21 ms·

There's an interesting downside about remote work that most articles don't talk about. Pay. The brutal fact is most companies simply re-brand outsourcing as "R

by neya 8y ago

There's an interesting downside about remote work that most articles don't talk about. Pay. The brutal fact is most companies simply re-brand outsourcing as "Remote" employees. Case in point, a few years ago, a DIY website builder (a company with a name of a coniferous plant species which I won't name directly) contacted me for a "remote" position. I passed all their tests and we eventually went to the salary negotiation stage. I agreed to this interview in the first place because I read online they paid really well for their employees, particularly in the US (Bay area). So, when we were discussing the pay, I threw in a number that's common for the Bay area employees and what seemed very, very reasonable for me. In fact, my current salary was almost the same, just so to make it clear to you that I wasn't trying to take advantage of them or anything. Immediately, the founder got offensive and told me, "What? Are you serious?? You live in Asia (I was living in Singapore at the time, which already had better pay as opposed to PH), for our employees in Philippines we pay 1/3rd of that and I can still get the job done. Why would I want to pay you that salary?" I told him, "Well, this is what you pay your Bay Area employees, don't you? Besides, my experience more than matches the job profile and requirements and my test results just proved to you I am more than capable for this position." His answer? "But, you don't live in the Bay area". I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. Since then, I very very carefully ask anyone who uses the word "remote" a LOT of questions, qualify them if they really know remote isn't the same as outsourcing before even going into the interview. I would have happily agreed to a lower salary if it was fair enough. But, asking me to go down to 1/3rd of my price because of where I lived in seemed ridiculous to me. In the last 10 years, I've lived in 7+ different countries and 35+ different locations within them as I'm that sort of person who likes to travel and explore new cultures. Basing my salary or worth based on where I'm from, where I live in at present seems the most ridiculous thing to me about remote work. Edit: Typos and clarifications

