14 ms·

3 years ago, remote top paying gigs were hard to find. Today they are the norm

157 points by luu 6y ago

dangwu 6y ago
It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.
- 0x008 6y ago
  Facebook did?
  - xenihn 6y ago
    it's conditional and doesn't apply to the entire org, or even to all engs. compare their new policy to twitter and square
- flarg 6y ago
  It's always been bums on seats for them. Without that they will be measured by productivity alone which will be a disaster.
- holoduke 6y ago
  Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are from existing lone wolfs who used to work remote before covid and never really worked in teams. We all know how successful (not!) outsourcing can be. Working from home is even worse.
  - tessierashpool 6y ago
    This is just provably false. Basecamp and GitHub are the famous counterexamples, but there are many, many more. (Although GitHub changed course when they got larger.) Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it. But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
    - kirk2121 6y ago
      Basecamp has about 50 employees
  - redisman 6y ago
    Sounds like your personal experience. Which is fine but there are thousands of companies and teams that have found it to be just as good or better than butts at the same physical office
    - mbeex 6y ago
      > Sounds like your personal experience. You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective. I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.
  - giantandroids 6y ago
    This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.
  - 4eor0 6y ago
    Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat. Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output. It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine. Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.
    - willbudd 6y ago
      > Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat. I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration. Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles. In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  While I haven't seen a formal plan announced, I think there are financial, logistical, social, and political headwinds to it. - Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board. - Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this? - Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch? - Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again. Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.
- tekno45 6y ago
  Salesforce not big enough?
  - marmshallow 6y ago
    Well it’s not one of the big four specifically. Neither is Twitter. While they carry weight, they’re simply not as dominant in terms of seeing cultural norms.
nexthash 6y ago
Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current policies when the pandemic fades away?
- dejv 6y ago
  My two cents as a remote dev for past two decades I think we are not going back as the landscape changed a lot: the scene used to consist of code me a facebook clone for 200USD to getting rich iOS apps towards seeing more bootstrapped high margin businesses and VC backed startups. This last group starting to learn doing remote work effectively and they manage to mine this talent pool profitably
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- axaxs 6y ago
  Yes, but not the utopia devs in big cities want. They're in for a rude awakening when they realize people with way more talent will do the job for less, not only in the US but worldwide. And I don't mean typical outsourcing bodyshops, but truly talented people in say, the midwest US or eastern Europe.
  - luch 6y ago
    or even western Europe. There are some world class developers in Spain, Italy or France that are paid ~30K€ to 50K€ per year. Even when factoring in the tax levels and COL, there is still a huge potential for social dumping from the EU
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      Spain and Italy are Western Europe by post-WW2 geo-politics, but a better definition would be to say they are Southern Europe which, by developer pay, is even worse than Eastern Europe that most devs there have long moved north to the point where I doubt they're many left there.
crandycodes 6y ago
I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB before COVID hit, and then accepted a new management role back on the team right as COVID was hitting. I've never seen my team all in the same room; but it's been fine/normal-ish. Now that full-remote just takes manager approval, we've had folks move away from Seattle/SF. I've got reports in the UK and NYC. It's pushed our culture to be a lot more communicative, intentional, and organized, which is good for everyone, Seattle based or remote. What's great about all this is now there isn't even a question of "is remote ok"? We don't need to be looking for a specific skillset or a certain level of seniority. It really opens up the talent pool; recent hires have given us a lot more selection. (P.S. - I'm hiring Product Managers; permanent remote. Check out my pinned tweet on the twitter profile in my bio)
- alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  This. I know companies where management have refused work-from-home PRE-COVID have struggled to deal with their whole company forced to work from home because of lockdowns as they were unprepared. As soon as restrictions were lifted here, these same companies forced workers to come back into the office... and now only a few weeks later, we’re in a lockdown again. In a digital world, and being the primary workers in this industry, I find companies that outright refuse work-from-home because “culture” are pissing in the wind.
  - onethought 6y ago
    I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?
    - NeverFade 6y ago
      Is it "fair" for many workers to work in hostile and dangerous environments like oil rigs or policing high-crime streets, while SWEs sit in comfortable climate-controlled offices? Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?
dejv 6y ago
This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they make a killing.
- angarg12 6y ago
  Not to beat that dead horse, but I agree. During COVID I transferred to a team based in the US west coast. My manager was happy with me working remotely from England, which has been great since I was able to move to the countryside where cost of living is much cheaper. However I'm still getting paid about half the comparable salary of my colleagues over there just because of the location. Yes, I know, in the US health and education is more expensive, but the difference in income still impact my bottom line. Also in a sense it's quite demotivating knowing that those new grads I'm mentoring make more money than me.
