9 ms·

I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or smal

by Vysero 6y ago

I couldn't agree more. If I could work from home permanently I would move far far away from where I am currently living. I would get myself a nice condo or small house, and settle in. Currently, where I live, despite the fact that I make almost 30k/year more than the medium average income I still can only just afford a one bedroom apartment spending the suggested 30% of my income. Imagine being able to buy a house!!!! What a world that would be!!!

CodeSheikh 6y ago
What's the guarantee that say your San Francisco/NYC employer will keep paying you city rates when you are living in a small town in mid-west. At some point they will catch up and start saving money this way. Everyone at a tech company is not a crucial employee. Don't get me wrong, I am all in for getting paid SF rates while living in a cheap Texas suburb.
- dheera 6y ago
  If that really happens, the next order effect will be cheaper rents in the bay area. Even now, there are some good rent deals. I moved to a new apartment a couple weeks ago (mainly because I needed a better WFH space to work effectively) and got 6 weeks free on my lease, which isn't normally seen in the bay area. When the pandemic passes though I do hope to be able to return to working from an office, if just because it's less lonely and there is usually better sunlight in business spaces than what I get at home. Maybe 2-3 days a week in the office and 2-3 days from home would be a nice balance, when it is safe to do so. Employers may also see the value in at least providing some additional financial incentive for living closer to the office and being willing to come to the office (if safe), although enabling full remote work for those who choose it is something I also fully agree with.
- kbos87 6y ago
  Bingo. As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the availability of talent in a particular market. I work for a very pro remote work company, but that’s still how we did things. You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move. People usually weren’t jazzed about it but understood.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Doesn't this just create an incentive for people to work remotely from high-COL areas, while living frugally? Does relocating from San Francisco to San Jose also come with a pay cut? What about to Stockton? Modesto? Further out?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole. You may make more if you're in SF but housing is still going to take a significantly bigger chunk of your paycheck and you may or may not come out ahead at the end of the day. Being on the periphery of a high cost area is probably the best deal. For most companies, for example, I imagine that Boston/Cambridge will be considered the same as Boston suburbs--even though within an hour drive you can get to vastly cheaper housing than in the city proper.
      - vkou 6y ago
        > Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole. Only if you don't live frugally, or if you aren't a senior engineer. If you do, a lot of the high costs of a high-CoL area can be avoided. If you are a senior engineer, that XY% raise over a junior is free money... Applied to a larger starting salary. Oddly enough, high-CoL areas have the same, or higher % raises, when you are promoted, than low-CoL areas. In the mid-west, the wage difference between a senior and a junior may be $30,000. In the bay area, it can be $150,000. Your CoL doesn't go up just because you have a better job title.
      - godelski 6y ago
        I wanted to add: If you live in SF and make $150k/yr and are able to put away 10% on investments that's $15k/yr. If you work somewhere else and take a move and make $75k/yr and are able to invest 20%, you haven't made a financial change. But a pay cut that big likely means you're somewhere that has less going on, less access to food, less for different types of activities, lower quality schools (that are funded less because property tax is lower), lower quality hospitals (big cities can afford all the fancy equipment and big time doctors), etc. So to be honest, moving to a cheaper area with the exact same COL might not be better because of other factors involved.
- rconti 6y ago
