15 ms·

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 p

by 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.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      Price, as it turns out, is a signal of value. Some of the value might be access to jobs which you may now be able to access from elsewhere, but certainly not all of it. How many places in the United States have the immigrant communities of the Bay Area, for example? And how do you recreate such communities in cheap places without making them expensive?
- logfromblammo 6y ago
  It creates an incentive to establish legal domicile in a high-rent neighborhood and then always be somewhere else, "traveling", and taking care of all your business over the network. So you can own/lease a broom closet or pied-a-terre in Expensiveton, maybe rent it out intermittently or to a "roommate", and actually work and sleep in Cheapsville. If home address has an impact on take-home pay, it will be gamed just as hard as all the other metrics.
SauciestGNU 6y ago
Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it right. Is the employee contributing less to the company based on their location in a cheaper market? I think not. So why should we as workers allow a company to extract more profit from our labor based solely on our physical location?
- dvtrn 6y ago
  It does feel quite bizzaro doesn’t it? The manager here says 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. my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers. I’d love to sit down to coffee with a hiring budget manager one day and get into the weeds on CoL against present value and just do all of the math until the cafe closes or one of us has to take the first coffee induced “bio break”. Or at least, this is how it would go if my company tried to sell me on this. Hell, I might even be amenable to the pay cut if the company was otherwise doing right by our relationship as employer and employee and I felt sufficiently invested in continuing that relationship, but we’re going to get real mechanical and be VERY thorough about it.
  - wtetzner 6y ago
    > my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers. It doesn't have anything to do with your skills. It's just that they believe they can replace you in Indiana with a lower salary. I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense, just that they're probably thinking about it in that way.
    - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
      Or that there is less demand for those skills in Indiana so the market for those skills in Indiana pays less than the market for those skills in a separate location. This raises the question of if "remote" is its own "virtual location" in terms of market. Unfortunately, there is not yet enough remote work for there to be an established "remote" market distinction. For people where there is only a handful of people with those skills in the world, they command ny/sf pay wherever they live.
eecc 6y ago
Exploitative crap you can only pull because of lack of unions and power asymmetry. Bleh
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- refurb 6y ago
  If you're in a union, you're usually stuck in pay bands based on seniority.
simmons 6y ago
CoL adjustments have always seemed like a bit of a foreign idea to me, as someone who has been a freelancer for 20 years (WfH for 15). I'm not sure I would be able to sell my customers on the idea that I should get paid more because I live in X county. (Since my value proposition would be the same, assuming the customer wasn't in/near X.) On the other hand, if I lived in an area with a weaker tech scene, maybe my ability to negotiate would be weakened if they knew I didn't have a wealth of local options to fall back on?
bogomipz 6y ago
>"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." It's standard practice for your company maybe. This hasn't been my experience at all. I have had three jobs where this was not the case. I've had colleagues who have experienced similar as well. People should be paid for their time. I can't even believe a company would want to engage in salary reduction negotiations with employees they value.
vsareto 6y ago
>Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X This seems logical, but determining X is still in your authority, so let's not pretend this is fair. It's usually not a granular break down of skills either, or worse, it's calculated by job title plus a single primary skill, e.g. "Senior C#/.NET Developer".
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Doesn't seem logical to me. Unless they are also offering to increase salaries if you decide to move to a higher col area.
fredophile 6y ago
Do you pay them more if they want to work remotely and move to an expensive market like New York or London?
- kbos87 6y ago
  Yes, on the flipside, it works exactly the same way in reverse if someone is moving to a higher cost market. We benchmark against data from Radford & Comtrix (salary/pricing data providers) and adjust upwards on a regular basis too.
  - supergarfield 6y ago
    I'm a little confused by this. To simplify, it seems like either you want developers that are physically present in London, in which case you have to find some and pay them London rates, or you don't particularly care if they are physically present, in which case I don't understand why you would pay someone working remotely from London differently from someone working remotely from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Presumably in both cases your company is getting the same value out of the employee. So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area? In other words, it seems like if I decide to work remote and lie about where I physically spend most of my time, it would make no difference to the company but might make one to my compensation, which, ignoring any moral judgement, just seems strange for the company.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area? Companies do this to a certain degree. My anecdotal observation is that a lot of tech companies that aren't in the Bay Area or only have a small presence there don't in fact try particularly hard to be competitive with the big Bay Area employers--unless there's someone they really really want. People may still join for various reasons.
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
jjeaff 6y ago
So, as a director of a big team, you also offer to increase the salary of employees who want to move to higher col areas like, say London or Tokyo right? I mean, it's only fair. You pay what the market rate for the talent in that area is.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  All places I've worked that have multiple locations adjust salary both up and down when employees move to different markets. It's all about the prevailing rate for labor where you are located, and not some measurement of the "value you provide".
