15 ms·

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will so

• syshum 6y ago
  Not even homogenization, for the US this will be the precurser to the next round of Layoff's, and all those people that took part in the #LearnToCode and other movements to retrain people displaced from other employment into Programming jobs / office style jobs are going to be shocked when their nice remote job is outsourced to another nation. Round 1 was the manufacturing Sector, Round 2 will be the office sector. Economically the US is on a down hill path, and there is not a money printer large enough to fix this problem
  • tester34 6y ago
    I hope you're right That's what I'm looking for - increasing salary 4 times for similar stuff while having living costs of 400-500 USD / month
  • ilkan 6y ago
    Many companies tried and failed since the 90's, because most coampanies' software dev is a core group of skilled people using vague specifications to build a product for their first time.
• lanevorockz 6y ago
  That is true, it might be the end of the sustainability of overpopulated cities ...
  • 0_____0 6y ago
    Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it
    • humanrebar 6y ago
      It's not that complicated. Build more housing and better transportation options. If particular kinds of businesses have a hard time thriving (like grocers), actually pay attention to what kills those businesses and fix it. It's often some sort of overboard regulation like zoning.
      • Hamuko 6y ago
        >It's not that complicated. On paper.
        • mywittyname 6y ago
          How dare you make housing affordable. I just spent 20x the median annual American salary on this house, and now you want to make it affordable? /s
          • imtringued 6y ago
            One day the fed will do the unbelievable, it will raise interest rates and all those mortgages will be underwater.
        • mdtusz 6y ago
          It really isn't all that complicated though, and just takes money to fix the urban planning mistakes that have been made in many metropolitan cities. Montreal is probably the most livable "big" city in North America, and it's mostly because of three things: 1. Excellent transportation. The metro is for the most part consistent, extremely affordable (it's ~$85/month, and about half that for students and youth), safe, and works as a great mainline transport. Busses are also very frequent - most coming at most 15 minutes apart during regular hours, and usually every half hour or so past 1am. You can get almost anywhere in the city in an hour or less using public transit. 2. Renters are protected. The Regie Du Logement heavily favours renters in housing related disputes, and as such, the prices also favour renters. Most individuals pay $1000 or less in rent, for entirely adequate housing, and if they want to move, it's almost certainly an option. 3. Permissive zoning. With the exception of the downtown core, there are grocery stores and pharmacies everywhere. Combined with depanneurs (corner stores) being within 500m of just about any point in the city, you are never far from milk, eggs, bread, beer, wine, and other necessities. Combined with businesses themselves being able to set up shop nearly anywhere as well. Ground floor business with residential above is the norm for nearly all "main" streets. Yes, there are difficult things for existing cities to recreate, but it is almost entirely due to poor urban planning choices being made by the municipal (or state/provincial) powers that be.
• jackcnreturns 6y ago
  People having been claiming the death of high salaries for years. My employer (FAANG-like) is willing to hire across 3 hour time zones, we have 20+ headcount to fill, and still can't find people fast enough. Fact is, good engineers that can scale reliable systems, build product, work with other teams, mentor junior engineers, etc. are still damn hard to find.
• yhoneycomb 6y ago
  If you want to maximize earnings, I almost wonder if it would be cheaper to rent the cheapest possible place in a remote area with a higher COL/salary, and then just live in a cheap area.
  • nly 6y ago
    Yes, but until remote work is the norm it's a quality of life trade-off. Living in low COL area around London for instance is complicated by the fact that the entire commuter zone, for certain classes of housing, is basically priced at central prices less cost of commuting. If you want a comfortable family life, with a bunch of kids, then you're looking at a long commute. Housing in the UK is severely messed up though. It's actually better in most of the US.
    • wooger 6y ago
      Yeah, at least the US has multiple cities with similar pressure on price, the UK market is so unbalanced by London. But anecdotally a huge swath of the younger population is moving to Birmingham or Manchester to escape the South East price crunch. It's essentially insane for anyone not on or approaching 100k GBP to even bother with the South East at all imo.
    • sokoloff 6y ago
      I think GP means “rent an address” somewhere expensive, claim you live there, and actually live someplace cheap, working remotely.
      • willcipriano 6y ago
        Similar to how Apple keeps all its intellectual property in Grand Cayman I keep everything I know about tech in the heart of SF.
