WFH Can Get You 40% Salary Boost In UK And US Tech Jobs

A web developer is the tech role most likely to be offered to work from home and also gets 39 percent more pay for the arrangement than other jobs, according to research.

Looking at six million data points from Glassdoor, the employer comparison service, HR software biz Remote found 31 percent of web developer jobs say they are remote-based followed by software engineers and translators. Web developers also get nearly £13,000 more than average in WFH roles. For software engineering, the difference is around £6,500.

In the US, the web developer is the most likely role to be offered under WFH arrangements. The role is paid $22,508 more than average when performed remotely. That's a 37 percent difference, slightly more than a software engineer in percentage terms, but in dollars software engineers get much more: it's around a $25,000 difference above the average salary.

Remote also looked at the industries most likely to offer WFH arrangements. IT is the highest as nearly one in six roles in the UK are advertized as remote in the sector. In the US, the industry most likely to offer WFH roles was management and consulting (19 percent), media and communications (16 percent), and IT at just over 15 percent.

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Nadia Vatalidis, Remote VP of people, said: "Employers hiring for remote roles have a much larger selection of top tier candidates and a reduced need for costly office space among other benefits. In addition, employees who prefer the remote life-work balance gain increased flexibility and the potential opportunity to work from anywhere in the world."

Working from home has become a hot topic in the tech industry since pandemic-induced worldwide lockdowns hastened the trend. Attitudes have been divided since.

In September last year, Microsoft found employers still don't know just how fruitful their staff are when away from the office, leading to "productivity paranoia." Some 85 percent of biz leaders say they have a "hard time knowing for sure that their people are being productive," the study found.

According to a survey of 50,000 employees in June and July last year, Brit workers are going into the office on average 1.5 days a week but more and more employers are expected to call staff back in, including BT.

It seems that some managers may need to reassess the measures they use to decide how productive their staff are, or risk losing some of them. ®