Ask HN: How much do you make at a remote job?
Inspired by threads about Amazon [1] and Google [2], I thought that we would all benefit from some more information about the pay of remote jobs.
Some companies seem to highly adjust for location, for example, Buffer is paying $93k for a developer in Hong Kong, $77k in Buenos Aires, and $144k in San Francisco, for the same job.
This raises questions about determining 'fair' salary outside the major cities, where the cost of living is well known and understood, and sources such as Numbeo and similar sometimes miss essential issues.
So, dear reader, what's your job, where are you based, on what's your salary?
The more information we have available, the better off we are! :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312984
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449
128 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threaddrome@protonmail.com
Granted, this was in 2009, but I was billing back then over 1500€ a week for web development (Python) to a couple of Italian companies. Tax-free too. Remotely. And I'm only semi-fluent in the language.
I also know quite a few Italians working remotely for American companies. Heck, I'm currently working with a guy from Bari and I know for a fact the American company we're both working with pays him six figures.
I'd give a serious go to exploring alternatives.
I'm currently super underpaid trying to switch jobs though.. It sucks here
Feel free to reach me (linkedin: vemv91), we're in need of an extra dev!
On a side note, how would they know if I lied? What would happen if I had a SanFran address, bank account, and everything but I lived in the middle of no where?
Also, is it legal to discriminately pay people different amounts based on where they live? I can't see a valid way to say, for most positions, that the people are more or less valuable to the company based on location.
If you're doing defense contracting or other such marketable services and you are hiring people who live in DC then yes I can see it but for run of the mill product development I cannot.
Certainly curious myself, it would be easy enough just to pick my parents' house as my permanent residence...
I'd say that is horribly unfair. What if this same form of open discrimination were applied to any other useless factor? Being in a location other then specific areas means nothing for remote position that is open to anyone around the world.
What you are willing to pay for a service should be what you are willing to pay for the service. Not anything as a function of location.
But isn't it fair, because you can choose your location where you want to work remotely from depending on your personal preference with no need to account for costs?
If they pay $30,000 a Bulgarian developer remotely, are they atomically going to adjust to $150,000 if some day he moves to London? I don't think so.
Use a friend's address in SF and be done with it if they do so.
If I'm a native from buenos aires for example, for me the ideal might to stay there, so ok, maybe it's fair that's my salary is adjusted with my cost of living.
but at the same time, it's the same labor and same output for the company, just cheaper. So you can also see that as a way for the company to get cheaper labor... If you are so much into having a remote team, then why would you discriminate against location right?
It can be seen as "we love remote, but actually just because it allows us to get the same labor for cheaper!".
Well, minimizing the cost of running business is very reasonable, as long as it's fair to the employees which is subjective and complicated issue.
I think that this is a fairly complicated issue. Some points:
* if you pay the SF rate for developers in small towns in Easter Europe or Siberia or India or whatever, where the average salary is less than $750/mo and sometimes much lower, you might have some odd dynamics. Golden handcuffs and all that;
* however, it is reasonably often an intentional decision to live in a cheaper place, with less opportunities, etc, so that you can save more money. So not really fair to heavily penalize for that and questionable how much should you penalize;
* it's hard to adjust the numbers globally, really. There are some web sites about cost of living, but they ignore loads of details about the local dynamics. Often it's just a crowd sourced average.
So paying the SF (or NYC or whatever) rate globally probably wouldn't work, you need some adjustments. The severity of such adjustments is hard to get right.
> If you're doing defense contracting or other such marketable services and you are hiring people who live in DC then yes I can see
That is fair but it is one scenario out of many that I'm sure seldom plays out. If I'm running a business the LAST thing I want is ANYONE outside of sales talking to the client. Only makes for bad bad things but it can still be a factor.
That being said that is obviously not what is happening here.
Basically, Phoenix is our standard bearer for scale. Seattle is just so much more expensive that you can't employ anyone in Seattle for those rates, so the higher pay scale is necessity. If everyone could be paid at Phoenix rates, they would be. The compensation is equitable based on cost of living.
It sounds nice at first glance, but I don't hear about it happening. Is that because no one is attempting or because no one is surviving the attempt?
This tends to make them really really good deal for an employee in Mississippi, and a really really bad deal for someone in NYC or SF.
My take? A business wants the best employee it can get for the dollar. If your best employee for salary X is some guy in Mississippi, then so be it. If only a guy in NYC can fill your need, then I guess you need to raise your rate.
