[brozaman]

I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money.

Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year.

I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.

[ChuckNorris89]

That's an insane salary for Spain, and remote to. Can I ask how to get such a wage there?

[brozaman]

Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount.

1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them.

2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more.

3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche.

4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot.

I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*.

As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.

[fogoflove]

There are definitely cases in which this is true -- yours, for example -- but I imagine Google has done the math on this.