Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

Well, it is a workers market right now.

Professionally there is nothing special about me except that I really enjoy working, but for the last two remote jobs, the offer letter I received was more than what I verbally agreed on with HR. Since I am also 70 years old, I take this as good evidence of how pro-worker the job market is right now.

I offer free mentoring (see my web site) and always talk about the importance to having a beginner’s/learner’s mind. I think that what companies want is: prioritizing the company’s interests, being flexible, and being observant looking for opportunities to improve the business. Fairly straightforward strategy.

Good luck reaching your financial goals/salary number but also please remember money isn’t everything, and is much less important than our relationships with other people.

Leverage.

If your work improves the productivity of 100+ other people, you're surely worth the price.

If your work saves $500k+ in annual costs, you're surely worth the price.

If hiring you cripples key competitors, you're surely worth the price.

If you can enable new revenues streams through knowledge that only you have, you're surely worth the price.

If hiring you does not increase productivity, reduce costs, fend off competition, or bring in more revenue, then you'll be fighting an uphill battle to justify that salary. But if you do, talk about it. People gossip and those companies who have the biggest multiplier to benefit off your work will be working hard to reach you.

In my opinion, remote or not is less important than you think. The key decisions will be based on whether hiring you at that price is a net positive for the company or not.

EDIT: And if you're outside of the US, set up a local LLC so that US-based companies can treat you like an independent contracting business. That'll make it much easier to hire you across borders. And at that price, you can surely afford the $1000 annually for a tax advisor retainer.

You just need to apply for roles with public companies that offer liquid equity. Very few of us are getting 250k+ on base salary alone. Most of us have the salary bands you’re already in, but have additional equity pay on top. It doesn’t have to be a FAANG either. There are loads of public companies out there hiring engineers at 250k total comp.

Oh hey, I did this recently.

The pandemic seemed like it was winding down (remember those naive days of 5 months ago?) and I decided I don't want to go back to the office, ever. Got a kid on the way, and I decided that the time I spend commuting would be better spent with my child. And my employers was making lots of whining noises that sounded like "we're never going to make this easy on you".

First, pick the right companies to apply to. Are you applying to one that 'also offers fully remote positions', or one where everyone is remote? Are remote employees first class citizens? A simple way to measure this: how high in the leadership do you have to be before you must live in a particular city (or some set of cities) to do the job? If the CEO is working from home, you know this company takes remote pretty seriously.

Edit a bit later: The reason I mention 'do they take remote seriously' is that companies that don't take remote seriously are the ones who still think in terms of 'city = salary rate'. Remote companies don't care.

In terms of CVs, no need to make it much different, imho. Maybe call out that you worked well remotely during the pandemic, and any other 'my coworkers aren't in the same physical space as me' experience.

Don't reveal your current salary during the interview process. The only salary you need to share with them is another company's competing offer.

Good luck. The market is excellent for developers right now.

My main trick has been to specialize in things that all companies like a lot (AWS, js, python), jumping gigs, and leveraging Remote Contracting networks [1].

To get to ~200k remote salaries is hard, but not impossible if you make clear what kind of business leverage you bring and what responsibilities you can take.

In addition, you might not actually need such a high Remote salary if you choose to live in cheaper towns. You don't need a $200k salary if you can make your $120k feel like $1M by living in the countryside.

[1] "How I got wealthy without working too hard": https://amaca.substack.com/p/how-i-got-wealthy-without-worki...

You should think about it from the company's perspective: Why should they hire someone at twice the rate at which they can find very good people? As you say most remote companies pay either average or slightly above-average local market salaries as that's good enough for most developers to find these jobs attractive enough (since many prefer remote work) for the companies to fill up their hiring pipeline with lots of good candidates.

That said I think $250k is definitely possible for non entry-level positions if you bring strategically important knowledge into a company. If you e.g. work for a startup/scaleup/enterprise in given space go talk to other companies in the same space that want to break into the competitors market or pull off a similar business model. Then you can e.g. say "I helped company X to scale their backend infrastructure to support 100 MM customers and I'm looking for a position where I can apply that knowledge and help you do the same, while having more responsibility / ownership / decision power". That will make you more valuable to a company than saying "I'm a really good Golang programmer". It's all about selling you as an individual with very specific market knowledge that a company wants.

If you're inside the US, just apply to any private unicorn or public tech company (the ones that get media coverage). Anecdotally, roughly 50% of them are now cool with full remote and virtually all will pay 250k or more in total comp.