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Sure, but 'remote' is the 'location', not home town. You don't pay a non-London salary because the employee lives outside, or a Euro-denominated one because they commute from Paris.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Yes, but I assume these are all markets where these companies have physical presence. I doubt many are adjusting up because you want to move to London because you like the fog.
ulfw 6y ago
Market rates are such a weird idea. The whole concept is. You should pay for how GOOD an engineer is. Not for where (s)he lives.
- stuxnet79 6y ago
  This is a simplistic view of the situation. Define "GOOD". For a business a "GOOD" engineer is one who is able to deliver business value at minimal cost. If by "GOOD" you mean talented then you have to realize that the US doesn't have a monopoly on talented coders. The greenback goes far in many places within your timezone. If borders are opened up via remote work companies will be forced to re-evalute the axes by which they quantify "GOOD" (talent, cost).
- rubidium 6y ago
  As an employee it is. As an employer it’s not.
ketamine__ 6y ago
Do these transitions actually work? I can't imagine taking a massive pay cut because I need to be closer to ailing parents. That is going to generate a lot of bitterness. What is the turnover like at your company?
badfrog 6y ago
> 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. It seems like nobody wins in this situation. If my goal is to maximize savings, I'd move to the Bay Area to get the maximum salary from you and find the cheapest housing in the area. I'd be miserable because I'm living in a place I don't like in a shitty apartment. On the other hand, if you offered to pay the same amount while I live in the midwest, I'd be happier with my living situation and be pocketing more cash. This would make me more productive and make me stay at the company longer, with no additional cost to you.
deegles 6y ago
If I deliver enough value to receive salary X, I don't see how my personal living arrangements factor in. There are stories of Google engineers vandwelling in company parking, by that standard they should have their salaries reduced. I'm sure that if one of your directs asked for a raise because they moved in to a more expensive apartment you would politely refuse. [0](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru...)
OJFord 6y ago
That doesn't make sense though, 'the market' isn't wherever they decide to move to, it's 'remote'. And yes, that will be less than SF rates, but it may well be more than non-remote rates wherever the employee happens to live. It's not paying less that's silly, it's paying an artificial amount less. The only way in which location should come into it is restricting candidates to those located in (or willing to work to) a particular time zone(s).
city41 6y ago
If Twitter’s move is a sign of things to come, the “potential market” you’re talking about can become quite large.
soulnothing 6y ago
I'm mixed on the cost of living to salary argument. If I provide X value to a company. Say I complete a project that generates Y revenue. Why am I now docked on pay, because I'm choosing to live in a lower cost of area. Have I contributed less to compete this business item that now generates revenue. I find I'm more productive working remotely. So I'm doing more to drive that revenue line for the company. I think this comes down, we're not paid based on revenue we generate. But to keep us out of the talent pool. Or how much an adjacent firm may be willing to pay us. I don't believe it's based on what I can offer. The next argument is on market salary demand. I live locally in a market that makes no use of my technical skill set. If I need to keep cash flowing I find any three month contract to keep the lights on. But then I go back to being remote, and compete on a remote pool. Now we're on a remote pool set. America, or another cheaper to live country. If it's an external firm, do we have a middle company that can handle that tax implications. So we can hire a developer in Southern Asia or Europe. That role can now be filled for a drastic monetary reduction. But at the cost of management over head. Time zone difference, communication lag, better remote processes / documentation, etc. I've helped a few teams acclimate to these off shore changes. As an aside I always found it odd companies that outsource a majority of their development to an off shore firm. That will never be on site. But if a full time, on site, employee asked for a wfh to watch a sick kid, they had to burn a PTO day. Compared to an off shore developer there is one thing a country local developer may offer. Better communication with stake holders. Working in the same time zone. Communication especially remote is a big deal. I've seen a number of teams not be able to adapt to the time zone difference or communication differences. I went to work for a FAANG company several years ago. I took a 35% pay cut off my last local job, while my rent increased by about 60%. I did it for the experience. I've never seen the high FAANG salaries people talk about, but that's just me. I'm also horrible at leet code / hacker rank so there's that, and I studied for over a year on hacker rank to get that job. As to my experience with cost of living adjustment frankly they've been border line insulting. Locally, on site, if I find a role that uses most of my skills I'm looking 150/180(full time / w2 contract). I had a fully remote contract role, that used all my skills and challenged me. That paid me 245. I always look at my rate as what is the given task and job duties, because I generally work medium to long term contracts. Senior Software, vs Dev Ops, vs SRE, vs Product manager all have different salary bands. I don't have a blanket salary, it's always what's the role you're asking me to do. When I first got a COL adjustment rate, I laughed. Then I became frustrated, and then I ignored COL adjusted salaries. Coming off a local contract role at 165, I was in talks for a more senior position, full time remote. A company out of a high cost of living area no less, started at 95. I'm not against being paid a bit less, but that drastic of a pay cut is insulting to senior staff. If you're going to pay me less, I want to know why. Regardless of locale, I'm incurring more costs. I pay for better internet, stocking of coffee/pantry, electricity, and the big expense space. I still live in a city. Getting a second bed room can help a lot ensure a better work from home environment. Globalization is going to become very interesting. I moved from New York for about a 10% salary reduction, while halving my rent. The determining factor is politics, and how people can adapt to working remotely.
a_imho 6y ago
Make remote protected. Substitute your argument for any protected class and see how silly it becomes[1]. Just because the market (actually people) [2] can discriminate against group X it does not make it right. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_employment_opportunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_employment_opportunity [2] 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...