      • the_gipsy 6y ago
        Or let the company pay you the million dollar mortgage while you rent in some backwater town.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• freebee56 6y ago
  How is he acomplishing that? You couldn't do that in the US unless you had a C2C contract
• dogma1138 6y ago
  Yep people who work remote from a low COL area will benefit now and will benefit possibly even more once market pressure would start ramping up. Whilst everyone wants to get paid as much as possible getting paid period is even better. If you have a competitive advantage that would increase the likelihood of them making you an offer by asking for less because your housing costs only 50-25% of what it would in SV you’ll use eventually. And whilst yes in a perfect world everyone would understand that they are eventually playing themselves but this is essentially the prisoners dilemma on a bigger scale and someone will flinch eventually and then the race to the bottom will start. Eventually we may bounce back again towards working from a centralized location and then history will just repeat itself.
  • Bombthecat 6y ago
    My firm works with a huge telecom company, some 15 years or so. The first time i saw them going from central to decentral i was line :why? My colleagues, working longer with them, where like : meh its not the first time. They go from central to decentral every five or so years for two reasons : getting rid of old workers, and hiring cheaper new workers. They will probably do the same every few years..
• h0l0cube 6y ago
  > A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. ... and the beginning of a new wave of entrepreneurship. The best talent goes towards companies that are too big to take risks. If you're ultra-competent, and the fat juicy wages aren't there to tie your resources on maintaining the status quo at some giant tech firm, maybe taking a punt on your own product (or teaming up with a friend) might be a little more appealing.
  • rorykoehler 6y ago
    This is why it will always be worth paying inflated salaries for FAANG companies. Taking all the top talent is a moat.
    • nhance 6y ago
      I've run a smart consulting business for 16 years now. I've watched over the years as many I've worked with have gone to FAANG. There may be opportunity costs involved, but there is no way FAANG can grab all of the top talent. Some of it is going to make its own way simply because they want to write their own rules.
      • mywittyname 6y ago
        You don't need to grab all of the top talent, just enough to keep them from coalescing into a threat. The few that slip by get acquir-hired in a few years.
        • pxue 6y ago
          Extremely relevant for Canadian talent pools. Bleed to SF/Bay area is real.
      • vmception 6y ago
        The other side of this is how so many people starting or running companies still dont have a realistic view of what to pay engineers. They're pricing a budget out to rationalize an equity raise and are completely inept at what is necessary to get their highly specialized engineers. Sure there are a lot of engineers working at noncompetitive companies making 80-180k and lower outside of the bay area. But if you expect to spend less time on recruiting and less time on attritition for your skillset that only exists in the bay area or HFT firms, wake tf up!
• cletus 6y ago
  You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop. Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't believe Big Tech will ever go fully remote. There are inherent advantages in physical colocation. I see this as a means of satisfying the ever-increasing demand. The Bay Area in particular is both largely exhausted in available talent and saturated in how many more people can be supported (given available housing and infrastructure). Disclaimer: I work for Facebook and have gone remote.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    Those can’t-loopers are interviewing for many scores of jobs before they wiggle slightly higher on one interview and get hired. The ones who can code interview at a couple places and pick from among their offers. I don’t think you can extrapolate from how many terrible coders you see in interview pipelines that the industry is overall terrible. The interview selection processes working is what you’re seeing.
  • nly 6y ago
    > London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't know. NY seems to be consistently more expensive judging by [0], particularly rent. Overall NY taxes are only 1-3% lower from my calculations, so I think overall NY'ers don't have it much better. The UK is also particularly generous when it comes to tax-advantaged investment and has state healthcare. [0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&city1=London&country2=United+States&city2=New+York%2C+NY https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
    • cletus 6y ago
      I've lived in both NYC and London (although not in London for years now). Housing is a hard one to compare. Your link mentions city center and out of city center. I'm not sure what that means exactly. The big issue with London is you have to go _far_ to get affordable housing and commute times are generally terrible. I'm not sure what the picture looks like now with Crossrail. The thing about New York is yes, Manhattan is expensive (generally) but affordability within 30 minutes of, say, Midtown can be substantially higher. London doesn't really have that. You'll see charts showing commuter towns being X minutes from Liverpool Street, King's Cross, whatever. My experience with London was that those were... unrealistic. Or rather they assumed everything went right. And it almost never does. Particular if a transfer is involved.
• actuator 6y ago
  Umm.. FANMAG pay the same comp for NY and SF. Roughly the same for Seattle too.
  • nly 6y ago
    The multiples I cited are what I tend to observe in the industry generally. There aren't really any FANMAGs outside of London.
    • actuator 6y ago
      Ah, your comment referred to FANMAG hence my reply. > There aren't really any FANMAGs outside of London. There are. For example, AWS has a development center in Cambridge.
