[soldergenie]

Did you have to take a salary cut when you moved to VA? (e.g.: so your salary would be more in line with VA norms than silicon valley norms?)

That is the big problem with telecommuting for me - it seems hard to find companies which are willing to pay silicon valley level salaries to people living outside silicon valley, and if you take a pay cut, the savings in rent diminishes drastically.

I suppose it is different when you start in silicon valley and move elsewhere while staying in the same company, rather than just starting out elsewhere. But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley.

[curun1r]

Not the poster you're replying to, but I manage both remote employees and local devs. We do adjust salaries based on location, but the adjustment data we use seems skewed in favor of remote employees. As an example, an employee in Florida gets $140k which is only $30k less than we'd pay him if he were local.

> But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley.

I'm not sure if this is true. If you're going to work for another SV company and remote, it's quite common for you to be able to quote a number higher than you got from your previous remote job and negotiate your way down to at or just above where you actually were in the previous job. The only time where I'd see you needing to adjust your salary down is if you took a job with a non-SV company in the interim. Just be aware that the salary data used by each company may be different.

But it is probably helpful to come to SV/SF at some point in the beginning and transition to remote work initially because hiring out here is somewhat incestuous and having a well-known SV employer on your CV will help with getting past HR filters and ensure you get the necessary LI touches.

[drewg123]

I changed jobs in order to return home from the Bay Area. With my old employer I would have taken a small pay cut, but that wasn't an option since my group did not have a presence in my home state, and the VP my group was under refused to consider telecommuters. I'm not certain what the pay cut would have been (since they were very secretive). There was a guerrilla salary survey which indicated that lower-cost areas did not have substantially lower salaries (maybe 20% less).

With my current employer, I get paid the same regardless of where I live.

[tptacek]

Those companies do exist, and they're getting more common.