11 ms·

You're probably in the Bay Area -- and if you don't want remote developers you're shutting yourself off from all of us who wouldn't move there no matter how hig

by stray 11y ago

You're probably in the Bay Area -- and if you don't want remote developers you're shutting yourself off from all of us who wouldn't move there no matter how high the compensation.

Avalaxy 11y ago
Can confirm. I've been looking for a remote job in the bay area. Not because I don't want to move there, but because it's virtually impossible to move there because all the companies want you to move on a very short notice and they don't want to spend a lot of money to get you an H1B visa. It was very hard to find companies that were willing to work with remote employees (even though they are much cheaper and often just as qualified).
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Many also offer needlessly poor relocation packages -- mostly because engineers are foolishly willing to accept them. A flat payment of even $8000 is not reasonable for someone to move across the country, even if they are moving alone and seeking small, affordable apartments. A minimum relocation package should include having the company handle the arrangements for a full-service moving company who will pack your things in boxes and unpack them in the new place, flight and hotel for 1 or 2 visits to the new city for housing search, cover all up-front costs with renting a new place (fees, deposit, first month rent), and still leave you with a few thousand dollars on top of that for incidental expenses, unplanned costs after you've moved in, etc. And if they need you to relocate from an area with accessible public transit to an area where a car is required, then a sign-on bonus that covers most or all of the cost of a reasonable quality car should also be standard. This is not luxury stuff, this is just the basic human cost of moving across the country. If you take the risk of a new job in SF and move all the way there and it doesn't work out, well you don't get a refund on your moving expenses and you don't get compensation for any personal time you took (e.g. if you moved yourself with a UHaul). And what if you injure your back while carrying furniture down the stairs? Will your new company cover the medical bills? What if the moving company you hired damages your stuff or loses it? Will the new company reimburse you? This is why it's so necessary that the company assumes the risk of these things. The company is funded and/or profitable (or else shouldn't be considering hiring someone who requires relocation). They can afford to bear the relocation costs and the risks. A lone individual may or may not be able to, and can't risk their livelihood on their ability to handle the relocation risks. But it's all too common that a start-up offers $2500 to a recent college grad who has been eating ramen for the last week. It sounds great, and they don't know enough about career status and so forth to realize that if you admit you are willing to physically haul your own stuff around, it already paints you as a low-status subordinate. These folks unblinkingly accept precarious and unreasonable relocation scenarios, and then the company can hide behind a claim of "well, no one else complained about our relocation assistance" when negotiating.
  - throweway 11y ago
    Interesting when you put it like that. When I graduated i'd never heard of relo assistance let alone knew how much to ask for. If offered 2k id been very happy.
- tixocloud 11y ago
  I'm in the same boat as well and it's been tough.
polack 11y ago
We're actually in Copenhagen. Probably should have mentioned that in the OP. Point taken though, we should consider taking in remote workers. My only "fear" is that it will be hard to build a good company culture without a "core" team sitting in the same location. We have some remote consultants working on our gui right now, and even though they do a fantastic job, it adds quite a lot of overhead in management and I'm not really satisfied with the knowledge sharing between the remote and the on-site teams. I guess there is a lot of room for improvements on our part here though.
- antocv 11y ago
  Ive never seen a team develop which dont share the same physical space. Even a Big Enterprise Company, suffers from "us vs them" in the same city but different building blocks, now imagine how "we" see "them" in another country and they us. Hell, Ive been in this "safe" big enterprize for more than 2-3 years now, and the people on the floor above and below are more strangers than you here on HN. So, remote work, consider it different. However, you mentioned finance, Ive turned down a very lucrative offering from a finance company just because they bragged that their investors are Saudi Arabians, its just personal, but no thanks, they can keep their blood/oil money.
- charlesdm 11y ago
  When you say high, how high are we talking? One thing to consider is that in most high tax countries (i.e. Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, etc) high (in terms of total cost, after accounting for employer tax + social security) actually isn't that high. I would consider an after tax salary of €2,500 not high, for example. But that salary might already cost the company €5,000-8,000 per month
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Agreed. Personally, I would love to move to Denmark, and I am actually on the job market right now (I do scientific computing with Python and some related data engineering tools, so I have no idea if I fit the OP's company) but my immediate instinct is to be really skeptical of this. For me to feel like a job offer to Copenhagen is attractive, the take-home pay needs to be similar to what it would be in Boston in the US ... so mid to high 100k USD range of gross pay, say something close to 100k USD take-home pay, which roughly corresponds to a take-home pay of 688k Danish krone per year. With high taxes there, I'm guessing this means a salary of greater than 1MM krone/year to be roughly equal to a competitive offer in a mid-cost urban area in the US. And if it is in the finance industry as the OP suggested in another comment, then there should be some opportunity for profit sharing as well. Cost of living doesn't factor into this so much, though cost of living in Scandinavian cities is pretty high. There is career risk and visa / tax hassle to worry about, relocation and housing costs, and the usual start-up risk. It's not at all the same as taking on a risk in the Bay area, where there are many jobs to switch to if your company doesn't work out. I think a lot of start-ups don't consider these things, and often they don't have to consider them because there's a line of schmucks down the street waiting to work for them. But if you are a thoughtful person and you consider visa risk, tax risk, career risk, relocation risk, regular start-up failure risk, etc., then for a job like this you might even expect a significant premium when compared to US-based jobs in the same field. A lot of European start-ups, I find, don't fundamentally think this way, and they expect that American workers should be happy to accept "European" salaries, which are then taxed at a higher rate, all while you're bearing many additional risks. Unless your personal preference function puts a huge, huge premium on the status of "living in Europe" then it's probably a bad deal in terms of net life happiness.

by stray 11y ago

You're probably in the Bay Area -- and if you don't want remote developers you're shutting yourself off from all of us who wouldn't move there no matter how high the compensation.