My clients are from all over the US - all 4 timezones. I work in the Pacific Timezone (SF) - Sleep at 6 am my local time and wake up at 2 pm. I know I can do this right now as I am young but it's not good for health (Or maybe it's fine if your body adjusts?).
Not once has any client asked me to come over and meet them and that works for me. I've also mentioned to some of them them that I do travel and work but never told them I'm actually out of the country.
I've ported my US number to Google Voice and that works perfectly.
EDIT: I think there are 2 things clients worry about if the freelancer is not in the US:
1) Will he be able to work in my Timezone, will I be able to call him when I want?
2) Can I trust the quality of the developer?
I think it's weird, that if a freelancer is based in SF working remotely, he can charge $X/hr but if that same freelancer moves to a different place (Singapore or Tokyo or Mumbai or Arusha) offering the same level of quality and service, he can only demand $Y/hr where X>Y.
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Ask me anything :)
It is just that they talk to me on my US cell phone number during regular US hours and I'd think they assume I'm in the US.
Yes, I might be walking on a thin line of being unethical/unprofessional.. But my clients are really happy with my work. So I tell myself, as long as I am providing value to them, they should pay me what I deserve and not based on my location.
Also, I don't really have an option, I did not want to get a regular H1B visa and so because of that, I thought it would be better I continue work living outside. The clients were remote even before I left.
I now have a pretty good reputation on Upwork and get a lot of work from there.
Also, giving talks at relevant tech meetups and having Youtube videos for those helps in getting leads.
$155k base plus a number of stock options (value of ~60k when I first joined under a year ago, now ~144k) vested over a period 4 years.
I spend ~$24k per year, live comfortably. Love my job!
Which part of the world do you live in (Europe (I'd assume Eastern or Southern), Asia, South America, Africa), if you don't mind sharing?
My general advice would be to ignore companies that play the "Market Card" against you. Change the conversation to be about the value that you generate. If they won't budge, find somewhere else. Companies that make people victims of the market of where they live are generally going to be awful places to work anyway.
If you can scrounge up the money the best is to go to a conference in a "major" software country. Try and meet as many people there as possible. Will it cost a couple thousand dollars? Yup. Will a good paying job replace that money in a few weeks? Oh yes.
If you can't do that, a lot of people seem to post that they are looking for developer help on Twitter. Do some crafty searching to try and find these people. Otherwise you'll have to use remote job boards which aren't bad but aren't great.
In my experience there are two types of companies looking for remote developers. One is looking to increase value by paying less and the other is aware that hiring is hard and having access to a wide pool of talent is where the value is at.
I'm loving working from home, it has some challenges--staying focused is rough. I log time using Hubstaff and as long as I can stay off reddit/hackernews I'm golden for time management lol.
Pay: $140 USD/hour (before taxes)
Working for a US company. I'm based in Romania.
Out of curiosity, what legal entity are you using?
SRL? PFA?
I guess my point is that you have to give them a reason to look at you, even if it's just "Hey, I remember that guy/girl from that blog/mailing list/conference. They seem decent."
____
* Most of that activity was driven by enthusiasm. I'm not sure I'd have the determination to invest that much time into an activity just as a career move.
In fact if you work remote I would go to other places in Argentina to work in which over a k per month will give you amazing lifestyle,like Bariloche, or Mendoza, without the safety problems of Buenos Aires. I would hold a server in Buenos Aires and work there eating first class meat and riding horses all day.
Buenos Aires is actually one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, of all Latin American capitals. I haven't been there in a few years, but the difference between official and black market exchange rate alone made a massive difference.
I don't know how the exchange rate is these days, but back then you could rent a luxury 3 bedroom condo in Buenos Aires poshest neighbourhood for $1k a month or less.
Lima has both very good areas, where the cost of living is very high, and horrendous areas (most of the city, actually).
The only places I know in Latin America with a cost of living as high as Bogota are Sao Paulo and Rio. So I'm astonished to hear Buenos Aires is in that range now, since the last time I was around there the cost of living was easily half of what you see in Brazil and Colombia.
bogota i much cheaper than rio and sao paulo and rio and sao paulo are not as expensive as they used to be since brazil was hit hard by recession
Have prices in Argentina, converted to dollars actually increased?
I was also in Santa Cruz earlier this year, it's not really comparable to any of the major cities in Latin America, of course it is cheaper, but you get what you pay for.
I was the only remote employee, the only contractor, and the only web developer. The rest of the team consisted of designers, marketers, and iOS engineers working full-time from the office.
I've since quit that job, but I saved up enough money to take time off and work on my own projects (e.g. www.IndieHackers.com).
