What's a good salary for a Ruby on Rails developer in Silicon Valley? Given the high cost of living there.

I'm moving my two-person startup to San Francisco and looking to hire a Rails engineer there.

Given how expensive the cost of living is there, what is a decent salary for a full-time, intermediate level, Ruby on Rails developer?

I have tried hiring someone on UpWork, but it's hard to work with someone in a different time zone. Another issue is being able to communicate properly. Some things are much easier to explain on a white board in person than writing up long specs.

Perhaps if there's somebody here who is a Rails dev in San Francisco, they can provide a more authoritative answer, but I'd use Glassdoor and other sites like that (I'd use multiple to get a better cross-section) to get a ball park idea of what the going rate is.

It's generally the kind of thing where you get what you can pay for, and if your Rails development is core to your business working, I wouldn't cheapen out just to save a buck.

I dont know about the first part, but to just comment on the thing about remote employees - you can get highly skilled developers, that have excellent english skills, working on your office hours. No, they are not physically next to you, but the advantage of lower costs often overweighs that detail.

Feel free to ask me if you want more info on Philippine devs, or check out some of the other companies in this field like Ciklum, who work out of the Baltic countries.

Good luck with your start up, and sorry if I went off topic.

I'd say a local employee is the difference of $150k vs $70k remote. I agree with Greif that some things are better communicated face-to-face. Will it save you $80k though?

Offshore is another thing, but then reliability and communication regarding that is a conversation in its own.