  Yeah, it won't last forever. If remote work becomes more popular, salaries will become more harmonized, as well costs of living.
  - chaostheory 6y ago
    Not forever, but it'll be longer than most people think. We've tried to make a vaccine for the original SARS. It's been 12 years now and there's still no successful, safe vaccine for it. For COVID-19, if a vaccine is released within the optimistic 18 months, how safe will it be compared to vaccines that went through all the trials normally?
    - jshevek 6y ago
      I believe rconti was not talking about the duration of COVID19 issues, nor the duration of WFH. Rather, the evolution of economic norms given the assumption of sustained normalization of remote work.
      - chaostheory 6y ago
        I think you're mistaken, since WFH gained massive adoption due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It's also what I believe he's referring to by, "Yeah, it won't last forever." I don't appreciate the downvote either for a reasonable comment.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Unfortunately a lot of folks are going to find out that 'harmonized' means lower, and maybe a lot lower. Cost of living may not adjust fast enough.
  - HighPlainsDrftr 6y ago
    It depends. Many engineers will run elsewhere once they start getting paid less than they deserve, and the company is cutting paychecks for profits. The more extreme the difference, the crazier it will get.
- chrischen 6y ago
  The same reason they didn’t hire someone from the Texas suburbs rate in the first place. An employee’s rate depends on how much they would be going for in the market, and living costs are part of the employee’s expenses—not that of the company’s.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    Suddenly the market becomes really large, including India, China and Eastern Europe in addition to the mid-west.
    - TallGuyShort 6y ago
      There's a bit of a spectrum. Companies have learned to have employees working from home, but they're all in the timezone they were in before, they already got to work together in-person before being in this situation, and entire teams were put into the same situation at once. That's a step toward full support of remote people all over the globe, but the further you get the more you have to factor in legal overhead, cultural and situational differences, time zone difference, etc. To be clear - I'm a big fan of remote work, I'm just saying that companies have been forced to solve only a subset of the problem they face before the market really can scale to be that large for everyone.
      - notyourday 6y ago
        "Remote work" is globalization of white collar jobs. It is baffling to me highly paid tech workers do not see it. "Work from home" is the first step. If a company embraces work from home, it embraces completely asynchronous communication. As soon as that becomes an acceptable way of solving problems, Vlad making $50k/year in Ukraine who will do 65 hours a week will become a contender to replace Jackson in SF, who is making $250k/year and refuses to work more than 40 hours a week because of work/life balance.
        dpoochieni 6y ago
        I do not know if its my non traditional background (no degree in computer science, big emphasis in history and philosophy since middle school) but I'm baffled by how politically naive many people in software can be. I understand why you might not like it but in pretending politics do not matter or won't affect you, you are letting other people decide and most importantly, think for you. How many people think tech companies are just completely well-intentioned in everything they do? Curb your enthusiasm, a healthy chug of skepticism is needed.
- freepor 6y ago
  They don’t need to pay SF rates. 100K in Indianapolis buys you a way better standard of living than 200K in SF.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Only if you disregard things like weather, things to do, proximity to great nature, and maybe not even then.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      Maybe Indianopolis isn't the perfect example for everyone. Portland, perhaps. Better proximity to great nature, still a lot of things to do, great weather (and getting better every year thanks to climate change, while California gets drier and drier), somewhat lower cost of living, etc.
      - shuckles 6y ago
