> 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.

This is why it will always be worth paying inflated salaries for FAANG companies. Taking all the top talent is a moat.

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.

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.

Extremely relevant for Canadian talent pools. Bleed to SF/Bay area is real.

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!

What makes you think their salaries are inflated and others are not lowballing?

I meant inflated relative to the mean. In principle I agree with your sentiment.

I don't think any company can afford to employ a significant percentage of the world's tech workers. Google has 150,000 staff, and even if half of them are developers that's only about 0.25% of the number of developers globally. Employing people as a moat only works within a large city (or a few dozen large cities). It can't be done if people can work from anywhere.

They don't need to. They just need to set the market rate so that start ups can't easily hire or retain the best; they're all competing to get into FAANGs, or failing that, companies that have the coffers to be second tier. The startup is left with the people willing to take a pay cut.

What's the real pool though? Most of the world's developers are either trash compared to the standard or working in a trash environment like Europe. It's basically SEA and the US in the leagues that matter which is a much smaller pool.

I'm in Europe (geographically anyway, technically the UK isn't in Europe right now). It isn't trash but I'd gladly swap my job for a remote one that pays NY wages.

I believe you're confusing the continent Europe with the European Union. UK is certainly in Europe.

As a British person who has been living through Brexit for years now, I am acutely aware of the difference. When Brits talk about whether they're in Europe or not it's always with reference to the EU. That's the one that actually makes a difference.

Until their competitors are providing the same products for less, or they are forcibly broken up by the government.

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.

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.

> 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?cou...

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.

My experience of London:

- There's little difference, time-wise, between being located in a town on commuter rail, vs somewhere three connections away on the tube. If you're inside the M25 but outside the North / South Circular, you need to be very close to a station or you're practically worse off than someone living in a town on the railway.

- Motorcycles and scooters, and increasingly, electric bicycles, are the big hack. Free or cheap parking, mostly unaffected by traffic (filtering), not stuck when the trains are cancelled, not constrained by the sparseness of the rail and tube network as you get further from the centre.

Crossrail isn't open yet (due next year, but I wouldn't bet on it); Crossrail 2 is mothballed and probably won't be built for a few decades.

I live in a 120sqm 4 bed house with garden in Enfield, 40 minutes motorcycle commute from Clerkenwell, or 60-80 minutes by tube and train, depending on delays and timing (don't leave enough slack and you miss a connection). We used to live in a very small 60 sqm 3 bed house with garden in Bow, which was about 30 minutes from Clerkenwell. Mortgage now is £1500; rent (for over 10 years, nice landlord) used to be £1300. There's fewer food delivery options, and an Uber home is (or was) the preferred route after a night out, vs a night bus to Bow, but overall it's a higher quality of life.

Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich.

>"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich."

I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?

I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London.

Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substantially better than being a salaried employee in London (although food in particular is MUCH more expensive in Switzerland such that people will drive an hour to Aldi across the border in Germany to go shopping).

Fun fact #1: there are limits to how many groceries you can bring into Switzerland. Meat in particular. You can get checked for this at the border.

Fun fact #2: IIRC years ago the supermarket just across the border in Germany had the highest revenue of any supermarket in Germany.

As for work authorization, it is relatively easy for EU citizens to get and somewhat harder for non-EU citizens. It generally takes 5 years on a B permit (work visa) to get a C permit (permanent residence) if you're EU, 10 if you're not.

I imagine with Brexit, UK citizens are now in the harder category.

Thanks. I think I knew Google had an office there. I'm curious if you or anyone else knows if there are other interesting tech or startup shops there?

I'd say there are 4 main places in Switzerland: around both ETH (the most prestigious universities) in Zürich and Lausanne, with plenty of spinoffs, in Geneva (mostly finance) and in Zug (lots of crypto).

Zürich has all (most?) of the big tech, plus lots of start-ups. Lausanne is mostly just start-ups and small companies.

For money, it's mostly Google. And that's the offer I've taken, turning down an AWS offer in Berlin. I am an EU citizen, so there's no meaningful barrier to living in Switzerland. It was a very hard choice vs Berlin though.

Was it a difficult choice because of lifestyle in Berlin vs Zurich? I would curious to hear your thoughts on that. Does AWS have an engineering office in Berlin now?

It's AWS Redshift in particular, in Berlin. My background in data volume and query optimization, along with compiler development, made me a particular fit. The Google job is actually a worse fit, focusing mostly on data volume, schema management and APIs. But I probably won't be in the same role indefinitely.

