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From what I understand, the employee loses leverage. If you don’t like the lower salary, often your only option is another company in your area that will also p

by city41 6y ago

From what I understand, the employee loses leverage. If you don’t like the lower salary, often your only option is another company in your area that will also pay an equivalently low salary. Hopefully if enough companies start hiring remote workers, our leverage will go up.

bhupy 6y ago
I'm not so sure that the leverage will change. If remote work were to go mainstream and that became the norm, employers won't pay different salaries based on location: they will pay one salary based on the cheapest location. It's not that different from outsourcing work today — there might exist manufacturing workers in the Rust belt that are capable of doing manufacturing, but employers just shift all their supply chains out to cheaper countries, since there's little difference between a Chinese person's labor, and a Pennsylvanian's labor. Similarly, if everyone is remote, then the difference between employees that live in low COL areas and employees that live in high COL areas starts to really blur. There might be exceptions to this for extremely high skilled engineers, but they're marginal cases. If we move to an all-remote (or even a "most-remote") engineering culture, then software engineering jobs will simply be "outsourced" to the cheapest COL areas.
- city41 6y ago
  I think this assumes all engineers are seen as equal. In some cases they may be. But in other cases companies are looking for good talent. If that good talent can show many remote companies are interested in them, they can likely command a nicer salary. But from what I understand today there aren’t enough remote friendly companies to make that work.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    If you're making the argument that good talent will always be able to command a high salary...nobody doubts that. This "good talent" is not the norm. Google has tens of thousands of software engineers, and only a handful of them (mostly the staff/principal/distinguished engineers) have the kind of negotiation leverage you're talking about, but they already get paid a lot in high COL cities anyway.
    - city41 6y ago
      True. Very top talent can basically do whatever they want. But there’s a spectrum and I think a wider range can benefit. I think you and I are mostly disagreeing on that. I think today a lot of “good but not top” talent find themselves crammed into the very crowded Bay Area. I’m hopeful that can be relieved a bit. But I’m being pretty optimistic.

by city41 6y ago

bhupy 6y ago

I'm not so sure that the leverage will change. If remote work were to go mainstream and that became the norm, employers won't pay different salaries based on location: they will pay one salary based on the cheapest location. It's not that different from outsourcing work today — there might exist manufacturing workers in the Rust belt that are capable of doing manufacturing, but employers just shift all their supply chains out to cheaper countries, since there's little difference between a Chinese person's labor, and a Pennsylvanian's labor. Similarly, if everyone is remote, then the difference between employees that live in low COL areas and employees that live in high COL areas starts to really blur. There might be exceptions to this for extremely high skilled engineers, but they're marginal cases. If we move to an all-remote (or even a "most-remote") engineering culture, then software engineering jobs will simply be "outsourced" to the cheapest COL areas.

city41 6y ago
I think this assumes all engineers are seen as equal. In some cases they may be. But in other cases companies are looking for good talent. If that good talent can show many remote companies are interested in them, they can likely command a nicer salary. But from what I understand today there aren’t enough remote friendly companies to make that work.
- bhupy 6y ago
  If you're making the argument that good talent will always be able to command a high salary...nobody doubts that. This "good talent" is not the norm. Google has tens of thousands of software engineers, and only a handful of them (mostly the staff/principal/distinguished engineers) have the kind of negotiation leverage you're talking about, but they already get paid a lot in high COL cities anyway.
  - city41 6y ago
    True. Very top talent can basically do whatever they want. But there’s a spectrum and I think a wider range can benefit. I think you and I are mostly disagreeing on that. I think today a lot of “good but not top” talent find themselves crammed into the very crowded Bay Area. I’m hopeful that can be relieved a bit. But I’m being pretty optimistic.