

Remote Sr. Software Developer salary? - flacon

I keep hearing about a shortage of experienced Sr. developers, but am not sure how that affects what developers are getting paid.<p>I am wondering, what people are roughly being paid for fulltime salaried Sr level dev jobs. I have 7 years experience with 2 years previous exp at a fast-paced and well-known startup. I do Ruby/Rails development and quite a bit of JS development. I also have exp with System Admin and project development/management.<p>Lets imagine, that I live in the Chicago area, but the job is a remote job where the entire team is remote and I can work from anywhere.<p>What salary ranges are people getting for a remote Sr. Developer job?<p>Any feedback would be appreciated.
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mgkimsal
The 'remote' will be the biggest hit, and the salary will be more based on
where that company is rather than where you are.

My own limited experience in this would say that for a US-based company, with
the 'remote' thrown in, you likely would be looking at north of $80k.

This is based on my own experiences working remote (not full time, but
contracting) and talking with others who are doing full and part time work
remotely.

The 'remote' thing will be the hardest. I've talked to companies all over that
are willing to shell out >$120k for a good sr level developer, but will not
entertain the idea of a remote worker under any circumstance. I am somewhat
sympathetic to this - a company needs to really be set up to take advantage of
remote workers. Just having someone working from home without a strong culture
of communication and inclusion will benefit no one. However, given the
supposed shortage of good developers available, this seems to be an area where
fwd-thinking companies could have a great advantage over their competitors.
But, it'll take a lot of time and investment to develop that culture, and
that's something few companies seem willing to do.

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tom_b
I've noticed traditional job listing for a senior dev often include mentorship
and guidance for other devs on a project. For companies with a traditional
(non-remote) team, perhaps a significant part of the senior dev extra value is
thought to be from a "walking the halls" interactions.

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mgkimsal
That's probably a factor in some cases, to be sure. Wouldn't exposure to
strong communication techniques and tools be valuable as well? I've worked
with some developers who truly/honestly didn't understand basic email
etiquette, let alone useful commenting techniques, version control, etc.

The skills that are defining some of the new breed of web-based companies out
there - distributed workforces, able to attract the best people for the job
regardless of where they're located - are sorely lacking in most dev shops
I've worked in or had first-hand accounts from.

It would also be interesting to me if the 'Sr dev' roles you're referring to
had actual time budgeted in to their working day for actual mentoring and
guidance of others, instead of just being a 'go to' person for every junior
dev's problems, on top of your own workload.