  • bfung 6y ago
    To be a little bit picky, Amazon & Microsoft pay about 1/2 in total compensation than the Bay Area companies. using data from https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ It’s been true since 2014, as I check salaries around the web to see how my hiring goes, and also for my own opportunities. My own records: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BoMvtY_mICEYygy0jXVGwmGIJxFs2zsAXsQvM6K8BEk/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BoMvtY_mICEYygy0jXVG... Point being - Amazon&MS salaries aren’t likely to change, while Bay Area tech companies, the outflux happening, will have to adjust.
  • Hydraulix989 6y ago
    Seattle is both as expensive and as competitive of a hiring market as the Bay Area (there used to be a CoL delta but the gap closed after 2013ish, when Amazon and Microsoft stocks both went on a tear and Facebook expanded with multiple new large engineering offices there). I say that as someone who recently left Seattle to move to the Bay pre-pandemic. Only miss the lower taxes, and certainly not the weather.
• ironmagma 6y ago
  Except that employers aren’t going to become less picky when switching to remote; likely, they will become even more picky and will want to improve their employee base since the supply has increased and that will be possible where it wasn’t before.
  • nly 6y ago
    It doesn't matter. The top 1% of a large pool is still bigger than the top 1% of a small pool, so competition increases for the same number of jobs.
    • ironmagma 6y ago
      However, a company that was previously land-restricted to only the 98th percentile (top 2% minus top 1%) now has access to the top 1% and will be trying to compete, so there are actually more jobs available at the top.
      • rightbyte 6y ago
        You are forgetting that for each "land restricted" company that had 0% 99th percentile hires locally available there was x companies having more % somewhere else for it to eventually be an distribution. There is no way you can filter out top 1/100 candidates anyway.
        • ironmagma 6y ago
          All that implies is that the number of top 1% candidates remains constant. Of course it does. Some companies had more than they needed, but if you take luxury away from a man, he will seek it out because he is used to it.
    • np32 6y ago
      This assumes talent is geographically homogeneous. IMHO, Talent in top cities in the US is better than the one in the rest of the countries, and so it goes for other countries. For top US firms, it may well be that there is a better pool for top talent, but not THAT much better. I believe it would be possible to do inferences from # of non-US citizen in FAANGs.
• ownagefool 6y ago
  The thing about London and the UK generally is the real money was historically in contracting. I reckon I was hitting the 6x. The perm market here has always been silly.
  • dogma1138 6y ago
    How much were you hitting? I haven’t seen contracts that go that high, I’m on 140K base + car allowance now (8K), in total I make around 220-215K cash w/ bonuses. employer pension is about another 20K or so a year. IR35 made contracting complicated but even before that I’ve never seen anything that gets you to SV levels of total comp.
    • burntoutfire 6y ago
      I've heard of contracts of 250K-300K GBP for senior architects positions.
      • dogma1138 6y ago
        That’s around what my role is, but I’ve never seen anything close to 300K p/a contracts for those, at least not actually 300K bailable since you don’t get that many days on those daily rate. I’ve seen short term contracts with £1500-2000 day rates but you’ll be hard pressed to bill 200-250 days on that rate a year.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • mikevm 6y ago
        For how long?
    • ownagefool 6y ago
      1500 a day. Depends on the exchange rate at the time and how many days you wanna work, but it was over $500k at the time. Obviously you can earn similar or more as a high level in FANNG and the initital grant in the US is a lot better. 800-1000 is a lot more typical. Your salary is pretty hot though. I traded in contracting to be a CTO on a lot less than you are, but I got some lottery ticket stocks and will probably see us through an IPO, so feels like that's worth something.
• machiaweliczny 6y ago
  I think you are overestimating suply of talented ppl. On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland. So it's 100 per 40M. Guess in other countries it's similar or less and here programming is quite popular.
  • machiaweliczny 6y ago
    This means that India, almost most populus country on earth has around ~3300 per year, correcting for internet/computer access in 20 years ago it's probably 1/3 of that.
  • burntoutfire 6y ago
    > On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland. How do you figure that?
    • machiaweliczny 6y ago
      There's only 2/3 top universities (if you are being generous, 1 if honest) that are match worldwide here (have people doing substantial research, funding valuable companies or just working in FANGs) producing around 100 graduates per year (combined). This gives me some ballpark estimate.
