6 ms·

The Shifting State of Remote Work

111 points by emiliowav 7y ago

kukabynd 7y ago
It’s not surprising given that those who are able to dictate their desired setup (remote work in this case) can command higher salaries. Would be nice to see the graph of years of experience + salaries for remote vs onsite workers.
- dkdk8283 7y ago
  At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF. I’m doing well as a remote worker, but I’ve been browsing job boards and many advertised ranges are about half of what I’m currently earning. It needs to get better.
  - foogazi 7y ago
    > At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF. Would be an example of someone not dictating their setup
    - xur17 7y ago
      Agreed. Any remote company that adjusts salaries based on location gets a hard pass from me.
      - mox1 7y ago
        I think its perfectly reasonable to do this. As someone who would love to be a remote worker as long as my total comp package is acceptable to me, I don't really give a crap if they are paying someone in SF 25% more. I would more look at compared to local jobs in my area. For example, my job, my years of experience, in my area (Midwest USA) is roughly $175K on a W2 salary. If that same position is 275k in NYC, but I'm offered it at $175k, sign me up! I'm sure they would pay me the $275k if I moved to New York...but not living in New York is worth $100k a year to me.
        foogazi 7y ago
        Totally reasonable to do it just not someone dictating salary In your case you don’t want to move out, in my case when I move back I’d like to receive the same pay since I’ll be doing the same work
        xur17 7y ago
        While true, you're going to miss out on some percentage of applicants that are willing to interview a bit more to get a non-adjusted rate. This might be fine if you have a good hiring funnel, but if you're a scrappy startup, this could be challenging. Also, you will likely end up with a slightly higher churn rate (since smart employees will continue interviewing to see if they can get a higher salary from a place that doesn't adjust based on cost of living). It's a perfectly reasonable approach to take as an employer, and if you can make it work, all the more power to you.
      - _jal 7y ago
        It does have an oddly... socialist flavor for the context ("To each, subject to their needs...").
        pepper_sauce 7y ago
        Salaries being literally dictated by geographical market rates is the opposite of socialism.
        _jal 7y ago
        You missed both the joke and the point. But that's OK, so did everyone else.
        pepper_sauce 7y ago
        whoosh :-)
  - dx87 7y ago
    Yeah, companies that want remote employees really need to drop the COL thing and pay everyone similar rates. At an old job, I was getting $120k doing remote work in a high COL area, and we were looking to hire another team member. Did a bunch of interviews, found someone who was a perfect candidate, and was more qualified than all of us currently on the team. The project manager wouldn't hire him because he lives in Detroit and wanted $125k, and they said that someone living in Detroit doesn't need that much money.
k__ 7y ago
I work remote so I have more free time. No commute, can work from many places, can do chores between work, etc.
- dx87 7y ago
  Same. I was offered a promotion at my current job, but it would require being on site at different locations. I turned it down because I get paid well enough to work from home, plus I get an extra 2-3 hours of free time every day since I don't have to get dressed or deal with traffic.
  - k__ 7y ago
    I "lost" a few promotions because working remote too. Still worth it.
ghaff 7y ago
The change isn't especially surprising. Given that the survey allows for even <50% remote work to be factored in, I expect that there's been an increase in the number of better compensated/more senior people who work remotely as opposed to being primarily contractors, support staff, etc. The article speculates about this but it seems pretty obvious among a lot of people I work with and know.
- HunterYAC 7y ago
  Anecdote - Talked to a highly paid contractor from Nasa the other day. He said he's been working in-office 30+ years and just this month was allowed to work full-time remote. Renaissance of remote work approaching imo.
bradlys 7y ago
> One explanation is that Buffer’s sample population may have changed over the years. However, Buffer sampled well over 1,000 employees in each annual report and doesn’t provide any indication that their sampling technique meaningfully deviated from past years. Sampling technique might not have differed or it might have. I did some deeper diving on the stats because I have a hard time believing remote shot up drastically like it makes it seem and that it suddenly pays great... 2018: https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/ https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/ 2020: https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 Compare 2018 > Most of the folks we surveyed work in the software industry (26%) followed by IT and Services (20%) and Marketing (19%). Only 5% of respondents work in Education and 8% in Media and Publishing. To 2020 > Forty-one percent of those who took the survey work at organizations in software space. Other industries include: IT and Services (19.5 percent); Marketing (8.7 percent); Other (7.3 percent); Financial Services (4.6 percent); Media and Publishing (3.6 percent); Education (3.3 percent); E-commerce (3 percent); Medical and Healthcare (3 percent); Consumer products (2.3 percent); Travel and Tourism (1.6 percent); Non-profit (1.5 percent); Government (0.6 percent); and Law and Legal Services (0.6 percent). Do we think that software suddenly had a 50-100% rise in engineers working remotely in 2 years? Maybe - but, personally, I'm skeptical. Seems more likely that the way they sampled their population changed. And it's almost like the increase in software engineers reporting directly correlated with a rise in wages. Go figure...