If you're outside the US, forget about salaried roles. I've found that a vast majority of companies mentioned above will have blanket policies against hiring non-US workers (most HR departments are still living in the past and don't know services like Pilot, Deel, Remote.com, etc exist).

Also, there's virtually zero non-American companies that pay those kind of salaries--save for a few select places like Singapore, Zurich (and funny enough, its also the American companies in those cities that pay the highest).

Contracting for sleepy European big companies is probably your best option if outside the US. In most European countries, there's insane cost benefits to having contractors vs. employees due to the social welfare systems and impossibility of firing an employee. So contractor rates can match US ones.

For all the talk about COVID unlocking the global marketplace of talent, I don't see any evidence of that happening yet.

Covid has eliminated geographic barriers to talent within countries, but the barriers between countries are still too scary for risk-averse, late-adopting HR/Compliance/Legal types to deal with.

Give it another 5 years before the FUD clears.

Personally I would just identify a technical niche that is highly valued by certain industries, and specialize in that.

For example in high-frequency trading, there is a small niche developing ultra-low-latency FPGAs or ASICs for trading systems. The work in question is fairly straightforward compared to other industries, but most of the people with the right skillset tend to go to aerospace or other big user of sophisticated electrical engineering instead. The number of positions in the relevant niche is low, but given that there are so few people, they won't care where they are, could sponsor a green card and will pay very well.

This kind of post is somewhere between depressing and surreal to me.

I live a long way outside the US - UTC+8 - and these sort of numbers are utterly unreal for most of the world. In my recent experience, pre-, during- and 'post-'pandemic, the vast majority of remote companies aren't willing or able to consider people outside their local timezone(s) and/or tax jurisdictions, while my local market is masssively under-developed compared with most other developed parts of the world, unless you can break into banking.

My most recent income was a little over a third of this, and that was with a bank, albeit on a devops-ish contract. I am a senior engineer - you could say mid-senior if you really wanted to pick holes in my CV - and I'm pretty much ready to quit the local market, and then likely relocate due to inability to pay rent otherwise...

Meh. Have a good end of year and stay safe, y'all.

In my experience, the easiest way to earn more is to work as a contractor. You can charge more, have more control over your time, get raises more often and go on holiday more often (every 6 months).

I made a whole video series about getting into contracting. This first one lays out my take on why you should consider it - https://learnetto.com/tutorials/why-should-you-become-a-cont...

You need to passively attract the attention of multiple potential employers with lots of money — either revenue or funding — and then let them outbid each other until you find your true maximum market value.

That means getting found by sourcers (recruiters) without explicitly making contact with them. Recruiters are, alas, still prejudiced against active candidates when you are trying to claw your way up the seniority ladder.

You need to show up in their searches somehow e.g. sign up for tech talks / seminars, update your LinkedIn and visit their LI profiles (LI will tell the recruiter / exec that you are looking at their profile, unless you have a pro account.)

None of this is particularly duplicitous. If you don’t have the chops you won’t get an offer. But it certainly helps tip the negotiation in your favour a little bit.

The easiest way to make a lot more money…

Get a job making 120-180 but 4 days a week. It is possible to do this. Make sure it is not an exciting company, but rather a corporate, slow moving one.

Now you can pick up a contract making 100+ per hour. 15-20 hours a week.

Do 4 hours of the main job. Do 4 hours of the freelance work.

You’ll easily be making 250k.

Another thing to note, as a developer you can solve a problem in 1 hour that may take others 4,5, or 10. At your full time job, schedule your work and spread out when you complete tasks.

I’ve found this is a solid way to make a lot of money 200-300k, at non FAANG, and I have been able to fit it all into 4 days every week. I also work less than 40 hours on average. I’m not affiliated with it, but there is a site called overemployed with more tips on doing this.

The key is getting a really slow, easy remote job first. This is easy to manage if you’re a good senior dev

Sales.

When I lived in an expensive part of SF (not long) I was eager to ask around "What do you do for a living?" Sales. One guy managed to bring in 20 million dollars worth of contracts into a tech company by calling his friends. His comp was north of 1 million for one year. He wanted 2 million for the next. That is a good deal for a company and easy to justify that comp. Another lady sold energy contracts. Another lady sold real-estate. Another guy worked in Oracle sales. What I learned: what revenue they generated for the company they got a cut. These people could walk into any company and add IMMEDIATE value. Their personal freedom was also astonishing, their employer couldn't care less where they were or what they were doing. Just bring in a sale.

