
Hacker News' “Who is Hiring?” thread, part 2, remote and locations - fijal
https://blog.whoishiring.io/hacker-news-who-is-hiring-thread-part-2-remote-and-locations/
======
TrickzOnU
I loved this line from the article "With unsolved US VISA problems for STEM
workers, IT companies might have to get creative to hire potential employees."
\-- Yeah, creative...like paying a living wage for the location. Pay salaries
that will allow someone to rent their own 1B (not bunking) and the "shortage"
will magically disappear.

~~~
ryandrake
Yep, the tired old "Shortage of Engineers" meme is bound to come up in any
discussion about tech hiring that ignores compensation. Saying there is a
shortage of something in a market only makes sense given a price. Sure, there
is probably a shortage of Bay Area engineers if you're paying $70K, but I bet
there is no shortage if you're paying $400K.

~~~
wrong_variable
I think its a lot more complex than that.

If the cost of beef was increased 4x for whatever reason, then most people
would just switch their preference for meat.

There are ofcourse a lot of greedy companies.

But a lot of the time the consumer demands a price point for software product,
many startups cannot afford to pay 400K to developers.

I think its not a reflection of how difficult it might be to create software
but stagnant wages for the average person.

~~~
branchless
The system of usury against land ensures that land costs adapt to absorb all
available income after food/clothing/energy costs have been accounted for.

Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in? Because people came with
money and the banks agreed to loan at a multiple of the new wage ceiling.

If wages increase x4 guess what will happen?

We need to stop banks creating debt to issue against land otherwise it will
always absorb all income. And therefore all productivity gains flow to the
land owner.

~~~
hueving
>Why is silicon valley more expensive to rent in?

Because supply and demand. High salaries attract a lot of people to the bay
and communities systematically refuse to build new housing to meet the demand
so the price goes up.

You can do whatever you want to the banks but that won't change the
fundamental of 2X people trying to live in X houses.

~~~
branchless
No, many hot-spots have large rentier presence including people "owning" and
renting out multiple residencies which causes huge supply pressure.

Credit also typically increases ahead of wages which squeezes people further.

This isn't supply of people vs supply of homes, this is supply of credit. If
you neutralise this you will see prices fall and be paying less of your labour
to banks.

2008 - the credit taps ran dry => huge crash. Before that near unlimited
credit saw land prices increase hugely. Neither on the up or the down did we
see wages have such volatility.

~~~
newjersey
I don't know why it is outrageous to say the solution to high rent is to build
more.

We shouldn't worry about "squeezing" people out. Ours is a HUGE nation. We
have A LOT of natural resources and there is no reason why we can't let people
build more (outside of protected areas, of course).

People who are "priced out" should move to places where rent costs less. I
keep hearing about property owners having enough political clout to block
further development, depressing supply. They placate existing residents with
tiny portions of rent-controlled apartments.

I fail to see how "gentrification" is a problem at all in the bigger scheme of
things.

I don't think people renting out more places is a problem. If landlords hold
supply out of the market to prop up prices, we can discourage such actions
with a more dynamic property tax that places a realistic tax burden on under
occupied or unoccupied property.

All that being said, we definitely need to figure out some way to peoperly
educate people about personal finance.

~~~
branchless
I'm not arguing _not_ to build more I'm simply arguing with the notion that
the main problem is one of supply and demand. It is not, there are other
problems in the mix including taxing labour not land.

[https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-
Depressio...](https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depressions-
Increase/dp/0911312587/?keywords=progress+and+poverty)

~~~
newjersey
> there are other problems in the mix including taxing labour not land

