
Ask HN: How much you make working remotely? - byEngineer
How much do you make working remotely?
======
putzdown
About $115K/annum working remotely—probably about the same as if not. As
@stephencanon said, an employer that suspected there was a downside in
productivity for remote workers (and I'd say it's at least equally likely that
working remotely results in higher productivity on average) could assuage
their own concerns by remembering the significant (~50% of salary?) savings
from not having to pay for air conditioning, heating, security, probably some
office equipment (I provide my own printers, for example, since they're not
terribly useful for remote work anyway), and various other bits of overhead.

~~~
marketingadvice
Can I ask what your job is? Sounds like you won the remote working game

~~~
jamie_ca
Sounds similar to me. Living in BC, doing Rails programming fulltime for a
company in Toronto. Fly out for a week for quarterly meetings, but otherwise
fully remote (and timezone shifted).

Started initially as a fully-remote team, but as the company's grown and staff
has rotated, I'm the only fully remote guy still there. Coworkers take an
occasional work-from-home day though.

------
stephencanon
Exactly the same as I would make if I weren't working remotely. I'm doing the
same work, and it has the same value to my employer. (If anything, one might
argue that remote employees should be paid more, since the overhead costs are
often less).

~~~
trjordan
I don't think it works that way.

Workers aren't paid by the value they create to the company. That sets a
ceiling, but the floor is set by the competitive market. How little can you
pay somebody to take that job and do the work you need done? That effectively
bubbles up from the local cost of living and is modulated by availability of
workers.

Hard-to-find software engineer in SF? Going to pay even more than the crazy
housing costs imply.

Easy-to-find marketing events manager in NYC? Going to pay less than the crazy
housing costs would have you think.

Remote allows you to hire from anywhere, so the competition is higher. I'd
imagine that, if anything, it would hurt your earnings, because you're now
competing with people from Iowa who have $300 / month rent payments.

~~~
throwmeaway21
You're wrong though, at least in my case. My pay doesn't change at all and I
move quite often.

~~~
varelse
Yes, he's wrong. I do quite well working remotely and every offer I've
received for which I'd have to work in a $%^&ing open office (because open
office good, cubicle bad plus mandatory daily Jar Jar meeting at no additional
cost(1)) would have entailed a 25-50% pay cut.

My advice is to refuse in every way you can to be the generic fungible
engineer most management wishes you to be, and to instead specialize in
emerging technologies. When such technologies are in demand, your compensation
will skyrocket.

1\. [http://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-
master...](http://softwaremaestro.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/scrum-master-jar-
jar/)

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
That link is stupid. We do daily standups. It usually takes about 3 minutes.
If it's taking 2.5 hours/week, you're doing it wrong.

~~~
varelse
Whenever I see "If X isn't working for you then you're doing it wrong" I
remind the person who said it that they really ought to consider that there
are no silver bullets/holy grails. If daily standups work for you, great (see,
I'm acknowledging that it works for some people), but please keep your process
religion to yourself, mmkay?

~~~
SnacksOnAPlane
But this is a pretty clear indication that things are broken. I understand
that there are variations in how things are done, but if you're doing
"standups", the whole point is: keep it short and sweet. Otherwise, call it a
"morning meeting" and run it as long as you want.

------
gk1
This would work better as a poll so people can answer anonymously.

~~~
IgorPartola
No, it would not. This doesn't work, and neither would a poll. To be clear: we
can have an interesting discussion on salaries, value of employees, etc. but
if anyone takes any of these numbers, from this post, or a poll, and does so
much as average them, they would immediately produce meaningless data. Some
reasons:

\- Participation is voluntary, the group is self-selected. This in itself
renders all results meaningless.

\- HN polls let you vote on more than one option, yet you only have one
salary.

\- Time of day bias. It is currently lunch hour on the east coast, and morning
in the Bay area. Remote developers living in the UK, Thailand, etc. are on yet
a different schedule.

\- Whenever a discussion like this pops up, the workers have an incentive to
lie. If you say "I am top talent in my field and I make [2x my actual
salary]", and enough people do this, you might actually raise the expectations
of the employers. This discussion is actively giving a voice to the workers,
and they have a huge reason to misrepresent facts for personal benefit.

