GeekWire Podcast: Tech pay, cloud trends, Kraken, and self-driving cars, with Qumulo CEO Bill Richter

Everyone is closely monitoring the implications of remote work as we emerge from the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that one of the most widely read stories on GeekWire this week — right behind the Titanic’s disappearing bathtub and Facebook’s potential name change — was a story on trends in tech salaries. 

Two big trends stood out in the report from jobs site Hired:

• Average tech salaries in Seattle are up 4.6% from last year, to $158,000, second only to the Bay Area, which saw its average dip slightly to $165,000.
• Nationwide, the average U.S. tech salary fell 1.1% to $152,000. With the shift to remote work, “employers are expanding their addressable candidate pool, filling roles faster and paying lower average salaries,” Hired said.

What’s going on here? That’s our first topic on this week’s GeekWire Podcast.

Guest commentator: We get a real-world perspective on tech hiring, remote work, and pay trends from Bill Richter, president and CEO of Qumulo. The cloud file storage and management company joined the ranks of Seattle’s unicorns with a valuation of $1.2 billion in its latest funding round. Richter was previously a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, and a leader at Isilon Systems and EMC.

“We are far more open to remote locations,” Richter said. “It really doesn’t make that much of a difference where they are when they appear on their video conferencing screen. And that opens up a lot of new talent pools.”

For its remote work policy, Qumulo’s executive team has delegated decisions to its functional leaders, with a plan to learn and adjust as it goes, adopting an Amazon-like policy before Amazon did.

“So we’re definitely approaching things differently,” he added. “That’s not a temporary state for us; that will be the future of the way we go as a company.”

What does that mean for pay? The Hired survey shows that new employees in far-flung locations might not command as much as those in tech hubs. But unlike some other tech leaders, Richter, whose background is in accounting and finance, doesn’t see much merit in attempting to adjust salaries when existing employees relocate.

“It’s a global market for talent. And in exchange for the talent and the impact that the individual provides the organization, they shall be compensated,” Richter said.

He explained, “All the micro-tuning of things like location and that sort of thing, that might work in the short run. In the long run, what we’ll see is a market clearing for compensation in return for talent.”

Other topics this week

• The boom in unstructured cloud data, which is fueling Qumulo’s business. My colleague John Cook makes his best effort to get Richter to disclose Qumulo’s financial data and IPO plans. Richter does share some insights into which sectors are seeing the biggest increase in data, and thoughts on how companies are viewing Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in this environment.

• The home debut of the new Seattle Kraken NHL franchise Saturday. Our colleagues Kurt Schlosser and Kevin Lisota got to tour Climate Pledge Arena this week. Check out their story and video. We reminisce about John’s run-in with the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot, Iceburgh, during GeekWire’s 2018 stint in the Steel City, and wonder if he’ll have a similar altercation with the Kraken mascot. We’ll soon find out.

• The future of self-driving cars, and the news that Amazon’s Zoox will test its technology in Seattle’s “different driving culture.” John is a skeptic of autonomous vehicles, based on his terrifying ride in one of Uber’s self-driving cars. Richter is an optimist. We can only imagine what will happen when four-self driving cars arrive simultaneously at a four-way stop in Seattle.

Listen above, and subscribe to GeekWire in any podcast app.

Produced and edited by Curt Milton; Music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell.