Ask HN: Is being remote affecting your job search? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is being remote affecting your job search?

20 pointsmetabro28 comments

For the last couple years good arguments were made to move to a lcol location and work remotely.

The golden ticket was to pull this off with a faang / faang adjacent company - make Bay Area SWE wages while living in Nashville.

Now that the job market has drastically changed, do you see living in these places where you have to primarily rely on remote work posing a challenge to finding work? Do people in the hcol tech hubs have a significant advantage or is remote work the new normal so the playing field is more or less level?

Interested to read your thoughts and experiences.

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I've lived in a LCOL my entire life and really made actual development money by going remote. I've done it for so long and the wage disparity is so great I will likely have to leave the industry if remote dries up. Owning a home does not permit me to move around the country and I'm not going to do staff level engineering for under $150k (and that's the lowest I'd ever go). Far easier to just go work somewhere else in a different field because at least then I'd be starting from the bottom with no memory of the past.

Remote work seems to be more difficult to get these days with all of the applications coming from people thinking it's an easy meal ticket. I've gotten most of my jobs through my network. Who knows how long that'll last. Pair this with the general apathy of doing coding interviews and other song-and-dance nonsense to get a job and this current job I have may be my last in the industry anyway. When skills are not valued over CS brain teasers the shark has been jumped.

> When skills are not valued over CS brain teasers the shark has been jumped.

That's been the case for like the past 15 years at least, in my experience. There's now dozens of businesses built just on helping others pass technical interviews. The shark was jumped a long time ago.

>all of the applications coming from people thinking it's an easy meal ticket

Because it is an easy meal ticket. Why are we pretending it's not?

This is the only profession in the world where you can make decent money from the comfort of your home, via self study and without any high level education. Look at the other well paying professions, bankers, management consulting, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. how long they need to spend in university and how much money their studies cost, before they can get their first wage.

Meanwhile someone who's been coding for fun since childhood can get a decent wage starting 18th birthday, without a degree and without going into debt.

In my developing country that just moved to developed status, SW jobs were a big contributor in lifting young generations of ambitious youngsters out of poverty saving them from having to emigrate or do backbreaking work for peanuts.

The career has some downsides but it has the lowest bar for a skilled profession ever.

The fact my company turns down over 80 applications a week and only 1/5 of the accepted applicants make it through the first interview tells me you're wrong. It's only an easy meal ticket if you're deluded. Highly motivated, hungry, individuals are not the usual candidate. The usual candidate is a code school graduate who got tricked by an influencer into spending 18k for a moonshot.

> Because it is an easy meal ticket. Why are we pretending it's not?

Well, at least for me it wasn't. I went to university to study CS (in Europe, so I didn't get a debt). It was hard (like any other Science/Engineering career I imagine). Then finding a job was relatively normal and the pay was normal as well. It was only after I got years of experience that it started to get better (e.g., home office, better salary, etc.), but it didn't come for free either (it happens that I like CS a lot, and I can afford to spend some part of my free time reading tech books... so that helps when it comes to salary as well).

I don't think it's an "easy meal ticket". Hell, I don't think anything in this world is an easy meal ticket (unless your parents are rich ofc).

I’m not surprised. Like everything else enabled by the internet, the short term gains from accessibility become long term inequality.

Remote work means employees are now competing with entire time zones rather than just the people in their locality.

It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it. Hate your 1hr commute? It’s a moat against your competition with a 2 hour commute.

> It’s kind of shocking to me how quickly and fully people embraced it.

HN is an outlier. People in law, finance and other office-worker industries expected to be asked to return to office at some point. It's only here where I observed a significant percentage that thought corporate WFH-forever policies were to accommodate their highly compensated employees, as opposed to opening a pathway to hire from cheaper regions at lower salaries in the future.

>become long term inequality

Can anyone explain me how so? I though it was supposed to improve inequality. As in you didn't have to be a Stanford grad, or be born in the US, or live in unaffordable places like Amsterdam, London or the Bay Area, to get access to good jobs?

So now some hard working individual from Africa, India or Vietnam who didn't win the lottery of birth can also get a good job too if he proves himself worthy, and also it will ease some of the housing pressure on those uber-expensive western tech-hub cities, while brining more money to developing nations. Win-win.