- ghaff 7y ago
  I would be interested to see how they qualify respondents with respect to "remote." If it was in the report, I missed it. Presumably there has to be some floor higher than "I travel a quarter of the time" or I work from home Fridays. I do see something of an increase in the number of tech people who can reasonably be described as working remotely but that does seem a big change in a couple of years. (Though it's not just software engineers but senior people in tech generally.)
  - hrktb 7y ago
    Even “I work from home Fridays” would be a relevant bar I think. It wouldn’t be allowed, or technically unfit (no access to critical tools) in a lot of companies I’ve seen 10 or even 5 years ago. Someone “working from home” would be considered traveling and lose most of the work resources.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think remote work is best suited for pretty senior people who don’t need much coaching. So that may shift salaries up a little. A while ago there was a small discussion in another thread about onboarding remote junior and I got the impression that nobody really knows how to do that well.
- Thorentis 7y ago
  Yep, this. You don't hire interns, grads, and juniors for remote work. So automatically the average salary is higher for remote work when you limit it to mid level and above.
  - thinkharderdev 7y ago
    Right, and in my experience at least a lot of remote workers are not people who are hired for a remote job but a senior(ish) person who negotiated with their employer to transition to being full-time remote, even if the company doesn't explicitly allow or support remote work.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Right. I work with a lot of people (and am one myself) who were hired into an office but are reasonably described as remote, whether or not 100%, now.
- paulie_a 7y ago
  Do most companies even do real coaching? If a company believes their senior people no longer need it. They do not understand coaching.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Coaching senior people is different. You can coach in small increments. Somebody who is new needs to understand the tech, current implementation of systems and all their quirks and also needs to understand how the company works. That’s a lot to teach at once.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I would love if sites like levels.fyi had a checkbox for remote work. Since there's few stats out there: $150k base, $50k stock ($200k / 4 years), no bonus. Focus on front end, 5 YOE.
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  Haha, I'd love to have this as well, sign me up for a job like this :)
rossdavidh 7y ago
It occurs to me that, in at least some cases, employers don't want to have remote workers (fear of loss of control), but will accept it if they cannot fill the position otherwise (e.g. there are no available programmers in our town). So, it will be interesting to see what happens when the next labor market downturn comes.
- itsthisjustin 7y ago
  Remote work is all about trust. Find good talent that you don't have to micro manage and you'll see that the output is 2x what the input used to be. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're left alone and not interrupted by meetings and a distracting workplace
  - HunterYAC 7y ago
    True story https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/05/21/heres-why-remote-workers-are-more-productive-than-in-house-teams/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/05/21/he...
ryanyde 7y ago
Agree with @bradlys' comment: This just suggests more highly paid people are being allowed to work remote, vs. remote jobs being paid more. Given the expansion of high paying roles across geographies, this could be driven almost entirely by FAANG opening engineering / R&D centers in other cities like Denver / Dallas, etc. Also 'remote' could be laxer standards for these same companies on going down to Mountain View / Menlo Park driven by commute and traffic. Many of my friends commute 2x a week, passing the 50% threshold for remote work, even though I wouldn't consider Menlo Park / Mountain View to SF 'Remote'
- ghaff 7y ago
  To be honest, of course. If remote work is paying substantially better it's because higher paid people have jobs that fit under some technical definition of remote. To your example, I don't work in the Bay Area but I'm theoretically in an office about a 30 minute drive away. However, I gave up my desk and only go in for meetings sometime. I'd definitely self-report as Remote even though I technically aren't. I wonder if some of it is just changes in attitudes. Lots of people in tech and elsewhere (e.g. sales) have long spent very little time in their offices even if they had one. I wonder if they consider themselves Remote today when they wouldn't have in the past because they were technically in an office.
quaffapint 7y ago
I've been looking on and off for a few months to see what the remote market is like. It's rare to find senior dev jobs paying >130k and even rarer to find local jobs that let you be remote a fixed number of days a week. It seems at least around here you would need to take a good pay cut to have a remote option.
- randomdude402 7y ago
  Anecdotal, but myself and two other people I know at two other places work "mostly remote," meaning commute once a week or less. In each case, we started by commuting full time, and added remote days after some months. Also for all of us, we have a good number of co-workers that go into the office most days. I found the same as you, in that looking for positions specifically billed as remote positions, the money is really not there.
  - HunterYAC 7y ago
    The good news is that remote jobs are growing by the day. Remote.co is doing a good job at snagging high quality jobs https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/ https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/