JimDabell 8y ago
> when we were discussing the pay, I threw in a number that's common for the Bay area employees > I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. > asking me to go down 1/3rd of my price because of where I lived in seemed ridiculous to me. I agree with the general principle that you shouldn't give massive discounts because you live in a lower cost of living area, but you're comparing it to a Bay Area salary as if that's the norm. It's a massive outlier. Going down 1/3rd of a Bay Area salary (I'm assuming a developer of some sort from context) still puts you in the top 1% or so of earners virtually anywhere in the world. Offering two thirds of a Bay Area salary certainly can't be described as a "sweatshop" salary.
- mfontani 8y ago
  They did offer 1/3 of, and not 2/3 of, from what I've understood from the OP comment.
  - JimDabell 8y ago
    Going down 1/3 means going down by 1/3 not going down to 1/3. It's possible they misspoke though. 1/3 of a Bay Area salary is still not a sweatshop salary and will let you live like a king in many places in the world though!
    - dominis 8y ago
      Let's reverse this notion: if your company is a remote(-friendly) company the place your employees are living is their decision. Since your company allows them to work wherever they want, they don't necessarily have to live in the Bay Area. This becomes a personal preference and I don't see why a personal preference is your business, moreover why you need to reward it with extra money. Also it's worth considering that in this business your employees are hired to think. It is nice companies starting to realize that it's not needed to be present 100% in the time in an office to be able to deliver the thinking, but they also need to realize that my brain produces the same output no matter where I live.
      - ownagefool 8y ago
        It's also a bit weird. Where I live is very expensive and far away from family but I live here because it's a nice area in proximity for jobs. What's to stop me just moving somewhere cheaper after I get the remote job tired to location? Are they going to renegotiate with me? What if I just forward my mail and don't tell them. Further still, there are always expensive areas in poorer places and cheaper areas in expensive places. Are these companies going to start auditing our finances before they discuss renumeration?
        detaro 8y ago
seppin 8y ago
> I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. He's right, you are wrong. Bay Area salaries are high because it's very expensive to live there. Even dev salaries in Europe are 20-30% of what they can be in the BA.
- hkt 8y ago
  ..but it's expensive to live there because of Bay Area salaries..
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  How expensive is it to live in Singapore?
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    I had a very tiny one bedroom there, barely bigger than a studio, and it was the equivalent of US$2000 a month in rent.
  - vmlinuz 8y ago
    Ah, you can live like a king in Asia for $20 a day! Which is very much not true in Hong Kong (where I live), or Singapore (where I have friends), or a bunch of other places in 'Asia'...
a_imho 8y ago
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-look-like/ https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
mihaifm 8y ago
That looks like a totally unprofessional discussion from his side. It's good that he gave you some kind of feedback on the salary part, but most of the companies will simply reject your application in situations like these, with a generic reason: "we decided to go with a different candidate". Anyway, the sad reality is that salaries are currently location based, no matter how you put it. At least until the world becomes a single economy, if it ever happens.
fyfy18 8y ago
GitLab themselves have this issue too. They openly publish their formula for calculating salaries [0], but it is very strongly weighted against the local rent index. If you spent all of your salary on rent, then yes it would be fair, but if you want to buy a car, new iPhone or go on a Caribbean cruise, it's going to cost the same whether you live in the Bay Area or Belarus. For example in the UK if you live in London and earned £60k, according to GitLab's 'Move Calculator' in Bristol you would earn £42k, or in Brighton £38k. Yes there is a difference between the living costs, but there is not that much difference. A 1br apartment close to the center of Bristol is around £900/mo, and in London zone 2 around £1200/mo. I've seen a lot of remote startups offering salaries around $100k USD, independent of location. For most of the US (outside hot areas like SF or NYC) and Europe that's a good salary, but what if the person you want to hire likes living in the middle of SF and doesn't want to move? For them that salary is going to be too low. I'm not really sure what is the middle ground here. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
- Tade0 8y ago
  > in Brighton £38k Interesting. This is roughly the amount they're offering contractors in Poland. Everywhere in Poland on top of that, because it's considered a single region, so you could possibly live in a small town where rent is ~£250 and other expenses proportional to that.
- sschueller 8y ago
  I don't think adding a location factor for anything that is less than 100% of the companies core location is fair. You are doing the exact same job and have the same skill level, you should be paid the same. If you decide to move somewhere where living is cheaper then that is up to you and should not affect your earnings. This is how you keep poor countries / states poor. Instead of paying people the same which would result in larger taxes paid and more spent in those locations you are keeping status quo.
  - donaltroddyn 8y ago