Based in one of the top-10 COL cities in the US.
$150k / yr plus 2% of profits.
I tend to only spend about 50% of my time in my home-city.
TBH I think I'm being underpaid by about $75k; if I were able to live somewhere cheap I would find my compensation about right, but I have a lot of ties to the place I'm currently living. There are other things I find frustrating (e.g., few resources, sometimes precarious whether we'll make payroll, not enough mentorship). I am currently negotiating with some of the really big employers in the field, to see if I can get up to around $250.
I lived and worked in SF for few years before my wife and I decide to move back to our home town to be closer to family. When I first went remote, I worked for a company who believed in paying people based on their location and not based on their skill level. This made for a rather unpleasant feeling as an employee and ultimately lead to me no longer working for them.
Since then I have joined a company who cares about the individual, and believes in paying people for what they are worth. Overall, my morale is much higher because of it and my loyalty to the company is greater in return.
To answer the question, I make the same amount as any equally skilled engineer at my company who lives in SF (or anywhere else in the country for that matter).
Then one day I decided to not cut my rate in half when bringing on a new client. Nobody but me seemed to notice, so now I don't do that anymore. Life got decidedly gooder.
So the answer to the posed question is that one should always bill out at their butt-in-seat Bay Area rate. For me, that was... Well, let's just say it was never less than double your highest number above.
The thing they're buying is you. Never cut your rate based on your location.
I can point to real products in the wild demonstrating that I can deliver a shipping app from the idea stage with no hand holding, and I can put together an entire sentence over the phone. But beyond that, there's nothing special that I do that other developers can't, except ask to be paid a market rate.
And to head off the inevitable comment about contracting being unsustainable and feast-or-famine, I recently ended a 5 year, full time remote gig at that aforementioned Bay Area rate. It's certainly doable, for a regular dev off the street. You just need to be able to prove that you're good at what you do.
communication and response time is also pretty huge. Employers love people that get right back to them with details, or at least a response to let them know they are working on it.
I myself am a contractor, but I also hire other contractors under me, so I know a little bit about the hiring of contractors process. Most of the time I start with something small, and work them into the larger jobs. For instance, I'll start them with debugging problem areas of our website / app. If they do well and fit with our remote team, I will give them more and more. Money doesn't matter nearly as much as being able to get the job done so if someone quotes $100/hour vs $75/hour its not even a consideration.
for instance, getting a really nice high def headshot on a website with actual samples of your apps, designs, or projects can really go a long way. (as opposed to an email with written descriptions of what you've done). Active Github pages are great, but its also nice to make a "demo page" of all of your end products.
lastly, it is great to see passion. this might be an active Twitter profile, a blog where you write a monthly post on what you are working on, or even an active Instagram where you take cool pics of your products and interact with others. it isn't mandatory but it definitely sticks out, big time.
I don't make nearly as much as many of the people in here, but I do live a comfortable life where I can travel and have some nice things, and I've been doing so for the last 10 years.
In total, I earned $210k (before tax) last year. I'm more of a digital nomad (part of the attraction of having a remote job) than really based in a specific but mostly alternate between countries in Europe and Asia renting an apartment for 2-3 months at a time.
Most important thing when working remotely is discipline and communication. Since you're not with the customers in their office, you need to really produce results and make sure they see those results.
Last job, also remote: SaaS startup, $95K per year + options. I was a full-stack Rails/Ember dev. Also not a Texas-based company.
On-again-off-again Rails/Ember contracting, always remote: $90/hour. Unrelated to the SaaS startup above.
How did you all find your jobs? My blindly applying online doesn't seem to be working out well.
"Cold calling" a company by sending in my resume never worked for me.
The networking makes sense, I don't have a big one and not a lot of remote stuff within it. I'll have to begin to remedy that. Thanks for the advice.
The best clients are the ones who contact you directly so reminding people you're available in your projects is important.
I'll do another ShowHN and the like, and make it clear I'm available for work on the readmes, etc.
London is bit of an exception, but lifestyle there is crazy expensive obviously
If you want a US rate you have to compete globally, which is quite discouraging to me.
So as a freelancer I'm happy to have a theoretically 'low' rate but which in practice lets me live more than well in Spain.
I guess they pay that in order to compete with London?
Else they don't seem to correspond with Germany's market and cost-of-living...
Check out http://gulp.de/. They have a regular survey among their users with a good breakdown by location, experience and the type of work the freelancers do. You can also browse profiles there or project listings on http://etengo.de.
Answering your question, I've not been looking anywhere - just what I read or could infer.