Go work for Meta (other MANGA companies would likely work but I'm not as familiar with them). Meta is shooting to have a significant portion of their workforce be remote over the next five years so they're pretty much always willing to offer full time remote. As someone working remote, I can say their location-based pay adjustments really doesn't scale to local cost of living (in a good way). Plus thanks to all the bad publicity they're struggling to fill roles.

Note: I'm talking about working remotely in the US, if you want to be remote from a different country Meta may not work for you.

That's high enough that it would be difficult to find alternatives to FAANG

and some of them may accept remote or not (highly uncertain), employees are certainly pushing for it but may be difficult to justify the high salary without coming to office in the future when things start getting back to normal

This is very hard in Germany or not possible at all (beside maybe FAANG).

I have a PhD in Machine Learning (including Papers at SIGKDD / ECML / ACL etc.) as well as relevant working experiences and it is just not possible to get this numbers. I tried really hard to get something that pays this well (beside FAANG) that hire here because i can not move (family stuff).

I once talked with Google and Amazon Research (before Covid) and they told me no remote only (thats why i skipped them for now). Did this policy changed?

I'm CTO for a Series A startup. We have 4 engineers who are making $200k - $300k in cash (excluding options). They are all referrals with 10+ years of experience (in some cases 15+) and they also have deep technical expertise in specific areas we need: Payments, Banking, Data Engineering etc.

Your CV matters but your prior work relationships matter more. Ask yourself: who, among all the folks i have ever worked for would refer me to their current employer and say: "We really need to hire this person - pay them as much as we can afford".

It's quite easy to do that find good companies and do good work in a very particular niche that underpromise and overdeliver (and go under on pricing) and use that to get more work at other companies. Then progressively go higher on pricing and do more than 1 (so you end up at 400k+) then pick the one you want and drop the other work. But if you start high you'll have a hard time proving your work easily, especially if its not specialised and you're not recognised in any way. It's alot of hard work to do the multiple at a go but you get there in the end.

If you simply want the $250k because thats what others are getting or something but cannot actually create the value you'll have a hard time getting there. An easy test for this is you feel you are underpaid at $250k vs being in a situation now where you can't get $250k at any job (non remote or otherwise)

Lots of SF companies that do remote without price alterations. A friend used to work at one: Safegraph.

I gotta tell you, though, that life at these SF startups isn’t the same as the low-output stuff you see at big companies. I’ve worked at a few and the expectation is that you are actually senior, i.e. you take ownership over things.

A lot of complaints you hear on HN are not meaningful in these environments: like when HN users complain about “management” telling them to do things and so on. Your job is execution on the product, not to be a func :: Specs -> Code.

Lots of engineers don’t want that sort of responsibility, so if you’re one of those people who prefer to just be someone supplied a detailed spec and then write code that matches then it’s not an environment you’re suited to.

It does pay well, though.

Consult.

When you are able to advise company leaders, then you magnify your worth and theirs, because you advance their projects and their employees. This makes you significantly more valuable in ways that the leaders are seeking.

In my experience, this necessitates you becoming an expert, such as in one specific technology, or one kind of integration, or one industry sector need, or in one kind of business leadership technique.

If it's difficult for you to earn $X/year in person in a high income area, then you'll probably find it even more difficult to earn $X/year remotely.

It is definitely possible to achieve the total compensation you're looking for working remote. The companies generally fall into two categories: FAANG/MANGA/BigTechAcronymOfTheWeek companies that are remote-tolerant, and remote-first companies that are either late-stage startups or recently IPO'ed. The first category can certainly support 250k+ for an SWE at a level similar to L5 or higher. The bar will certainly be higher for the second category (as they don't have stupid amounts of money that FAANG does), so Staff+ will likely be the only positions that offer that type of compensation. Levels.fyi is a great resource to see current TC levels for offers being given by these companies.

I have been recently going down the same path you have, so I can list some options I have encountered, for whatever that may be worth:

* Coinbase

* Confluent

* Addepar

* Gemini

* Ramp

* Reddit (doesn't change compensation based on location like many companies, by the way!)

* Socure

* Benchling ...