    > You are doing the exact same job and have the same skill level, you should be paid the same. Colocated employees at the same skill level performing the same job aren't paid the same - employers and employees negotiate compensation individually.
LaGrange 8y ago
> There's an interesting downside about remote work that most articles don't talk about. Pay. Which is extra annoying, because working remotely means that at least two expenses may be pushed on you: office and hardware. If you're me, and you live with just cats and love your vintage 2013 MB Pro, that might not be that much. But I also would get 80% of the benefit from a job that's just close enough to my home, doesn't have an open office, and doesn't enforce strict working hours. People who benefit more, like folk with families, also need to spend on a home with an extra room.
- rorykoehler 8y ago
  >vintage 2013 MB Pro It's considered vintage already? I only just bought it 18 months ago.
- jobvandervoort 8y ago
  I think any company should pay for equipment for their employees. GitLab does this, we will do this. Desk, monitor, computer, chair, etc. Alternatively, offer a budget for a coworking space. These kind of expenses are nothing compared to a monthly salary.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
The obsession companies have with location varied comp is irrational.* The only solution is to arbitrage by living in a high comp area that is not terrible. There are second order benefits (opportunity etc) from living in those areas which you get for free; we have to use them. If it were a “nobody wants to live there” comp, I would completely understand. Supply and demand. But is London really ~twice as bad as Brighton? My lungs agree, but surely that’s not what the market thinks? Pay people double to live on the South Pole, not San Francisco. * Perhaps it is a rational reaction from companies to an irrational behaviour of the labour market, where the majority of devs expect it and get offended if you don’t. Fine. Whatever it is, it’s “free money”.
- a_imho 8y ago
  It is not irrational, it is a cost reduction and very sensible from their point of view. Of course, they can do this only because remote is not a protected class. It could also be fair if they were to offer relocation to any place the employee picks, but even writing that sentence is ridiculous, why would a business act fair when they can exploit people?
zerr 8y ago
Exactly. Many "good" companies do that as well, Mozilla for instance. It's fine if they don't pay top Bay Area rates (e.g. 500K-700K+ total comp), but playing the "we pay a competitive rate in your region " game doesn't cut it - I work remotely to escape my region rates - fortunately, there are companies who pay solely based on contribution rather than coordinates on the map.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  Then new graduates and others with difficulty selling themselves start working for the coordinates people and after six months or a year they leave to go work for the contribution people. The more and faster that happens the quicker companies will convert from the former to the latter.
- danielmg 8y ago
  I'm sorry - $500k! I work for a big US company in the UK in a senior role and I get $150k approx. I work just outside London but I regularly have to attend meetings right in the City. I'm going to move to Mexico before Trump gets his wall!
  - zerr 8y ago
    You can stay in London, e.g. Facebook pays mid to high six-figures (GBP). Seven-figure is also possible for some (incl. bonus), even for IC engineers. They are poaching engineers from finance sector.
    - danielmg 8y ago
      I work in Finance! I shall have a butchers.
      - zerr 8y ago
        Here you go: https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/moving-from-finance-to-facebook- https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/moving-from-finance-to...
langitbiru 8y ago
By the way, Singapore is one of the most expensive cities to live in Asia, probably behind Tokyo.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I think rent in Singapore is probably higher. Much less area to live on.
  - zeckalpha 8y ago
    Housing in Singapore is not suspect to normal market conditions. Yes, expensive, but 80% of people live in subsidized housing.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  One of the most expensive in the world, not just Asia.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Like it or not they are right, you are wrong IMO, maybe not 1/3rd but much less. Salaries are what they are in SF, because that's what it takes for people to live there and have a sorta decent life. Rent, food, taxes, transportation etc etc reflect on salary. Also competition has a major impact on salaries. Companies fight a lot over SF engineers, not so much for those in Asia. (unless they're super brilliant) Edit: Google has ~ 85,000 employees. If they give each employee an extra $100K bonus it would cost them $8.5 Billion. They can afford it. Why they don't give it? Because they don't have to.
- underwater 8y ago
  Salaries in SF are driven by competition, not living costs (in fact living costs are driven up by the high salaries). There are plenty of cities with comparable living costs to SF, but with much lower salaries.
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    Fine, but en engineer looking for a job today has to live in SF, with SF prices. The chicken/egg question doesn't matter at this time. What would happen to salaries if 150,000 more engineers from middle America started to apply to jobs in SF?
BerislavLopac 8y ago
