.

The former are going to be fine either way.

The latter are in for a rude awakening.

so how do you differentiate if you are good at what you do, or is just highly paid because of where you live and worked?

Easy! If you live in The Bay Area it probably applies!

Many companies have a hiring restriction that requires candidates to live near their offices so that they can physically appear for work. This of course constrains the labor pool which artificially inflates salaries. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that in The Bay Area housing itself is also constrained, which multiplies the cost increase on local talent.

> There's companies out there that value output at what you're worth

In any auction the selling price is not the value of the item to the winning bidder, it's the second highest bid plus $1. If you move to a LCOL area the competing offers are all going to be garbage unless you can find a second high-paying company to extend you a remote offer (which may or may not happen, depending on how widespread remote work becomes). Facebook has no reason to unilaterally raise their bids unless you can secure good competing offers as leverage.

> Live wherever you want and demand whatever salary you think you're producing at. If FB wants to leave high productivity labor on the table, let them.

You need leverage to make demands and the best way to have leverage is to have competing offers with similar or higher numbers. If more higher paying companies are open to remote work, then you can play that game, but if your only competing offers are from local companies who pay crappy non-tech-hub salaries then Facebook is just going to call your bluff when you ask for more money. It's still an open question how the future is going to pan out.

Yep! FB can’t pull this shit once you have other offers.

Where I live, even $15 per hour is considered a decent salary for a mid-senior engineer. I know for a fact that I'm on the same level as engineers in the valley, both in hard and social skills, up to the accent and culture tropes – but I'm still here because I never wanted the H1B hassle (especially without a degree).

Every time I read comments like yours on HN, I become more and more hopeful about my future. I'm not in a bad place right now, that's for sure – but it looks like it's going to get a lot better.

Allow me to boost your hope a little more. I'm a college dropout, don't work for a FAANG, and will make about $400k this year. I hope you make it big.

You sound inspirational, but an outlier. I hope to become one as well, but rely more on trends.

Everyone who makes $400k/yr is an outlier to some degree, regardless of their pedigree or employer. The key to my success is a skill stack, rather than a skill. I'm a pretty good programmer but I am really good at taking really complicated things and explaining them to non-technical people without using jargon. That makes me valuable where I am. But the thing that opened doors for me is the third leg of my skill stack: teaching. Every opportunity I have to teach something, I do it. It can be teaching my entire team about unit testing and mocks, how to transition from one source control system to another, or taking a junior programmer and teaching them to think like a programmer. Especially the latter group, those people who you teach to improve their own careers really remember it. Because employers suck at giving major raises/promotions when people grow, those people usually leave. And then every opportunity of theirs suddenly becomes your opportunity too. As soon as there's another opening, they want you on their team. In a way, you increase your own luck by increasing the luck of others.

Of course it's not 100% guaranteed, and if you acted as if people you mentored owed you something they would just resent you anyways. To butcher a metaphor, when I changed from being a shooting star super-developer to a rising tide that raises all ships, that's when my income and opportunities really took off. When I stopped caring about getting credit for everything I touched. When I started doing everything I could to help others in their career, mine really took off.

How do you handle promotions and negotiating raises? I'd be concerned about the long term effect if I went remote. The bay area is expensive, but a 50% or 100% increase in compensation seems possible. That only seems possible in areas like the bay, Seattle, or NYC.

I don't really consider promotions or raises. If I take a job, after 1 year I take a hand full of interviews even if I love my job. Then I repeat every 6 months. This improves my ability to interview and keeps me aware of what skills are being required as well as what compensation is being offered. If I get an offer substantially better than my current one, I take it.

Please don't take this as rude, but this comment seems incredibly naive. Bay area is easily twice as expensive as many other locations. A 50% or even 100% increase in compensation seems like a very bad deal.

You might more successfully argue the benefits of bay area weather. But those arguments are harder for Seattle or NYC.

If you double your salary but double your expenses, that's still a good deal because you've doubled your disposable income (ie. the gap between the two).

I'm not offended. I'll give you housing. I'm nowhere close to being able to afford a home. But I'm fine with an apartment. Doing a rough estimate of housing in places I might consider moving to, I might be able to save 5k-10k/yr. I could save more after actually looking, and maybe get a nicer place.

But I don't think saving that money would be worth the long term cost of moving to a place where I would be overpaid for my experience level. I might get lower raises, and I think I would have a hard time getting a competitive offer as a remote worker.

The calculations would change if I had a family. I'd be be able to afford a really nice house in the state where I went to school.

Why not just live in SF?

> the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.

And you're potentially causing yourself a nice future tax issue.

The company needs to account for which state(s) my income taxes are to be paid towards if I'm w2'ing their situation, as a citizen of the United States, I give as little information as possible because then I'm not able to be 'wrong' or somehow incorrect.

This leaves me with exactly two addresses for location, one for shipping things and one for "The state in which you reside". Residence is a legal thing, you can travel and be nomadic while maintaining your resident status within one or more particular states.

I've been working remotely for 10+ years like the parent comment, and it would make a very interesting impact on my tax history if what you both are saying holds any water.

Plus possibly criminal fraud.

I downvoted your suggestion because it's illegal (like, felony tax evasion and perjury illegal).

It's illegal to live in SF?

Guy edited his comment after I posted. He was initially advocating lying about living in SF while not actually doing so. Poor form.

Ok, I've had that happen to me one time. I hate that.

Why is it illegal?

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