I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.
She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?
I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).
I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.
I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
1. I will not work at in office job.
2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.