When I came to the US I worked and earned $47/hr as a developer, I was employed as a consultant and had one client whom paid the consulting company $550/hr for my services. I worked over 40h/week but my pay was capped at 40h. I worked this job for 3 years. It was a bit of a sweat shop, but it worked out as after 3 years I was able to get a much better paid job.

I did something close to this before "fully remote" was popular. This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but it worked for me:

Take a non-remote job (as far as possible under Covid conditions) and spend a couple years proving your worth, then sell your manager on fully-remote. Be flexible but respect your non-negotiables whatever they are. At this point, if you're good, your manager is highly motivated to keep you and if you're being reasonable, they will try to make it happen.

Note that there are some companies -- particularly FAANGs -- that have very strict rules about this, so if your "ask" is "digital nomad" and you go to Google, that's not gonna work. But if it's "WFH in Tahoe" you can probably pull it off.

Good luck with it! I'm going to try the same next year if "starting my own startup" doesn't gel.

When you say "fully remote", do you mean partially remote within USA? Or within your region but working from home?

Companies advertising "remote" or "fully remote" jobs are almost never looking for worldwide remote candidates. Your location and cost of living always play an important role in compensation.

I just scored my first 250k at a faang after being erm... stuck at a regular/non-prestigious company for 3 years.

There's basically a cottage industry of 'cracking the faang interview' so I don't feel like repeating it here. But basically any faang/adjacent will pay mid level engineers mid 200s.

Many commentators are suggesting exploring a freelance/contract role instead of a full-time job to make $250k. Now, If we do the math you should be charging ~$125/hr working 8hrs 5 days a week to annually make 250k. You need to charge even more if you plan to take leaves.

My question is where do you find these generous clients? From what I've heard even the top paying freelancing sites like Toptal don't have clients that pay that much to senior developer (after deducing platform commission).

Here’s a cheap and easier trick: find two easy remote jobs each paying $125k. There’s your $250k a year. You don’t need any particularly distinguished resume.

With the right job responsibilities, this is doable for a software engineer. If you can offset the two jobs a bit by time zone it’s even better.

But you better hurry, once people catch on that this is possible the supply of developers can quickly increase overnight, leading to a fall in salaries from oversupply.

You need to find companies who pay enough. 99% of recruiters, jobs on LinkedIn are not paying enough, you need to network, find job opportunities through friends. Use your references from previous jobs. Join tech communities and make friends / show your technical prowess. Most of the jobs I accepted in my career were via word of mouth and with ex coworkers inside the company to put a good word.

I'm living in Europe, working for a European company and pulling 200k$ in base salary with no equity (as a contractor in a different country, treated like an employee, but no sick pay or paid holidays) + some other online businesses netting some variable amounts. I live in a low cost and low tax location - so I can pocket roughly 85% of the profits. One way that really helped me to negotiate higher salary is to have recurring revenue on the side which could support my lifestyle. I'm transparent about that with employers and they know I'm running some side businesses.

Given you're already making a significant amount of money I would focus on optimising taxes / location and then focusing on creating other passive / semi passive revenue streams.

I found this article to be pretty enlightening about the nature of of the software engineering job market, which should help you figure out what companies can afford expensive developers.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

If you're okay with a little risk, it's probably easier to join a remote series S-ish startup where you get a solid base salary (130k-180k based on your experience) and where the stock could be worth anything from 0k/yr to $100k+ per year. I would highly recommend only joining these types of companies if they have technical founders who have worked in BigTech and understand the value of high quality engineers and maintaining a good engineering culture (aka blameless post mortems, predictable deadlines, no-overworking, etc.)

Consulting for me; I work for a large firm but bonuses put me well over $250k. Most of my job is also not tech; I largely manage development teams these days. As a pure engineer, you should be looking at product companies selling SaaS.

To command that level of salary and industry, you need to have at least 10 years experience, with half of that at a “digital economy” product company. If you’re not at a larger product company working on production systems, your title will probably be a level below where you’re at now (so expect to come in making about what you do now, albeit with a higher ceiling for comp and promotions).

Startups aren’t necessarily the best entryway either. The job of working at a startup is very different from working on a relatively mature codebase. It takes a different mindset and a much more methodical approach. Less “move fast and break things” and more “readable code, complete documentation, good tests”.

There is only one thing that will affect your salary - it's what you are able to get at other companies. So the best strategy is to have several companies outbid each other. When you search for jobs, don't just get an offer from one job, try to get an offer from at least 10 jobs.