It is important that the company embraces the remote working completely -- i.e. even if they have local employees their work process needs to be exactly the same as for the remote ones. Ideally, the company should have no offices, and offer all employees expense allowance to pay for a local office if they want to (e.g. a coworking space or similar, with the option to pool it together if there are more people in the same location). As long as a company treats people differently based on the location (usually by those who are in the same location as the management get treated more favourably), it is not possible to have a real remote culture. Another issue is related to the time zones; things tend to fall apart if teams work across more than 4-5 timezones. I should be possible to organise teams according to time zones, but that creates a similar (although less disruptive) differentiation as co-location.
matz1 8y ago
One of the upside of hiring remote employee is for better value. Assuming similar skill, because why would you pay 100k for bay area employee where you can pay 33k for remote employee?
- bobwaycott 8y ago
  You’re talking about a remote employee costing less, not being a better value. The value of an employee is not equal to that employee’s cost. Assuming all employees were paid equally, you’d still find some who were more/less valuable to the company than others. Extend this recognition outward, and the cost can quickly be seen to have little to do with determining the value of a good (or poor) employee. The things that determine a team member’s value are things like productivity, coachability, quality of work, and many other things unrelated to their raw dollar cost.
  - matz1 8y ago
    From the employer perspective, better value means lower cost for the same amount quality.
    - bobwaycott 8y ago
      That's an extremely naive employer perspective. It is exceedingly rare to be able to place an exact dollar amount on the contribution of a team member. Much less to place an exact dollar amount on some subjective notion of quality. The only exact dollar amount an employer-employee relationship definitively has is the negotiated price at which the two actors are willing to play together. I've been the employer. With any technology professional, I'm willing--and happy--to pay right up to the rough approximation of value I feel the team member brings. Most of the time, that rough approximation is, "Do I feel like the company is getting its money's worth out of this team member?" It's rare to find the same amount of quality among a number of team members, because everyone is unique and brings their own flavor of contribution to a team. Person A might bring a lot more to the planning, architecture, and direction of the project. Person B might be great at not only delivering code, but helping others do so, as well. Person C might be a royal pain to manage as part of the team. Person D might crank code out non-stop, but seems to create bugs/issues in proportion to the amount of code they're pushing out. Judging the quality of team member contribution winds up working out to some sort of curve--there are usually outliers on the high and low ends. You want the vast majority of the team to be roughly equivalent and trending toward the high end. The low-end outliers--those who clearly are not keeping up with the team, not providing enough value in their contribution, are difficult to manage, aren't good team players, etc--those are the people where the cost starts to become an issue. An employer who prioritizes the exact dollar cost to be as low as possible isn't looking for quality--they're looking to fill seats as cheaply as possible, while hoping something passable comes out as a result. Nobody who knows what they're doing is going to want to stay in an environment like that.
lazerwalker 8y ago
The good news is I think this is a problem that goes away (or at least is lessened) as remote work becomes more ubiquitous. When there's more supply of remote employers, presumably some of them will make a big point of paying people the same rates everywhere as a hiring differentiator, which will make it harder for employers just looking for a good deal.
- joelbluminator 8y ago
  "Good news" depending on who you are. If remote really becomes a common thing US programmers will start earning Europe salaries, and Europe programmers will start earning China salaries. I don't think it's going to become that common (I'm thinking less than 10% of programmers will work remote 10 years from now). Yes it will be more common but it will not be common.
yati 8y ago
Basecamp, although currently in a "hiring freeze", pays the same salary no matter where you are: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d04f4f194b https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d... I would love a list of such companies, maybe people posting on the monthly who's hiring thread can clarify that.
nilsocket 8y ago
I completely agree with this. A person did put in the same effort as the other one for learning something. Since a person leaves in an area which isn't properly developed or cheaper, he/she is living in order to save money or due to some other personal reasons, shouldn't be discriminated and paid less for the same talent/value the company receives. Obviously it always feels better to live in developed areas. When a company is receiving same quality from different vendors, they should pay the same for different vendors irrespective of their origin of locations.
wyclif 8y ago
I'm a dev working remote in the PH. While this state of affairs is frustrating, I await the day when pay for technical work has nothing to do with one's location. Your biggest mistake was mentioning the Philippines. The sad fact is that a lot of employers, including Filipino ones, associate this country with low-wage employees and cheap labour. That's why the PH is the capital of outsourcing and offshoring in order to cut costs. It shouldn't matter, and I feel sorry for Filipinos trying to get paid fairly in this business climate, but unfortunately this country is so corrupt that it's a case of poor economics and planning.