That all sounds to me like a global net benefit for the greater good of humanity. Is it not? More money in the hands of the working class in developing nations means less poverty, less global inequality, less emigration.

Now if your only moat was physical proximity, but not your skillset, well then ... tough, I guess, but I don't think this is a problem for most TBH. Offshoring and outsourcing is nothing new and has been a thing for decades and most western tech workers in expensive cities haven't gone extinct.

Plus, workers in rich western nations have plenty of other lucrative career prospects with moats around them if that's what they want: law, medicine, investment banking, defense and other government jobs, etc. People who went into SW development because of passion, will be fine either way.

I agree that it increases equality but it’s a race to the lowest common denominator. If we just look at the US for instance. Assume typical Bay Area engineer makes 250k/yr. Rest of the country (exclude tech hubs), that number is <130k. Do you think Bay Area engineers when competing for remote jobs make closer to 250k or 130k? My guess is much much closer to the latter.

Sure, but that's how capitalism works. It seeks to optimize every cost of the organization including labor. Now consider the following:

Outside of family obligations, nothing is forcing people to live in the Bay Area to begin with, they choose to do that willingly because they prioritize their careers above everything else. There's no rule saying everyone must live in the Bay Area. You can find a tech job in more affordable cities as well, just that it might not be your dream job at a company that pampers you. People cramming like sardines in tech-hubs is precisely the problem that remote work can alleviate. Now, the speculation driven housing problem is another issue on its own though.

If I zoom out for a broader picture, and looking at it from a cold, hartless, games theory perspective, devs in the Bay Area making less money so that devs worldwide, especially in developing nations, make more money, feels like a worthy sacrifice for the good of the planet/mankind. Same thing happened to manufacturing and it might happen to certain parts of SW development.

Nothing is stopping the Bay Area tech workers from unionizing and getting better protection against remote workers from abroad taking their jobs at lower wages. They're certainly a hefty majority there and they could do it if they wanted to, but so far they choose to pursue individualism because "I can make more money than others by negotiating for myself; fuck you I got mine, you go get yours".

Or who knows, maybe a push for unionization would actually accelerate the move to globalized remote work. This coming decade will be interesting.

Bay Area remote workers at top paying companies aren’t competing internationally so much as across the US. Wages might go down across the board vs going up in other places due to the race to the bottom nature of these things. But housing and stuff will likely continue to go up.

Precisely, it baffled me how people here went on with it seeing only the first order consequences. I'm a grad student in Chile and I get emails from recruiters in the US three or four times a week. I haven't picked up a job and don't plan to until I finish my degree (soon), and I haven't thoroughly evaluated the quality of each offer. Meanwhile recruiters in my country don't look as much, might as well be because American employers have much to gain from a remote worker compared to local employers. Several of my friends are from Argentina, and they all work for US companies either remotely or on-site, something I would have had a hard time believing just five years ago. This decade will be interesting.

Which job board are you using? How are recruiters contacting you? What is the salary range offer?

I want to start off by saying that I am not a dev, my job is engineering that uses advanced mathematical theory to solve physical problems.

I have only set up a LinkedIn profile. Recruiters have my email from there, the conferences I've attended and contact information I've passed to my friends (being an engineering grad student helps). It varies, but the lowest is 45k/year, which living in the capital (even more if I lived in a village) of Chile means that as a single male I would live comfortably and without worries.

45k US Dollars? What kind of advanced mathematical theory you are using? What is your domain?

Yes, 45k USD remote for US companies, as opposed to entry level salary for MSc grads of 18k for the field I'm working in, in Chile. As I said, that's the lowest salary offer of remote jobs. The theory is numerical analysis of partial differential equations, specifically, the finite element method (for CFD, fluid-structure interaction, thin shell mechanics, buckling, and so on). To have a basic understanding of how to code custom FEM programs one needs at least an understanding of the fundamentals of functional analysis + analysis of PDEs + tensor calculus + the specific theory of physical application involved. These are non-trivial skills that take years and years to develop, so I would advise to anyone interested that it's best to get a job as a dev instead. I do it out of passion and because my family has a history of civil/mech eng.