111 points by emiliowav 7y ago

It’s not surprising given that those who are able to dictate their desired setup (remote work in this case) can command higher salaries. Would be nice to see the graph of years of experience + salaries for remote vs onsite workers.

dkdk8283 7y ago
At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF. I’m doing well as a remote worker, but I’ve been browsing job boards and many advertised ranges are about half of what I’m currently earning. It needs to get better.
- foogazi 7y ago
  > At my employer we have zones and your salary is adjusted based on COL compared to say SF. Would be an example of someone not dictating their setup
  - xur17 7y ago
    Agreed. Any remote company that adjusts salaries based on location gets a hard pass from me.
    - mox1 7y ago
      I think its perfectly reasonable to do this. As someone who would love to be a remote worker as long as my total comp package is acceptable to me, I don't really give a crap if they are paying someone in SF 25% more. I would more look at compared to local jobs in my area. For example, my job, my years of experience, in my area (Midwest USA) is roughly $175K on a W2 salary. If that same position is 275k in NYC, but I'm offered it at $175k, sign me up! I'm sure they would pay me the $275k if I moved to New York...but not living in New York is worth $100k a year to me.
      - foogazi 7y ago
        Totally reasonable to do it just not someone dictating salary In your case you don’t want to move out, in my case when I move back I’d like to receive the same pay since I’ll be doing the same work
      - xur17 7y ago
        While true, you're going to miss out on some percentage of applicants that are willing to interview a bit more to get a non-adjusted rate. This might be fine if you have a good hiring funnel, but if you're a scrappy startup, this could be challenging. Also, you will likely end up with a slightly higher churn rate (since smart employees will continue interviewing to see if they can get a higher salary from a place that doesn't adjust based on cost of living). It's a perfectly reasonable approach to take as an employer, and if you can make it work, all the more power to you.
    - _jal 7y ago
      It does have an oddly... socialist flavor for the context ("To each, subject to their needs...").
      - pepper_sauce 7y ago
        Salaries being literally dictated by geographical market rates is the opposite of socialism.
        _jal 7y ago
        You missed both the joke and the point. But that's OK, so did everyone else.
        pepper_sauce 7y ago
        whoosh :-)
- dx87 7y ago
  Yeah, companies that want remote employees really need to drop the COL thing and pay everyone similar rates. At an old job, I was getting $120k doing remote work in a high COL area, and we were looking to hire another team member. Did a bunch of interviews, found someone who was a perfect candidate, and was more qualified than all of us currently on the team. The project manager wouldn't hire him because he lives in Detroit and wanted $125k, and they said that someone living in Detroit doesn't need that much money.

k__ 7y ago

I work remote so I have more free time. No commute, can work from many places, can do chores between work, etc.

dx87 7y ago
Same. I was offered a promotion at my current job, but it would require being on site at different locations. I turned it down because I get paid well enough to work from home, plus I get an extra 2-3 hours of free time every day since I don't have to get dressed or deal with traffic.
- k__ 7y ago
  I "lost" a few promotions because working remote too. Still worth it.

ghaff 7y ago

The change isn't especially surprising. Given that the survey allows for even <50% remote work to be factored in, I expect that there's been an increase in the number of better compensated/more senior people who work remotely as opposed to being primarily contractors, support staff, etc. The article speculates about this but it seems pretty obvious among a lot of people I work with and know.

HunterYAC 7y ago
Anecdote - Talked to a highly paid contractor from Nasa the other day. He said he's been working in-office 30+ years and just this month was allowed to work full-time remote. Renaissance of remote work approaching imo.

bradlys 7y ago

> One explanation is that Buffer’s sample population may have changed over the years. However, Buffer sampled well over 1,000 employees in each annual report and doesn’t provide any indication that their sampling technique meaningfully deviated from past years. Sampling technique might not have differed or it might have. I did some deeper diving on the stats because I have a hard time believing remote shot up drastically like it makes it seem and that it suddenly pays great... 2018: https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/ https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018/ 2020: https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 Compare 2018 > Most of the folks we surveyed work in the software industry (26%) followed by IT and Services (20%) and Marketing (19%). Only 5% of respondents work in Education and 8% in Media and Publishing. To 2020 > Forty-one percent of those who took the survey work at organizations in software space. Other industries include: IT and Services (19.5 percent); Marketing (8.7 percent); Other (7.3 percent); Financial Services (4.6 percent); Media and Publishing (3.6 percent); Education (3.3 percent); E-commerce (3 percent); Medical and Healthcare (3 percent); Consumer products (2.3 percent); Travel and Tourism (1.6 percent); Non-profit (1.5 percent); Government (0.6 percent); and Law and Legal Services (0.6 percent). Do we think that software suddenly had a 50-100% rise in engineers working remotely in 2 years? Maybe - but, personally, I'm skeptical. Seems more likely that the way they sampled their population changed. And it's almost like the increase in software engineers reporting directly correlated with a rise in wages. Go figure...

