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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1553799

by frankenstein59 • 16 years ago

18 16 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

I just want to get a general feeling of how much people on HN value the freedom to work from wherever they want.

cperciva3• 16 years ago

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.

frankenstein592• 16 years ago

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!

cperciva3• 16 years ago

Most of the Canada->SV difference is nuisance costs of adjusting to a different country. Immigration. A driver's license. Banks. Income taxes. Insurance. All the little things which we know how to do because we've done them all our lives but which are never really documented.

If I spent 5 years living in the bay area, that $20k/year would drop significantly, since I would no longer need to learn those quotidian details.

Perhaps I should have said that I consider Canada to be $5k/year preferable to silicon valley, plus $15k/year as a frictional cost of changing countries.

cperciva3• 16 years ago

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.

juliob• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

byoung22• 16 years ago

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.

gexla• 16 years ago

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.

notahacker• 16 years ago

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 .

clueless123• 16 years ago

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 ;)

barrydahlberg• 16 years ago

In NZ $80k USD would be epic!

pjmurray• 16 years ago

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.

mmt• 16 years ago

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.

byoung22• 16 years ago

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.

djb_hackernews• 16 years ago

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?

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

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