I agree to some extent. Property (land) taxes have to be high enough to
discourage people from leaving it unused. I have no problems with fully
replacing personal income tax but I'm not an expert and I have no idea if we
can realistically raise the same tax revenue from land tax alone.

~~~
branchless
We can. Land ownership is far harder to hide. Land value tax is the
establishment's worst nightmare.

------
ryanSrich
Remote work is not a silver bullet for solving the faux work shortage. Aside
from the fact that there is no shortage in the first place [1], remote work is
still very new. Without proper operations in place and a solid, tested,
management structure you'll end up with a hodgepodge of culture and unhappy
employees. I used to be bullish on remote work until I actually started doing
it. It can certainly work, and I still encourage companies to explore it, but
it's not a one size fits all approach, or a replacement for proper
organizational management.

1\. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-
of-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-solomon/the-myth-of-the-tech-
tale_b_9349542.html)

~~~
devonkim
Those of us that have worked as remote engineers for a lot of our career know
that most companies in general are just plain not managed in a way that would
work for companies that have lots of remote workers, especially larger
companies. Policies that discourage and undermine remote work that are popular
with large companies include:

1\. Mandatory all-hands meeting times

2\. Banning popular communications platforms like Slack, Google Chat, Skype

3\. Expectations of all workers to be present continuously for their timezone
instead of letting workers self-organize

4\. Performance and productivity metrics based around KPIs that do not
actually measure productivity but presence

~~~
im_down_w_otp
You left out:

5\. Incompetent IT Ops mostly staffed by cheap contractors to offset
overpaying for terrible hardware and software from Cisco to ensure a complete
inability to reliably utilize the corporate VPN.

~~~
devonkim
Having been ops before I have to stand up a little. Not _all_ contractors
compete primarily on price (in my case I was paid substantially more than FTEs
and even other contractors I found out - 20%+ more than my peers, in fact) but
also based upon scarcity of qualified persons. I've rarely heard of VPN that's
consistently stable that meets the conflicting requirements that IT managers
ask for. Juniper, F5, Cisco, and even smalltime crap based upon OpenVPN just
constantly breaks repeatedly in many real-world corporate networks.

This doesn't mean that you're incorrect though - most IT O&S winds up going to
lowest-bidding contracting companies and offshored resources that are measured
upon the dumbest KPIs ever that completely leave out whether users are
actually happy with anything at all. In fact, most IT in the F500 seems to
have given up on ever making users happy. I'd say the better measure would be
tickets / user filed - if a user never files a ticket, they're not
complaining.

------
jballanc
One additional reason that I've observed to add to the list:

* Declining dominance of the Microsoft/Oracle hegemony in secondary markets

During the '90s Microsoft and Oracle were particularly effective at entering
emerging markets and pushing their solutions to such a degree that "computer
programmer" became synonymous with "Microsoft/Oracle developer". Thus, if you
wanted to become a software developer in one of these markets, it meant
learning C#/Java, along with all the ecosystem, tooling, and
inevitably...lock-in.

Fast-forward 20 or so years, and the Open Source movement is finally beginning
to crack that shell of lock-in. Anecdotally, when I first moved to Turkey 4
years ago, technology job sites almost exclusively listed C#/Java positions.
Today, I know many Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, etc. developers living and working
in Turkey, and there's been an explosion of related conferences, trainings,
events, etc.

The one last hurdle I see that needs to be overcome in these places is the
notion that developer education is as much a concern for those that employ
developers as for the developers themselves. Pretty much all of the
conferences/trainings have to be held over weekends because it is still
difficult for developers to get time off during the week to attend. Once that
bit of cultural shift happens, I only foresee this trend accelerating.

~~~
spraak
Is there anywhere (e.g. blog) you've shared about your move and experience
living in Turkey? Like, do you speak Turkish for your job?

~~~
jballanc
Unfortunately I'm woefully behind on blogging, and there's a number of
programming topics that are higher on the list than anything like that. In
short, though, Turkey is a great place with friendly people, _breathtakingly-
amazing_ food, and lots to see and do. I work remotely, and English is the
_lingua franca_ of everyone I work with, though I have managed to learn enough
Turkish to get around at home.