ghaff 7y ago
I would be interested to see how they qualify respondents with respect to "remote." If it was in the report, I missed it. Presumably there has to be some floor higher than "I travel a quarter of the time" or I work from home Fridays. I do see something of an increase in the number of tech people who can reasonably be described as working remotely but that does seem a big change in a couple of years. (Though it's not just software engineers but senior people in tech generally.)
- hrktb 7y ago
  Even “I work from home Fridays” would be a relevant bar I think. It wouldn’t be allowed, or technically unfit (no access to critical tools) in a lot of companies I’ve seen 10 or even 5 years ago. Someone “working from home” would be considered traveling and lose most of the work resources.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I think remote work is best suited for pretty senior people who don’t need much coaching. So that may shift salaries up a little. A while ago there was a small discussion in another thread about onboarding remote junior and I got the impression that nobody really knows how to do that well.

Thorentis 7y ago
Yep, this. You don't hire interns, grads, and juniors for remote work. So automatically the average salary is higher for remote work when you limit it to mid level and above.
- thinkharderdev 7y ago
  Right, and in my experience at least a lot of remote workers are not people who are hired for a remote job but a senior(ish) person who negotiated with their employer to transition to being full-time remote, even if the company doesn't explicitly allow or support remote work.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Right. I work with a lot of people (and am one myself) who were hired into an office but are reasonably described as remote, whether or not 100%, now.
paulie_a 7y ago
Do most companies even do real coaching? If a company believes their senior people no longer need it. They do not understand coaching.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Coaching senior people is different. You can coach in small increments. Somebody who is new needs to understand the tech, current implementation of systems and all their quirks and also needs to understand how the company works. That’s a lot to teach at once.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

I would love if sites like levels.fyi had a checkbox for remote work. Since there's few stats out there: $150k base, $50k stock ($200k / 4 years), no bonus. Focus on front end, 5 YOE.

tiborsaas 7y ago
Haha, I'd love to have this as well, sign me up for a job like this :)

rossdavidh 7y ago

It occurs to me that, in at least some cases, employers don't want to have remote workers (fear of loss of control), but will accept it if they cannot fill the position otherwise (e.g. there are no available programmers in our town). So, it will be interesting to see what happens when the next labor market downturn comes.

itsthisjustin 7y ago
Remote work is all about trust. Find good talent that you don't have to micro manage and you'll see that the output is 2x what the input used to be. It's amazing how much you can get done when you're left alone and not interrupted by meetings and a distracting workplace
- HunterYAC 7y ago
  True story https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/05/21/heres-why-remote-workers-are-more-productive-than-in-house-teams/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/abdullahimuhammed/2019/05/21/he...

ryanyde 7y ago

Agree with @bradlys' comment: This just suggests more highly paid people are being allowed to work remote, vs. remote jobs being paid more. Given the expansion of high paying roles across geographies, this could be driven almost entirely by FAANG opening engineering / R&D centers in other cities like Denver / Dallas, etc. Also 'remote' could be laxer standards for these same companies on going down to Mountain View / Menlo Park driven by commute and traffic. Many of my friends commute 2x a week, passing the 50% threshold for remote work, even though I wouldn't consider Menlo Park / Mountain View to SF 'Remote'

ghaff 7y ago
To be honest, of course. If remote work is paying substantially better it's because higher paid people have jobs that fit under some technical definition of remote. To your example, I don't work in the Bay Area but I'm theoretically in an office about a 30 minute drive away. However, I gave up my desk and only go in for meetings sometime. I'd definitely self-report as Remote even though I technically aren't. I wonder if some of it is just changes in attitudes. Lots of people in tech and elsewhere (e.g. sales) have long spent very little time in their offices even if they had one. I wonder if they consider themselves Remote today when they wouldn't have in the past because they were technically in an office.

quaffapint 7y ago

I've been looking on and off for a few months to see what the remote market is like. It's rare to find senior dev jobs paying >130k and even rarer to find local jobs that let you be remote a fixed number of days a week. It seems at least around here you would need to take a good pay cut to have a remote option.

randomdude402 7y ago
Anecdotal, but myself and two other people I know at two other places work "mostly remote," meaning commute once a week or less. In each case, we started by commuting full time, and added remote days after some months. Also for all of us, we have a good number of co-workers that go into the office most days. I found the same as you, in that looking for positions specifically billed as remote positions, the money is really not there.
- HunterYAC 7y ago
  The good news is that remote jobs are growing by the day. Remote.co is doing a good job at snagging high quality jobs https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/ https://remote.co/remote-jobs/developer/