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I work remotely from outside Boston, a friend at work is remote from Argentina (I find the parallel to the article interesting). I make more than he does by a s

by NateDad 11y ago

I work remotely from outside Boston, a friend at work is remote from Argentina (I find the parallel to the article interesting). I make more than he does by a significant amount (very roughly similar to the salaries in the article). I actually don't know what would happen if I moved to Argentina. I presume my salary would get dropped. Maybe not.. depends on if I can convince someone else to give me an offer at my previous salary for remote work... but then what of my Argentinian friend? I think all developers should get offered the same amount independent of location. As remote work takes off (and I think it will...), this will become the norm. Why? Because of how market works. If Google will pay me 170k to work from my house, then smaller companies need to start competing with that. Ironically, the big companies are still way behind on this. I work at Canonical... our devs are all fully remote. I have people from nearly every continent working on my project. There's very very little friction to remote teams, except sometimes you need to talk to someone who's asleep. But that honestly is not usually that bad. You keep close teams in similar time zones and everything just works out. We use hangouts and irc and email... hell, the disincentive to have useless meetings probably saves us more time than we spend working around the relatively small problems remote work introduces. (also, I'm kinda glad to get away from whiteboarding crap... a whiteboard is not a good tool for pretty much anything in development... a shared text window is almost always superior)

kspaans 11y ago
I agree that your gross pay is higher, but I'm curious if your net take-home pay after "expenses" is still higher? I use scare-quotes because while it's easy to compare things like tax and rent, it's harder to compare food and entertainment (where cheaper costs may entice someone to eat out more regularly). It's hard to make a strictly apples-to-apples comparison, but I think it's a worth looking at whether you would take home more or less by working in Argentina. (The general "you", not suggesting that you have to consider moving to Argentina. :P) I think the article puts things a little unfairly by saying only "Option 1: Ann's pay is reduced". Yes that is what's happening, but if Ann knows what her compensation will look like in Buenos Tiempos, she should be able to figure out roughly if she will take home more money by moving there.
facepalm 11y ago
You think it means everybody should be paid more. It could also go the other way round, everybody being paid less. Then again, what is the difference between "remote workers" and "offshore development"? The latter doesn't seem to have worked out too well so far?
dongping 11y ago
The company will try to pay less whenever possible. And since your Argentinian friend don't have offers with higher salaries, he gets that particular amount. All developers will get the same if not for regulatory barriers (working permit and alike).

by NateDad 11y ago

kspaans 11y ago

I agree that your gross pay is higher, but I'm curious if your net take-home pay after "expenses" is still higher? I use scare-quotes because while it's easy to compare things like tax and rent, it's harder to compare food and entertainment (where cheaper costs may entice someone to eat out more regularly). It's hard to make a strictly apples-to-apples comparison, but I think it's a worth looking at whether you would take home more or less by working in Argentina. (The general "you", not suggesting that you have to consider moving to Argentina. :P) I think the article puts things a little unfairly by saying only "Option 1: Ann's pay is reduced". Yes that is what's happening, but if Ann knows what her compensation will look like in Buenos Tiempos, she should be able to figure out roughly if she will take home more money by moving there.

facepalm 11y ago

You think it means everybody should be paid more. It could also go the other way round, everybody being paid less. Then again, what is the difference between "remote workers" and "offshore development"? The latter doesn't seem to have worked out too well so far?

dongping 11y ago

The company will try to pay less whenever possible. And since your Argentinian friend don't have offers with higher salaries, he gets that particular amount. All developers will get the same if not for regulatory barriers (working permit and alike).