What I don’t see is why all companies should follow Bay Area salaries.

By being able to get a Bay Area salary (e.g. $150k/year) while working from anywhere in the world (e.g. any city where $40k/year is considered comfortable living and $80k/year is considered "well off"), the incentive to continue saturating the area with local talent decreases.

Same salary, lower cost of living, AND the ability to be a homeowner in the foreseeable future? That's a hard deal to beat.

This could be good for people who send some money back home (e.g. Indians). If you have a high number is absolute terms, then you can send more money to family.

$150K is below the median base salary offer we see for senior software engineers. See https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary -- with a few notes:

* This is base salary only. Total compensation is significantly higher once you include factors like equity compensation, bonuses, benefits.

* This does vary a lot with stage of company. Earlier-stage startups use more equity and less salary. We work with companies from pre-series A to public megacorp.

* This is for senior engineers. Less experienced engineers do typically earn less.

* We're fairly selective in the engineers we work with, but it's based on the abilities you demonstrate in our multiple-choice quiz and technical interview, rather than your credentials.

Typical for what? SF? Your company? CA? For people with your level of experience?

It's fairly atypical for French to work only 35h a week. I've never seen that anywhere in tech in the private sector.

[https://github.com/anfurny/scalaRiddle]

What about the guy with 25+ years of experience?

EDIT:

Friends, this is what happens when you post before coffee. As ams6110 points out I'm in violent agreement with the person I'm rebutting. Should have stayed in bed.

Note that salary is a misnomer. The term now is "total compensation" which has a significant RSU portion.

Most locales also have companies that know that the best talent can go to the Bay Area and make $150,000 and much more, so they offer salaries that are way above normal for the area, but competitive to Bay Area salaries.

But if you’re not on that side of the talent scale (or not perceived as being on that side of it), your salary ends up being in line with your locales average salary across multiple industries for “mid level job requiring a bachelors degree”

But I definitely don’t agreee the peak is below 150k...

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-jose-software-enginee...

According to SO salary estimator the median salary of a 5y experience Java dev with a masters degree is $108k in SF.

Same profile in Hamburg yields €38k and in Paris €42k on average.

Edit: made less jerky

And worldwide, Silicon Valley is probably less than 1 percent of all tech hires and less than 10 percent of the top hires. Silicon Valley takes an impressive amount of the top talents for its size, but not most, and almost certainly a decreasing amount. The world is large, and by far the most talents couldn't even get a visa for the US if Google or Apple wanted them.

Did anyone suggest they should?

ORIGINAL: I believe it should be about 100 USD/hour for skilled consultant, but maybe someone with more experience can correct that.

I should really look into what is to be known to get 100 USD/hour for medium term projects in Prague. I would be able to live from 2 to 3 month project for full year.

You have to transform yourself into a consultant, being a contractor locks you into the rates you mentioned (the ceiling is around $50 to $70; big agencies are able to sell contractors to enterprises for around $80). It's not for everyone though, the rate is higher for a reason, you have to do a lot more things yourself and many devs don't enjoy doing them. Narrowing you specialization helps very much; it's also helpful to choose only a few (around 2) verticals (e.g. logistics, material production, ...) that you work in and mention that to everyone.

That's pretty much the only difference. Lots of guys try dividing their bill rate by four, but as I said above, that's just personal preference. (And also diminshes the perceived value of what you do.)

And depending on the client's timezone, you could start work later during the day...

All of my local clients accept a compromise; meet in-person once per sprint (every 2-4 weeks). Otherwise all work is done remotely.

My remote employees and contractors are not required to commute or work onsite, therefore the remote rate applies.

Kudos to Basecamp for committing to standard salary levels, but I believe geographic cost-of-living adjustments are more accurately assessed through periodic bonuses.

How many employees/subs do you have?

< 10 employees.

But the "bay pay" isn't for your work. It's so you can work - i.e. cover your expenses associated with working at that particular place.

So as long as we're covering expenses, I'd prefer they cover mine at that second place. The fact that I might actually be living cheaper is none of their concern.

I have met Indian developers living in India making just about as much as they would in the US and they were always busy.

If my living expenses were far below my rate, I'd save my money happily against the possibility my living expenses would go up or my income would go down in the future, and would not lower my rates.

If I occasionally lost a bid but still got enough work, I would not lower my rates.

As a worker, lowering your rates unnecessarily screws other workers, and future-you is another worker getting screwed.

Given a situation with two developers working remotely with exactly the same skills, experience and knowledge on the same project, but one works in India, the other one works in the Bay area.

Can you give me one valid reason why the developer in India should get a penny less than the developer in the Bay area?