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    Salaries in the UK are less than the USA, or even China. I remember a friend moving from Beijing to Cambridge (for a well known big Corp) had to put up a decent struggle to keep his salary from being cut to local levels. I don’t get why UK salaries are less than most other major dev sites.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Because devs don't tend to have PPE degrees from Oxford, and as such, are merely peons. \s Seriously, it's super weird and I don't understand it either.
giantandroids 6y ago
It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case). I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board. COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.
- busrf 6y ago
  Unfortunately the CEO of the large streaming company based in Los Gatos has strongly negative feelings about remote work even after COVID: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-remote-work-a-pure-negative-11599487219 https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-re...
  - NeverFade 6y ago
    Netflix having employee-unfriendly policies is nothing new: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174 https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency... This is very much in line with their traditional approach.
ffggvv 6y ago
it’s great but from what i’ve also heard, the permanent remote teams at fb for instance are pretty shitty projects that no one else wanted to own, not the shiny stuff most people want to work on
jayd16 6y ago
I don't think we'll really know what the future holds until people start coming back to work. When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Yes, everyone on Zoom is fine. Half in the room and half on Zoom has never been easy and I am not sure how that will be solved going forward.
  - NeverFade 6y ago
    If WFH becomes fully accepted, I don't think many employees will choose to commute 30-60 minutes to spend their days at the office instead of staying home with their spouse, kids, and pets.
  - ludston 6y ago
    The solution that everyone goes on Zoom, regardless of whether or not they are sitting next to each other. Pretend the team is fully remote, but still take advantage of organic, local interaction to skill up new developers. We were coincidentally doing this in my workplace 6 months before COVID took off.
    - StopHammoTime 6y ago
      Exactly. A lot of teams seem to also struggle with no "face to face" communication. Yeah you can't turn and talk to your colleague but you can press "Call", which arguably is the same amount of effort.
    - glandium 6y ago
      How well does echo cancellation work in these cases?
      - Mashimo 6y ago
aste-risk 6y ago
what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart (https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Cheaper market probably
- adenozine 6y ago
  Bonuses, seasonal differentials, benefits, vacation time, excellent managers who don't micromanage might all be reasons people stay there. I don't work there, but I've worked for less than I'm "worth" before because of reasons like those. 10% pay cut, but 5wks vacation instead of 2? Sign me up. I really landed an offer like that once, I felt so lucky. It all just depends. It could just be bad statistics or something like that too, it's all quite hard to actually quantify when there's so many non-numerical factors (insurance, commute, social, etc)
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  How much international employees do they have? The US, especially the SF area is probably the highest paid location, most of the world has much more reasonable wages.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I've been working with and running remote teams for a few years. It takes some getting used to but basically it can work. And when it doesn't work, it's usually for the same reasons that local teams can fail. Which is of course a combination of communication issues, management issues, and sometimes simply not having the right people on your team. Communication issues get amplified in a remote situation because you are dealing with cultural issues, timezone issues, and often poor tooling. And even when it works well, a video call just isn't a substitute to being in the same room. A key lesson here is to simply rely less on this and push your processes in a more asynchronous direction. E.g. having scrum related meetings over a video meeting is even more painful than having them in real life. They are inherently synchronous in nature. Going asynchronous reduces meeting pressure. We have a lot of tools to support that these days. Most of which came out of the OSS community which out of necessity tends to favor asynchronous processes because remote is a defacto reality in pretty much most of them. Another lesson is that once you get used to this actually being a workable situation, hiring locally at greater expense becomes harder to defend. Basically it levels the playing field and your premium rate is going to be more related to what you can do then it is to where you are doing it. When there are lots of qualified people willing to work at a quarter your rate, maybe that is going to be a challenge long term. In reality it's not so bad; you get what you pay for also remotely. Worse, you actually need a certain level of maturity and skills to compensate for people being remote. So, that biases rates to the premium end of the spectrum. But still, expecting San Francisco rates just because you are based there or used to be based there on a remote project that also has people from India, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, would probably not be long term sustainable. You can literally get an entire team for those rates and it wouldn't be that bad of a team.
BJBBB 6y ago
But for some on-site hardware jobs, demand seems to have increased (anecdotally?). Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand. Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp. I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.
msantos 6y ago
Yet another hot take on on the state of "remote", where remote actually means: US and Canada wide (and maybe UK but that would be a bit of a stretch).