------
sytse
"Fast forward 5 years, now more than 20% of the positions there are open
remote work! " At GitLab we think that remote only is the logical conclusion
of this [http://www.remoteonly.org/](http://www.remoteonly.org/)

"High speed Internet." apart from that the tools (video calling, etc.) are
also getting better.

BTW I think the rise of English is really interesting, I added that
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-
org/commit/4bff...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-
org/commit/4bffb3636ff3d59170c65642fc1062e17fb3927b)

~~~
jxm262
Thanks for sharing that link, as I've never seen this Manifesto before. This
puts into words so much better than the explanations I give people for why I
prefer remote. It's interesting to see some of these on the list - -written
down processes over verbal -async communication -formal communication over
informal

We often hear alot about enlarging your net of potential talent (#1) and
flexible work hours, but there's much more to it than that.

At this point, I can't imagine _not_ working remotely anymore. I'm just sooo
much more productive and happy this way.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for your kind response. I can't imagine commuting for 2 hours pay day
either.

------
legohead
I happened to be in Russia when the Who's Hiring thread showed up. I have
family there, so I was entertaining the thought of possibly moving there, or
maybe staying for a year or two.

However, I noticed most of the remote locations were "US-only", and even the
ones in other countries were usually local to that country -- "germany only",
etc.

I was wondering how many of the "US-only" ones would accept me, since I am a
US Citizen, just not living in the US. Or is there some kind of tax reason
they have to be US-only?

~~~
speeder
I am from Brazil, since I graduated around 2009, I never got a 100% legal job,
and never got a well paying job or contract.

I keep hearing that I should move, or should work remote, I always reply:
"How?"

Because most countries only allow you to move into them if you get invited or
is already wealthy.

Most remote jobs I see, no matter where I look (I don't look only on HN) are
US-only, or local only.

Most jobs that accept foreigners, have written on them: "Must already have H1B
or Greencard"

So what I am supposed to do?

People criticize me when I complain that my yearly income has been on average
about 10.000 USD, and I have to expend 2000 USD to build an "average" computer
(or 4000 USD if I do it with only 100% legal parts with all taxes paid),
saying that I am "stupid" for not working remote or relocating. But I am yet
to see someone offer me a solution.

Even people that could hire me directly, sometimes say to me: "Oh, I loved
your work, I am sure you will find work! Of course, I can't hire you, because
it is against my company policy."

~~~
spraak
A way to get experience might be to suggest that you're hired as a consultant
or contractor. It's easier for the company to do, but be careful that they
still treat you fairly. I know a company in the UK that does this for its
remote workers.

~~~
speeder
I don't lack experience. I lack JOB. Or REAL contract.

I've been working since 2009, I have lots of projects done, plus a startup.

But most of this, is not legal, usually I had jobs pretending to be contracts
(ie: it was a day job, but paid as if I was a contractor, highly illegal in my
country, because the government consider this a way to avoid following labour
laws... and it is exactly that), low-paying contracts that don't follow all
laws correctly either, stuff paid off the books, and so on.

But I found noone, in any country, willing to hire me 100% legally with fair
pay, either as employee or contractor. (I did got some offers for legal work,
but the pay was always less than my student loans, and later the loans I made
to pay student loans, so not worth it at all).

~~~
yeukhon
As the parent said, you should try jobs coming from recruiters on LinkedIn
(that's where they hang out the most) US enterprise companies hire consultants
through the recruiting agency. InfoSys, Tech Mahindra, DataArt, Altoros, Ness,
HCL, a bunch more. They will hire you legally but usually take half of what
they agree with the hiring company. Say the hiring company pays $80,000 on a
contract you'd only see maybe $40,000 on your employment contract. They take
cut of an undisclosed amount. These are legitimate vendors. Basically
outsource. Browse LinkedIn.

------
iwillium
If you combine SF with Silicon Valley you really ought to combine Cambridge,
MA with Boston, MA

