High-Paying Remote is the new FAANG
Why most software engineers in the future will want remote careers
Some time ago, I published this article about leveraging a remote dev job to live in countries with low cost of living, paying low tax rates (under 15%).
About 4 months after, I am starting to see a lot of evidence of how this route is quickly becoming the most desired career and life path for most devs out there.
Software Abstractions and Software Dev as a Commodity
Building software products and services used to be something that required a lot of handcrafting, and it still does.
But it’s 2024, and we have been on a clear and decade-long path towards abstraction when it comes to building software.
Long gone are the days where being a Java or C++ expert was considered necessary to be a great engineer able to build something of high-quality.
Today, we have an infinite amount of libraries, APIs, cloud services and open-source software solutions, that it’s hardly ever required to build anything from scratch.
A lot of the job has become gluing existing services together, in a way that serves a specific business purpose.
Most new startups, even those that operate at scale, use TypeScript or Python.
With just a few of them - that are operating on infra products, or for some particular reasons require very high level of performance or parallelism - leveraging also Go or Rust.
If you’re curious of how up and coming scale-ups decide on their tech stack, check out
as it has quite a few articles on it.This means that there’s a perspective where software is becoming more and more a commodity: easier to build, plug and play, pay to use.
With some intelligence and craft required to manage this process.
AI
I will write an entire piece around AI sometime in the future.
Long story short: in my opinion AI within software dev is yet another abstraction.
Basically: everything I’ve said in the previous section regarding abstraction, that happened in the last 10 years, just got a 2x/3x multiple on its acceleration in the past 2 years thanks to AI/LLMs.
Software Dev Market Becoming Efficient
Most markets are inefficient.
In general, most businesses make money by leveraging these inefficiencies:
Real estate prices move slow, and oftentimes you can buy/sell something for a price that doesn’t reflect the actual value - but where you can with a high-enough degree of certainty forecast the trajectory - and make a profit.
Buying crude oil requires someone to ship it to you in barrels from the other side of the world, dealing with all kinds of vendors. This someone will take a cut.
Drop-shipping items from china to Amazon EU/US customers, taking a cut.
Etc.
The stock market, for example, is on the other hand quite efficient:
Assets are bought and sold digitally: they move fast, cheaply, and every market player has a clear view of the market and its prices.
This makes it hard for someone to “buy and re-sell and take a cut”.
That’s why most financial advisors out there tell you to buy index funds and not try to beat the market.
Because this market is quite efficient, and if asset X is priced at Y, unless you have some sort of exceptional edge, price Y will probably reflect the value of X.
The only players able to exploit the very minimal inefficiencies of the market, are - other than human traders acting on insider information - robots.
Namely, High-Frequency Trading (HFT) firms that optimise algorithms and compute to make the minimal gains per trade, and have a huge volume of trades in order to make a profit.
Offshoring
Software companies buy talent and computers and sell software products and services, making a profit.
If it’s 2010,
and there’s a clear demand for something they know how to build, and by buying talent in California and executing fast, they’d still be able to take market shares and make a profit, that’s a win. They will do it.
In fact, they did.
Yes, in theory it would be more efficient to find these human resources in other places with a better price point, but, in business, effectiveness > efficiency.
If you’re Google, and you know how to build a search engine that takes market shares and becomes a monopoly (which is much harder to compete against), you have access to funding, and you can hire and build quick, while still being ridiculously profitable, you’ll do it.
Fast forward 2024,
and the situation isn’t exactly the same as it was a decade ago.
Offshoring has become WAY more effective than it used to be.
The technology and infrastructure is there.
Skilled people are there: young folks in emerging economies have been told for 10+ years now that working in IT a great way to make money and build a good life, and most emerging countries have a large supply of skilled tech workers.
Half the people at Google Zurich are Central and Eastern Europeans.
Half the people in Silicon Valley are Indian or Chinese.
Covid made us improve on processes and systems to get shit done remotely.
People also have fall in love with working remotely and with the flexibility it allows.
Also, make no mistake: even if offshoring wasn’t necessarily super effective, it was so much more efficient that companies did it nonetheless.
Even 5 years ago, all of Central Europe and India had already received significant investments from American tech companies wanting to expand in the area.
After Covid and the changed interest rates environment, this has just accelerated.
Basically, software dev market is becoming more efficient
And this has implications.
There will still be high-paying tech jobs in HCOL areas
(HCOL = high cost of living)
There are many reasons for this:
International companies like to stay diversified, and not just rely on a few countries, governments or continents.
They’re global companies, and they will hire and sell anywhere that makes sense.
The West (let’s summarise like this HCOL areas such as North America or Western Europe) has a lot of talent, especially US tech hubs, because this is where most of the hiring has happened in the past. And global tech companies will likely want to have a presence there to hire some of this talent.
The US has a relatively favourable environment for companies running high-performing organisations: contained employment taxes, easy to hire, easy to fire, top universities, hustle culture and young folks with big dreams being ok working their asses off, etc.
So it’s not like all the jobs are moving offshore.
Also because salaries for top devs in emerging markets will keep rising.