157 points by luu 6y ago

It probably won’t be the norm in the future. I’ve been waiting for a “Big 4” company to announce some sort of permanent WFH plan but they haven’t budged, and that’s a bad sign.

0x008 6y ago
Facebook did?
- xenihn 6y ago
  it's conditional and doesn't apply to the entire org, or even to all engs. compare their new policy to twitter and square
flarg 6y ago
It's always been bums on seats for them. Without that they will be measured by productivity alone which will be a disaster.
holoduke 6y ago
Working from home doesn't work. People need to be together physically to create trust in each other. Trust is the base ingredient for successful collaboration. Many teams in current covid situation suffer from team issues. Demotivation, unaligned, conflicts. The fun is gone. Specially visible in software dev teams in which generally people are not the most proactive talkers. Most positive feedback you hear today are from existing lone wolfs who used to work remote before covid and never really worked in teams. We all know how successful (not!) outsourcing can be. Working from home is even worse.
- tessierashpool 6y ago
  This is just provably false. Basecamp and GitHub are the famous counterexamples, but there are many, many more. (Although GitHub changed course when they got larger.) Working from home doesn't work for companies who don't know how to do it. It's not the same as working in an office and of course many companies are doing it wrong right now because they leaped into it without any knowledge of how to do it. But plenty of companies have done very well with working from home, and had all the healthy teamwork anyone could ask for. It's not a matter of opinion, it's proven fact.
  - kirk2121 6y ago
    Basecamp has about 50 employees
- redisman 6y ago
  Sounds like your personal experience. Which is fine but there are thousands of companies and teams that have found it to be just as good or better than butts at the same physical office
  - mbeex 6y ago
    > Sounds like your personal experience. You can say exactly the same from the opposite perspective. I'm a freelancer and while I am _personally_ more than happy with remote work (prefering it for many years), many people are not. It is also a cultural thing, agreed. But the culture based on personal contact isn't a bad thing per se. In many cases it is superior, especially when considering mixed variations. Regarding the argument that companies get remote work wrong, the same is true for the former normal of physical presence. There is simply much more experience with this. It will not need much time, until remote work shows his nasty sides large-scale too. And they are there yet. Control mechanisms as one of the more unsubtle examples become more sophisticated every day.
- giantandroids 6y ago
  This is simply false. There have been plenty of companies running 100% remote based teams successfully for a while now. Further to that, some of the worlds best open source projects are all coded as a type of remote team. Any problems that there are, are from management not being able to make the jump in culture and harness remote tooling.
- 4eor0 6y ago
  Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat. Forcing people into the office isn’t about producing useful output. It’s about embedding an expectation, and routine. Kegerators, snack bars, they’re not about motivation. But embedding buy in.
  - willbudd 6y ago
    > Open source developers across the world would like to have a chat. I think this touches on an important aspect of working remotely: a high percentage of open source developers participate in these collaborations not because of financial reward, but because they are on some technical level passionate about the project(s) they are involved in. In other words, they find relatively strong intrinsic motivation in their endeavors in comparison to strictly external rewards such as remuneration. Personally, I find that the presence/lack of such intrinsic motivation plays a far greater factor when working remotely than when I made hours at the office. In the office, social interaction and a clear-cut shift would compensate for otherwise intellectually unrewarding tasks, whereas at home the same kind of tasks often seem to turn into solitary mental struggles. In other words, the freedom and efficiency of working remote can be wonderful, but I find it only tends to work out like when I'm (on some level) genuinely enthusiastic about the work at hand.
caseysoftware 6y ago
While I haven't seen a formal plan announced, I think there are financial, logistical, social, and political headwinds to it. - Financial: Companies are saving major cash by reducing office space and the associated perks. It's no longer a fight to serve the best meals, have the best designed space, and the greatest views. Further, eliminating business travel increased margins across the board. - Logistics: Many companies in the Bay Area (especially SF proper), NYC, Boston, Chicago, DC, and other places are highly dependent on mass transit. How many people will want to use it after this? - Social: Some % of the population has been convinced that anyone can contract and die of covid quickly and easily. All the restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc, etc around their offices have withered and many have died in the last year. If companies don't feed their people, will they hope everyone brings a lunch? - Political: The Biden Admin just announced masks are likely necessary into 2022. Further, we're seeing new covid variants/mutations triggering lockdowns all over again. Any one of those may not be enough but collectively, it will create major resistance to any sort of "in the office" demands.
tekno45 6y ago
Salesforce not big enough?
- marmshallow 6y ago
  Well it’s not one of the big four specifically. Neither is Twitter. While they carry weight, they’re simply not as dominant in terms of seeing cultural norms.

