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This is one of the things that's always bothered me. Let's say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K. You've made a calculation: my va

This is one of the things that's always bothered me. Let's say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K. You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. In other words, the company will (eventually) make more than $150K per year off my contributions to the company. But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of "cost of living". Why? My value to the company hasn't changed! I am still worth the same amount as I was before! The only thing that changed is where I choose to reside. What difference is that to the company? As remote working becomes more and more acceptable, we're going to start to see companies like Twitter and Facebook competing nationwide, not just in Silicon Valley. An engineer in Oklahoma will now be in a market that includes all of the big giants, and not just the local banks or whatever. Likewise, Twitter and Facebook will be competing against each other in the lower COL areas like Oklahoma! And not just SF startups, but competing against NYC and London startups as well. This whole area is really fascinating to me, but the "you get paid differently depending on where you live" thing has always struck me as bizarre and one-sided in favor of the businesses and not the people in high demand, like good software engineers.

dexter0 6y ago
> You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. Part of that value calculus was that you are willing to relocate (or already reside in) the Bay Area. In other words, if the company offered only $90K and still required you to live in the Bay Area, you and most other qualified candidates would balk at the offer. > The only thing that changed is where I choose to reside. What difference is that to the company? Clearly the company is betting that if you walk away instead of accepting the pay cut, they will be able to find another qualified candidate among the now much larger talent pool they are able to court with remote work.
deleted 6y ago
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alkibiades 6y ago
thats not how the free market works. im not sure where people got the strange concept they are paid what they are worth to the company. or that they are paid based on how hard they work. its literally just supply and demand like everything else.
ones_and_zeros 6y ago
It's not about where you live. It's supply and demand. Those companies artificially limited their supply and provided a ton of demand within their narrow market. They are now opening up to new markets and spreading out the demand accordingly. Forced analogy time: It's like if I decide I'll only buy peaches from the organic farm down the road. They charge $20/lb. I calculate that I get $21/lb worth of utility. The Farmer is happy. A few years later I decide that purchasing organic peaches online for $15/lb fits the bill, and utility dropped slightly to $19/lb but still better in comparison. The farmer is no longer happy.
- aeternum 6y ago
  The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF. Tech companies typically do increase your salary if you move to a higher CoL area.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    >The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF. The buyer (Facebook) may not be playing all their cards. They may very well intend to reduce SF employee headcount, but want to experiment, and so saying otherwise will allow them to do it in a slow, controlled manner.
  - Tade0 6y ago
    Relocating for most people is actually a bigger deal than it may seem. I personally have no problem with it and did just that at least once, but after returning I asked around and most if not all of my friends and family would not do the same even for - and this was especially shocking to me - 4x the salary. Apparently flexibility is rare and sought after.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Was that 4x the salary truly 4x, after subtracting out the costs of living? I got an offer for an on-site job in London the other day, that would technically be ~1.5x salary boost - and ~5x the salary I had the last time I worked for a local company. But after subtracting out the costs of living, it turned out it would be effectively a 3x salary decrease, and at the same time a significant degradation in the standards of living. Turns out, London isn't a particularly friendly place for a couple with a toddler to move to.
enitihas 6y ago
> You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. You are in for some surprises then. Companies don't pay you just in relation to the value you deliver. Most companies pay the least amount required to get the value you deliver. Now if you are competing against engineers who are willing to accept lower salary due to low CoL in another area, the company would offer less. Offcourse, that is not how things should be.
- matz1 6y ago
  That is how thing should be. Let say I shop for a gadget. I pay for that gadget not because the value it deliver but the least amount required to get the value it deliver.