        Portland sees the same cost of living trends as the Bay Area, so enjoy the arbitrage while it lasts I suppose. (For what it’s worth, so does every similarly desirable metro area in the USA outside of Houston.)
        rootusrootus 6y ago
        Agreed. We jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) talk smack to Californians moving north to Portland in hopes they won't come, because along with the steady influx of people comes steadily increasing housing prices. As much as I have said for years I never want to live some place like Seattle, I have to admit that Portland isn't really that far behind.
    - freepor 6y ago
      If you do that you also have to disregard the other myriad ways in which Indianapolis is a better place to live than SF.
  - 6y ago
- lukevp 6y ago
  Hey, as someone from a cheap Texas suburb... why did we get singled out for this example specifically?
- nathan_long 6y ago
  It cuts both ways, right? Companies: "I don't have to pay you $big_city rates because you live in $small_town and nobody there will offer you $big_city rates." Candidates: "I don't have to accept $small_town rates because I work remotely and can work for a company in $big_city."
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    The market is / will be self-balancing in this case. If companies can't hire people they'll have to come up with more than you're offering. If you're unemployed, you'll have to accept less than you're asking.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    > But if a company is fully remote, why should it adjust for costs of living at all? Candidate A lives in an expensive place and Candidate B has an expensive hobby. Neither is the company's concern, is it? The bottom line is that each is worth $X to the company and wants $Y in compensation. Because if it wants to hire workers that live in SF, it has to pay SF wages. It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa. Think about it flipped around a bit. Let's say that instead of hiring employees, you're buying candy bars. Someone running a bodega in NYC isn't gonna give you a discount just because you're going to have the candy bar mailed to Oklahoma. The bottom line is not the $X value and the $Y compensation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just like the company's bargaining position is a complex mixture of the value that different employees provide and the opportunity cost of leaving a position unfilled, the employee's bargaining position is affected by the salary the company is willing to provide and the opportunity cost of accepting this job offer instead of another.
    - aantix 6y ago
      > It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa. Not yet. When Tulsa engineers wake up to their value, they hold the cards. I’ve been on the hiring side for good senior engineers. They’re hard to hire, period. They take a ton of time to properly screen and by the end of the interview process, the company has wasted so many resources that could have been used for development if they don’t land that person.
- metajack 6y ago
  At a certain point people will move to the bay area for the higher paycheck, so that keeps it adjusted pretty high. Companies are not competing against local-to-the-employee employers, they are competing with all employers globally. Even with regional adjustments, the math usually works out in your favor to not be in the bay area.
- Vysero 6y ago
  "What's the guarantee" - There is no guarantee. Then again, there is no guarantee that the person who bought my drink didn't spike it with molly either...
- mLuby 6y ago
  A straightforward legal fix is to make location one of the things you can't ask about during hiring, like age, marital status, or disability. All they should be able to ask is what fraction of their work hours you're available for. It could be that everyone must be online 9-5 PST, or there're a few hours of overlap, or there's no expectation of common work hours as long as you "get your work done."
- thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
  I'd be fine with that. Even 30% reduction in pay would still be much better in an affordable city like Chicago or Houston.
darepublic 6y ago
Culture embracing remote work would help disperse the wealth geographically. It would hurt some property owners in urban meccas I suppose

