How a Remote Job from Low-Cost Low-Tax (LCLT) Protects You from Layoff Anxiety
And gives you more leverage "against" your employer in general.
Intuit recently laid off 1800 employees for “poor performance”.
Let’s start with this:
Your company, especially if it’s a big corporation, it’s not on your side.
If they could legally exploit you to the bone, they’d probably do it.
Most of them at least: there are exceptions of course (especially small/medium size fully-remote companies that trust their employees and give them freedom 🙂).
But definitely most Big Tech/FAANG companies belong to this category (as you can see on layoffs.fyi).
It's important to understand that, even if they brainwash you into thinking that you’re a happy tribe changing the world together, the truth is that you’re effectively selling them your services, and it’s in your interests to get the best deal possible.
The more leverage you have, the better deal you can cut.
A personal recommendation: I suggest you to have a “tribe” that is not a corporation but it’s actual people who genuinely and non-transactionally care about you.
Back to the leverage…
Imagine every company is desperately looking for engineers to build stuff and ride a bull market, and that there aren’t as many qualified devs out there.
Devs have leverage.
Now imagine you’re on a bear market, there are less money to be made, devs are pricey, there’s a growing number of devs available, we realised we can effectively build software from places with low cost of labour, many companies are doing layoffs, etc.
Companies have leverage.
Till here, I agree, nothing new.
But here’s the interesting part.
CoL and Leverage
If you’re living in the US, your CoL is high, your monthly burn rate is high and there’s not much you can do to reduce it if you lose your job, especially if you have a family.
They might give you some severance, but other than that, you have no welfare protections that allows you to have an income.
You’re desperate!
Desperate = lowest possible leverage on your side, highest possible leverage on companies side.
This has the effect that in every deal you'll make with a corporation for your services, they'll be able to negotiate much harder than you.
It's not a good position to be in.
Now...
Imagine if your CoL wasn’t that high.
Sure, if you work from LCOL, your salary will also be lower than if you work from SF/NYC.
But maybe you find a well paid remote job, and you're able to retain most of the salary through efficient taxation, to save a lot of it thanks to a low CoL, and you can invest it in affordable real estate in your area.
Let's now imagine that you're in this situation, and you get laid off.
How desperate would you be?
Probably you already have one or more properties covering for a great deal of your living costs, you can easily reduce your spending a bit and end up with a very low burn rate.
You're not desperate.
Sure, you’ll keep looking for jobs and maybe you’ll be a bit stressed out.
But you’re nowhere close to the level of desperation that a laid off dev would experience in the US.
Remote work gives you leverage.
I encourage you to think about how to optimise YOUR life, YOUR freedom, for YOUR people.
Not for a corporation.
Just my 2 cents.
What do you think?
Job Board
I’m allocating more resources into improving my job board at EuroTopTechJobs.com
My Product Management team at the moment is the 60 paid subscribers of these newsletter.
I recently got feedback regarding:
Adding a column for the “freshness of the job”: indicating if the job is new (added this week), 1 week old, 2 weeks old, or 3 weeks old.
Splitting the Job Board / table into two Google Sheet windows: one which is strictly a job board with jobs, links to apply, expected Total Compensation (TC), country, city, etc; and one window which is a tool to calculate your saving rate based on your lifestyle, country of residence/taxation and TC.
So I will be iterating on exactly that.
If you want to be part of shaping this Job Board, might be a good time to become a paid subscriber and join the private chat with the other paid subs where we discuss these things.
Also, the weekly Job Board’s update email will now become a private email to paid subscribers only, as I start adding names of fully-remote companies paying 100k-200k TC for devs (which could setup shop in LCLT countries).
Coaching Program
Recently one of the participants got a couple of offers (waiting for a third one) and will switch from a low-pay, high-tax, MCOL/HCOL work setup to a mid/high-pay, low-tax, LCOL setup.
Very exited to share more about this soon :)
In general, I am getting more convinced that a 2 paths solution is what makes the most sense:
A paid async course on Learning How To Navigate Europe’s Tech Market: low price (somewhere between $50 and $500 depending on a few details that I still need to address), aimed at sharing knowledge regarding what paths are available right now to devs in Europe and how to go—in practice— about each of them.
A high-ticket, exclusive and hands-on (from my side) coaching program aimed at moving the needle of your situation: this is the best option for people like this aforementioned candidate who managed to 10x their work situation in 2/3 months. This is better suited for people who are already prepared for a change (in terms of skills and interview prep), who are willing to put in the work and who care about getting the best results possible in the shortest amount of time possible.
I am also thinking of adding a “side-service” to the job board, consisting of an async/offline CV/LinkedIn review service: you are a paid subscriber of this newsletter (5 eur/month), you have access to the job board, and you want to maximise your reply rate after you apply: you can submit your CV and LinkedIn and I will give you feedback on how to improve it, including detailed comments on both CV and LinkedIn profile. Then I give you the possibility to incorporate my changes and further iterate/repeat this process with me for a few times (between 3 and 5) until you have a good enough CV/LinkedIn. I could price this anywhere between $350 and $700. Still need to think about it. I think it could be valuable too as CV/LinkedIn has a huge impact on your applications and on your inbounds from recruiters on LinkedIn.
Don’t forget to participate to and checkout the results of this salary transparency doc if you haven’t already.
