The Real Reason American Developers Are Desperate for Remote Work

Here’s why US developers are so desperate to work remotely instead of commuting by car into an office, even 3 days a week.

Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Career Programming
Published in
6 min readJun 12, 2024

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Not my view, but I like the concept of working remotely while looking at water. Photo Kornél Máhl on Unsplash

Foreign developers are often very surprised to learn that senior software engineers in the United States with at least 1–3 years of full-time work experience as a software engineer typically make $100,000USD a year.

Big Tech companies like Netflix, Google, and Amazon often pay twice that, so developers have mostly held their noses and gone back to the office.

However, senior developers making $100,000USD are desperate to work remotely in the US, just to be able to make ends meet.

Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold, they are not!

That can’t possibly be right, though. After all, the US has a federal minimum wage of only $7.25/hour (a full-time salary of $15,000 a year).

So, why are American developers so desperate to work remotely, when they make $100,000USD or more a year, more than 6x the minimum wage?

A Hypothetical Software Engineer in San Mateo, CA

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Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Career Programming

Hi, I'm Doctor Derek! I've been a professional web developer since 2005, and I love writing about programming with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js & Git.