I really wish HN got rid of polls. People tend to treat them as valuable data,
and they are really just noise. The discussions are great, but the number
noise is worthless.

~~~
jonnathanson
Indeed. Many people (though not all people) lie on anonymous polls.
Frequently. They lie when they perceive themselves to have incentives to lie
(per your last bullet point). They also lie _in absence_ of any apparent
incentives.

Some of it is just human psychology. Nobody sees what appears to be a norm,
measures himself against it, and wants to admit that he falls short of it --
even if he's totally anonymous. This is especially true when a poll concerns
topics of great emotional weight, like salary. Take an anonymous poll on
everyone's favorite sports team, or favorite ice cream flavor, and you'd
probably get accurate results. Take a poll on salary, and many of the results
would be dubious.

------
incision
I know three people who work 100% remote, full-time for rates equivalent to
130-185k+ per year.

Interestingly, I'd always thought of remote workers as either high-end
technical specialists working as-needed or cheap bodies being delegated to.

These folks all fall somewhere in the middle with the common factor being soft
/ niche skills - they work for sort of places that most people would run away
from and work on things the most people haven't touched in years.

Two of them started out on-site, but were so valuable the company was happy to
allow remote work in order to keep them on staff.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I've been that guy, several times in my career. Moved back to the Midwest, my
Silicon Valley employer continued to pay me. Subsequently got other jobs
working at startups and working from the Midwest (3 of them at least). Working
one now.

------
jasonkester
"Somewhere on the high end of Silicon Valley market rate for the specific
thing that I do for a guy who's been doing it this long."

The important part is that the spot on the globe where I decide to plug in my
laptop has precisely zero bearing on that bill rate. I'll grant that the
offset of having to pay for my own equipment and health care versus having to
pay a premium in housing cost and take a huge hit on quality of life so as to
be able to commute an hour to sit in a felt cube all day every day does leave
me a bit ahead. But then I'd argue that surplus should be captured by _me_
rather than J. Random Software Company.

Never let the poor negotiating position of the others around you affect your
ability to negotiate the best deal for yourself. If your counterparty suggests
dropping your rate to match the locals in whatever tropical paradise you've
had the good sense to set up shop in, it's your job to chuckle softly and say
"no. It doesn't work like that."

------
dejv
About 2500 USD/month, working hour or two a day. I can make more easily, but I
already make like 2x of average salary in my country, so I can live
comfortably, travel as much as I want to and have time to pursue other
projects (running my little winery and working on low cost FTIR spectroscope).

~~~
BilalBudhani
working hour or two a day? What's your work schedule looks like? curious to
know.

~~~
dejv
I am doing maintenance programming for living (in Delphi 5), which usually
consist of long list of small problems and changes: I am usually trying to do
one or two things a day, generate new binaries and send it to customer so he
have something new to play with. I am usually working on my own things till,
say 5 or 6 and then do my daily work for my customer.

~~~
singold
Besides having the not-so-mainstream needed habilities, how do you manage to
find that kind of (niche?) work?

~~~
dejv
I don't know, really. I do Delphi programming for 15 years now and it was
quite mainstream back then, even now I occasionally do work for new clients
(iOS, Rails, Machine Learning) and every 7 years or so I found another client
whom I really like to work with and I just try to keep around. So I might find
my client number 3 eventually and it is not going to be Delphi anymore. I
usually work with like 2 new people each year.

Basically I do like to work with established, non-tech company that is around
for long time, both companies are family owned with 50+ years in operation. I
do respond to ads sometimes, got some referrals, bump to some odd guy at wine
tasting and stuff like that.

~~~
singold
Thanks for sharing your experience! :D

I had never think about this: _" established, non-tech company that is around
for long time"_

Probably makes for a very good working enviroment, they may have a lot of
technology to add to their business, and also they may value your work a lot
more than a tech companies.

------
riffraff
I suspect you meant to ask this to people doing commission/independent-
developer/consultant-type work, rather then employees that only happen to work
remotely, if so maybe it needs to be specified.

~~~
otoburb
And for a certain class of employees that work remotely (e.g. sales,
consulting), people should know that the trade-off often requires a
significant amount of travel away from home (sometimes up to 50%+).

------
zerr
Living in East Europe, working as a consultant (C++, no web dev) remotely for
West European company. Making 10x more of what I'd make locally (Senior/Lead
role).

I've changed several jobs during the last decade, always tripling the next
salary (of course I've never mentioned my previous salary) - and I've always
given the rate I asked for.

So, if you want to make more - just ask for it.

~~~
JacobKyle
I've been halfway considering doing something similar myself. Where do you
live? What are the standards of living there?

~~~
zerr
Please write your email in your profile and I'll send some more details.

------
malditojavi
With 60% oDesk clients and 40% other remote clients, back in 2012, I did
around 17k $ in the whole year. I explained it at the end of this post
[http://malditointer.net/after-working-1200-hours-in-
odesk/](http://malditointer.net/after-working-1200-hours-in-odesk/)

~~~
malditojavi
I keep working in remote for hand-picked clients. I raised my rates (I started
really low, 8$/hour, coming from non-technical background at all). My current
rate is 25$/h, and I have started to take some projects that imply some
development (ruby on rails, html/css).