You can compare the company with yourself trying to buy an house: The house is on sale for $140 (the seller is the developer). If there is only one bidder, you could even buy the house for $130 (you are the only company to give an offer to the developer), but if there are 10 bidders, you will probably end up buying (hiring) the house (developer) for $250.

It's a matter of how desperate the employer are. If they already have many developers - lookup their salary and if it's low they are not desperate enough, eg. they already have a stream of cheap talent.

Almost every large tech company now has fully remote tech roles for senior developers. $250k total comp is average for someone w 4-8 years experience.

You just need to be good in coding, data structures and system design - and be able to show this in the interview - achievable with some practice.

As a salesman, maybe… you may even be able to land a few appointments and treat them all as a boutique. As a developer, a marginal chance exists in the fintech, if you are able as a quant or as a janitor for very exotic and often old codebases.

If you want a base salary that high, move into Product Management or Sales/Sales Engineering. Maybe Data Analytics/Engineering if you're really good at math and find the right company.

Or, as others have said, start your own company.

An alternative scalable way is to switch from a full time job to becoming a freelancer/consultant and set your own rates.

In order to be able to land high paying projects as a consultant, you would need to showcase your skills somehow (open source, portfolio, etc...). This can happen later on though and as a start the easiest way would be to ask for referrals and make it known to your network that you're looking for consulting opportunities.

Making this transition though would imply that you'll need to think about it as a business instead of a job, and start cultivating new skills i.e. communication, marketing, sales, etc...

I was able to recently get a close to $200k base salary job as Sr. software engineer for a startup. Fully remote with benefits. Have a lot of experience though and may be considered somewhat of a niche area.

Somewhat of a tangent, does anyone know how to convert a US-working condition total comp of 250k$ to, say, Swedish-working condition total comp?

The highest Swedish total comp for Software engineer I ever heard is (75kSEK / month). This is 2.5 times lower than the above figure. However, to be fair, total "Swedish" comp should also include public benefits, like pension, parental leave, free "stay at home with sick child", free university, free healthcare, etc.

How can one determine if Swedes are underpaid or just pushed into mandatory savings?

1. Fill out your LinkedIn profile with keywords related to the job you're looking for. This gives you inbound leads. Discuss comp on the first call.

2. Practice LeetCode.

3. Practice system design.

4. Come up with compelling anecdotes in the STAR format for the common behavioral questions.

5. Use levels.fyi to target applying to places that will meet your comp expectations.

6. Keep going. Practice makes perfect.

$250k. Wow. I'd have to say you'd need multiple doctorates, you'd written at least one book that every programmer regards as "The" reference manual, and gotten a Nobel Prize for something. I've been writing software professionally since 1979 and I'm at not quite 3/4 of your goal. Maybe location and choice of tool set has something to do with it. Good luck.

I'm a senior with 20 years experience from a first world country and my salary would more than double if I got what you currently get.

Get really good. By that I mean get fluent in the code, the sales pitch of a product, corner cases and examples of where this has saved real or hypothetical customers money and how. Always looks good to be active on their support groups just incase you encounter a tech person at interview. Then become a consultant.

To have an above average pay you have to show above average abilities on GitHub.

How much experience do you have? Assuming you're not a new grad, any FAANG (or company that wants that level of talent) should give you more than $250K for a mid-level or higher SWE role, even remote.

Look for something in web3 / Decentralized Finance, there is a ton of money flowing into it right now and almost all jobs are remote.

Find a way to generate $500-750k/year for your company. They will be happy to hire you for $250k/year.

depending on where you live and how much experience you have, it shouldn't be too hard to get a ~$200k (base comp) fully remote. $250k base comp sounds harder though. I'm a hiring manager at a FAANG and we're hiring a bunch of positions right now, remote is really taking off.

I once heard the saying 'developers are like prostitudes - pretending to be excited costs extra...' so i take from that you should pretend to be very excited about every idea your higher-ups managers throw at you - i mean that will make everybody else that has to deal with the shit they come up with hate you - but they will surly pay your gratefully because you make them think they are not retarded worthless space (most of the time they are - don't know if anyone doesn't know that open secret).

Just get a remote job at FAANG.

What makes you think you're worth anything anywhere near that?

If you have to ask here, you won't find it.

Why stop at 250?

If you are worth 250k companies find you. I used to get companies calling to offer work because I was able to prove my worth and have companies refer me to other companies.

Harder for you to put a number on your head and try to convince anyone you are worth it.