~~~
jkempe11
Same with the LA area here. "Santa Monica" is mentioned once, but if you
aggregated all the locations that fall into the Greater LA area, I bet it
would rank higher.

~~~
im_down_w_otp
It would also cover the land area of a small country. ;-)

------
dschiptsov
Remote is still rare, it seems, because usual sweatshops are traditional
habitat for pointy haired bosses and other parasitic "management".

For remote, the way Linux kernel or BSDs are being developed, one needs
nothing but git, emacs and browser (well, in case of Linux also a working
mail) and no management at all. How could, say, Amazon, even hypothetically
switch to remote?

More seriously, there is no market for code - otherwise people would just pay
per commit (passed all the tests) nice and easy. The problem is people with
money doesn't need a mere good code, they need their positions, their bonuses,
their status. They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy
which supports them, not for your good code.

This is why, perhaps, remote works fine for "nonprofits", like FreeBSD, but
for corporations it is still a heresy.

Again, there, it seems, is no demand for mere good quality code.

This, by the way, is connected with hiring. Almost no one hire for abilities,
everyone is hiring for good school diplomas. (Which diploma Mike Pall has?
Igor Sysoev was a college dropout).

If I am wrong, and there is a market for code - solved problem, pushed a
commit, all tests passed, money transferred - please tell me, I would
participate gladly.

~~~
riskable
> They will pay you for filling a slot in the social hierarchy which supports
> them, not for your good code.

This is absolutely true but remote workers can still be FTEs that extend a
manager's umbrella of influence. So really, working remotely is orthogonal to
managerial pyramids of power.

If anything, hiring remote workers may allow managers to get _more_ employees
working for them because they can get more bodies for the same amount of
budget.

~~~
nicobn
Not always. A friend of mine works remotely for a financial institution. His
manager wanted to revoke his work from home agreement because he wanted to hit
a target metric of number of man-days worked in a physical office to justify a
corner office with upper management. Sad but true.

------
slantedview
We embrace technology for every stupid purpose imaginable, yet remote work
facilitated by technology is generally viewed with disdain. It makes no sense,
which is why remote work will continue to rise into the future. The dramatic
centralization of our industry into a few locations also doesn't help with the
crush of housing costs.

~~~
happyslobro
Putting a laptop on a cart, keeping it at just the right position relative to
the whiteboard wall, and jotting down notes and diagrams for the guys on the
other end, is frustrating. Repeating ~10% of the statements in a meeting
because of audio issues is frustrating. There are a lot more technologies that
need to be brought to market, or improved, in order to eliminate the drawbacks
of remote work.

Right now, I find that working with the remote people is fine when there is
some separation between our work, like an API, and it is excellent when I can
get work to pay for me to travel. But debugging or pair programming over a
call, where we can only share one screen, is just painful.

~~~
devdas
Have you thought about working in a shared screen session for code editing,
with a parallel chat client for interactivity. Voice is just too low SNR for
code.

~~~
happyslobro
Shared screen session? Are you referring to GNU screen, and suggesting that we
collaborate on some sort of mainframe setup? That sounds like a really
interesting idea, like that crazy shared tabletop interface the Wayland guys
have been promising.

Right now, my setup is: watch the loudest person's screenshare on my small
screen (1080p) and do everything else on the main screen (4K). Git push to a
WIP branch every few minutes. It makes for an interesting git history, for
sure.

------
kowdermeister
How does hiring remotely work financially? Should I set up a company and
invoice the company that hired me? Does it make to go off-shore?

Any info would be helpful, thanks.

~~~
Const-me
Depends on your jurisdiction + citizenship. In some places, you may work
without setting up a company, e.g. being a sole entrepreneur.

------
deepGem
I hope some policy makers in the government keep a watch on such threads. They
will get an idea about the loss of taxes, that these remote would otherwise
pay if they were to be employed in the US. Not to mention the social security
and the indirect economic contributions. In fact all the anti-immigration
camps should get a reality check at this point. In 5-10 years, most of the US
tech jobs will be remote and not a dime of the remote worker's income will
reach american shores.

