Full-office tech jobs pay 1.9x less than full-remote | Hacker News Reader

Full-office tech jobs pay 1.9x less than full-remote

landing.jobs

47 pointsmaggioli53 comments

No, they don't.

This is what happens when you put data from completely different markets together, and you take an aggregate statistic. If all of your full-office jobs are in India and Africa and most of the flexible ones are in the US, of course you'll end up with a huge difference if you don't adjust for the market.

The whole analysis is done poorly. You could at least share the actual data.

While we’re at it, it’s not clear what “1.9x” means. Does it mean I pay the employer?!?

I think it means 1/1.9 times as much. Although it is definitely an easy to misinterpret phrase, which shouldn't be used in general. In this case, "roughly half" is probably good enough.

Cite your source and data please

> you could at least share the actual data.

you can be the first here to demonstrate

They aren't making a specific data-based claim. It is well known that different markets exist, the onus is on the article to explain how they handle that obvious confounding factor.

Reminds me of the stackoverflow dev survey, while they do break down some of the categories by location (the locations being USA and Other of course), others don't.

Err, I agree that I'm not super impressed with the blog post in general, but it is an announcement of their report. I don't really feel like digging through the PDF, but is the actual data really in that document?

I never understand "x times less" valuations. 1.9 times 100k, for example, would be 190k, so is it paying 190k less? How is this intended to be calculated? I never went to college so maybe this is a common way to express something being a percentage of something else, a percentage less than something else, or perhaps an average static value less than something else, that I'm not aware of that is being taught.

I would say the HN title probably needs to have the editorialization removed so that it reflects the actual article title and reduce the confusion (Full remote tech jobs pay better, Global Tech Talent Trends shows), but it appears within the article they do use the 1.9x less pay phrase.

No, you're right. While "1.9x more" is common enough to have an agreed upon meaning, "1.9x less" is not a common expression. It's just a low quality article, don't think too much about it.

Maybe they're trying to say that the full-remote salaries are "1.9x more" than the full-office salaries and they don't understand that it doesn't work that way. That would mean that if full-office salaries were $50,000 then full-remote be $95,000 more, for a total of $145,000.

I think they are trying to say that in-person positions pay 1/1.9 times as much as remote ones. On top of the issues around the phrase "x times less" being a bit confusing, this suffers, I think, from false precision. I mean, come on, how accurate is this survey? How about "In person positions pay roughly half that of full-remote ones."

And it's this thread of responses that makes it clear that this phrasing is far too ambiguous to be useful, and I'm not alone in that confusion.

“X times less” is is not X times Y, it is Y divided by X. That “less” in the statement turned multiplication into division.

In the very least, it is too close to the more familiar phrasing "x% less," which unambiguously means (100 - x)%.

I went to college, even tutored some math classes there, "1.9x less" is... somewhere between nonsense and poor math communication skills, I think. Skewing toward the former.

Probably it can be defined as "A is X times more than B" if and only if "B is X times less than A", just not to go to negative values.

If they said "0.3x less" that would make sense. But I agree with you in doubting that the full-office salaries are negative. "1.9x less"… what are they multiplying by 1.9 to figure out how big of a discount from the full-remote salary employers are paying?

Maybe because fully remote jobs tend to be more senior?

Many companies don't trust juniors to get productive without in-office supervision. There's more competition to hire experienced devs, and many of them ask for remote.

They usually don't. Juniors who get productive remotely very fast are already usually top few% of juniors. Being "average" junior fresh after university is way harder remotely.

I can work fully remote for a company in San Francisco and make 75% of their in-office wages, but 150% of my local in-office wages.

Remote companies can draw talent from everywhere, but also have a lot more competition from every company on the planet offering remote.

Non-remote companies are also competing with remote companies

"The fact that North America is the only region paying less to Full remote than to Hybrid remote is also curious. If you have guesses on reasons for this, please reach out."

If a significant number of remote jobs on other continents are working for North American employers, that explains it all right there.

Seems to be hugged to death. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220705142650/https://landing.j...

Alternative phrasing: Full-office pays 52.6% of full-remote. Or "about half".

What do they mean when they say "1.9x less"? If job A pays $100,000 a year, and job B pays "1.9x less", what does job B pay?

$100,000 divided by 1.9 = $52,632.

The “less” in the statement turns multiplication into division.

Is that really what they're trying to say? Why wouldn't they say 0.47x less instead?

I it looks like they had an 'online content specialist' do the blog post. My bet is that that person wasn't really involved in the research, and so decided to just pull figures directly from the document. Most likely an adequate phrasing here would be "roughly half," but if you aren't involved in generating the figures, you might be wary to about manipulating them.