500 euros/day/head sounds beyond wasteful to me, at least when not in SF/London.
I can only imagine there's got to be an awful ASAP culture in those environments...
Personally I am much less stressed out doing corporate contracting than I was with the shitty freelance work I did before, subcontracting with web agencies that haggle about every hour.
This is how my rate developed over the years:
* 50 DM/h working for a great agency as a student (that was in 2000) * 15 €/h working for an agency as a student (Yep, I was dense enough to take a paycut. Didn't even occur to me to ask for at least 25. So much facepalming...) * 30 €/h working for the same agency when I decided to do freelancing full-time * 30 €/h, then 40 €/h working for a small software company (First time I got to 40 hours a week of billable time. I was swimming in money! ;) * 45 €/h working for another agency (iOS development) * 50 €/h first contracting gig at $BIGCORP (160 hours a month - 8000€) * 65 €/h second contracting gig at $BIGCORP2 (which is where I still am, 160+ hours a month - > 10k) * 65 €/h working for a friend with a product idea (only a few hours, far from full-time) * a few fixed-price projects in between, most of them were a desaster, one was decent
Regarding "wasteful"; It's supply and demand. For some reason the capitalism game works much better in contracting than with permanent jobs in Germany. I think part of it is that employees are so hard to get rid of and the overhead is high (~40%?).
There are tons more pimps like Computer Futures and in Germany Gulp and Etengo. Just sign up on their website, upload your CV and expect to get spammed with every contract they have to fill.
Searching for them in GMail, I just noticed that many project descriptions are in German, even if the job itself only requires English. They are very formulaic so it shouldn't be too much of a problem if you don't speak German.
Here's an example of one in English:
I am looking for a Frontend Developer for a very well-known exciting client of mine .
Location: Berlin
Start: 01.09.2016
Lengths: 3 Months ++
Technical skills (please also reply, even if some technologies are not part of your skillset):
Sounds interesting? Please send your CV and your hourly rate to redacted@example.com. If you know anybody who wants to do this role, please forward the project description.Having said that, some project descriptions mention a number of days per week that one can work remote or "remote negotiable". And then I've seen a few that were 100% remote, where the recruiters where really excited about it. For them it's still very rare I guess.
I have a bit of a middle ground with my current team. I'm onsite most of the time. But since I've been there multiple times and earned their trust, I can work remotely as long as I don't stray away too far wrt to time zones. I'll probably make use of that in the fall/winter. Thinking of Barcelona, Tarifa, Canary Islands, maybe Malta.
Regarding C++ jobs: The ones I see are usually Qt or embedded Linux stuff (often automotive). There is definitely a lot of C++ contracting work available and I can imagine the rates are at least on par, probably higher than web dev.
* I assume he is male from seeing his first name and profile picture on github
edit: Example C++ project mail with "remote possible"
für meinen Berliner Kunden suche ich einen erfahrenen C++ Entwickler, der Lust auf ein sehr spannendes und langfristiges Projekt hat:
Start: 01.02.15
Dauer: >1 Jahr (50% Auslastung)
Remote: Nach Absprache möglich
Bei Interesse senden Sie mir Ihren CV (in Word-Format) unter Angabe Ihrer Verfügbarkeit und aktuellem Stundensatz (All-In).Same question if you are a digital nomad (let's say switching countries monthly) ?
No duh you say, but people have posted in HN threads like this one about how they just have their income payed into a US bank account, so they aren't earning any money in the other country.
For digital nomads, it adds even more complexity since it's a bit of a grey area.
There are no taxes on foreign generated income here (Colombia).
However I cannot bring over $10k a year through the financial system without being hit with a 3% financial transaction tax.
Fortunately it is easy to legally elude that tax, paying for everything with a foreign-issued card does the trick. And every once in a while a quick shopping weekend abroad with the girlfriend is a good way to bring a new laptop and $9999 x 2 in cash.
I joined a company as a remote Senior Full Stack Engineer at 95k a year. It was a jump up from my previous company where I just negotiated up to 80k from 65k. This was in Northern Virginia, where 95k was pretty decent - though toward the end of my 1.5 years there I was expecting a major jump to 110, 120k based on the work. When I started asking for my raise, I learned it's a lot harder to negotiate as a remote employee and was laid off.
I picked up a contracting type gig where I negotiated a decent pay for where I moved (SoCal), but at the end of the month they decided I wasn't worth paying almost 2x as much as their devs in Poland/Brazil and such.
I then took a nice paying, stable in-office job and couldn't be happier :)
First job was $90K.
Current is $125K.