But in my opinion the tech jobs that will be left in the West will fall into a few categories:
Legacy companies with legacy teams, that have a stable business and wouldn’t want to disrupt it too much by hiring in the West and hiring East. Classic examples are Fortune500 companies and banks.
Local companies which are afraid of internationalisation and mostly build and sell in the same location.
International companies building the new frontier technologies: OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, NVIDIA, etc.
Jobs in category 3 will be the highest-paid worldwide, and engineers in these companies will keep “being wealthy”, despite the increased cost of living in their location.
They will also be super competitive jobs to land.
And they’ll have poor WLB.
Jobs in category 1 and 2 will have increasingly low pay compared to the cost of living - with a few exceptions - and purchasing power of people with these jobs will be middle class.
Moreover, engineers with jobs in category 1 and 2 will face increased competitiveness as some opportunities move overseas, and I think they might live a state of fear of layoffs, as they’re one offshoring-reorg away to losing their job and being in trouble.
Western FAANG jobs are 📉📉
FAANG used to be prestigious because it was good:
Great pay
Great job stability
Decent WLB
People with these jobs had both high purchasing power and high saving rates
Today, FAANG jobs in the West start lacking quite a few of these desirable traits.
WLB is gone
Hard to feel a job as healthy when in less than 2 years 400k jobs were cut.
It’s much easier to pressure employees in an organisation when they’re scared of losing their job, and when the market for them is not so juicy.
FAANGs, compared to the past, are having a harder time to make money and face increased competition: meaning they care more about the bottom line and all the leadership is pressured to run lean and efficient organisations, where money isn’t wasted (paying 300-400k+ for an engineer coasting isn’t really an efficient way to allocate capital) .
Pay won’t rise
2010-2020 saw the increase in salaries for devs in the West, especially for those in big tech.
Today, we’ve reached a plateau.
Stability is obviously gone
Purchasing power will likely decrease
If salaries have plateaued, and cost of living is rising, this means that purchasing power will diminish.
Remote work is 📈📈
Remote work isn’t easy.
Let’s start with this.
I don’t want to paint a ridiculous picture of remote work being the easy paradise everyone has access to.
Remote jobs are competitive, especially high-paying ones.
But, as the tech employment market becomes more efficient, I think we’ll see a stable rise in remote and offshore work.
If you think of yourself as a single-person company
Who takes in money from tech companies, and spends it on your life, as one variable (money from companies) stagnates and/or goes down, you still have the opportunity to focus on the other variable (life costs).
Companies become more efficient, and you, as a “software dev output” provider, can become more economically efficient too.
Getting a 200k+ remote job ain’t easy, but getting a 50k one isn’t that hard if you’re a bit capable.
$50k is already plenty of money in a long list of places with contained cost of living, high quality of life, and contained taxes.
Lifestyle
This is a tricky one.
I don’t want to get roasted, but in my opinion the majority of devs doesn’t really have that great of a lifestyle.
Especially in big tech.
I worked in a lot of different companies including a few big techs, and I think oftentimes the lifestyle just isn’t there.
I don’t want this to sound like I want to ‘bully nerds’. I am a nerd too.
Also, lifestyle is very personal and what is good for someone might not be good for someone else.
But I think we can all agree that commuting everyday to an office that looks like a warehouse - or a kids’ theme park in the best cases - hangout with a group of people with extremely low diversity (basically male, nerdy engineers), with a boss looking on your shoulder, forced chit chats and social time with people that you wouldn’t necessarily choose as your friends but just happen to work with you, isn’t all that great.
Imagine, on the other hand, having the freedom to choose when, how and where to work, with whom to spend your social time, being evaluated on your output, having less office politic, saving hours in commute time every week, and I think it’s quite easy to see how remote work gives a hands-down better lifestyle.
This has to be worth something.
Remote work - reality check
Some companies are calling people back to the office.
And, surprise surprise, other companies look very much forward to poaching the disgruntled employees working in companies doing RTO.
If you have a high-paying job in the West, it’s possible or even likely that you’ll get called back to the office.
After all, lots of companies there have spent billions in office space, have an “onsite-first” culture, and look forward to leveraging a RTO to do another round of layoffs without having to pay severance (because some people will spontaneously quit).
But there still are plenty of companies that want to leverage remote
To avoid paying real estate, being able to hire and retain great talent at better prices, build a culture that is more resilient towards the future, because it’s clear that devs want the freedom to work where they want.
Conclusion
I believe in what I say.
I might very well be wrong.
These are just my opinions.
And I’m just a “broke and lazy” European dev :)
Yet, I like to act based on what I know - then if I’m wrong, I’ll course correct in the future.
So here’s a bunch of stuff I’m doing to facilitate devs going remote:
Euro Top Tech Jobs: the nr.1 job board for high-paying tech roles in Europe, AND the premier destination to find high-paying ($100-600k) fully-remote tech companies (now 39+).
Coaching Program: the only serious coaching program for devs in Europe willing to get high-paying jobs in big tech or Switzerland, as well as those looking to pursue high-paying remote careers.
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