Ask HN: How much you make working remotely?
How much do you make working remotely?
Started initially as a fully-remote team, but as the company's grown and staff has rotated, I'm the only fully remote guy still there. Coworkers take an occasional work-from-home day though.
Workers aren't paid by the value they create to the company. That sets a ceiling, but the floor is set by the competitive market. How little can you pay somebody to take that job and do the work you need done? That effectively bubbles up from the local cost of living and is modulated by availability of workers.
Hard-to-find software engineer in SF? Going to pay even more than the crazy housing costs imply.
Easy-to-find marketing events manager in NYC? Going to pay less than the crazy housing costs would have you think.
Remote allows you to hire from anywhere, so the competition is higher. I'd imagine that, if anything, it would hurt your earnings, because you're now competing with people from Iowa who have $300 / month rent payments.
If you're paid at a certain level, and there exists a job that will pay you 50% more, there are basically 2 possibilities:
1) You know that job exists, and there are others like it, and you don't want it because it requires you to come into an office / work in an industry you don't like / do something less fun.
2) You're currently underpaid and haven't been able to line up competitive pay to force 2 company's to bid you up to market rates. Maybe it's a personal thing, maybe it's that the magical 50% raise is a one-off anomaly by un-educated employer, or something else.
In either case, the employer wants to figure out what you're currently paid, and they should be able to get what they want without giving more than 10 or 20% more. The only real way to get around this is to refuse to give current comp and be viciously underpaid, or to get 2 companies to give offers and start bidding it up.
In short, yes, you may be able to keep your salary as you move around. There are probably jobs out there in expensive areas that pay more than you make right now, but I'm guessing you don't want them.
My advice is to refuse in every way you can to be the generic fungible engineer most management wishes you to be, and to instead specialize in emerging technologies. When such technologies are in demand, your compensation will skyrocket.
1. http://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-master...
We take about 10 minutes/day.
The biggest source of No True Scotsman fallacies on the internet.
- Participation is voluntary, the group is self-selected. This in itself renders all results meaningless.
- HN polls let you vote on more than one option, yet you only have one salary.
- Time of day bias. It is currently lunch hour on the east coast, and morning in the Bay area. Remote developers living in the UK, Thailand, etc. are on yet a different schedule.
- Whenever a discussion like this pops up, the workers have an incentive to lie. If you say "I am top talent in my field and I make [2x my actual salary]", and enough people do this, you might actually raise the expectations of the employers. This discussion is actively giving a voice to the workers, and they have a huge reason to misrepresent facts for personal benefit.
I really wish HN got rid of polls. People tend to treat them as valuable data, and they are really just noise. The discussions are great, but the number noise is worthless.
Some of it is just human psychology. Nobody sees what appears to be a norm, measures himself against it, and wants to admit that he falls short of it -- even if he's totally anonymous. This is especially true when a poll concerns topics of great emotional weight, like salary. Take an anonymous poll on everyone's favorite sports team, or favorite ice cream flavor, and you'd probably get accurate results. Take a poll on salary, and many of the results would be dubious.
Interestingly, I'd always thought of remote workers as either high-end technical specialists working as-needed or cheap bodies being delegated to.
These folks all fall somewhere in the middle with the common factor being soft / niche skills - they work for sort of places that most people would run away from and work on things the most people haven't touched in years.
Two of them started out on-site, but were so valuable the company was happy to allow remote work in order to keep them on staff.
The important part is that the spot on the globe where I decide to plug in my laptop has precisely zero bearing on that bill rate. I'll grant that the offset of having to pay for my own equipment and health care versus having to pay a premium in housing cost and take a huge hit on quality of life so as to be able to commute an hour to sit in a felt cube all day every day does leave me a bit ahead. But then I'd argue that surplus should be captured by me rather than J. Random Software Company.
Never let the poor negotiating position of the others around you affect your ability to negotiate the best deal for yourself. If your counterparty suggests dropping your rate to match the locals in whatever tropical paradise you've had the good sense to set up shop in, it's your job to chuckle softly and say "no. It doesn't work like that."
Basically I do like to work with established, non-tech company that is around for long time, both companies are family owned with 50+ years in operation. I do respond to ads sometimes, got some referrals, bump to some odd guy at wine tasting and stuff like that.
I had never think about this: "established, non-tech company that is around for long time"
Probably makes for a very good working enviroment, they may have a lot of technology to add to their business, and also they may value your work a lot more than a tech companies.
I've changed several jobs during the last decade, always tripling the next salary (of course I've never mentioned my previous salary) - and I've always given the rate I asked for.
So, if you want to make more - just ask for it.
AMAnything if you feel like! Willing to help or solve some doubts.
You said you started to take development projects, then what kind of projects you were working on earlier?
I also do freelance work on the side, billed $32k last year (mostly from Wordpress website referrals). I consider myself a perpetual traveller to minimise tax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler
I don't know why anyone thinks you should get any less than someone in-office. I am guessing those people are probably underpaid because they don't know how to value / sell themselves.
Apply for jobs on: https://weworkremotely.com/ https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote http://nomadjobs.io/
I make essentially a market rate salary.
Where is here? Op's handle? Cybercoders? That's incredible if true. You could essentially recruit for a few years and then retire.
Anyways, I have been working remote for about a year. It's the best. I wish more recruiters / companies would understand that it doesn't make sense to have coders in the office.
I don't have to get SF coders pay, I will take a little bit of pay cut to live in Denver.
FYI: https://weworkremotely.com/
and for cybercoder4life, I'm looking for remote work.