nexthash 6y ago

Does anybody think this might be a permanent shift? I would love it if I could have the convenience of a top-paying remote job in software development. The twitter thread voiced concerns about this trend being like a pendulum that could swing back to the dominance of in-person work, even within a year. Covid has proved that remote employment is possible, but the question remains: will companies rescind their current policies when the pandemic fades away?

dejv 6y ago
My two cents as a remote dev for past two decades I think we are not going back as the landscape changed a lot: the scene used to consist of code me a facebook clone for 200USD to getting rich iOS apps towards seeing more bootstrapped high margin businesses and VC backed startups. This last group starting to learn doing remote work effectively and they manage to mine this talent pool profitably
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
axaxs 6y ago
Yes, but not the utopia devs in big cities want. They're in for a rude awakening when they realize people with way more talent will do the job for less, not only in the US but worldwide. And I don't mean typical outsourcing bodyshops, but truly talented people in say, the midwest US or eastern Europe.
- luch 6y ago
  or even western Europe. There are some world class developers in Spain, Italy or France that are paid ~30K€ to 50K€ per year. Even when factoring in the tax levels and COL, there is still a huge potential for social dumping from the EU
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Spain and Italy are Western Europe by post-WW2 geo-politics, but a better definition would be to say they are Southern Europe which, by developer pay, is even worse than Eastern Europe that most devs there have long moved north to the point where I doubt they're many left there.

crandycodes 6y ago

I work at Microsoft and in Azure Cosmos DB, the same org as Steve. Leadership believing in remote makes all the difference. We'd been doing more and more remote hiring in the years before COVID, especially when remote made a specific skillset's talent pool larger. This led to some remote-friendly, bordering on remote-first culture. When COVID hit, we adapted really fast. I had taken a short break from Cosmos DB before COVID hit, and then accepted a new management role back on the team right as COVID was hitting. I've never seen my team all in the same room; but it's been fine/normal-ish. Now that full-remote just takes manager approval, we've had folks move away from Seattle/SF. I've got reports in the UK and NYC. It's pushed our culture to be a lot more communicative, intentional, and organized, which is good for everyone, Seattle based or remote. What's great about all this is now there isn't even a question of "is remote ok"? We don't need to be looking for a specific skillset or a certain level of seniority. It really opens up the talent pool; recent hires have given us a lot more selection. (P.S. - I'm hiring Product Managers; permanent remote. Check out my pinned tweet on the twitter profile in my bio)