  - enitihas 6y ago
    Sure, if you think human beings should be treated like disposable gadgets.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Well, if your labour is not, in fact, fungible it won't behave on the market as if it is fungible. You'll see this often for people paid a lot doing a single role for 30 years. Given the probability of a good replacement hire, they can't actually be replaced. Given their unique knowledge of that company, they're worth 50% to another. You'll also see this at startups where people will move from place to place keeping their income. But the median Facebook engineer's labour is fungible. It doesn't really matter which engineer is there so long as there is an engineer there. And human beings are not being treated as disposable gadgets. Their labour is behaving like any other good in the market. There are some specifics but for the most part it is true. There's no should to this. It's merely observational truth.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Is the price of a disposable gadget not based not the price of the labor that went into it? They're both subject to the same forces.
arkanciscan 6y ago
90k for an Oklahoman is a bit overpriced if you ask me ;-)
nopzor 6y ago
employers pay their employees based on supply and demand, not based on value. the supply and demand is historically based on a geographic locale. one could argue this is how you make your own purchasing decisions. now, with remote workers, this becomes interesting and not as clear cut. i'm not making a judgement on whether this is fair or not (that's a whole other topic), but rather just pointing out how the calculus is generally made today.
zamalek 6y ago
Someone probably used the argument that "you can reduce costs due to salaries" when pitching this to Zuck. They should have cited the rental savings instead. > Likewise, Twitter and Facebook will be competing against each other in the lower COL areas like Oklahoma! The market should recover when this new reality matures. Lots of engineers are currently willing to relocate and the current market is still incredibly competitive. Good talent is hard to find and easy to lose. That will not change.
jjtheblunt 6y ago
Maybe presence in the office, to teach others in the office, is (supposedly) work $60k in the example above? (Seems silly to me, but that's what the management could claim.)
kd5bjo 6y ago
Employment is a market, similar to many others. As long as there are a significant number of companies that want you to show up in an office, choosing to live in an area with fewer employers puts you in a different cohort with a lower market-clearing price. Also, the value you deliver to your employer will change whenever there’s a substantial shift in your working relationship. To the extent that your job requires collaboration, working in the same timezone as your peers has obvious benefits, for example.
coliveira 6y ago
This just shows that companies are on the look to exploit their workers as much as possible, i.e., to make them work for the lowest salary possible for that particular job. It really bothers them that you may take home more money than they can possibly get away with paying you.
Hamuko 6y ago
The $150k is not what your work is directly valued at, but rather an agreement of what it'll take for you to drag your ass to San Francisco, which is objectively a bad place to live if you're a human that has to make budgets, and come to work at Facebook. Also yes, if Facebook starts to hire remote workers, then your value will drop because they now have the access to a pool of workers who don't want to drag their asses to San Francisco and can pretty easily settle for less since their rent doesn't require them to bleed money.
- volkk 6y ago
  i'm kind of super interested (also scared) in the effects FAANG companies allowing remote workers will have. sure, maybe salaries at FAANG might decrease as supply/competition rises, but then all of the other companies that arent FAANG now have to sort of raise the lower boundaries of their pay since they cant just say "well you can go ahead to move to SF if you dont like it". Are we looking at lower high end of the spectrum but a higher median?
  - ip26 6y ago
    It seems like the top end would drop a lot more than the median would rise. Given the poaching it seems clear SF has a scarcity of developers that satisfy FAANG, and scarcity drives price up radically. If remote work becomes more widespread, the scarcity condition would presumably evaporate. Socially speaking it could be a very good thing. Many of the big challenges we are facing (wealth disparity, political polarization, housing crunch) can be tied to the gross disparity in economic opportunity between places like SF, Austin, NYC, vs everywhere else.
    - mrkurt 6y ago
      Those companies already hire all over the world for the scarce, high dollar engineers. I don't think top end compensation will drop while those companies are monopolies. Most of those salaries balloon because they poach people from each other.
      - 6y ago
dqpb 6y ago
> one-sided in favor of the businesses Remember how Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and eBay colluded to suppress wages of Software Engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Remember how Facebook (the subject of this thread) chose not to?