by Vysero 6y ago

CodeSheikh 6y ago

What's the guarantee that say your San Francisco/NYC employer will keep paying you city rates when you are living in a small town in mid-west. At some point they will catch up and start saving money this way. Everyone at a tech company is not a crucial employee. Don't get me wrong, I am all in for getting paid SF rates while living in a cheap Texas suburb.

dheera 6y ago
If that really happens, the next order effect will be cheaper rents in the bay area. Even now, there are some good rent deals. I moved to a new apartment a couple weeks ago (mainly because I needed a better WFH space to work effectively) and got 6 weeks free on my lease, which isn't normally seen in the bay area. When the pandemic passes though I do hope to be able to return to working from an office, if just because it's less lonely and there is usually better sunlight in business spaces than what I get at home. Maybe 2-3 days a week in the office and 2-3 days from home would be a nice balance, when it is safe to do so. Employers may also see the value in at least providing some additional financial incentive for living closer to the office and being willing to come to the office (if safe), although enabling full remote work for those who choose it is something I also fully agree with.
kbos87 6y ago
Bingo. As a director of a team at a mid-sized tech company who had conversations with employees making decisions like this, I can tell you that it is standard practice to adjust salary for the cost of living and the availability of talent in a particular market. I work for a very pro remote work company, but that’s still how we did things. You want to move to the Midwest and work remotely, or apply for a transfer to a different regional office? Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X, which means an adjustment in salary for a voluntary move. People usually weren’t jazzed about it but understood.
- vkou 6y ago
  Doesn't this just create an incentive for people to work remotely from high-COL areas, while living frugally? Does relocating from San Francisco to San Jose also come with a pay cut? What about to Stockton? Modesto? Further out?
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole. You may make more if you're in SF but housing is still going to take a significantly bigger chunk of your paycheck and you may or may not come out ahead at the end of the day. Being on the periphery of a high cost area is probably the best deal. For most companies, for example, I imagine that Boston/Cambridge will be considered the same as Boston suburbs--even though within an hour drive you can get to vastly cheaper housing than in the city proper.
    - vkou 6y ago
      > Generally speaking, CoL adjustments don't really make you whole. Only if you don't live frugally, or if you aren't a senior engineer. If you do, a lot of the high costs of a high-CoL area can be avoided. If you are a senior engineer, that XY% raise over a junior is free money... Applied to a larger starting salary. Oddly enough, high-CoL areas have the same, or higher % raises, when you are promoted, than low-CoL areas. In the mid-west, the wage difference between a senior and a junior may be $30,000. In the bay area, it can be $150,000. Your CoL doesn't go up just because you have a better job title.
    - godelski 6y ago
      I wanted to add: If you live in SF and make $150k/yr and are able to put away 10% on investments that's $15k/yr. If you work somewhere else and take a move and make $75k/yr and are able to invest 20%, you haven't made a financial change. But a pay cut that big likely means you're somewhere that has less going on, less access to food, less for different types of activities, lower quality schools (that are funded less because property tax is lower), lower quality hospitals (big cities can afford all the fancy equipment and big time doctors), etc. So to be honest, moving to a cheaper area with the exact same COL might not be better because of other factors involved.
rconti 6y ago
Yeah, it won't last forever. If remote work becomes more popular, salaries will become more harmonized, as well costs of living.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  Not forever, but it'll be longer than most people think. We've tried to make a vaccine for the original SARS. It's been 12 years now and there's still no successful, safe vaccine for it. For COVID-19, if a vaccine is released within the optimistic 18 months, how safe will it be compared to vaccines that went through all the trials normally?
  - jshevek 6y ago
    I believe rconti was not talking about the duration of COVID19 issues, nor the duration of WFH. Rather, the evolution of economic norms given the assumption of sustained normalization of remote work.
    - chaostheory 6y ago
      I think you're mistaken, since WFH gained massive adoption due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It's also what I believe he's referring to by, "Yeah, it won't last forever." I don't appreciate the downvote either for a reasonable comment.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of folks are going to find out that 'harmonized' means lower, and maybe a lot lower. Cost of living may not adjust fast enough.
- HighPlainsDrftr 6y ago
  It depends. Many engineers will run elsewhere once they start getting paid less than they deserve, and the company is cutting paychecks for profits. The more extreme the difference, the crazier it will get.
chrischen 6y ago
The same reason they didn’t hire someone from the Texas suburbs rate in the first place. An employee’s rate depends on how much they would be going for in the market, and living costs are part of the employee’s expenses—not that of the company’s.
- notyourday 6y ago
  Suddenly the market becomes really large, including India, China and Eastern Europe in addition to the mid-west.
  - TallGuyShort 6y ago