by kbos87 6y ago

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.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    Price, as it turns out, is a signal of value. Some of the value might be access to jobs which you may now be able to access from elsewhere, but certainly not all of it. How many places in the United States have the immigrant communities of the Bay Area, for example? And how do you recreate such communities in cheap places without making them expensive?
logfromblammo 6y ago
It creates an incentive to establish legal domicile in a high-rent neighborhood and then always be somewhere else, "traveling", and taking care of all your business over the network. So you can own/lease a broom closet or pied-a-terre in Expensiveton, maybe rent it out intermittently or to a "roommate", and actually work and sleep in Cheapsville. If home address has an impact on take-home pay, it will be gamed just as hard as all the other metrics.

SauciestGNU 6y ago

Just because it's standard practice doesn't make it right. Is the employee contributing less to the company based on their location in a cheaper market? I think not. So why should we as workers allow a company to extract more profit from our labor based solely on our physical location?

dvtrn 6y ago
It does feel quite bizzaro doesn’t it? The manager here says 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. my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers. I’d love to sit down to coffee with a hiring budget manager one day and get into the weeds on CoL against present value and just do all of the math until the cafe closes or one of us has to take the first coffee induced “bio break”. Or at least, this is how it would go if my company tried to sell me on this. Hell, I might even be amenable to the pay cut if the company was otherwise doing right by our relationship as employer and employee and I felt sufficiently invested in continuing that relationship, but we’re going to get real mechanical and be VERY thorough about it.
- wtetzner 6y ago
  > my question is: in this hypothetical, did my skills somehow lose monetary value to the company because I left the west coast and bought a house in Indiana? What’s the calculation on that one? Let’s talk numbers. It doesn't have anything to do with your skills. It's just that they believe they can replace you in Indiana with a lower salary. I'm not saying it makes a lot of sense, just that they're probably thinking about it in that way.
  - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
    Or that there is less demand for those skills in Indiana so the market for those skills in Indiana pays less than the market for those skills in a separate location. This raises the question of if "remote" is its own "virtual location" in terms of market. Unfortunately, there is not yet enough remote work for there to be an established "remote" market distinction. For people where there is only a handful of people with those skills in the world, they command ny/sf pay wherever they live.

eecc 6y ago

Exploitative crap you can only pull because of lack of unions and power asymmetry. Bleh