~~~
morgante
Any American citizens working remotely still have to pay US taxes.

~~~
lukasm
Isn't it above 1mln? (US citizen working in London told me he has to make the
tax return, but he is not tax for anything below 1 000 000 $)

~~~
jahewson
It's $100,000 not 1m. Many countries have a tax treaty with the US so that
you're not double-taxed, but instead pay the greater of the local rate or US
rate.

------
phantom_oracle
My own assumption is that even though remote work will increase, it will
remain marginal and not consume most of the IT jobs out there.

The simple reason being that the biggest IT/tech companies have invested
heavily in land & buildings (think about how Apple and Facebook have built
huge "campuses" \- why they call the offices/building a campus, I don't know,
but anyways ...) and they need to utilize those assets in order to avoid the
"white elephant" problem.

Also, unlike "agile" software-development or on-demand hosting, they can't
merely downscale their land & buildings as they would for their AWS clusters
and they also can't sell these buildings, as they seem geared specifically
towards the needs of their owners (it isn't just a regular old office-block).

So while _some_ startups of the future will embrace a remote-first culture,
the big tech companies and many other regular startups will continue along
with the concept of a fixed-location and fixed-office well into the future.

~~~
k__
maybe not having land/building investments puts companies in a better
position? To apply changes faster etc.

------
danielsamuels
I wonder if this is conflating Cambridge, UK with Cambridge in the US?

------
carlob
Great post! A couple of nitpicks on the data presentation for the sake of
making it even better:

1\. You don't have enough data to warrant 5 significant digits in the
percentages, and even if you did, is it really relevant?

2\. The points in your plot are interpolated using some sort of spline, why?
If the answer is: because it looks better than jagged edges, then you should
probably remove the spline, because you're effectively adding extraneous
information. On the other hand a linear trend line could be nice here.

~~~
xando
Hey, thanks for the comments. And I agree. I will keep that in mind writing
the next part.

(I'm an author)

------
radicalbyte
Amsterdam is in Europe and in the top 20..

~~~
xando
right. I've updated the writing.

~~~
aerique
Did you merge all Dutch jobs into Amsterdam? This would be sensible for some
but not all locations in The Netherlands.

------
antouank
Bear in mind that HN has mainly US based readers. So those insights are not
reflecting the reality IMO.

~~~
ryanSrich
If you read the article the author points out, several times, that he does not
recommend taking this data as absolute truth throughout tech.

------
Artlav
I wonder how meaningful the "remote work" is, considering the legal issues of
hiring workers from another country?

What if there weren't any?

Time zones aren't always the problem, high-speed internet is often common,
lots of IT jobs are location-agnostic.

It could have a serious impact on the job market - what is poor in USA is
upper 1% income worldwide, so an ability to get a remote job at USA prices can
make local jobs uncompetitive by huge factors.

What sort of effects would this have on the world? Or is it meaningless
speculation anyway, since the legal restrictions aren't going away in any
plausible futures?

------
yeukhon
My observation this month happens to be UK/London job availability on "Who is
Hiring" is increasing while the jobs for SV (mainly SF) is decreasing.

------
rwhitman
I'm increasingly curious about what kinds of trends there are in tech hiring
outside of the English speaking world. Wouldn't the HN "Who's Hiring" thread
being in English make it inherently biased in terms of global trends,
especially when looking for the "next Silicon Valley" as the end goal?

Would a city like Beijing or Taipei be adequately represented here at all?

~~~
xando
I've just run the query and it's 6 (not this month, all time) with Beijing as
a location.

My best guess for China is: they have to have something similar, although
obviously not in English. They have a huge market with limited reasons to
cooperate with English-speaking Internet. Also, Chinese Internet is isolated
you won't see many services that are available in US or EU.