    There's a bit of a spectrum. Companies have learned to have employees working from home, but they're all in the timezone they were in before, they already got to work together in-person before being in this situation, and entire teams were put into the same situation at once. That's a step toward full support of remote people all over the globe, but the further you get the more you have to factor in legal overhead, cultural and situational differences, time zone difference, etc. To be clear - I'm a big fan of remote work, I'm just saying that companies have been forced to solve only a subset of the problem they face before the market really can scale to be that large for everyone.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      "Remote work" is globalization of white collar jobs. It is baffling to me highly paid tech workers do not see it. "Work from home" is the first step. If a company embraces work from home, it embraces completely asynchronous communication. As soon as that becomes an acceptable way of solving problems, Vlad making $50k/year in Ukraine who will do 65 hours a week will become a contender to replace Jackson in SF, who is making $250k/year and refuses to work more than 40 hours a week because of work/life balance.
      - dpoochieni 6y ago
        I do not know if its my non traditional background (no degree in computer science, big emphasis in history and philosophy since middle school) but I'm baffled by how politically naive many people in software can be. I understand why you might not like it but in pretending politics do not matter or won't affect you, you are letting other people decide and most importantly, think for you. How many people think tech companies are just completely well-intentioned in everything they do? Curb your enthusiasm, a healthy chug of skepticism is needed.
freepor 6y ago
They don’t need to pay SF rates. 100K in Indianapolis buys you a way better standard of living than 200K in SF.
- pb7 6y ago
  Only if you disregard things like weather, things to do, proximity to great nature, and maybe not even then.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    Maybe Indianopolis isn't the perfect example for everyone. Portland, perhaps. Better proximity to great nature, still a lot of things to do, great weather (and getting better every year thanks to climate change, while California gets drier and drier), somewhat lower cost of living, etc.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      Portland sees the same cost of living trends as the Bay Area, so enjoy the arbitrage while it lasts I suppose. (For what it’s worth, so does every similarly desirable metro area in the USA outside of Houston.)
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        Agreed. We jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) talk smack to Californians moving north to Portland in hopes they won't come, because along with the steady influx of people comes steadily increasing housing prices. As much as I have said for years I never want to live some place like Seattle, I have to admit that Portland isn't really that far behind.
  - freepor 6y ago
    If you do that you also have to disregard the other myriad ways in which Indianapolis is a better place to live than SF.
- 6y ago
lukevp 6y ago
Hey, as someone from a cheap Texas suburb... why did we get singled out for this example specifically?
nathan_long 6y ago
It cuts both ways, right? Companies: "I don't have to pay you $big_city rates because you live in $small_town and nobody there will offer you $big_city rates." Candidates: "I don't have to accept $small_town rates because I work remotely and can work for a company in $big_city."
- TallGuyShort 6y ago
  The market is / will be self-balancing in this case. If companies can't hire people they'll have to come up with more than you're offering. If you're unemployed, you'll have to accept less than you're asking.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > But if a company is fully remote, why should it adjust for costs of living at all? Candidate A lives in an expensive place and Candidate B has an expensive hobby. Neither is the company's concern, is it? The bottom line is that each is worth $X to the company and wants $Y in compensation. Because if it wants to hire workers that live in SF, it has to pay SF wages. It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa. Think about it flipped around a bit. Let's say that instead of hiring employees, you're buying candy bars. Someone running a bodega in NYC isn't gonna give you a discount just because you're going to have the candy bar mailed to Oklahoma. The bottom line is not the $X value and the $Y compensation. It's a lot more complicated than that. Just like the company's bargaining position is a complex mixture of the value that different employees provide and the opportunity cost of leaving a position unfilled, the employee's bargaining position is affected by the salary the company is willing to provide and the opportunity cost of accepting this job offer instead of another.
  - aantix 6y ago
    > It doesn't have to pay SF wages to workers living in Tulsa. Not yet. When Tulsa engineers wake up to their value, they hold the cards. I’ve been on the hiring side for good senior engineers. They’re hard to hire, period. They take a ton of time to properly screen and by the end of the interview process, the company has wasted so many resources that could have been used for development if they don’t land that person.
metajack 6y ago
At a certain point people will move to the bay area for the higher paycheck, so that keeps it adjusted pretty high. Companies are not competing against local-to-the-employee employers, they are competing with all employers globally. Even with regional adjustments, the math usually works out in your favor to not be in the bay area.
Vysero 6y ago
"What's the guarantee" - There is no guarantee. Then again, there is no guarantee that the person who bought my drink didn't spike it with molly either...
mLuby 6y ago
A straightforward legal fix is to make location one of the things you can't ask about during hiring, like age, marital status, or disability. All they should be able to ask is what fraction of their work hours you're available for. It could be that everyone must be online 9-5 PST, or there're a few hours of overlap, or there's no expectation of common work hours as long as you "get your work done."
thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
I'd be fine with that. Even 30% reduction in pay would still be much better in an affordable city like Chicago or Houston.

darepublic 6y ago

Culture embracing remote work would help disperse the wealth geographically. It would hurt some property owners in urban meccas I suppose