alfiedotwtf 6y ago
This. I know companies where management have refused work-from-home PRE-COVID have struggled to deal with their whole company forced to work from home because of lockdowns as they were unprepared. As soon as restrictions were lifted here, these same companies forced workers to come back into the office... and now only a few weeks later, we’re in a lockdown again. In a digital world, and being the primary workers in this industry, I find companies that outright refuse work-from-home because “culture” are pissing in the wind.
- onethought 6y ago
  I agree. But what about the business that aren’t 100% digital? Is it okay to have half your workforce at home? Is it fair? What about roles that thrive off human interaction, do they get written off?
  - NeverFade 6y ago
    Is it "fair" for many workers to work in hostile and dangerous environments like oil rigs or policing high-crime streets, while SWEs sit in comfortable climate-controlled offices? Is it "fair" that thousands of employees of particular companies work endless shifts in unpleasant warehouses, while others enjoy nice downtown offices?

dejv 6y ago

This is highly related to location based compensation. Sure companies are still able to pay there most senior devs less than their out of coding bootcamp just because they are not sitting in their SF office and I am ok with this, but as a remote dev from eastern Europe I am seeing new types of companies that learned how to work with remote talent effectively (not just in term of pay, but also team dynamic) and they make a killing.

angarg12 6y ago
Not to beat that dead horse, but I agree. During COVID I transferred to a team based in the US west coast. My manager was happy with me working remotely from England, which has been great since I was able to move to the countryside where cost of living is much cheaper. However I'm still getting paid about half the comparable salary of my colleagues over there just because of the location. Yes, I know, in the US health and education is more expensive, but the difference in income still impact my bottom line. Also in a sense it's quite demotivating knowing that those new grads I'm mentoring make more money than me.
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  Salaries in the UK are less than the USA, or even China. I remember a friend moving from Beijing to Cambridge (for a well known big Corp) had to put up a decent struggle to keep his salary from being cut to local levels. I don’t get why UK salaries are less than most other major dev sites.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Because devs don't tend to have PPE degrees from Oxford, and as such, are merely peons. \s Seriously, it's super weird and I don't understand it either.

giantandroids 6y ago

It's always been a no brainer for my team to hire remote and we were majority remote before COVID. There is simple reason for this; The hiring pool is much much wider when you remove geographical restrictions. Trying to hire within the criteria of someone being able to physically transport themselves to a certain location limits greatly your ability to find and recruit talent. Even more so for niche areas where skills are even more in demand (Security Engineering in my case). I remember just before COVID a large content streaming platform (the biggest one there is) were trying to hire security team members, it caught my interest and I was more than experience enough, but they had a caveat that hires were only available for those that can travel to Los Gatos, California. Suffice to say, being in the UK with children settled into school and liking my life here, it was a showstopper. edit: I just checked and they still have the same hiring conditions on their job board. COVID has proven the case of 'necessity is the mother of all invention' and these companies are finally understanding that you can run remote engineering teams perfectly ok. Even though it's not like for like, open source projects have been operating this way for years and had set the blueprint on remote collaboration. Some of the folks on my team used to be office based (even though we worked together virtually, they liked the social aspect), however they have pivoted now. Firstly they love how they can spend a good 4-5 hour chunk of uninterrupted thought at pure unadulterated programming without someone wondering over in the middle of them debugging to say 'he, did you see the email I sent you'.

busrf 6y ago
Unfortunately the CEO of the large streaming company based in Los Gatos has strongly negative feelings about remote work even after COVID: https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-remote-work-a-pure-negative-11599487219 https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflixs-reed-hastings-deems-re...
- NeverFade 6y ago
  Netflix having employee-unfriendly policies is nothing new: https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency-and-blunt-firings-unsettle-the-ranks-1540497174 https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-netflix-radical-transparency... This is very much in line with their traditional approach.

