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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

> I dunno about Stripe, but a lot of folks at Google (and presumably the other FAANGs in the region) have had that option for a decade or more. ... Only restrictions are that you have to be a solid performer beforehand, and you have to find a team that's either in that location or that's willing to have you work remotely (many teams are happy to have remote workers, particularly ones who are high performers).

Anecdotally, I have never heard of anyone getting a job at a FAANG with that kind of salary working remotely from day 1. On the other hand, I have met several people who started on-site but switched to working remotely later. I'm not saying it's not possible to do the former, but it seems like it's way easier to work remotely for a FAANG if you've already proven yourself, which obviously doesn't work if you have already moved to a lower CoL area and are looking for work.

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> Anecdotally, I have never heard of anyone getting a job at a FAANG with that kind of salary working remotely from day 1.

The cities the parent comment mentioned (Ann Arbor, Boulder, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Boston, Seattle) are all cities where Google has offices. So, the folks they mention weren't working remotely, but rather working locally in remote offices.

Source: Google San Diego employee

Many of them actually are working remotely, but have the option to go into the local office if they need anything. Sometimes they also started going into the office a few days a week and then stopped because there's really no point when the team they're working with is remote. (This is before COVID - now everybody is in this situation, and it's likely the whole company will once we come out of COVID. Most of the moves in question were either from my first time at Google [2009-2014] or the period when I wasn't working for them [2014-2020].)

Source: know the people mentioned.

I think it's very rare, I've worked at Google for 8 years and I've met maybe 1 person who works from home on a somewhat regular basis.

Observer bias arguably. If they are working from home, rather hard to meet them.

Also varies a lot by PA. Chrome is very friendly to remote work, because they're an open-source project with a lot of non-Google contributors anyway. Android or Search, not so much. Research, infrastructure, geo, and core - decent. Don't know too much about the other PAs.

A lot of the people I mentioned above actually transferred PAs to make remote work work. If that's a goal of yours, Google's a big enough company that there's probably a role available.

How? You'd still have meetings with them.

The problem is that you need a VP exception for remote work and many VPs don't believe in it at all. So there are entire orgs where the number of remote people is zero.

I was making a broader comment in case someone took that to mean that they can get a remote job working for Google or a similar company without previous experience there, which seems very unlikely.

Yes. 100% remote new hires are extremely rare at FAANGs, and usually reserved for people who are industry superstars (eg. Lars Bak). Going 100% remote after being a valued contributor for 2-4 years beforehand is open to many ordinary employees.

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