      • burntoutfire 6y ago
        I myself have a CS degree from a Polish university that's regularly in top1-top3 of the rankings. I don't think it means that much. We've had a fair share of people who didn't enjoy the work that much and did bare minimum. On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of people from lower ranked universities who didn't graduate in CS (but, for example in Maths or Physics) who are very strong contributors. The truth is that university pedigree is not a definitive indicator of on the job performance. BTW (unrelated) - I think all Polish universities are a joke when it comes to CS. I've never heard of either one of them making you write a compiler or an OS or a database engine from scratch as a part of taking a course, while it seems fairly standard on top US universities. Instead, the workload is superficial and skews towards semester-long BS projects that prepare you for run-of-the-mill jobs in industry (web dev, big data etc.). Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed. The reason for that is because none of the professors, barring maybe a few exceptions, are doing any meaningful research, so they have no understanding of the state of the art.
• hahahahe 6y ago
  If anything this is going to drain talent from other places toward traditional big techs. WFH greatly increased talent pool for top payers.
• 908B64B197 6y ago
  Folks from the UK should simply vote with their feet instead of whining and move to SV. It's the only way it will change.
  • petercooper 6y ago
    And that's the reason why UK rates are so low. Relatively few people meet the conditions of both wanting to move (for cultural or family reasons, say) and being able to move (visas being the main impediment here - as someone who considered it 15 years ago, moving to the US to work is no walk in the park).
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      Time to negotiate better visa options for UK engineers!
      • petercooper 6y ago
        I'm not optimistic, but if the UK and US ever do a trade deal, an Australian or Canadian style deal that allows more freedom of labor would certainly be interesting.
      • mrkstu 6y ago
        Good for the engineers, not much incentive for the government to lose their best and brightest to the US.
• yowlingcat 6y ago
  > A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries On what grounds? People said the same thing about outsourcing. It didn't really change anything. Engineer salary has already been bimodal for quite some time. Trying to recruit for the upper tier hasn't gotten any easier.
• headcanon 6y ago
  That works both ways though. The 6x places might move to, say, 4x over time, but the 1x and 2x places will salary upwards to compete. As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Indeed. The only folks in trouble are the ones who decide to remain in VHCOL geographies.
  • SomewhatLikely 6y ago
    I'm not sure sure about that. The 6x places can pay that because of high revenue per employee. It's not like the 1x places will suddenly see a higher revenue per employee to pay higher compensation.
    • therealdrag0 6y ago
      If the company comes to you it might. It’s like how a Cuban can move to Miami and have their “productivity go up”, but with remote work the employee can stay where they are and the company can “move to them”. Of course the flip side of this is offshoring where the company can raise someone else’s productivity more cheaply than someone making US wages already.
    • jb775 6y ago
      There's people scattered all over the country making 2x-3x rates that could have been earning 6x, but moving to San Fran or NYC was never a feasible option. The 6x companies will offer them 4x, settle on 4.5x, and both parties are happy. It will inevitably drive down the 6x pay, but drive up the 1x-3x pay. However, the companies will be the real winners though unless there's some type of coordination between all employees...Not only will they have massive payroll cost savings, buy they will reduce office rent expenses, electricity use, etc.
      • chmod600 6y ago
        What happens when that pattern repeats into highly-educated parts of Eastern Europe and Southern Asia?
• cko 6y ago
  What country is your friend's employer based in? I'm America living in Romania soon to apply for developer jobs and I see time zone and residency status as potential obstacles.
  • oblio 6y ago
    You poor soul, American living in Romania? How did this mishap happen? I'm guessing it was because of your (presumably Romanian) partner? :-)
    • cko 6y ago
      Yes, Romanian partner it is. But it's pretty nice here, why do you call it a mishap and what is a better option? Portugal right?
      • oblio 6y ago
        Well, just out of curiosity, visit some local hospitals or make some appointments with doctors in state owned hospitals or clinics. For better options, I'd say most of other Eastern European countries in the EU are probably better (except for Bulgaria), and also probably Portugal or Spain. Just check out where the big Romanian diasporas are :-D
• anm89 6y ago
  ok, I think we can all agree not to add any more letters to that acronym at this point and just call it big tech. Although I really would like to get a job at GAFNDMRASDGAMGICZ soon.
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    I'm not stopping until we reach FANDANGO.
    • kibibyte 6y ago
      My personal favorite that I've seen is FLAMINGASS (Facebook Lyft Amazon Microsoft Intel Netflix Google Apple Salesforce Square) (at least one of these is definitely a bit of a stretch)
      • anm89 6y ago
        That's awesome! I'm sure the press'll be picking that one up any moment now.