Why Berlin vs Zurich decision was hard: in part the cost of living (e.g. childcare) in Zurich, the fact it's outside the EU (e.g. very little consumer protection, less consumer choice, a hard border with customs), and the relative conservatism of society leading to a lot of things which make it harder for women to work: early closing of shops (not that different to Berlin to be sure), apartment living and limitations on running washing machines (if you don't have a housewife to do laundry during the day), school finishing early on Wednesdays and 2 hour lunches where children are expected to go home and eat (housewife again), etc. My partner half-jokes that we should get a housewife or maybe one each.

Oh and recycling religion which I don't buy into - I reckon there are very few things which it makes sense to recycle heavily - primarily metals - but Switzerland promotes it as a virtue. Sorting recycling materials does not make me feel virtuous; it makes me want to pay someone to remove the problem. This isn't that much different to Germany though.

I reckon the AWS salary in Berlin would have put me higher in the income distribution for the city than the Google salary in Zurich, but overall, even accounting for higher costs, I expect to have a lot more disposable income in Zurich. Taxes, for one thing, are lower - though where you live can make a substantial difference.

Lifestyle as in nightlife, restaurants, multiculturalism etc.: not such a big deal to me right now with a 12 month old kid. As a motorcyclist I like the idea of the Alps and less crime. I've had 6 motorcycles taken in London, including one bikejacking at a stop light and not including an attempted bikejacking where I outran my pursuers to help. For younger single people I think Berlin would be a better choice. We already had much of that experience in London before Brexit though.

Zurich is also much closer to western Europe. Munich, Milan and Paris (surprisingly) are 4 hours by train. Berlin is almost in Poland. From my EUrail trip in the 2000s, I recall acutely how pleasant it was to be in Switzerland after having gone through most of the ex Eastern Block countries, to Greece, then ferry to Italy and up over the Alps.

This "can't code a for loop" is a misleading statement given the kind of interviews that are typical at e.g. Facebook.

Even if that candidate could code a for loop and a while loop and knew the syntax of that programming language by heart and knew their algorithms to boot, it's more than likely that they would fail the interview anyway.

Complaining about people that can't code loops emphasizes that the candidates are incompetent while omitting the also very relevant fact that many companies are ridiculously difficult to please.

The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies.

A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.

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.

A company that goes fully remote might simply choose to close offices in the 4-6x places.

> As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.

I worked for a large tech company that started going remote before COVID. Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United States at all. Why hire a $100K Midwest US engineer when you can hire two good international engineers for the same salary and not have to pay for their health insurance?

There will always be some demand for US engineers and time zones put some limits on outsourcing, but opening the floodgates to full-remote companies means that even engineers in the cheapest US cities are now competing against increasingly qualified engineers who will happily take half the compensation to do the exact same work.

> Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United States at all.

Facebook, Google, etc. have offices around the world, but that hasn't led them to close any of their US offices. If there were enough equally qualified candidates in these areas that would accept compensation at a fraction of Bay Area salaries, why wouldn't they follow suit?

Companies with huge cash reserves are not optimizing things to save money. Companies dripping with cash will continue to have their offices in prestigious locations and continue to pay absurd amounts of money for acquisitions we roll our eyes at, because money to them is cheap. Same way some people buy absurdly overpriced luxuries, because the price is not an issue.

OP was contending that even the FAANG gravy train is over. My claim is that if increasingly talented engineers exist elsewhere, they would have already been hired and emmigrated to the US Tier 1 city HQs in the first place.

We already have a majority immigrant workforce, and talent is still scarce as it is. I am originally from the American Midwest growing up within driving distance to a top ranked CS university that attracts diverse students from all over the globe with near perfect standardized test scores, literally contending with the likes of Stanford and MIT.

However, our graduates all leave town afterwards for greener pastures at the usual suspects. We just recently got out first homegrown unicorn startup, and there are plenty of satellite offices for brand name companies here. Still, hardly anybody ever stays.

World class engineering talent abroad wants their golden ticket to the US, in particular, to a handful of specific cities only. The vast majority of my FAANG coworkers are immigrants, for example, and our interview bar is more selective than Harvard in terms of raw acceptance rate. Tech companies are essentially in an arms race for brains, even lobbying for more favorable immigration laws. Surprisingly, none of the people we have hired (and cleared our challenging bar for algorithm interview performance) have any desire to return to their home countries. Meanwhile, this global workforce has not dropped total compensation one iota.

Because they aren't just trying to hire the top talent. They are also trying to lock up top talent so that their competitors can't benefit from it.

> Why hire a $100K Midwest US engineer when you can hire two good international engineers for the same salary and not have to pay for their health insurance?