The reason for such spread, I suspect, is that there is not much market for FEM professionals outside of the US and Europe, and if it exists, it's very small and unsophisticated.

Thank you for the detailed reply. Do you use OpenFOAM or nastran?

I prefer using FOSS apps. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34343297

For my medium size company, before wfh applying for a job was competing with people living in the sf Bay Area, now it’s competing with the entire US and the actually company throws out resumes from high cost of living areas including any from CA

My own experience at the end of last year was my first job search in the remote era. In the past, I'd look for local jobs in my East Coast City and see a handful that felt like a good match. When I applied to those, I was one of a small number of candidates, and since I generally chose things that felt like a really good match, a job offer came far more often than not, and would rarely get no response.

Fast forward to this past cycle and high availability of remote work, and there were literally dozens of jobs per week that felt like near-perfect matches. For those that I applied to, I was one of 40-200+ applicants for the role. Of the 50 or so jobs I applied to directly w/out a prior recruiter contacting me, I had 10 intro chats, 3 interviews going to the final round, and one job offer. About half of the result resulted in rejections ranging from immediately to a few months later, and the rest simply had no reply.

There were some weird experiences. About a month after I started a new job, I heard back from 3 interesting roles on the same day, over 90 days after my initial application. In another, the interviewer was super communicative and responsive, and had me take a personality quiz after intro calls with them and the hiring manager. Apparently I failed, because I was totally ghosted after that.

Mirrors my experience down to the friendly hire manager who ghosts.

You are probably getting paid more than you would have locally. And locally higher level opportunities are harder to come by.

100x more choices for employers isn't working out better for them. They would rather have the same amount of candidates but higher quality for cheaper but they get a mountain of resumes instead. Hiring ends up taking 3 months and too many man hours.

Here in the UK I find working from home more comfortable, but there are pros and cons to both WFH and offices. But I get about 3-4 hours back per-day that I would have spent on a train. I also save money on transport and lunches in London. Finally I'm able to work for companies across the country rather than everything being focused in London which is evening the playing field.

Personally I don't mind working remote or onsite, but what I'm noticing is much more competition for remote roles. I live in Munich which has a tech sector, and isn't LCOL, but isn't a hub the way Berlin or Amsterdam is.

Onsite / hybrid roles in my area get 10-20 applications in the first day, while remote roles often get 150-200. This is for regular everyday startups and companies, not FAANG which I expect gets much more interest.

There are also fewer available remote roles to apply to. So I would say yes, if you have to be remote because of your location I expect it is more challenging. Companies (at least here) have more leverage at the moment, and the majority have not fully embraced remote, while at the same time remote jobs are the most desirable ones.

It is more challenging, but not as much as it was before the pandemic started. 5 years ago less than 1% of the companies were offering 100% remote positions. Nowadays I can say that, at least from my point of view, I find that at least 30% of the companies out there offer 100% remote positions. I think this number is going up as well (as well as hybrid, though).

Thankfully, 100% office work is less and less common.

Nevertheless the biggest advantage is (as usual): your skills. If you ace the interview, companies in general will want to hire you no matter what.

At least 70% of mid/senior jobs are full remote in my country, or at least advertised at such (based on my data of ~30k job adverts). It's a developing country so salaries do not match US salaries by a large margin, but those are the facts, and I haven't really heard of anybody being forced to work from the office in my environment (although naturally I think that such stuff happens).

Just starting to bootstrap a startup and I would not hire from the Bay Area for all but save the founding engineers where its critical we get someone in who has depth of experience and can quickly become a tech lead at staff level. The salaries are just to high.

Instead I will pull from the brilliant pool of engineers from South America and Europe and areas like the mid-west etc. We will do a lot of work in OSS, so running an asynchronous / non-linear workday full time remote team works just great.

I would really not like being limited to hiring in small geographical area.

If you plan to practice the "salary arbitrage" mentioned above, it needs to be a good deal for the employer. If you can provide the same amount of value as someone in the Bay Area at 20% discount it is a good deal for both parties.

I was working remote before COVID. I'm not based in USA. Remote has given me opportunity to work with people that for sure would never come to my home country.

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