Avalaxy 11y ago

Can confirm. I've been looking for a remote job in the bay area. Not because I don't want to move there, but because it's virtually impossible to move there because all the companies want you to move on a very short notice and they don't want to spend a lot of money to get you an H1B visa. It was very hard to find companies that were willing to work with remote employees (even though they are much cheaper and often just as qualified).

p4wnc6 11y ago
Many also offer needlessly poor relocation packages -- mostly because engineers are foolishly willing to accept them. A flat payment of even $8000 is not reasonable for someone to move across the country, even if they are moving alone and seeking small, affordable apartments. A minimum relocation package should include having the company handle the arrangements for a full-service moving company who will pack your things in boxes and unpack them in the new place, flight and hotel for 1 or 2 visits to the new city for housing search, cover all up-front costs with renting a new place (fees, deposit, first month rent), and still leave you with a few thousand dollars on top of that for incidental expenses, unplanned costs after you've moved in, etc. And if they need you to relocate from an area with accessible public transit to an area where a car is required, then a sign-on bonus that covers most or all of the cost of a reasonable quality car should also be standard. This is not luxury stuff, this is just the basic human cost of moving across the country. If you take the risk of a new job in SF and move all the way there and it doesn't work out, well you don't get a refund on your moving expenses and you don't get compensation for any personal time you took (e.g. if you moved yourself with a UHaul). And what if you injure your back while carrying furniture down the stairs? Will your new company cover the medical bills? What if the moving company you hired damages your stuff or loses it? Will the new company reimburse you? This is why it's so necessary that the company assumes the risk of these things. The company is funded and/or profitable (or else shouldn't be considering hiring someone who requires relocation). They can afford to bear the relocation costs and the risks. A lone individual may or may not be able to, and can't risk their livelihood on their ability to handle the relocation risks. But it's all too common that a start-up offers $2500 to a recent college grad who has been eating ramen for the last week. It sounds great, and they don't know enough about career status and so forth to realize that if you admit you are willing to physically haul your own stuff around, it already paints you as a low-status subordinate. These folks unblinkingly accept precarious and unreasonable relocation scenarios, and then the company can hide behind a claim of "well, no one else complained about our relocation assistance" when negotiating.
- throweway 11y ago
  Interesting when you put it like that. When I graduated i'd never heard of relo assistance let alone knew how much to ask for. If offered 2k id been very happy.
tixocloud 11y ago
I'm in the same boat as well and it's been tough.

polack 11y ago

We're actually in Copenhagen. Probably should have mentioned that in the OP. Point taken though, we should consider taking in remote workers. My only "fear" is that it will be hard to build a good company culture without a "core" team sitting in the same location. We have some remote consultants working on our gui right now, and even though they do a fantastic job, it adds quite a lot of overhead in management and I'm not really satisfied with the knowledge sharing between the remote and the on-site teams. I guess there is a lot of room for improvements on our part here though.

antocv 11y ago
Ive never seen a team develop which dont share the same physical space. Even a Big Enterprise Company, suffers from "us vs them" in the same city but different building blocks, now imagine how "we" see "them" in another country and they us. Hell, Ive been in this "safe" big enterprize for more than 2-3 years now, and the people on the floor above and below are more strangers than you here on HN. So, remote work, consider it different. However, you mentioned finance, Ive turned down a very lucrative offering from a finance company just because they bragged that their investors are Saudi Arabians, its just personal, but no thanks, they can keep their blood/oil money.
charlesdm 11y ago
When you say high, how high are we talking? One thing to consider is that in most high tax countries (i.e. Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, etc) high (in terms of total cost, after accounting for employer tax + social security) actually isn't that high. I would consider an after tax salary of €2,500 not high, for example. But that salary might already cost the company €5,000-8,000 per month
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Agreed. Personally, I would love to move to Denmark, and I am actually on the job market right now (I do scientific computing with Python and some related data engineering tools, so I have no idea if I fit the OP's company) but my immediate instinct is to be really skeptical of this. For me to feel like a job offer to Copenhagen is attractive, the take-home pay needs to be similar to what it would be in Boston in the US ... so mid to high 100k USD range of gross pay, say something close to 100k USD take-home pay, which roughly corresponds to a take-home pay of 688k Danish krone per year. With high taxes there, I'm guessing this means a salary of greater than 1MM krone/year to be roughly equal to a competitive offer in a mid-cost urban area in the US. And if it is in the finance industry as the OP suggested in another comment, then there should be some opportunity for profit sharing as well. Cost of living doesn't factor into this so much, though cost of living in Scandinavian cities is pretty high. There is career risk and visa / tax hassle to worry about, relocation and housing costs, and the usual start-up risk. It's not at all the same as taking on a risk in the Bay area, where there are many jobs to switch to if your company doesn't work out. I think a lot of start-ups don't consider these things, and often they don't have to consider them because there's a line of schmucks down the street waiting to work for them. But if you are a thoughtful person and you consider visa risk, tax risk, career risk, relocation risk, regular start-up failure risk, etc., then for a job like this you might even expect a significant premium when compared to US-based jobs in the same field. A lot of European start-ups, I find, don't fundamentally think this way, and they expect that American workers should be happy to accept "European" salaries, which are then taxed at a higher rate, all while you're bearing many additional risks. Unless your personal preference function puts a huge, huge premium on the status of "living in Europe" then it's probably a bad deal in terms of net life happiness.