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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

This is news? It's just another ridiculous facet of living in the Bay Area. You're making 150k/yr at your software engineering gig, but you're 35 years old and still renting.

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And every employer insists on local employees, just because it's trendy. Salaries have not kept pace with housing costs.

"Every employer" is an exaggeration, but I'd agree that far too many of them do. I also wonder if they do it not because it's "trendy", but because management has bought into "culture fit" arguments without challenge or at least serious reflection and criticism, or perhaps because of the envy that goes along with their own management responsibilities ("hey, if my ass needs to be in a seat downtown at 8am, so does yours, even if your job doesn't require on-site work and all-hands meetings").

Remote work is becoming a benefit, not a feature, and I think it's becoming a major factor in whether a certain sector of developers and engineers accept a given gig or not. Especially if you're a grownup and have a family and young children. And once you've tasted remote work, and have your own home office, setup, and workflow, it's hard to go back to commuting, time-wasting meetings that should have been an email, and million dollar housing.

There is a real difference between collaborating with someone in person rather than via Skype. You get to know proximal coworkers too.

For everybody telling that there is "real difference" of collaborating in person vs remotely, nobody seems to be able to explain what this difference _is_, except in some vague terms.

If the difference is "being able to go and ask your coworker directly if you don't know something about the project or want to share some ideas", it is: a) obviously possible over Skype, and b) it brings nothing but damage to development efforts, as interruptions break the flow for hours. Unless it is urgent, it is much more preferable to write an e-mail and go work on some other park of the project.

I am an introvert, and human interactions are draining my energy. Most of the developers I know are also introverts. Of course, occasionally direct interactions are absolutely necessary, but it is rarely enough to warrant 100% presence and constant interruptions, which simply don't allow to get anything done.

Those interruptions, on a small volume, are actually pretty important. That's one way that information cross-pollinates on the team. Those accidental conversations about the codebase can and do lead to reprioritising changes or coming up with new approaches. With a remote person, you don't get that. Remote workers can't make nearly as big of an impact when it comes to doing the stuff they /aren't/ directed to work on.

Also, at some point, somebody has to bring new hires up to speed, and I certainly wouldn't want that process to happen over Skype. Teaching new hires is an important time to get them on the same page on the team's practices and help find the rough spots in bootstrapping someone to the codebase.

In general, software development is much more high-bandwidth than people give it credit for. It's often much more beneficial to hash out an unclear specfication with a coworker over coffee than it is to forge ahead and just make stuff that seems like it could work.

I think the biggest benefit is sitting together with your teammates.

At JotForm, (most of) our teams have their own rooms with doors that can close. They can have lively "high bandwidth" discussion in front of a white board. People glance what is on their teammates' screens. Making comments about what they are doing and coming up with new ideas. They go to lunch together. Once a week, team lunch out is paid by the company. Informal talks turn into amazing ideas.

Sitting together as a team is very motivational. You see excitement in other person's eyes and that in turn excites you.

We also do a lot of co-piloting. Working on hard tasks or tasks that requires knowledge of two people can be done much more quickly when you sit together.

We do have many remote developers but they all work individually on individual projects. It works really well if you work by yourself and if you have a backlog of tasks to do. In such cases, working alone remotely is perfect.

Here you go (something I have posted previously on this forum)-

1. Timezone issues - this is, imo, the biggest one. Especially after working with people in China, India, Europe or even eastern USA (with me in SF bay area). People all over the world usually start working around 9-10, and stop working around 6-7. Meetings, code/design discussions are very difficult on those schedules, especially when you want a decision on smaller issues where a quick back n forth would settle the matter in 30 min if everyone was in the same room. And there are plenty of such issues, where unavailability of your coworkers seriously affects the productivity.

2. Impromptu discussions: These are triggered by spontaneous ideas, and ideas do not come according to a fixed schedule of meetings. By not having remote workers in these discussions, both sides lose (by not having more brains, as well as by missing out).

1. I live in Switzerland, but I work with US East timezone. I am an evening person, and it is very convenient — starting working at 3PM and have the entire first half of day to spend with my family (they all are morning people).

2. There's Slack/HipChat for that.

Then don't make your employees move to the most expensive region in the world.

Like it or not, this is where the movement is, and the VC. There is a lot of momentum to it.

And yes it's expensive, but at least they do pay well here

Actually, taking into account cost of living, I don't believe the Bay Area pays any better for the median developer than other competitive cities.

I wonder how much can people realistically save under these conditions

I know people who make less than $150k who have bought homes and condos this year. It's not like every place costs a million dollars. Condos cost significantly less than that, as do homes in downtown San Jose, south San Jose, and east San Jose.

I wouldn't personally have bought a home this year, because why buy at the peak? But it is doable. The down payment is the primary hurdle.

35 year olds in the bay are making closer to $300-$500k/yr, not $150k. Probably not that many renting if they don't want to

That's just not true, not by any stretch. Certainly not for the median salary, and not even for the average, even though that's distorted by the long tail of very high salaries. There are easily-googled studies out there which put mid-career median salaries at $150k at best. If that seems absurdly low to you, that's probably because your friends are a self-selected group (as they are for everyone). Sort of like "how could Nixon win, I don't know anyone who voted for him".

To be clear, my comment applies specifically to software engineers in the bay area

So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school and a lot of experience can easily get an offer around $150k from one of the better companies in the bay area (assuming one interviews well). Their median was $148k, in fact. Numbers like $300k or $500k are not typical for software engineers, even in the best companies.

And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.

The median salaries listed on Glassdoor (although not filtered by age) for even senior software engineers in the Bay Area aren't even CLOSE. Your sample is obviously biased (not to mention self-selected).

I am 35 years old, as are most of my friends, and we are all making over $700k right now... Your number seems kind of low?

What gives you the impression that people are making such a small amount of money in the Bay Area?

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