This seems a case of correlation rather than any recent causal change (still relevant & interesting but worth noting): companies that paid more traditionally appropriately compensate & value their employees more and would thus be more likely to offer flexible / progressive work situations.

A particularly large divide I've seen "in the wild" is FAANG companies requiring contractors & vendor staff to be in-office while offering remote to their FTEs. This results in (traditionally lower-paying) vendors being forced by contract into full-office enforcement.

Best most forward thinking tech companies went remote. Old school companies with low pay and no growth want people in the office

> Full-office jobs are the most poorly paid (1.9x less than full-remote jobs). The differences can be very significant, and a hypothesis to support this may be because less competitive companies are less inclined for remote work, consequently losing attractiveness to the best tech professionals, and hurting their competitiveness even more. A speculation, but worth debating. The fact that North America is the only region paying less to Full remote than to Hybrid remote is also curious. If you have guesses on reasons for this, please reach out.

My thought would've been they adjusted for commute time and costs to arrive at that number but it appears they did not. Factoring for that you can safely say remote work pays twice as much. I'd be curious what the delta in NA is between office and remote.

I think that to make any real sense of this number, you have to understand the demographics and other characteristics of their sample set much better than the article allows you to.

It's not loading, but... I guess that result might be biased by comparing local European companies (paying EU salaries, with all its variability between companies) versus American companies paying American or close to American salaries for their remote employees?

It would be interesting to compare EU full-office/hybrid/full-remote companies and the availability of EU vs USA full-remote positions.

My thoughts exactly. Moreover, it's not just that full-remote jobs tend to be American; it's that they tend to be Silicon Valley. The very jobs that treat developers as a profit-center rather than a cost-center are also those that tend to have gone the way of full-remote.

Standard sample-size of one caveat, etc. etc.

I worked 100% remotely for four years, and while the pay was higher, so was the expected workload. In the remote job I'd regularly work 10-12 hour plus days, and often had to work weekends. My current job, with 2 days a week in the office and the rest remote, is basically 9-5. I reckon in my case the extra hours cancelled out the higher pay.

Also a sample size of 1, but: my current full-time remote job is strictly 9-5/5 days a week with upper management extremely concerned about ensuring people have a solid work/life balance and sufficient time off.

It also pays 2x what I’d make locally.

Just to say that fully remote is by no means necessarily a stealth sweatshop.

How do you pay “1.9x less”?

Also paying more for remote employees makes sense. I literally just told people “I want a salary matching in-person employment and fully remote” when applying for jobs ~8 months ago.

My resume and track record proved my ability and the remote was another perk. If I was junior I’d probably want to go in and / or wouldn’t have that negotiating power.

Hi. For the ones interested, source here: https://landing.jobs/global-tech-talent-trends-2022/ Agree that phrasing should be 'Full-remote jobs pay 1.9x more than full-office jobs', it'd be more clear.

Is this adjusting for seniority? In-person only roles are overwhelmingly junior/associate level right now.

Anecdotally, this seems right. I almost doubled my compensation - and got a bunch of equity, and better benefits - by switching to full remote work. I know many who've done the same. It's a sea change. It'll be tough for smaller non-remote employers to compete.

I am not sure about this. In my experience, be able to be in the office and working closer with stack holders allow more visibility, faster promotions and higher paycheck. Remote co-workers careers tend to be more static. I have seen this in small as well as FAANG.

Yeah but I think this is a Simpson's paradox thing.

The companies which are fully-remote have higher engineering talent bars and better pay (ie startups, FAANG, etc). The companies which are not-remote are low-pay low-skill engineering jobs (ie insurance companies).

Within either of these buckets you may be right, but not across the industry.

Tech jobs in _general_ pay as much as you job hop

Job hop every year and be the best

You'll kill the middleman margin, and you'll find out that tech makes a fucking shitton of money

ahhhhhhh money :)

t. remoteworker who's probably 5x the average income for his level in his city

I think it's more likely that a job with full-remote is more "with the times" and more likely to pay a commensurate wage than the legacy corps that require butts in desks to do Teams meetings all day.

It's been rare for me to see full-office positions most seem to allow for somewhere in between 1-3 days WFH -- which was kind of the standard before the pandemic for me anyway

Because company only willing to offer remote to harder to get talents, who happen to be paid higher?

Correlation vs Causation, here we go again

fascinating insight in this report. For those who don't know Landing Jobs is the matching platform based in Portugal, tho with devs signing up from all over the world

Not true, remote still pays 200k+/year in most cases. Company needs have not changed and the market is still hot.

Read the title again.

It’s a weird title…

Out of curiosity what types of roles have you seen in that pay range?

not sure why this submission was flagged, can somebody from mods please explain?

Mods don’t flag, users do

Reply on news.ycombinator.com