Fun fact there was an attempt to implement (copy) whoishiring.io
[http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945#](http://www.v2ex.com/t/213945#) the reason they
like it but no google maps in china.

(I'm an author of this blog post)

~~~
rwhitman
Makes sense. I couldn't help thinking about this post from a few months back,
in the context of tracking geographic shifts in startup hiring:

[http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-
tech-...](http://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11592570/china-startup-tech-economy-
silicon-valley)

I wonder if China's tech startups would impact the data if they had a presence
on HN. Kind of an interesting puzzle

------
daxfohl
SF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs? I figured south bay and the
peninsula had much more than SF proper.

~~~
pchristensen
"SF proper has 70% of "silicon valley" tech jobs"

...that post on HN Who's Hiring. Big difference (biased towards newer
companies) compared the the Bay Area tech industry as a whole. For instance,
I'd bet that Google (Mtn View) + Facebook have more job postings any given
month than the whole HN Who's Hiring post. And that's not counting eBay,
Cisco, Apple, LinkedIn, Tesla, etc etc etc.

~~~
daxfohl
Yeah, plenty of listings likely paraphrased per Jim Gaffigan:

It’s like, ‘Hey, where’re you from?’ ‘Me, I’m from San Francisco.’ ‘Oh really?
Where in San Francisco?’ ‘Uhhh, outside San Francisco.’ ‘Where outside San
Francisco?’ ‘Gilroy.’

------
jkempe11
Shocked not to see LA in the post at all. Santa Monica (an LA suburb, more or
less) appears once.

------
yuvadam
I find it very surprising that Tel Aviv, Israel (supposed "startup nation") is
nowhere in those charts.

~~~
xando
Please keep in mind that this only Hacker News Who is hiring, maybe other
sources are more popular there.

Also, nearly every big city was already announced as next Silicon Valley by
the press by now. The press is creating huge illusion here.

------
dccoolgai
Surprised not to see DC in the list of cities... usually shows up a lot in the
hiring threads...

~~~
ryanSrich
I'm surprised as well. When I moved from DC to Portland I saw a massive
decrease in recruiter spam. Even two years later I still get 10 emails per
week about jobs in DC. Portland on the other hand? Pretty much zero.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
Out of curiosity, what's generating the job spam in DC? Profile on LinkedIn,
or other sites?

I have the same thing going on.

~~~
ryanSrich
No idea. I get random emails from shady "meetups" and networking events too. I
can't report the spam and unsub fast enough.

The recruiter spam has transcended LinkedIn too. It's mostly direct emails
from recruiters. I wouldn't mind if the jobs were even slightly related to
what I do. It's pretty clear I'm a designer and frontend dev, but I get spam
for Java and PHP gigs all the time...

------
lxfontes
honest question: Any idea why Toronto (and Canada in general) is not higher in
this list?

~~~
wrong_variable
Per capita Toronto/Vancouver is a lot higher than London, its just that London
is 8 million people while Toronto is barely 3 million.

~~~
Apocryphon
I'm always amazed that Montreal hasn't taken off yet as an alternative to the
two.

~~~
xxpor
The language laws are a huge impediment, both for operations and hiring
international people.

------
bchjam
London is in Europe but Berlin in Germany? seems pretty ironic given recent
news

~~~
_ao789
London isn't technically in Europe anymore..

~~~
dragonwriter
> London isn't technically in Europe anymore..

London is in Europe as much as it has ever been. Geographically, its status
hasn't changed -- whether you consider the island off the coast of the
European mainland part of Europe or not; politically, its still the capital of
the UK, which -- despite having voted that its government _should_ withdraw
from the EU -- remains an EU member, and not even formally on the exit path
yet.

~~~
Brakenshire
UK will also remain a member of the Council of Europe, a signatory to the
European Convention on Human Rights, will probably have a Switzerland-ish deal
on European trade, and will likely opt-in to a lot of European projects like
the ESA and science funding/cooperation.

