Is the employment market actually giving you that?
Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...
Yes. Not all applications benefit from FAANG experience. There is a lot of work to be done that pays in the 130-200 range that isn't necessarily cutting edge. I should add, benefits are excellent (major medical) and it's a private office.
> Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...
I can believe it. Sometimes, you just need technical excellence to bring a product to market, otherwise you fail. But other times, you can simply apply well understood paradigms to well understood markets and have excellent financial returns.
It's the difference between an excellent business and an excellent product. When you have a choice, choose the excellent business.
Yes, because the employment market is not a free market. You can find (virtually) any employees your heart desires, because workers are highly motivated to not die. In addition, they have no bargaining power, meaning they take what they can get. They don't have visibility either - hiring is a perfect black box to them.
The scales are not only not balanced, they're almost completely tipped. This is why companies can pay below market and still get a constant supply of (shitty) employees. If you simply lower your standards, you can get infinite employees. They could hire children if they wanted, and it would be easy. They could pay 50 cents an hour if they wanted. Luckily, the laws prevent this - but it's most certainly NOT an issue of demand. There's a high demand among children to work and there's a high demand among laborers to work for poverty wages.
We're talking about highly-skilled software engineers and product specialists who are used to being able to command high 6-figure salaries with considerable additional perks (RSUs, bonuses, 3 meals a day on campus, free laundry...)
Those are the folks Meta/Amazon/Google are mandating return to 5 days a week in office. The folks stuck doing manual labour in their fulfilment/data/moderation centres... those ones mostly never were allowed to go remote in the first place.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. But you're not, you're a cog like the rest of us and the only thing you command is a shitty drip coffee machine in a cramped break room.
This is a matter of class, not a matter of profession. You, and I, are being bullied by our employers because we have absolutely 0 say in how we work our jobs. That's no different than any manual laborer - minus the ones who are unionized.
In a matter of irony, mechanics and such that operate in a union have much more control over their workplace. If their job allowed it, they could trivially strike for the benefit of WFH. That's not a power you have, you're too busy bending over and then later justifying how you wanted to take it all along.
Based on what I observe in my niche, (3) have an enormous advantage when it comes to both hiring and maintaining senior talent.
I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.
If I wanted to stretch my budget, I would go to LATAM. Developers marketing themselves as "go remote, stretch your budget further" will see just how far it can stretch.
I'm hiring in the USA because my business requires knowledge of the US business environment (benefits management) and require in-person because it's easier to prevent mistakes which can attract the ire of regulators when you are small and don't have formal review processes.
> I wanted to reply to your comment re:Nordics but it seems it reached a limit to comment depth, your experiences are probably related to interacting with a biased sample, a quick google tells me that on average only a couple hundred Swedes immigrate to the US per year.
Possible, and I didn't interact with only Swedes; I interacted with mostly Norwegians and a few Swedes, so I may be generalizing somewhat. But it really seemed like there was a collective sense of "I need to act as ruthless as possible to run a business here". I don't think American business customs are well understood in practical application.
In a relatively free labor market (like e.g. California’s) that perspective is fine with me, because you probably have to pay more for the conscientious “75%” developers you need. But Sweden has a heavily regulated and unionized labor market where differences in pay are typically motivated by the collectively agreed “fairness”.
I can assure you that your argument would have been just as foreign for my acquaintance.
I think I simply have more information than you do in this case. :)
(Because I know the person we’re talking about, and because I’ve worked in Swedish startups for 20 years, my own and other’s.)
I don't need elite developers; I need competent, conscientious "75%" developers. It doesn't make sense to spend time interviewing, onboarding, and hiring, just to expose myself to another risk factor.
Your friend was probably not thinking "fair" or "unfair", rather, what is the employment market bringing him.