  - taude 6y ago
    FB was at least a few years away from growing into a Public company when all this went down.
polote 6y ago
> Why? My value to the company hasn't changed! I am still worth the same amount as I was before! Do we have stats about he difference of hours between remote and non remote employers? I thought the main goal to have those big tech campus is to have dev stay longer at work. If you are remote you will work less and then your value decrease
- rob_b 6y ago
  Being remote means you always have access to work, thus often resulting in you working much more than you would in an onsite only role.
jedberg 6y ago
You're not being paid based on your value to the company. You're being paid based on the minimum they can pay you to get you to work there. If you move to Tulsa, you're minimum goes down because they know there are fewer opportunities for you to work in Tulsa. As remote work becomes more prominent, then your salary would probably go back up as there will be more jobs for you in Tulsa. But it probably won't go back up to SF levels because everyone else has that opportunity too.
maximente 6y ago
why does it bother you? you're thinking like some individual laborer in a weirdly abstract sense, not like the person paying them. hint: you aren't paid based on your worth, you're paid based on, in general, the lowest that your employer can afford to pay you to not leave for a competitor. capital on the aggregate always tries to get labor to work for the lowest possible price that they can. that's why negotiations go on between workers and employers. that's why if you don't negotiate, you get bowled over. software engineers seem to think that they are this ultra elite labor class whose "value" is somehow tied completely to their intrinsic skills. that all goes out the window when software engineers begrudgingly accept massive pay cuts to take their insanely comfortable salary and lifestyle to a low COL area. that ought to tell you everything you need to know about your intrinsic "value": you lose immense power when you don't live in a place where you can quickly and easily get a job with a competitor. if software engineers learn anything from this, it's that they are being paid a premium to essentially not change companies.
jpeg_hero 6y ago
I always see comments like this from individual contributors. I'll give you the managers perspective. You may be worth $150k, any one individual engineer could be worth multiples of that! Look at your entire engineering team, from best to worst. Is not there some inflation of salaries in the SF Bay area? The bootcamper that is making $110k out of bootcamp? Are they really 73% as effective as you? The marketing person down the hall? Do you contribute more then that person today? Yeah, probably. Without marketing to get the word out and sales to actually bring in the cash, how much would your contribution be worth? You have to look at the whole system as a manager. And yes we pay the bootcamper $110k because we hope they'll grow into be a great engineer like you.
- brmgb 6y ago
  That has absolutely nothing to do with what he said which is in no way linked to its status as an individual contributor. The real point is it's not about what you are "worth" but about your market value. If you are away from Silicone Valley where you could find a similarly paid job, your options are more limited. That's a loss of bargaining power and Facebook thinks they can get away with paying you less.
- amscanne 6y ago
  You’re acting like the company is assigning value to people and paying them accordingly. That’s not how it works. Pay is determined by the labor market. Substitute wizzle for “senior engineer”, and wozzle for “bootcampers” or “marketing”. Facebook pays $150k for wizzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones. It pays $110k for wozzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones. People (reasonably) want a specific combination of wizzles and wozzles, for growth, different roles, etc. At no point does Facebook assign a price for wizzles based on their expected individual contribution. Maybe there are some “market makers” in some industries, but I don’t think it applies in tech.
  - jpeg_hero 6y ago
    Well said, totally agree with the way you phrased it.
- 6y ago
mc32 6y ago
I kind of understand where you’re coming from and as an employee I agree... but on the other hand when you relocate from TUL to SFO you expect a COLA, right? Why would COLA only apply one way?
- kgin 6y ago
  If the company honestly didn't care where you lived and you took it upon yourself to move to SF, you wouldn't get an adjustment. But if the company needs you in SF, then they'll need to pay what it takes to hire someone in SF, regardless of where you lived before. It's only a cost of living adjustment to you. To the company, it's what they have to pay to get an SF worker. It just happens to be higher than what you were making before.
kgin 6y ago
In the big picture, wages are set by how much it would cost to replace you with an equally-qualified worker. In a location-agnostic situation, this would mean "how much it would cost to replace you with an equally qualified worker anywhere in the United States?" (Or world, really, but let's stick to US for now) What Facebook is probably signaling with this location-based cut is that this is the direction they are headed. They can't afford to immediately cut their Bay Area workers' salaries to this US-average-number (because they would lose their current workers faster than they can replace them) but they are not going to give preference in the future to Bay Area workers and will not pay new Bay Area workers higher salaries unless their physical presence in the Bay Area is explicitly needed.
mech422 6y ago
Of course, programmers in Oklahoma are not idiots either.. They know that not only does the company have a wider choice of employees - the employee has a wider choice of employers. They also know SV companies pay more then $90K, and if they already have a decent gig they will not 'settle' for what they could get at a small company. They may not ask for the full $150K - but they are going to ask for say $120-125k. End result is salaries will start to homogenize around the country. P.S. We've seen this in AZ as more tech comes in, salaries have been getting closer and closer to SF.
