Of the 10,583 developers world-wide who reported working remotely some or all the time, their median salary was US $55,000.
For the last year I’ve sent lots of applications to fully or partly remote companies. I feel like I need to urge people that:
- It’s not easy to find a full-time remote job.
- Most remote workers with good salaries have either their own business, or they are very experienced professionals.
- There are successful freelancers, but they usually have a network of regular customers or they have high rating profiles on freelance websites.
- You have a very small chance to get a well-paid remote job on a western market if you live in Asia, Africa or in Post-Soviet world regardless of your nationality.
- You won’t get a salary of $55,000 if you aren’t US or Canadian citizen, unless you are a very high-quality professional with fluent English and right connections. And lucky.
So please, do not give up your regular job, thinking that you can just travel around and work on the beach once in awhile.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been traveling and working remotely on international projects for many years. And it’s a really cool experience with its own good and bad sides. However, there is a lot of work to be done until you can start traveling and working remotely.
US companies won’t hire a junior developer to work remotely from Asia in a opposite timezone, just because he is very smart and proactive with excellent communication skills.
The best thing one can do is to focus on slowly moving current skills and experiences into the field that allows remote work, or start learning new skills at a spare time, like coding, design, analysis, etc.
Of the 10,583 developers world-wide who reported working remotely some or all the time, their median salary was US $55,000.
This was significantly higher than the salaries of the 25,413 non-remote developers. Their median salary was just $45,000.
And let’s take a quick look at this data again. These two statements can confuse some people, so we should clear up a few things.
- If you want to give up your job and learn coding, because remote developers have higher salaries, be aware that developers with 11+ years experience are nearly twice as likely to work remote as developers with less than 5 years experience. And more experience usually means higher salary.
- If you happen to be a non-western keep in mind that the majority of respondents are from western countries, where salaries are much higher. (24% USA versus 7% India and 1% China)
- And also keep in mind that this statement includes developers who work remotely just sometimes, which means that they are still office workers. And the experienced developer who had worked in the company for many years, has definitely more freedom to allow himself working sometimes from home, rather than some new junior developer with a small salary.
- Companies tend to pay (for same positions) more money to developers, who work in the office and companies often use “remote” as an excuse to pay less.
All these lead us to a conclusion that remote developers have higher salaries not because they work remotely and thus they are more effective, but because on average they have much more experience. Or we can put it like this:
You have to be an experienced high-quality professional or a business owner to have a good income from remote work.
I hope this will help you and good luck on your journey to a remote work!
