Stop Paying Local Rates for Backend Work That Can Be Done Async and Remotely

Most backend work doesn't require someone in the same room, the same city, or even the same timezone.

The pricing model should reflect that.

The geographic premium you didn't agree to pay

When you hire a backend engineer locally, you're paying for their skills and for their location. Those two things get bundled together in the offer, and most founders don't think to separate them.

But location has a price. It shows up in salary expectations calibrated to local cost of living, in competition with local employers that drives compensation up, in the implicit assumption that proximity is part of what you're buying.

For some roles, proximity is worth paying for. For most backend engineering work, it isn't — and you're paying for it anyway.

What backend work actually requires

Think about what a senior backend engineer does day to day.

They read specs, write code, open pull requests, respond to review comments, run tests, merge changes, and repeat. They communicate through tickets, comments, and documentation. They make decisions in writing that persist in the codebase. The work is fundamentally text-based and asynchronous by nature, even when it happens inside an office with everyone on the same floor.

The synchronous moments — the architecture discussions, the debugging sessions, the planning conversations — matter, but they're a fraction of the total work. And most of them can happen just as effectively over a call as in a conference room, if the written context surrounding them is good.

The local premium you're paying covers a requirement that the work itself doesn't impose.

Where the local rate premium is highest

The cities where this gap is most significant are the ones with the most competitive enterprise hiring markets.

In San Francisco, Seattle, New York, London, Zurich, Singapore — local backend rates for senior engineers reflect competition with tech giants, financial firms, and large enterprises that have set compensation floors that most startups can't justify. The engineers in those cities are excellent. They're also priced to reflect a market in which their alternatives are well-funded companies with large HR budgets.

Paying those rates for work that can be done from anywhere isn't a mistake in principle — sometimes the right person for a role happens to be local, and the rate reflects that. The mistake is treating local rates as the only option when the work itself doesn't require local presence.

What the async remote model actually changes

When backend work is contracted out asynchronously to someone outside your local market, the rate decouples from your city's cost of living and employment competition.

The rate reflects the scope and complexity of the work, the contractor's skill, and what the global market for that expertise actually is — not what it costs to compete with Google for an engineer in your specific zip code.

For well-specified, discrete backend projects, this often produces a meaningfully lower total cost than a local hire or a local contractor, without any compromise on the quality of what gets built.

The catch — and it's a real one — is that the work has to be specified well enough that someone working remotely and asynchronously can build against it without constant clarification. The documentation investment is real. It's also upfront, finite, and not specific to any single project — once a team develops that discipline, every subsequent project benefits from it.

The objection that comes up most often

"We tried remote contracting before and it didn't work."

Usually what happened is that the spec wasn't good enough. The contractor spent time trying to understand requirements that should have been written down. The team spent time answering questions that should have been answered in the documentation. The engagement was slow and frustrating, and the conclusion drawn was that remote contracting doesn't work — when the actual problem was that the work wasn't ready to be handed off.

Remote async contracting fails in predictable ways. The failure mode is almost always documentation quality, not contractor quality.

What to look at before deciding local rates are necessary

Before your next backend hire or contractor search, it's worth asking three things about the specific work.

Does this project have a defined scope and a finish line? If yes, it's a candidate for contracting rather than hiring.

Could someone outside the company build against the current spec without a walkthrough? If no, that's the thing to fix first — not because it blocks remote work specifically, but because it's already slowing down whoever is supposed to be doing the work now.

Is the local rate premium buying something the project actually needs? If the honest answer is no, you're paying for proximity as a default, not as a requirement.

Where to take this from here

If you have backend work that fits the profile — defined scope, documentable, no genuine requirement for local presence — the form at /contact is the practical next step. It covers whether your team's documentation and process infrastructure is set up for async contracting to work well, which is the question that determines whether the model is ready to use or needs some groundwork first.