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Comment by mbustamanter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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