AMAnything if you feel like! Willing to help or solve some doubts.

~~~
avinassh
How much time and effort did it take you to reach $25/h from $8/h? From what I
see, it is very competetive and there will be always some guy who is willing
to work at less than price you mention (and sometimes, if not most of times,
he would have more experience/ratings than you) how do you handle that? I mean
how would you make someone chose you over a experienced guy?

You said you started to take development projects, then what kind of projects
you were working on earlier?

~~~
malditojavi
You can figure that out if you take a look to my oDesk profile, link is
included in the post and you can see what kind of works/and when I raised my
$/h.

------
designergal
$115K per annum + equity. Designer + some front-end dev - 6 years design
experience, junior dev experience. I do pay for my own healthcare though, but
I consider it one of the things I am willing to sacrifice for the lifestyle.

I also do freelance work on the side, billed $32k last year (mostly from
Wordpress website referrals). I consider myself a perpetual traveller to
minimise tax:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_traveler)

I don't know why anyone thinks you should get any less than someone in-office.
I am guessing those people are probably underpaid because they don't know how
to value / sell themselves.

------
NateDad
I am a software engineer at Canonical working in Go on Juju. I live in
Massachusetts and have 15 years of professional development experience and a
BS in CS from a decent technical university (WPI). When applying for the job,
I asked for (and got) the same salary I'd ask for if applying for an office-
based job in Boston (which was a fairly significant bump over my old office-
based job in Boston). From what I understand, Boston salaries may be lower
than those in SF, but the cost of living probably makes up for the difference.

------
brunosutic
I'm Ruby on Rails & Javascript developer from South-Eastern Europe (Croatia,
Zagreb). I'm working for a client in Chicago, USA and my rate is 40usd/hr.

~~~
odonnellryan
How did you get the job?

~~~
brunosutic
We started working via oDesk, but later switched to working directly.

------
throwmeaway21
$87.5k salary + equity as a designer/dev type. It's the same pay no matter
where I live and is higher paying than my pervious location-dependent job.

------
daledavies
I charge about £50 per hour doing freelance e-learning development, but I
don't actually take much freelance work on because I'm too scared to move away
from full time employment - from which I earn a lot less (roughly £30k a year)
but I get 42 days holiday, pension, sick pay and security.

------
ap22213
150k. Although I work remotely, I still live in the DC area and occasionally
go to the office for meetings.

------
3rdwrld
Third world national, living in the third world. $3800 per month working full
time (~40Hrs a week)

------
chroman
$40/hr @ 30-40/hr work week. I live in a low-cost country. Tempted to move to
Silicon Valley though. I live with the constant battle of wanting to live in
the USA or in my home country.

------
wantsemployment
So how do I find one of these jobs? Do I have to be a genius or master at
language or technology X? 20 years of work experience? Can I live on the other
side of the planet?

~~~
ishanr
Learn either rails, python or front end stuff (angular, sass, html), git is a
must.

Apply for jobs on: [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)
[https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote](https://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote)
[http://nomadjobs.io/](http://nomadjobs.io/)

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jeffasinger
I work remotely, for a company located about 1.5 hours drive away, though am
expected to come into the office twice a month on my own dime.

I make essentially a market rate salary.

------
GingerBoats
I do freelance, so it varies depending on how I schedule client work. On
average, I sit comfortably around $5k a month with a 30/hr work week.

------
processing
$6k per month - if I sell something in new or do a workshop (not remote) 10k.

------
synaesthesisx
Not entirely remote, but about $30/hour.

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jimaek
$2000 per month working full time remotely.

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lordbusiness
Above market rates for office-based work.

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nrzuk
£350pd at the moment as a freelancer

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ishanr
$4K a month. Unlimited vacations.

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techtonic_
$650/day on a C2C contract.

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itake
$80/hr @ 20-35hrs/week

~~~
durango
Freelance or contracted by a service firm at that rate?

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cybercoder4life
225k this year, its great as long as they don't micro manage you

~~~
nomnombunty
wow, that's amazing. May I ask what type of work you do?

~~~
trjordan
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess freelancing on CyberCoder.

------
byEngineer
My rate is 65usd/hr on w2 at the moment

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cybercoder4life
this year 225k, it's great as long as they micro manage you to death

~~~
crixlet
um, spam much?