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, engineer salaries are bimodal. I believe this is because labor demand is bimodal. It sounds the company you are describing has this hiring philosophy: we prefer to hire as many mode 1 engineers as we can for the dollar. However, there are also companies that have a counterparty hiring philosophy: we would rather have a smaller, more mode-2 engineer centric organization than a larger more mode-1 engineer centric organization.

What's more, I've noticed that the small, more deliberately leveraged organizations have a strong bias towards the latter hiring philosophy, because it applies not just to their technology divisions, but to the organization as a whole. In finance, it's the boutiques; in technology, it's the startups. Large companies that are able to maintain mode-2 centric culture exist, but generally only when they have high-profit revenue based on R&D.

> timezones

Wait till they discover all the competent English speaking engineers in South America

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.

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.

In a world where employees need to show up to 6X Co HQ everyday to work, the cost of living and the cost of hiring is directly linked (6x). But in a world where people can work anywhere, salaries will be disconnected from housing costs and we may see a lot of 6x companies happily slide lower. It will come down to how many employees meet the 6X Co's hiring bar and how good 6X Co is at turning new hires into productive employees. If there are enough available people above their current headcount, the floor will be closer to 1x. How close to 1x (2x? 4x? 5.5x?) is hard to know. I don't think it's simple to know where the market will fall after a remote work revolution.

Great points and I will add:

It is easy for a thousand engineers to train in Bay Area and move elsewhere.

But could another locale train a thousand engineers to be ready to employed in the Bay Area companies?

In many cases, the value (initial value) comes from assimilating in the culture and while a lot of bigCos could still make people work in Bay Area before sending them home, the challenge is for these locations to evolve to be capable themselves.

This forwards an over-inflated notion of the cultural and knowledge value that working at a Bay Area company imparts.

The Bay Area does not have a monopoly on good culture or experts: at times it may even notably lack them. There are many experts there and much good culture to learn from, but there are also many idiots and charlatans, and it is just as likely you'll find one of them first. How does a beginner tell the difference?

There is no locational bound on where people can learn to write great software, on where they can write great software, on where they can teach others to write great software, or on where a strong culture can be grown and shared, i.e. one of good ethics, responsibility, fun, art, innovation, trust, etc.

The Bay Area is not magical; it is just a place where a lot of money and a useful attitude toward spending it (on risky technology ventures) got cyclically concentrated over time.

I believe most Engineers in the Bay Area did train somewhere else. California has 1/4 immigrants from other countries, and some similar amount moved there from other states.

> "In a world where employees need to show up to 6X Co HQ everyday to work, the cost of living and the cost of hiring is directly linked (6x)."

They are not directly linked, and it is a harmful falsehood to perpetuate (sorry to single your specific comment out here -- I know lots of people are saying it.)

Would they pay you more if you moved to a more expensive area of the city, or less if you chose a bit cheaper? Would they pay you noticeably more in a year of higher than average inflation? Would they change your wage depending upon your marital status, which impacts expenses dramatically? At any point in setting your offer number, did they do calculations of your reasonable expenses, or ever take into account what type of lifestyle you lead? No.

If you are a software developer, you likely make enough to pay an average person's bills in your area, plus some luxuries, and then a bit more beyond. Likely enough to put away some savings over time. Was $YourCo just ... very generous in letting you have that amount of savings, compared to other industries, which pay less?

No. None of these are the case, because cost of living is not relevant to your salary, except to the small degree in which it factors into what the market (i.e. we) expects and will accept. That is where "region" has traditionally played a role, because low mobility between regions has historically made them into homogenous, isolated markets, which is where this falsehood can creep in.

So what really sets that number?

Industry salary reports, people's beliefs in 'the market trends', gossip about what other companies are offering, the acceptance rate they've had on offers in the recent past, your stated salary expectations, your experience level, the degree of specialization your role has, the importance of that role to them, their overall budget for hires, whether you negotiated or not, and whether or not you have competing offers you can play against them. All this boils down to "what they think you will accept, and how badly they want you." -- not your costs.

What happens when American employers starting hiring more and more in Europe/Africa/Asia? I'm not sure. I think fluent English communication skills, timezone affinity, cultural connection, and ease of travel to 'say hi' all form bits of moat, but those will certainly matter less and less with time.

In the near term, as SF+NYC start to allow remote work 'across North America', I think there are just way more jobs and companies looking than there are liquid engineers ready to move. Salaries might drop while we transition, but I really believe they'll go broadly as high as (or higher than) they were in those markets for a time, and this Spotify move is exactly why: the big players will now be competing for the best people everywhere, and the average carrying cost per employee, with no office requirements, is way down.