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
refurb 6y ago
If you're in a union, you're usually stuck in pay bands based on seniority.

simmons 6y ago

CoL adjustments have always seemed like a bit of a foreign idea to me, as someone who has been a freelancer for 20 years (WfH for 15). I'm not sure I would be able to sell my customers on the idea that I should get paid more because I live in X county. (Since my value proposition would be the same, assuming the customer wasn't in/near X.) On the other hand, if I lived in an area with a weaker tech scene, maybe my ability to negotiate would be weakened if they knew I didn't have a wealth of local options to fall back on?

bogomipz 6y ago

>"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." It's standard practice for your company maybe. This hasn't been my experience at all. I have had three jobs where this was not the case. I've had colleagues who have experienced similar as well. People should be paid for their time. I can't even believe a company would want to engage in salary reduction negotiations with employees they value.

vsareto 6y ago

>Happy to let you do it, but know that the market rate for your skills there is X This seems logical, but determining X is still in your authority, so let's not pretend this is fair. It's usually not a granular break down of skills either, or worse, it's calculated by job title plus a single primary skill, e.g. "Senior C#/.NET Developer".

jjeaff 6y ago
Doesn't seem logical to me. Unless they are also offering to increase salaries if you decide to move to a higher col area.

fredophile 6y ago

Do you pay them more if they want to work remotely and move to an expensive market like New York or London?

kbos87 6y ago
Yes, on the flipside, it works exactly the same way in reverse if someone is moving to a higher cost market. We benchmark against data from Radford & Comtrix (salary/pricing data providers) and adjust upwards on a regular basis too.
- supergarfield 6y ago
  I'm a little confused by this. To simplify, it seems like either you want developers that are physically present in London, in which case you have to find some and pay them London rates, or you don't particularly care if they are physically present, in which case I don't understand why you would pay someone working remotely from London differently from someone working remotely from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Presumably in both cases your company is getting the same value out of the employee. So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area? In other words, it seems like if I decide to work remote and lie about where I physically spend most of my time, it would make no difference to the company but might make one to my compensation, which, ignoring any moral judgement, just seems strange for the company.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >So why not hire only people working out of the Welsh countryside and refuse raises to anyone who wants to move to a higher COL area? Companies do this to a certain degree. My anecdotal observation is that a lot of tech companies that aren't in the Bay Area or only have a small presence there don't in fact try particularly hard to be competitive with the big Bay Area employers--unless there's someone they really really want. People may still join for various reasons.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago

jjeaff 6y ago

So, as a director of a big team, you also offer to increase the salary of employees who want to move to higher col areas like, say London or Tokyo right? I mean, it's only fair. You pay what the market rate for the talent in that area is.

ryandrake 6y ago
All places I've worked that have multiple locations adjust salary both up and down when employees move to different markets. It's all about the prevailing rate for labor where you are located, and not some measurement of the "value you provide".
- OJFord 6y ago
  Sure, but 'remote' is the 'location', not home town. You don't pay a non-London salary because the employee lives outside, or a Euro-denominated one because they commute from Paris.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Yes, but I assume these are all markets where these companies have physical presence. I doubt many are adjusting up because you want to move to London because you like the fog.

ulfw 6y ago

Market rates are such a weird idea. The whole concept is. You should pay for how GOOD an engineer is. Not for where (s)he lives.

stuxnet79 6y ago
This is a simplistic view of the situation. Define "GOOD". For a business a "GOOD" engineer is one who is able to deliver business value at minimal cost. If by "GOOD" you mean talented then you have to realize that the US doesn't have a monopoly on talented coders. The greenback goes far in many places within your timezone. If borders are opened up via remote work companies will be forced to re-evalute the axes by which they quantify "GOOD" (talent, cost).
rubidium 6y ago
As an employee it is. As an employer it’s not.

ketamine__ 6y ago

Do these transitions actually work? I can't imagine taking a massive pay cut because I need to be closer to ailing parents. That is going to generate a lot of bitterness. What is the turnover like at your company?

badfrog 6y ago

> 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. It seems like nobody wins in this situation. If my goal is to maximize savings, I'd move to the Bay Area to get the maximum salary from you and find the cheapest housing in the area. I'd be miserable because I'm living in a place I don't like in a shitty apartment. On the other hand, if you offered to pay the same amount while I live in the midwest, I'd be happier with my living situation and be pocketing more cash. This would make me more productive and make me stay at the company longer, with no additional cost to you.

deegles 6y ago

If I deliver enough value to receive salary X, I don't see how my personal living arrangements factor in. There are stories of Google engineers vandwelling in company parking, by that standard they should have their salaries reduced. I'm sure that if one of your directs asked for a raise because they moved in to a more expensive apartment you would politely refuse. [0](https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru...)

