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The postings behind “Remote Lowers the Floor, Not the Ceiling”

Read on 1 September 2026 from the public Greenhouse and Ashby job-board APIs of roughly 120 technology companies; 82 boards answered and 34 of them carried qualifying rows. A posting qualified when its title contained engineer or developer, was not a management, sales, support, research or design role, and published a US dollar salary band between $50,000 and $900,000. That left 361 postings.

Work mode was classified from the posting itself: hybrid when the location or text names hybrid working or a number of office days; otherwise remote when the location says remote; office when the role is pinned to a city with no remote marker. Thirty-four postings that fit none of these were dropped rather than guessed. Seniority comes from the title; a title with no marker counts as mid, which makes that bucket the noisiest. Where a posting publishes several location-tiered bands, the row keeps the lowest floor and the highest ceiling.

Medians by seniority and mode

Robustness

Sample concentration is real: Affirm alone contributes 42 of the 108 remote rows. Removing the single largest company from each bucket, the pattern survives and sharpens: senior floors read $180,610 office against $163,000 remote while the remote ceiling rises to $256,000 against $240,000; staff floors read $225,000 against $182,600 with ceilings within half a percent of each other.

No company in the sample posts the same title in more than one work mode, so a same-role paired comparison was impossible. That absence is itself a finding: companies decide the mode per role rather than pricing one role both ways.

All 361 postings

Match.dev publishes this so the numbers can be checked and argued with. Postings change; links go stale. The sample is US-listed, transparency-law-shaped and tech-forward, and says nothing about companies that do not publish bands.