• 2W2 6y ago
  I already only do 10 hours of work per week in this pandemic WFH. No one seems to notice. I’m L6 at google. Why not double down and get two “full time” jobs. I’ve heard from my friend in BoA that he works less than 1 hour per day. TC: 800k
  • whatshisface 6y ago
    Wait until you find out how many people work less than 1 hour per day in the office!
    • kamaal 6y ago
      One of the biggest revelations in this pandemic remote work era is you don't 6 layers of management just to forward emails to each other. Lots of management turns out to be was just for crowd control.
  • almost_usual 6y ago
    WFH where? Are you paying 400k+ in taxes? What are you doing with your time? I think I’d go mad if I only worked 1hr a day with these lockdowns.
    • piva00 6y ago
      There is so much stuff to do with your time if you don't have to care about money. For me, personally, it'd be to invest time in making music, getting good enough in that as my taste is, I just need a lot more free time to practice it. Just like I had when I was a kid learning to program, I've only achieved it due to spending endless hours in experimentation and little projects without usefulness. It's something that is very hard to do, mentally speaking, when you are occupied 8 hours/day with work, I don't have capacity to spend another 4-5 hours/day with music. If I worked 1-2 hours/day I'd definitely have 8-10 hours daily to plunge into it, not only time-wise but my mental capacity would be much more free to put effort in it. And that can be any hobbies or passions you have that work hours don't allow you to pursue, if money isn't an issue I'm sure you will find ways to fill your time with what you enjoy doing. If you really enjoy work, well, then you have much more time to work on things you deem worth of.
• andrewstuart2 6y ago
  Is the justification for paying 6x more that those companies presume there's greater than a 6x increase in output due to network effects? I honestly haven't seen anybody try to justify the expenses over just trying to hire for the same qualities, but more dispersed.
  • ffggvv 6y ago
    theyre actually that much better IMO. the bay area has unbelievable talent.
    • andrewstuart2 6y ago
      Isn't that because the companies that attract that talent and pay those salaries are there, though? I don't doubt you, but also there's nothing about the geography of the SF bay that gives people more talent. The only reason I can think that a company wouldn't start elsewhere, or decide to move to save on costs while hiring the same talent level (who presumably wouldn't mind lower TCO) is the network value of existing bay area talent.
      • ffggvv 6y ago
        id say yes. and companies that want to compete with them do have to pay competitive wages. regardless of location. IE snapchat pays more than FANG despite being in LA, where wages are generally lower for tech companies, because they want to compete with FANG. Same with some companies in seattle etc.
• rajacombinator 6y ago
  FAANG caliber engineers can easily generate millions in profits for companies, and it’s not easy to find them. Downward pressure on salaries is not happening any time soon.
• Hydraulix989 6y ago
  We have been in a global pandemic for one year now. Meanwhile, nothing has really shifted in terms of market value of world-class engineers. If a pandemic isn't enough to cause the "bubble" to burst, any reasonable person would struggle to say that doom and gloom is impending. Software is still eating the world (arguably even moreso as of late). If companies are fighting for remote talent by showering them with the same kind of compensation packages as they would have gotten in San Francisco and New York, how is that the logical conclusion that can be drawn? Almost all of the remote engineers I know have successfully negotiated keeping their same salary (despite all of this hubbub about lower salaries elsewhere). Where is all of this hidden world-class engineering talent? I'm from the Midwest and could count on fingers how many people from my hometown even knew what C++ was. Out of all of those fortunate people, only one of them still lives there. Can you imagine any American company contending with the Chinese government for hiring remote workers (let alone risking infosec -- the other top article on HN today is about a Chinese company breeching a US competitor)? Can you imagine any IIT-caliber engineer wanting to work remote instead of move to the US? My Indian-American colleagues have described the abject starvation and poverty at home to me. I've also seen it myself first hand while traveling. South Korean engineers have close-knit online communities for moving to the US for work in Silicon Valley (there's even a Korean government agency to facilitate this). Pockets of talented engineers have also existed in Poland, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine as well (look at the IOI rankings), but timezones make these remote workers hardly manageable. My previous company was almost entirely staffed from Eastern European immigrants who happily packed their bags and booked one way plane tickets to SFO. Those people have been through multiple periods of history aptly described as none other than sheer hell, with the literal climate to boot (I.e. hath frozen over). Outside of these countries, you're no longer hiring the best of the best. Talent is still scarce, and nations that have the government, culture, population, and resources to foster it are numbered. If I had to guess, every single person I worked with while I was at FAANG had a 150+ IQ (top 0.1%ile). Many had PhDs (we called them "research scientists") or Ivy League caliber degrees.