Remote Sr. Software Developer salary?

1 points by flacon 15 years ago | 4 comments

I keep hearing about a shortage of experienced Sr. developers, but am not sure how that affects what developers are getting paid.

I am wondering, what people are roughly being paid for fulltime salaried Sr level dev jobs. I have 7 years experience with 2 years previous exp at a fast-paced and well-known startup. I do Ruby/Rails development and quite a bit of JS development. I also have exp with System Admin and project development/management.

Lets imagine, that I live in the Chicago area, but the job is a remote job where the entire team is remote and I can work from anywhere.

What salary ranges are people getting for a remote Sr. Developer job?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

mgkimsal 15 years ago |

The 'remote' will be the biggest hit, and the salary will be more based on where that company is rather than where you are.

My own limited experience in this would say that for a US-based company, with the 'remote' thrown in, you likely would be looking at north of $80k.

This is based on my own experiences working remote (not full time, but contracting) and talking with others who are doing full and part time work remotely.

The 'remote' thing will be the hardest. I've talked to companies all over that are willing to shell out >$120k for a good sr level developer, but will not entertain the idea of a remote worker under any circumstance. I am somewhat sympathetic to this - a company needs to really be set up to take advantage of remote workers. Just having someone working from home without a strong culture of communication and inclusion will benefit no one. However, given the supposed shortage of good developers available, this seems to be an area where fwd-thinking companies could have a great advantage over their competitors. But, it'll take a lot of time and investment to develop that culture, and that's something few companies seem willing to do.

tom_b 15 years ago | |

I've noticed traditional job listing for a senior dev often include mentorship and guidance for other devs on a project. For companies with a traditional (non-remote) team, perhaps a significant part of the senior dev extra value is thought to be from a "walking the halls" interactions.

mgkimsal 15 years ago | | |

That's probably a factor in some cases, to be sure. Wouldn't exposure to strong communication techniques and tools be valuable as well? I've worked with some developers who truly/honestly didn't understand basic email etiquette, let alone useful commenting techniques, version control, etc.

The skills that are defining some of the new breed of web-based companies out there - distributed workforces, able to attract the best people for the job regardless of where they're located - are sorely lacking in most dev shops I've worked in or had first-hand accounts from.

It would also be interesting to me if the 'Sr dev' roles you're referring to had actual time budgeted in to their working day for actual mentoring and guidance of others, instead of just being a 'go to' person for every junior dev's problems, on top of your own workload.

flacon 15 years ago | |

Thanks for your answer.

In this case the entire company works remotely, similar to 37signals. So its a distributed team.