I definitely agree it's not simple to know where the market will fall in the long run. If European/African/Asian companies start correspondingly hiring here, that'll help North American engineers overall, but I'm not sure if we'll all end up at 1x, 3x, .5x, or what. It's easy to forget that there is room for an awful lot of software jobs in the world, especially, again if companies no longer need to pay for office space proportional to headcount. Some of these companies have a lot of money and were primarily constrained in the past by offices+office-inertia.

Regardless, 'cost of living' is not the root cause driving wages that people keep claiming it is, and when employees join in that lie, it hurts us.

It's all just what the markets of employers and employees are willing to bear, and what we should really be estimating as those isolated markets merge over the next decade is more like #qualified engineers / # potential software jobs, world-wide.

What happens when that pattern repeats into highly-educated parts of Eastern Europe and Southern Asia?

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.

Indeed. The only folks in trouble are the ones who decide to remain in VHCOL geographies.

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

Wait until you find out how many people work less than 1 hour per day in the office!

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.

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.

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.

How does one get TC 800K ($?) at Google L6? Did you get hired during a stock price collapse?

How people report their TC is all across the board

They could have refresher RSUs, they could have negotiated to stay on and move up, they could just be reporting what they took home after stock price appreciation, they could have offered something special

Do you know not do any scrum or project management?

nice! how do you manage that?

I have a system that tracks how long I use my work machine for, and visualizes it in a bar that is 10 units long.

I got by doing this for about 15 months before they started somewhat catching on. Productivity is still the same, but some things are leaky.

I'm nowhere near your TC though. I feel like you are a smarter, more optimized version of me, but I hope to get there someday and that's the path I'm currently on.

geez lol. I am envious!

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.

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..

If anything this is going to drain talent from other places toward traditional big techs. WFH greatly increased talent pool for top payers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah I’ve seen and even been offered £1500+ contracts but those were relatively short term no where close to being enough to fill out 200+ billable days per year.

You could get probably get to £150K or so over a year focusing on those contracts only 100 days billable is doable but usually you won’t find more than 5-6 months of those contracts per year.

Hopefully the IPO will work out well for you :)

I've heard of contracts of 250K-300K GBP for senior architects positions.

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.

For how long?

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.

> 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.

That is true, it might be the end of the sustainability of overpopulated cities ...

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

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.

>It's not that complicated.

On paper.

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.

I have to point out here the co-existence of permissive zoning AND rent protection. This is the way.

I'm not sure if rent control exists in Montreal, but advocacy organizations in US metros often push rent control as a standalone solution to various housing crises. But rent control requires the existence of a decently functional housing market to do its job correctly.

Yes, I have seen a lot of US cities that used rent control to do nothing except reduce accountability. You can build a decently functional housing market without rent control. But with rent control you don't need to build a functional housing market so the suffering continues.

All true, but don't underestimate the impact of the FLQ/PQ crisis. Several hundred thousand people moved from Montreal in the 90s, and immigration and money shifted to Toronto and Vancouver. Montreal was a renters market for 2 decades as a result, and Toronto experienced a boom that hasn't stopped since.

You’re forgetting - there just aren’t that many people who want to live in Montreal. That keeps costs down significantly.

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

One day the fed will do the unbelievable, it will raise interest rates and all those mortgages will be underwater.

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work

if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate

Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so

of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people.

Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to day costs.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

What are these numbers comparing? Property taxes?

Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

Sure, here’s an analysis from Australia:

https://www.crcsi.com.au/assets/Resources/b6e1625f-d90b-433d...

Orders of magnitude may be hyperbolic, but costs alone are twice as much from that study. Note that some of those costs are directly paid by households and not through taxes. For example, you need a car and drive further distances increasing fuel and maintenance costs.

We're not talking about taxes, but environmental cost. San Francisco provides a bunch of (human) services walnut creek does not.

As one example, muni costs money and sf pays more for BART than WC does. These are still cheaper and more environmentally efficient than everyone owning cars.

If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.

1. Carbon offsets do not reduce emissions

2. Bart and muni are not the majority of the $9000 difference. The majority of the cost is various social services. The actual cost of muni per sf resident is something like $500, which is still significant (muni is not a great rapid transit system), but that's far less than the cost of carbon offsets for every resident.

There's not enough tax base to support infrastructure like installing broadband, repairing and winter upkeep of roads and electric grid, fire stations, hospitals. Even businesses like nursing homes which one expects would benefit from lower property costs do not prosper due to lack of population and supportive medical services. Lower COL areas are net users of tax revenue from the country due to inefficiency, cities are net generators to the country.