by neya 8y ago

JimDabell 8y ago

> when we were discussing the pay, I threw in a number that's common for the Bay area employees > I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. > asking me to go down 1/3rd of my price because of where I lived in seemed ridiculous to me. I agree with the general principle that you shouldn't give massive discounts because you live in a lower cost of living area, but you're comparing it to a Bay Area salary as if that's the norm. It's a massive outlier. Going down 1/3rd of a Bay Area salary (I'm assuming a developer of some sort from context) still puts you in the top 1% or so of earners virtually anywhere in the world. Offering two thirds of a Bay Area salary certainly can't be described as a "sweatshop" salary.

mfontani 8y ago
They did offer 1/3 of, and not 2/3 of, from what I've understood from the OP comment.
- JimDabell 8y ago
  Going down 1/3 means going down by 1/3 not going down to 1/3. It's possible they misspoke though. 1/3 of a Bay Area salary is still not a sweatshop salary and will let you live like a king in many places in the world though!
  - dominis 8y ago
    Let's reverse this notion: if your company is a remote(-friendly) company the place your employees are living is their decision. Since your company allows them to work wherever they want, they don't necessarily have to live in the Bay Area. This becomes a personal preference and I don't see why a personal preference is your business, moreover why you need to reward it with extra money. Also it's worth considering that in this business your employees are hired to think. It is nice companies starting to realize that it's not needed to be present 100% in the time in an office to be able to deliver the thinking, but they also need to realize that my brain produces the same output no matter where I live.
    - ownagefool 8y ago
      It's also a bit weird. Where I live is very expensive and far away from family but I live here because it's a nice area in proximity for jobs. What's to stop me just moving somewhere cheaper after I get the remote job tired to location? Are they going to renegotiate with me? What if I just forward my mail and don't tell them. Further still, there are always expensive areas in poorer places and cheaper areas in expensive places. Are these companies going to start auditing our finances before they discuss renumeration?
      - detaro 8y ago

seppin 8y ago

> I thanked him for his opportunity and advised him to contact some sweatshops instead of playing the "remote" game. He's right, you are wrong. Bay Area salaries are high because it's very expensive to live there. Even dev salaries in Europe are 20-30% of what they can be in the BA.

hkt 8y ago
..but it's expensive to live there because of Bay Area salaries..
zeckalpha 8y ago
How expensive is it to live in Singapore?
- hellofunk 8y ago
  I had a very tiny one bedroom there, barely bigger than a studio, and it was the equivalent of US$2000 a month in rent.
- vmlinuz 8y ago
  Ah, you can live like a king in Asia for $20 a day! Which is very much not true in Hong Kong (where I live), or Singapore (where I have friends), or a bunch of other places in 'Asia'...

a_imho 8y ago

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap-look-like/ https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

mihaifm 8y ago

That looks like a totally unprofessional discussion from his side. It's good that he gave you some kind of feedback on the salary part, but most of the companies will simply reject your application in situations like these, with a generic reason: "we decided to go with a different candidate". Anyway, the sad reality is that salaries are currently location based, no matter how you put it. At least until the world becomes a single economy, if it ever happens.

fyfy18 8y ago

GitLab themselves have this issue too. They openly publish their formula for calculating salaries [0], but it is very strongly weighted against the local rent index. If you spent all of your salary on rent, then yes it would be fair, but if you want to buy a car, new iPhone or go on a Caribbean cruise, it's going to cost the same whether you live in the Bay Area or Belarus. For example in the UK if you live in London and earned £60k, according to GitLab's 'Move Calculator' in Bristol you would earn £42k, or in Brighton £38k. Yes there is a difference between the living costs, but there is not that much difference. A 1br apartment close to the center of Bristol is around £900/mo, and in London zone 2 around £1200/mo. I've seen a lot of remote startups offering salaries around $100k USD, independent of location. For most of the US (outside hot areas like SF or NYC) and Europe that's a good salary, but what if the person you want to hire likes living in the middle of SF and doesn't want to move? For them that salary is going to be too low. I'm not really sure what is the middle ground here. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

Tade0 8y ago
> in Brighton £38k Interesting. This is roughly the amount they're offering contractors in Poland. Everywhere in Poland on top of that, because it's considered a single region, so you could possibly live in a small town where rent is ~£250 and other expenses proportional to that.
sschueller 8y ago
I don't think adding a location factor for anything that is less than 100% of the companies core location is fair. You are doing the exact same job and have the same skill level, you should be paid the same. If you decide to move somewhere where living is cheaper then that is up to you and should not affect your earnings. This is how you keep poor countries / states poor. Instead of paying people the same which would result in larger taxes paid and more spent in those locations you are keeping status quo.
- donaltroddyn 8y ago
  > You are doing the exact same job and have the same skill level, you should be paid the same. Colocated employees at the same skill level performing the same job aren't paid the same - employers and employees negotiate compensation individually.