And that the cost of living is less in India than in SF is not, in my opinion, a valid reason.

You pay your developers, or any staff come to that, what they're worth to you.

You can reverse that question to help answer it.

Can you give me one valid reason why the developer in the Bay area should get a penny more than the developer in India?

One of the reasons the Bay area developer is paid more is because it costs so much to live there that they need to make more to pay their bills. If they won't work for less because of the cost of living, then it's a factor in how much they get paid. As such, it's not just the employer that's factoring employee location into the amount they get paid.

Salary levels aside I have been part of a company based in sf that had money issues so the indian side took over with local financing and closed all worldwide offices and moved r&d to india. Which made sense because the future customer base was in india.

Location and connection to customer base matter. I guess less so for developers compared to the product manager.

It's not that easy. What they are worth to you is your upper limit. What they are willing to work for is the lower bound. It's composed of many things, mostly supply and demand, but not an insignificant portion is living expenses. Most employers would gravitate towards the lower bound. And for a dev in India, it might be reasonable to pay them less. If there's another company willing to pay Bay rate, that's great for the dev, but the expectation that everyone (let's stay in remote developers category) around the globe should be paid the same is not based in reality.

Developers in India are generally paid less because employers can, which is clearly why companies look to employ staff in India.

As a developer living in the UK, while I don't work remotely (often), if I was in a position to do so and decided I was going to move to India, I certainly wouldn't expect my employer to cut my salary as a result. If they did, I'd be out of the door and looking for a new employer promptly.

From the company's perspective, the conditions are not equal, try as we might (and do) to make them so. They are working on the other side of the clock from much of their peers and technical leadership. They are 18 hours of flight away when it comes time to visit on-site. They spend more time, on average, commuting to/from work. They face weather conditions that preclude reliable commuting several weeks per year.

They face disadvantages inherent to their location and related to the fact that their location isn't the HQ. It's not their fault, but to make the economics make sense for the company, they are paid well for the local market, but less than the Bay area market. If wages in India were Bay area wages, we wouldn't have started new dev teams in India.

The condition of one experienced dev moving away to a different location (I don't care whether higher or lower cost) is different from trying to build a de novo team in a different location. You take with you the experience and relationships you developed and that makes you different from your hypothetical identical twin who is applying to work remotely from wherever you are contemplating moving.

We, like most for-profit companies, generally try to do things that increase profits.

We don't enforce that, as a condition of employment, you must accept share-based compensation. Employees are mostly [1] paid in cash and we let employees decide how much of that cash they want to invest in the company.

[1]-some executives are "forced" to accept share-based compensation as part of their comp.

If you pay less than 25%, the employee is very likely to find a better deal somewhere else. If you pay more than 33%, you might have occasional difficulty operating your business or giving raises.

There are plenty of potential employees willing to work for less than 25%, and a few more that will demand more than 33%. You should leave them to other employers, that will have other means of monetizing their work.

Candidates are perfectly able to self-sort themselves into a pay range appropriate for them, especially those that know their own worth versus the companies that routinely try to lowball.

This is why one of my stock interview questions is "how do you measure the value to the company of work done by this position?" For me, whether the response is honest or evasive is often more telling than any details given. In my view, the value an employer should bring to the table is the ability to monetize my work to a far greater extent than I could manage on my own. I might be able to provide $2X in value and charge $X for it as a freelancer, so an employer should at least be able to magnify my work into providing $3X or $4X and then pay me more than $X for it. Ideally, the employer squeezes $5X or more of value out of my work, and then pays me $1.6X or more to do it for them.

So what I'm willing to work for is not my lower bound. That bound comes from what I could get working the same job for someone else, or for myself, and that comes from how well different companies can convert my work into cash, and how greedy they are about capturing that additional value for themselves.

I would likely be willing to work for $40/hr. That amount keeps the bills paid. But it won't ever keep me from looking elsewhere for better work.

So my expectation is that employers that comb the globe looking for bargain employees are crap at monetizing the work of their employees. And to some extent, I think that Silicon Valley salaries are way above that 33% threshold, and are dooming those employers to future cash flow problems, unless they actually are able to bring in an extra $1M per developer--which I suppose could really happen with the right unicorn magic. It's really hard to judge, unless you can look at how the company makes money from their developers' work.

So, theoretically, in case of remote work and a global pool of talent, it is a less optimal use of your dollars to adjust salaries to the cost of living (all other things being equal, e.g. skill set level, culture).

Now with more competitors, salaries will probably end up rising close to SF ones--which are likely near to the upper bound, marginal value produced by the employee.

Because they are willing to take less.

The work is not worth more just because you happen to live in the bay area.

