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I've always found this incentive structure perverse. Take Peter Norvig and place him in LA vs Louisville. In either case he's a remote employee working from a h

I've always found this incentive structure perverse. Take Peter Norvig and place him in LA vs Louisville. In either case he's a remote employee working from a home office. <very profitable company> will want to pay him differently depending on where he lives and depending on where their HQ is. And yet his output is the same. Let's say he prefers less dense cities, maybe then his output is even higher in Louisville, as the lower cost of living affords him a better home setup and a social circle that all can afford to live nearby each other. Society seems to want to cram people into as small a space as possible near work places, optimizing for business progress. Seems to me to make sense in the short term and fail in the long term. Here's to hoping a silver lining of the pandemic is better utilization of space towards human happiness and the health of the global ecology. :)

aripickar 6y ago
The elasticity of talent of the average engineer is so much higher than that of Peter Norvig it doesn't really make sense to discuss it. For an individual person it doesn't matter where they work if theres no replacement, but for any engineer, it matters.
triceratops 6y ago
A company will pay as little as it can to any employee. Including Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig's minimum acceptable offer is just far higher than Average Joe/Jane Progammer's minimum. Right now, LCoL area employees complain about getting paid less in absolute terms. If they get bumped up to HQ payscales, the HCoL-area employees will (rightly) complain that they're now being paid less in relative terms than the LCoL-area folks, despite producing the same value as them. So there's no winning, no "fair" answer.