

Ask HN: How much is a remote job worth to you?  - frankenstein59

What percentage or amount of salary would you give up to have a job which allows you to work from anywhere.  Meaning you never have to go to an office or be in any particular country.  Let's assume your work hours in UTC have to be approximately the same no matter where you are.<p>I just want to get a general feeling of how much people on HN value the freedom to work from wherever they want.
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cperciva
I consider working in Canada to be $20k/year preferable to working in silicon
valley.

I consider working in Vancouver to be $15k/year preferable to working
elsewhere in Canada.

I consider working from home to be $40k/year preferable to working from an
office.

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frankenstein59
Canada to the valley is interesting and unexpected (I've obviously never been
to Canada :] ) but I am quite surprised at your willingness to take a 40k hit
to work at home. Thanks for the input!

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cperciva
_I am quite surprised at your willingness to take a 40k hit to work at home_

In terms of $/hour, $80k/year for an 8 hour work day isn't much worse than
$120k/year for an 8 hour work day plus a 1 hour commute in each direction. And
I think best when there aren't other people around.

~~~
frankenstein59
Ah yes, when factoring in commute that makes sense.

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mmt
I'm a someone who "likes"[1] going in to the office.

However, commuting is expensive[2] and, more importantly to someone with
significant introversion, interacting so closely with people in person all day
is mentally exhausting.

To me, that's about $10/hr. I don't place much value in having the freedom to
live anywhere I want, since I already do. The added freedom to travel is
appealing but heavily moderated by the need to ensure a suitable workspace
with reliable, high-enough bandwidth connectivity wherever I go.

[1] Finds value in the structure and face-to-face communication

[2] Especially if one includes time. A 45-mile one-way driving commute would
need about $10k/yr in salary to offset the after-tax out-of-pocket expenses.
If that's from the South Bay to San Francisco, it's an hour each way, adding
23.5% to the time away from home (assuming a half hour lunch). Caltrain is a
bit better, but, unless one lives and works at a station, it will cost more
than just the $2500/yr in monthly tickets. One can work on the train, but
there's still at least 15-30 minutes at each end getting between home/work and
the train seat, at best a 12% savings in workday length.

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byoung2
You could actually negotiate the other way around. For example, if your
commute is 1 hour each way, and you work 5 days a week, you're wasting 10
hours each week. If you pitch working from home as being able to turn some of
that commute time into increased productivity, you are actually more valuable
to the company.

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juliob
I wouldn't give up any salary if the job is in the city where I live. I would
rather be in the office to connect with people and to have structure.

If I had to live elsewhere, it would depend on the cost of living. In SE Asia
for example, I would give up 60% or more. In Europe, I would give up only
20-40%.

~~~
piaskal
It's not about where you have to live, but where you want to live. The whole
point of remote job would be the ability to move to whatever place you like.

~~~
byoung2
I would love to live in the Philippines and pull an American salary. The cost
of living is easily 50-70% cheaper than Los Angeles, and the people there are
so friendly.

If your company uses (or could use) offshore workers, you could have a good
case for moving overseas to manage that team. The value of having someone they
trust working alongside the offshore team is probably worth paying you your
current salary.

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djb_hackernews
I was thinking about this recently in terms of normalized developer worth.
Developers in the valley and NYC get paid a ton of money because of COL. What
if we factored out COL (which is something software developers can do), then
what is our worth? It is surely below the 100k mid level salaries for
developers in the valley/NYC.

Could developers in those places end up pricing themselves out just due to
location?

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pjmurray
As an alternative - I work site based requiring me on site 15 days at a time,
6 days off. Accommodation and food provided. As a salaried employee I am given
a 40% uplift for this. I have heard of cases where this can be as great as
60%. However, the detail is in the numbers - when on site you are usually
required to work 12hr days. 50% more hours, 40% more pay. Go figure.

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gexla
As a contractor / freelancer, you shouldn't be willing to lower your rates
based on where you live. As an employee, you should only be willing to do this
as some sort of negotiation in place of losing your job. Company: To keep your
job you need to take a pay cut. You: I will take a pay cut if you allow me to
work remotely and live wherever I like.

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notahacker
A given company shouldn't pay you less for working from home unless it
actually reduces your usefulness to them, in which case they're perfectly
entitled to propose a cut and hope that doesn't demotivate you too much. If
that means two more free hours a day, a better lifestyle and/or lower costs of
living then you're still quite possibly better off worth negotiating that pay
cut.

Realistically, for most people absolute freedom to work where they want
probably means leaving their existing job and having much more restricted
choice of jobs or companies looking to contract out, which unless you're
presently underpaid will probably to lead to lower offers .

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clueless123
It really depends..

$80k in the Valley or in NY is barely enough to live, The same 80k is O.K. in
Texas and is great in most capitals in S. America..

Besides, some of us actually like going to the office ;)

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barrydahlberg
In NZ $80k USD would be epic!