LaGrange 8y ago

> There's an interesting downside about remote work that most articles don't talk about. Pay. Which is extra annoying, because working remotely means that at least two expenses may be pushed on you: office and hardware. If you're me, and you live with just cats and love your vintage 2013 MB Pro, that might not be that much. But I also would get 80% of the benefit from a job that's just close enough to my home, doesn't have an open office, and doesn't enforce strict working hours. People who benefit more, like folk with families, also need to spend on a home with an extra room.

rorykoehler 8y ago
>vintage 2013 MB Pro It's considered vintage already? I only just bought it 18 months ago.
jobvandervoort 8y ago
I think any company should pay for equipment for their employees. GitLab does this, we will do this. Desk, monitor, computer, chair, etc. Alternatively, offer a budget for a coworking space. These kind of expenses are nothing compared to a monthly salary.

nothrabannosir 8y ago

The obsession companies have with location varied comp is irrational.* The only solution is to arbitrage by living in a high comp area that is not terrible. There are second order benefits (opportunity etc) from living in those areas which you get for free; we have to use them. If it were a “nobody wants to live there” comp, I would completely understand. Supply and demand. But is London really ~twice as bad as Brighton? My lungs agree, but surely that’s not what the market thinks? Pay people double to live on the South Pole, not San Francisco. * Perhaps it is a rational reaction from companies to an irrational behaviour of the labour market, where the majority of devs expect it and get offended if you don’t. Fine. Whatever it is, it’s “free money”.

a_imho 8y ago
It is not irrational, it is a cost reduction and very sensible from their point of view. Of course, they can do this only because remote is not a protected class. It could also be fair if they were to offer relocation to any place the employee picks, but even writing that sentence is ridiculous, why would a business act fair when they can exploit people?

zerr 8y ago

Exactly. Many "good" companies do that as well, Mozilla for instance. It's fine if they don't pay top Bay Area rates (e.g. 500K-700K+ total comp), but playing the "we pay a competitive rate in your region " game doesn't cut it - I work remotely to escape my region rates - fortunately, there are companies who pay solely based on contribution rather than coordinates on the map.

barry-cotter 8y ago
Then new graduates and others with difficulty selling themselves start working for the coordinates people and after six months or a year they leave to go work for the contribution people. The more and faster that happens the quicker companies will convert from the former to the latter.
danielmg 8y ago
I'm sorry - $500k! I work for a big US company in the UK in a senior role and I get $150k approx. I work just outside London but I regularly have to attend meetings right in the City. I'm going to move to Mexico before Trump gets his wall!
- zerr 8y ago
  You can stay in London, e.g. Facebook pays mid to high six-figures (GBP). Seven-figure is also possible for some (incl. bonus), even for IC engineers. They are poaching engineers from finance sector.
  - danielmg 8y ago
    I work in Finance! I shall have a butchers.
    - zerr 8y ago
      Here you go: https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/moving-from-finance-to-facebook- https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/moving-from-finance-to...

langitbiru 8y ago

By the way, Singapore is one of the most expensive cities to live in Asia, probably behind Tokyo.

Aeolun 8y ago
I think rent in Singapore is probably higher. Much less area to live on.
- zeckalpha 8y ago
  Housing in Singapore is not suspect to normal market conditions. Yes, expensive, but 80% of people live in subsidized housing.
hellofunk 8y ago
One of the most expensive in the world, not just Asia.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Like it or not they are right, you are wrong IMO, maybe not 1/3rd but much less. Salaries are what they are in SF, because that's what it takes for people to live there and have a sorta decent life. Rent, food, taxes, transportation etc etc reflect on salary. Also competition has a major impact on salaries. Companies fight a lot over SF engineers, not so much for those in Asia. (unless they're super brilliant) Edit: Google has ~ 85,000 employees. If they give each employee an extra $100K bonus it would cost them $8.5 Billion. They can afford it. Why they don't give it? Because they don't have to.

underwater 8y ago
Salaries in SF are driven by competition, not living costs (in fact living costs are driven up by the high salaries). There are plenty of cities with comparable living costs to SF, but with much lower salaries.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Fine, but en engineer looking for a job today has to live in SF, with SF prices. The chicken/egg question doesn't matter at this time. What would happen to salaries if 150,000 more engineers from middle America started to apply to jobs in SF?

