4 ms·

Pay is not based on the cost of living but on the area job market. These can have a relationship but are not the same. London is an example of an expensive city

• magduf 7y ago
  >If there's robust competition and a shortage of people, the salaries will be high. Yes, but if some software corp builds a campus in the middle of nowhere, there won't be robust competition, obviously. So the salaries are going to be terrible. The only reason the corporation would do this is to save money, so they're not going to offer salaries similar to the high-CoL location; doing so would cost them more money (paying for building the new campus, the huge administrative cost of opening and staffing this location and getting it productive, plus the lack of savings in salaries). The whole idea doesn't make any sense at all. If you look at the way companies operate, they never do this, except for manufacturing (where they're looking for low-skilled workers they can train). For high-skilled knowledge workers, they always go where the workers are.