Up to half of developers work remotely; here's who's hiring them

One of the great things about technology work is that it doesn't really matter where it's performed. You're on the network, with minimum latency, regardless if you're down the hall or on another continent. For employees, working from home -- or from a remote office -- means greater flexibility and reduced stress from commutes. For employers -- and this is extremely important in the IT field -- it means being able to draw from a vast, global pool of talent, with no concerns about relocation. In addition, work could even be handed off from time zone to time zone for more rapid turnarounds. 

It is estimated that there are between 18 to 21 million developers across the globe. Of this, only about one million -- or five percent -- are in the United States, so you can see how an employer in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, needs to spread its recruiting and staffing wings.

It's in the best interest for tech-oriented employers, then, to be open to this global pool of talent. There are a number of companies leading the way, actively hiring globally distributed tech workforces. Glassdoor recently published a list of leading companies that encourage remote work, which includes some prominent tech companies, and Remotive has been compiling a comprehensive list of more than 2,500 companies of all sizes that hire remote IT workers.

Survey data from Stack Overflow, analyzed by Itoro Ikon, finds that out of almost 89,000 developers participating in its most recent survey, 45% work remotely at least part of the time, and 10% indicated they are full-time remote workers. A majority of remote workers, 58%, are regular full-time employees.

Interestingly, remote developers make more than their onsite counterparts. The average annual compensation for the remote group is $139,081 while it is $111,321 for non-remote developers, Ikon says. In addition, "the job satisfaction of remote developers on average is slightly more than that of the non-remote professionals."

Below is just a small sampling of employers in the enterprise computing space offering remote work opportunities for IT professionals, identified by Glassdoor and Remotive. This sampling illustrates the wide variety of enterprise technology-oriented offerings supported by remote IT workforces. Many others offer personal productivity or consumer-oriented solutions or apps. (Of Remotive's list of 2,500+ employers, 1,484 were "actively hiring" at the time of this writing.)

Altassian: Collaborative workplace tools

Citrine: AI platform for materials development

Close: Inside sales platform

CROmetrics: Data-driven experimentation

Datadog: Infrastructure monitoring and analytics

Dynatrace: Enterprise cloud analytics

Emptor: Trust as a Service

Invoca: AI-driven call analytics platform

Intuit: Financial software provider

NAVEX Global: Ethics and compliance platform

Paylocity: Payroll and human resources

ProFinda: Workforce optimization

Rackspace: Cloud service provider

Red Hat: Enterprise open-source systems  

Redox, Inc.: Electric health records systems integration

Retego Data: Marketing analytics

Senseye: Predictive maintenance

Silverfin: Cloud-based financial management 

Tigera: Zero-trust network platform

When I Work: Employee scheduling software