OJFord 6y ago

That doesn't make sense though, 'the market' isn't wherever they decide to move to, it's 'remote'. And yes, that will be less than SF rates, but it may well be more than non-remote rates wherever the employee happens to live. It's not paying less that's silly, it's paying an artificial amount less. The only way in which location should come into it is restricting candidates to those located in (or willing to work to) a particular time zone(s).

city41 6y ago

If Twitter’s move is a sign of things to come, the “potential market” you’re talking about can become quite large.

soulnothing 6y ago

I'm mixed on the cost of living to salary argument. If I provide X value to a company. Say I complete a project that generates Y revenue. Why am I now docked on pay, because I'm choosing to live in a lower cost of area. Have I contributed less to compete this business item that now generates revenue. I find I'm more productive working remotely. So I'm doing more to drive that revenue line for the company. I think this comes down, we're not paid based on revenue we generate. But to keep us out of the talent pool. Or how much an adjacent firm may be willing to pay us. I don't believe it's based on what I can offer. The next argument is on market salary demand. I live locally in a market that makes no use of my technical skill set. If I need to keep cash flowing I find any three month contract to keep the lights on. But then I go back to being remote, and compete on a remote pool. Now we're on a remote pool set. America, or another cheaper to live country. If it's an external firm, do we have a middle company that can handle that tax implications. So we can hire a developer in Southern Asia or Europe. That role can now be filled for a drastic monetary reduction. But at the cost of management over head. Time zone difference, communication lag, better remote processes / documentation, etc. I've helped a few teams acclimate to these off shore changes. As an aside I always found it odd companies that outsource a majority of their development to an off shore firm. That will never be on site. But if a full time, on site, employee asked for a wfh to watch a sick kid, they had to burn a PTO day. Compared to an off shore developer there is one thing a country local developer may offer. Better communication with stake holders. Working in the same time zone. Communication especially remote is a big deal. I've seen a number of teams not be able to adapt to the time zone difference or communication differences. I went to work for a FAANG company several years ago. I took a 35% pay cut off my last local job, while my rent increased by about 60%. I did it for the experience. I've never seen the high FAANG salaries people talk about, but that's just me. I'm also horrible at leet code / hacker rank so there's that, and I studied for over a year on hacker rank to get that job. As to my experience with cost of living adjustment frankly they've been border line insulting. Locally, on site, if I find a role that uses most of my skills I'm looking 150/180(full time / w2 contract). I had a fully remote contract role, that used all my skills and challenged me. That paid me 245. I always look at my rate as what is the given task and job duties, because I generally work medium to long term contracts. Senior Software, vs Dev Ops, vs SRE, vs Product manager all have different salary bands. I don't have a blanket salary, it's always what's the role you're asking me to do. When I first got a COL adjustment rate, I laughed. Then I became frustrated, and then I ignored COL adjusted salaries. Coming off a local contract role at 165, I was in talks for a more senior position, full time remote. A company out of a high cost of living area no less, started at 95. I'm not against being paid a bit less, but that drastic of a pay cut is insulting to senior staff. If you're going to pay me less, I want to know why. Regardless of locale, I'm incurring more costs. I pay for better internet, stocking of coffee/pantry, electricity, and the big expense space. I still live in a city. Getting a second bed room can help a lot ensure a better work from home environment. Globalization is going to become very interesting. I moved from New York for about a 10% salary reduction, while halving my rent. The determining factor is politics, and how people can adapt to working remotely.

a_imho 6y ago

Make remote protected. Substitute your argument for any protected class and see how silly it becomes[1]. Just because the market (actually people) [2] can discriminate against group X it does not make it right. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_employment_opportunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_employment_opportunity [2] 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...