ffggvv 6y ago

it’s great but from what i’ve also heard, the permanent remote teams at fb for instance are pretty shitty projects that no one else wanted to own, not the shiny stuff most people want to work on

jayd16 6y ago

I don't think we'll really know what the future holds until people start coming back to work. When everyone is on zoom, its easy to keep zoom etiquette. Its a lot harder if we revert back to in office meetings and a dial in number if someone happens to be WFH that day.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Yes, everyone on Zoom is fine. Half in the room and half on Zoom has never been easy and I am not sure how that will be solved going forward.
- NeverFade 6y ago
  If WFH becomes fully accepted, I don't think many employees will choose to commute 30-60 minutes to spend their days at the office instead of staying home with their spouse, kids, and pets.
- ludston 6y ago
  The solution that everyone goes on Zoom, regardless of whether or not they are sitting next to each other. Pretend the team is fully remote, but still take advantage of organic, local interaction to skill up new developers. We were coincidentally doing this in my workplace 6 months before COVID took off.
  - StopHammoTime 6y ago
    Exactly. A lot of teams seem to also struggle with no "face to face" communication. Yeah you can't turn and talk to your colleague but you can press "Call", which arguably is the same amount of effort.
  - glandium 6y ago
    How well does echo cancellation work in these cases?
    - Mashimo 6y ago

aste-risk 6y ago

what's up with microsoft? out of all the big tech companies in that chart (https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html), their employees look most underpaid; yet they are doing amazing. How can they get away with not paying their engineers on par with competition?

aaomidi 6y ago
Cheaper market probably
adenozine 6y ago
Bonuses, seasonal differentials, benefits, vacation time, excellent managers who don't micromanage might all be reasons people stay there. I don't work there, but I've worked for less than I'm "worth" before because of reasons like those. 10% pay cut, but 5wks vacation instead of 2? Sign me up. I really landed an offer like that once, I felt so lucky. It all just depends. It could just be bad statistics or something like that too, it's all quite hard to actually quantify when there's so many non-numerical factors (insurance, commute, social, etc)
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
How much international employees do they have? The US, especially the SF area is probably the highest paid location, most of the world has much more reasonable wages.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I've been working with and running remote teams for a few years. It takes some getting used to but basically it can work. And when it doesn't work, it's usually for the same reasons that local teams can fail. Which is of course a combination of communication issues, management issues, and sometimes simply not having the right people on your team. Communication issues get amplified in a remote situation because you are dealing with cultural issues, timezone issues, and often poor tooling. And even when it works well, a video call just isn't a substitute to being in the same room. A key lesson here is to simply rely less on this and push your processes in a more asynchronous direction. E.g. having scrum related meetings over a video meeting is even more painful than having them in real life. They are inherently synchronous in nature. Going asynchronous reduces meeting pressure. We have a lot of tools to support that these days. Most of which came out of the OSS community which out of necessity tends to favor asynchronous processes because remote is a defacto reality in pretty much most of them. Another lesson is that once you get used to this actually being a workable situation, hiring locally at greater expense becomes harder to defend. Basically it levels the playing field and your premium rate is going to be more related to what you can do then it is to where you are doing it. When there are lots of qualified people willing to work at a quarter your rate, maybe that is going to be a challenge long term. In reality it's not so bad; you get what you pay for also remotely. Worse, you actually need a certain level of maturity and skills to compensate for people being remote. So, that biases rates to the premium end of the spectrum. But still, expecting San Francisco rates just because you are based there or used to be based there on a remote project that also has people from India, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, would probably not be long term sustainable. You can literally get an entire team for those rates and it wouldn't be that bad of a team.

BJBBB 6y ago

But for some on-site hardware jobs, demand seems to have increased (anecdotally?). Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand. Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp. I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.

msantos 6y ago

Yet another hot take on on the state of "remote", where remote actually means: US and Canada wide (and maybe UK but that would be a bit of a stretch).