More here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16051409

> As the article so nicely points put, the work you're doing is exactly the same regardless of where you do it from. Charge accordingly.

First of all, a remote employee is not worth the same as one in the office. For 2 engineers of the same capacity, any employer or coworker would rather have the engineer physically near than physically afar. How much that discount is extremely hard to guess, but there should be one in the general case.

Also, being hired as a remote engineer from the get go is not the same commitment as being hired to be in the office. There is no personal or professional relationship yet. This means that being hired as a remote worker, you will generally be assigned remote work, and if they want collaborative, product and team roles, will hire someone to be in the office. The processes of hiring and working relationship are different.

Now, to my personal experiences: I worked remotely my first few years, and then as an in-office employee for a couple of years to a SF startup. After that, I left the US and worked remotely for the same company for 2 years. There was a minimal adjustment to salary: and then I had the incentive to study the finances of what was going on.

The company paid less payroll taxes, and I did not receive any benefits: no 401k matching, no free food, no snacking, no coffee expenditures, etc. The benefits lost my have compensated a chunk of the remote-ness productivity loss in the long run. But there was a cost to productivty and I could compare it solidly between my two periods: it took longer cycles to get some projects finished, and issues of importance sometimes had time-zone differences that made them more inconvenient to resolve.

But then I also saw why talk about cost of living. Working in the same company, I had seldom talked about salary with co-workers (and my personal policy is to disclose mine immediately, even if they dont disclose theirs). But after turning remote I got asked about my salary by a considerable amount of people, even from ex-coworkers! I dont think people have a right to be upset about it, but they do feel upset about such a thing. They perceive it unfair, because the costs are there for them, and maybe their job or their manager wont allow them to be remote.

The last part is only true because most of today's organizations and processes are organized this way. Objectively, there's very little (outside of the individuals ability/willingness to work) that can't be optimized for remote work using modern technology.

I've been working remote for many years now and even many large enterprises I have worked for recently have adopted tools needed for working remotely efficiently (easy video/chat/screen share, collaborative productivity tools etc.). At this point, my impression it's mostly mental barriers (managers!) that stall any progress in this area.

Only the most important one: communication.

Its like saying you dont need to meet someone in person before marrying them, because all you need to know can be asked on an email or a skype call..

> I've been working remote for many years now and even many large enterprises I have worked for recently have adopted tools needed for working remotely efficiently (easy video/chat/screen share, collaborative productivity tools etc.). At this point, my impression it's mostly mental barriers (managers!) that stall any progress in this area.

I have been mostly a remote worker and I'm positively confident in-office working is more productive than remote, the same way going to the gym is more effective than working out at your home for the whole. There are exceptions and deviations, but the generality is true. Thats my model, but reality also matches with that idea: othterwise remote companies would be eating in-office companies, but they arent.

Massive telecommuting is quite recent habit thanks to technology advancements and it still needs some paradigm shift especially on management level. Such shift had to happen in the past with introduction of computers in offices, on-line shopping, on-line banking, selling insurances etc.

Collaboration is great, but it's better as a purposeful thing spaced between uninterrupted work. As two-minute interruptions several times an hour, it's a serious impediment to focused work.

For me at least, my experience working remotely was that I was less integrated into the team, and struggled to contribute and keep up when planning involved ad hoc discussions. But I got more done per hour, and the conversations I did have with teammates were more structured and productive than they tend to be in person. We also had a better knowledge base and lower bus factor, because information was passed in text more than by word of mouth.

Under ideal circumstances with experienced teams, in-person work probably has an edge. After all, you can interact like it's remote work in any case where that's a better system. But in the real world, I suspect remote work has clear advantages for some tasks.

This is a good way to ensure unhappy employees stick around due to being paid a lot more than what they’d earn otherwise.

Think Google/Facebook total comp if you need a number to plug into your mental model. Software is a nice gig.

Too much light, sand, and heat to be able to concentrate

Even if you're working in a coastal hut, nothing beats good ergonomics of a real office

It's a very addictive schedule. The only downside is that you'll be alone pretty much all day because not a lot of people can work like that.

Jealousy factor can't be beat. But beyond making your friends/acquaintances drool on social media, yes the ergonomics stink for classic development.

However, I think variety is nice. Just like in an office situation, sometimes a breakthrough idea comes when sitting alone in an uncomfortable meeting room (and without secondary monitors). At home, I do some work on my back deck (partially remote worker here) but it's only when I'm in that mental place where I need to crawl out of a box and get a fresh look on things. It's also nice during meetings, so long as you prevent outdoor audio from distracting the conference call.

I find it relaxing and easier to concentrate. Probably related to how I stare out the window when thinking about a problem.