That's only a result of the resources made available by the inhabitation of rural lands being under-valued on the market due to subsidies. Say goodbye to affordable food prices if we don't subsidize rural locales.

If you have to subsidize something, you only want to subsidize as much as necessary. Farmers can get their subsidies. A remote worker moving out of SF with a fat paycheck doesn't need the subsidy.

Utilities, deliveries, etc... Urban areas are way better in many ways.

Heck just roads. At a certain level of rural you are paving and patching 10 miles of road per person. In the city you are paving like a few feet per person.

But add on top of that the cost of public transit infrastructure. 1 mile of underground BART line cost $1,500 per person. And that ignores maintenance.

Pro-tip, most US cities don't have anything like that. Midwest are all buses except Chicago. I can't think of a single Southern city with a rail transit system.

You’re ignoring the fact that people take up space.

Every single cabin in the woods running off solar used to be an area with trees.

EDIT: And don’t even get me started on those cabin dwellers buying cats and letting them roam the forest like the invasive bird and mammal eating machine that they are.

They're already more efficient though, and there's no benefit to the current residents (tech rich or not) from massive incoming population growth.

There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

The scope of what I'm talking about is bigger than yours. Cities are more efficient, and we need to move more people into them (not just the ones that are big right now, just to cities in general) to give ourselves a better shot at keeping our planet habitable in the long run.

To your second point - degradation of infrastructure is not an issues with cities, it's an issue with management and investment. On a practical level, with additional people should come additional industry and tax revenue which should in turn allow metropolitan areas to keep pace infra-wise.

>There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

That's what happens in suburbia. You build a lot of infrastructure for very few people. That infrastructure was partly funded by private companies or federal government incentives. Once you have to collect property taxes and maintain the infrastructure you've overburdened yourself and can no longer meet your obligations precisely because there are not enough people living in that area.

> some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

Barcelona comes close. Perhaps not so much these days, but its a city that was really built with that in mind. And some of that persists.

Japan doesn't do too badly either. Some brief research is showing me that the configuration of apartment we would recognize as a 2BR would rent for something like $1200 or less in a lot of the Tokyo metro.

Where would people go? Underpopulated cities? Rapidly expand towns?

There is a massive population outflow from high COL coastal cities to smaller interior cities happening right now. SF, NY, LA, and Seattle are all shrinking.

Here's a great, interactive map based on Redfin data:

https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/migration/

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.

> On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland.

How do you figure that?

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.

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.

I also don't think degree means much but anyone with some curiosity gets one here as it's free, so it's still good estimate. Even if you add all outliers, physics and math students then you get max 3x my estimation.

> Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed.

Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.

You are only looking at university graduates. This, by far, doesn't tell you the picture in the job market.

I have worked for the past 17 years with a lot of brilliant engineers, some of them didn't even have a university degree, some had from a crappy uni just because they needed a diploma for a job, and others never touched CS and graduated in Biology or Statistics. You can't measure who is at your level or not just by university graduation stats, it's completely biased to your definition of what's a software engineer at your level: someone who graduated from a university considered at the same level or better than yours for research. That's all your metric tells, not how many people per year in Poland can develop/engineer the same feature set or product as you do, with the same time. And that's nigh impossible to measure or even estimate, there's no data available for that estimation.

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.

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.

You poor soul, American living in Romania? How did this mishap happen? I'm guessing it was because of your (presumably Romanian) partner? :-)

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?

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

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.

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.

I think GP means “rent an address” somewhere expensive, claim you live there, and actually live someplace cheap, working remotely.

Similar to how Apple keeps all its intellectual property in Grand Cayman I keep everything I know about tech in the heart of SF.

Or let the company pay you the million dollar mortgage while you rent in some backwater town.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Time to negotiate better visa options for UK engineers!

Good for the engineers, not much incentive for the government to lose their best and brightest to the US.

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.

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.

theyre actually that much better IMO. the bay area has unbelievable talent.

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.

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.

Umm.. FANMAG pay the same comp for NY and SF. Roughly the same for Seattle too.

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/

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_mICEYygy0jXVG...

Point being - Amazon&MS salaries aren’t likely to change, while Bay Area tech companies, the outflux happening, will have to adjust.

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.

The multiples I cited are what I tend to observe in the industry generally. There aren't really any FANMAGs outside of London.

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.

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.

I'm not stopping until we reach FANDANGO.

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)

That's awesome! I'm sure the press'll be picking that one up any moment now.

How is he acomplishing that? You couldn't do that in the US unless you had a C2C contract

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

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.

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