BerislavLopac 8y ago

It is important that the company embraces the remote working completely -- i.e. even if they have local employees their work process needs to be exactly the same as for the remote ones. Ideally, the company should have no offices, and offer all employees expense allowance to pay for a local office if they want to (e.g. a coworking space or similar, with the option to pool it together if there are more people in the same location). As long as a company treats people differently based on the location (usually by those who are in the same location as the management get treated more favourably), it is not possible to have a real remote culture. Another issue is related to the time zones; things tend to fall apart if teams work across more than 4-5 timezones. I should be possible to organise teams according to time zones, but that creates a similar (although less disruptive) differentiation as co-location.

matz1 8y ago

One of the upside of hiring remote employee is for better value. Assuming similar skill, because why would you pay 100k for bay area employee where you can pay 33k for remote employee?

bobwaycott 8y ago
You’re talking about a remote employee costing less, not being a better value. The value of an employee is not equal to that employee’s cost. Assuming all employees were paid equally, you’d still find some who were more/less valuable to the company than others. Extend this recognition outward, and the cost can quickly be seen to have little to do with determining the value of a good (or poor) employee. The things that determine a team member’s value are things like productivity, coachability, quality of work, and many other things unrelated to their raw dollar cost.
- matz1 8y ago
  From the employer perspective, better value means lower cost for the same amount quality.
  - bobwaycott 8y ago
    That's an extremely naive employer perspective. It is exceedingly rare to be able to place an exact dollar amount on the contribution of a team member. Much less to place an exact dollar amount on some subjective notion of quality. The only exact dollar amount an employer-employee relationship definitively has is the negotiated price at which the two actors are willing to play together. I've been the employer. With any technology professional, I'm willing--and happy--to pay right up to the rough approximation of value I feel the team member brings. Most of the time, that rough approximation is, "Do I feel like the company is getting its money's worth out of this team member?" It's rare to find the same amount of quality among a number of team members, because everyone is unique and brings their own flavor of contribution to a team. Person A might bring a lot more to the planning, architecture, and direction of the project. Person B might be great at not only delivering code, but helping others do so, as well. Person C might be a royal pain to manage as part of the team. Person D might crank code out non-stop, but seems to create bugs/issues in proportion to the amount of code they're pushing out. Judging the quality of team member contribution winds up working out to some sort of curve--there are usually outliers on the high and low ends. You want the vast majority of the team to be roughly equivalent and trending toward the high end. The low-end outliers--those who clearly are not keeping up with the team, not providing enough value in their contribution, are difficult to manage, aren't good team players, etc--those are the people where the cost starts to become an issue. An employer who prioritizes the exact dollar cost to be as low as possible isn't looking for quality--they're looking to fill seats as cheaply as possible, while hoping something passable comes out as a result. Nobody who knows what they're doing is going to want to stay in an environment like that.

lazerwalker 8y ago

The good news is I think this is a problem that goes away (or at least is lessened) as remote work becomes more ubiquitous. When there's more supply of remote employers, presumably some of them will make a big point of paying people the same rates everywhere as a hiring differentiator, which will make it harder for employers just looking for a good deal.

joelbluminator 8y ago
"Good news" depending on who you are. If remote really becomes a common thing US programmers will start earning Europe salaries, and Europe programmers will start earning China salaries. I don't think it's going to become that common (I'm thinking less than 10% of programmers will work remote 10 years from now). Yes it will be more common but it will not be common.

yati 8y ago

Basecamp, although currently in a "hiring freeze", pays the same salary no matter where you are: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d04f4f194b https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d... I would love a list of such companies, maybe people posting on the monthly who's hiring thread can clarify that.

nilsocket 8y ago

I completely agree with this. A person did put in the same effort as the other one for learning something. Since a person leaves in an area which isn't properly developed or cheaper, he/she is living in order to save money or due to some other personal reasons, shouldn't be discriminated and paid less for the same talent/value the company receives. Obviously it always feels better to live in developed areas. When a company is receiving same quality from different vendors, they should pay the same for different vendors irrespective of their origin of locations.

wyclif 8y ago

I'm a dev working remote in the PH. While this state of affairs is frustrating, I await the day when pay for technical work has nothing to do with one's location. Your biggest mistake was mentioning the Philippines. The sad fact is that a lot of employers, including Filipino ones, associate this country with low-wage employees and cheap labour. That's why the PH is the capital of outsourcing and offshoring in order to cut costs. It shouldn't matter, and I feel sorry for Filipinos trying to get paid fairly in this business climate, but unfortunately this country is so corrupt that it's a case of poor economics and planning.