Comment by andrewstetsenko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstetsenko | Hacker News Reader

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andrewstetsenko

Hello, everyone! It’s Andrew, founder of Relocate.me.

In a nutshell, Relocate.me is a one-stop platform for tech professionals who are willing to relocate for work.

Since launching Relocate.me on Hacker News over 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15922401), a lot has changed, and I’m excited to finally introduce Relocate.me 3.0 with a batch of new features and enhancements:

1) Learning center (https://relocate.me/learning-center): A treasure trove of useful information and practical advice on finding employment abroad.

2) Companies (https://relocate.me/companies): A handpicked list of tech companies hiring internationally; you can filter companies by country.

3) Improved search (https://relocate.me/search)

4) Calculators (https://relocate.me/net-pay-calculators) to estimate your after-taxes paycheck in 20+ countries

5) “Who Wants to be Relocated?” initiative (https://relocate.me/wwbr): A public list of potential tech hires promoted among international recruiters.

6) Non-developer jobs with relocation assistance. Including (but not limited to) Product Manager, Design, and Marketing roles.

7) Telegram channel (https://t.me/relocateme): A quick way to keep up to date with new positions as they’re posted, relevant news, and more.

Thank you so much for reading this far! Our team will be happy to hear your feedback.

Legit question, how many people are being relocated currently? I would have thought Corona would have really messed up your flow but I keep getting emails from you guys with jobs so I assume it's still happening.

I'd be curious as well, though I've met people in the last year who have made moves with the correct visas. Not on this platform though. It seems like the flights were the hardest part.

I’ve noticed that projects like this primarily focus on recruiting for software roles (which is understandable if they are shared here), but what are the roadblocks to listing traditional engineering roles (mechanical, electrical, etc). Lack of exposure to those industries (understandable)? Companies not offering relevant positions?

Non-software engineering disciplines tend to involve professional licensing that doesn't necessarily carry over automatically to other countries.

In my experience, the good ones do.

Medical typically does

I'm sure this strongly depends on where. I don't really know the state of the world today, but very distinctly remember curves being destroyed in the late 90s early 00s by a flood of professional engineers and medical doctors fleeing former Soviet republics to the US and not having their licenses or even degrees recognized and having to go back to school. There was a time where the quality of students in Los Angeles community colleges was probably higher than an average Ivy League university because of this.

Not necessarily. You might need to get country specific additional training which can be either easy to get or .. well not.

You've already described the main roadblocks. I suppose that those industries have less in-demand vacancies comparing to software engineering, as well as companies are not offering so many positions with relocation support.

Who wants to move to Europe to make 2k a month doing electrical or mechanical engineering? Since working for a US based competitor is not feasible from Europe in these fields, the pay tends to suck.

I would assume the biggest roadblock is they actually build physical products

I know that there are state level taxes as well in the US. Can this be included in the calculator?

Also I wonder what the difference in disposable income would be given something like (typical) health insurance, food prices, and housing per state/area

Thanks a lot for the feedback on the US salary calculator! Makes sense... Added this to the backlog

Andrew, it would be interesting to hear a bit about the founding story. One question I'd like to ask is how did you acquire the customers in the early days? What was the plan for that and what actually worked?

I started a recruitment agency first... After a while, I realized that it was almost impossible to scale this business as well as to be somehow unique comparing to other recruiting firms. It took me around 3 years to negotiate buying the Relocate.me domain name and then the Relocate.me story started.

It helped a lot that I was in this field for almost 5 years before launching Relocate.me. So the first users came through the word of mouth and a Product Hunt campaign.

Moreover, we 'manually' invited software engineers to the platform, those who somehow expressed their interest in moving abroad (haha, this can help - https://relocateme.eu/blog/how-to-source-for-software-develo...)

I see a bunch of calculator but there's no level bands or numbers for compensation when browsing positions.

Good point. Actually we thought about adding this info to vacancy pages. However, as our experience shows, many companies are not ready to disclose salary info to the public.

> However, as our experience shows, many companies are not ready to disclose salary info to the public.

Depends on the demographic you are trying to attract on the platform.

I've done a little bit of tech recruiting and I can tell you this: top engineers, no matter the level, get a lot of offer. And they won't hesitate to sort by compensation (unless of course it's SpaceX).

Really, there are two kinds of businesses out there: those that try to make money playing games with compensation and CoL adjustments and those who make money building the best software out there and scaling. The later won't have any problem giving a number: they need the talent right now to scale.

No kidding. The amount of contact I've had over the last few years, by what might be best-tagged as 'low-ballers'? Absurd.

The most amusing, puerile trick goes somewhat like this:

Looking for junior full stack dev. Expert at query optimization, scaling, python, etc

Junior?! Add the word 'expert' once, and by no means is it a junior role.

I recently had a recruiter approach me with a job description such as:

"Able to mentor junior devs"

along with

"Make key decisions" about this and that, peppered throughout the job description.

Ah. I see. A management role, under the guise of a 'junior' job title. On top of this, my linkedin shows 10+ years experience!

Why are you even calling me for a junior role to begin with? Well the answer is obvious. Keyword search, without even glancing at the linkedin profile.

Then on top of all of that, the pay is below the average junior role position locally. Wha?!

Precisely what are these people looking for? An "extremely intelligent", "driven" and "highly capable" dev, combined with "gullible" and "easy to trick"?

And even if you find such a person, what's the point of it all, when they get offered 2x the salary in 3 months?

I just don't get it.

These are the people who used to sell mobile phones in your local shopping center before, by some luck, ended up in recruitment.They have no idea that JS and Java aren't the same. They tend to call random people hoping something will stick. Sometimes, such recruiters get hired by equally delusional companies and hence the results you described.

Then how do they plan to hide anything above mediocre? Most good+ engineers I know will not waste time on an interview if they do not know upfront that the company pays a sane wage. Else it is a time waste.

I won’t get to an interview without an idea that there’s a possible overlap in our picture of compensation, but I don’t mind taking the first 15 zoom call if the job otherwise seems interesting.

Because this project might provide value in aggregating and filtering the data (i.e. remote job postings) in other ways that still add a lot of value to a certain kind of user.

I think that quick research about the company can give a rough idea about the salary they offer.

In most cases, it's possible to find feedback from past employees on Glassdoor.

If I email these companies and tell them my friend might be interested I guarantee they will give me a range. Same thing with recruiters.

I definitely think there is a market for figuring this out and mashing it up on job pages with a browser extension.

looks like a great resource for the developer community. Where do you expect the developers to move from, and move to?

Thanks for the warm words. It’s funny, but we did a poll yesterday about the most desired work abroad destination among 589 developers (exclude my vote - it was Japan). You can find the results - https://www.dropbox.com/s/ga2y72eqwcd9bp6/Relocate.me%20Marc...

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