> Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, Ind

> Competition for each position is fierce. Especially for the SF-type jobs where the salaries are so astronomical compared to your remote area (like Greece, India, Thailand, etc.). You may have some (or even a lot) of experience in some tech, but so would the other 50-500 applications for that position. This puts the ball in the court of the employer, because they use stupid filters like "the right fit" - which most of the time equates to finding the person they can extract the most value from per-dollar (or the 1 who kills their wannabe-Google interview process the best) As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I disagree with this. I've worked remotely for almost all of my career, across three companies and long term consulting. I've also interviewed many candidates for positions that were remote-friendly. For self-awareness, I'm going to acknowledge that there is an element of survivorship bias in play here. That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader. What I believe actually happens is a cultural obstacle: two types of companies offer remote work. The first type has a cultural foundation set up to treat remote employees equally both in the work environment and in the interview process. The second type is well-intentioned, but does not design their work environment or interview process to enable remote employees to succeed as well as onsite candidates and employees. If you are seeking positions at companies that merely offer remote work in a sort of half-hearted, "this is the future and we want to be trendy and 'get the best talent'" way, then yes, it will be competitive - you'll find that even if you do well in interviews onsite candidates will be chosen more often than not. But if you optimize your job search for positions which treat remote employees as first class citizens (especially with regards to on the job communication and the interview pipeline), you'll probably notice that the competitiveness of the process quickly returns to what you'd expect of typical engineering interviews in coastal areas.