- brogrammernot 6y ago
  AZ salaries, when factoring in COL, are more than most tech jobs in California. This is leaving the allure of non-valued startup options but on average the salaries I’ve seen (yes, n=1) are in the realm of the upper curve of Bay Area salaries .
  - wikibob 6y ago
    Do you have some reliable data you can share on AZ salaries? Glassdoor is obviously not reliable.
    - mech422 6y ago
      I actually haven't looked for a job locally in 3-4 years. I'm currently working remotely for a SV company. I did do a few interviews with AWS for a TAM/Engineering type role earlier this year. They had no quibbles with $175K. I actually lost interest when I found out it was a 25% on-premise role at client facilities. If I had known everyone would be working remotely now, it might have been different.
      - wikibob 6y ago
        Based on Levels.fyi data for salary by level, how much would the level for that role have paid in the Bay Area?
  - 6y ago
mrkurt 6y ago
I'm disappointed that all the replies to this sentiment are "lol, it's supply and demand". I mean, maybe that's it but it's not a very useful thing to think about. As someone who's run two remote companies now, I have struggled with this dilemma as an employer. Because I agree with you, if a person is worth $x to the company, their location doesn't change that. The flip side, though, is that I also want people to be on relatively equal footing. Not everyone can move to optimize their relative adjusted income, and the problem with a salary number is that it doesn't reflect status. An entry level SF salary will get you a house + a lake house in Oklahoma. A person who owns a vacation home is living an entirely different life than someone with a roommate in Oakland. If you _don't_ adjust salaries for cost of living it makes that even worse, because suddenly you're probably paying less than someone in SF or NYC needs, more than what most people need in other states, and paying a crazy high localized salary to someone in Vietnam. All that said, we're doing the same salaries regardless of location. And I'm still not sure that's the right choice.
- Vysero 6y ago
  "Not everyone can move to optimize their relative adjusted income"-- Yes and not everyone can get married, and have a partner to share the load with either. So does that mean a bachelor and a married man should be paid different salaries? Not everyone can find the time to run a side business. So should those who can be penalized? You pay your employees what they are worth to the company and forget entirely about what they are and are not capable of doing outside of the company because it's really none of your business. If that means you can't find employees because you aren't willing to value an employee correctly than your company will fail, end of story.
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    Single and married folks with families get paid differently. We pay ~3-4x more for healthcare for people with families than individuals. You've sort of dismissed my point, though. The dilemma is that salary choices create friction within companies. It's not as simple as "pay what it takes to get someone" and "it's none of your business" because it does, in fact, have repercussions on how well a company works.
dudul 6y ago
Salaries are mostly driven by how hard it is to find an employee, not the value they produce. If the model is to hire someone to be in the office, you obviously need to pay based on your location and local cost of living to be attractive. Completely logical to pay $300k in SF and $90k in Tulsa. Now, if you really go all in with distributed workforce, the problem becomes "why pay $300k for the guy in SF while I can hire the 'same' guy in Tulsa for $90k?" Instead of the guy in Tulsa being upset that they're not being paid as much as their buddy in SF, it's the one in SF who should wonder if they'll be able to keep their salary at $300k for long.
causehealth101 6y ago
Let me preface by saying this policy is a serious threat to my compensation - so I hear you loud and clear! That said: this is the reality and, as unfair as it sounds from the employee's perspective, it makes perfect sense. Facebook does not pay Bay Area compensation to its employees in other parts of the world. It should be no different for those in different COL areas around the US. Not only does this suck for current employees, but new hiring will be a nasty wake-up call. If a candidate in a different city thinks they'll cross their arms and demand Bay Area pay, there will be multiple other qualified candidates in that city & around the country more than happy to accept a competitive offer tied to their COL. *Spelling
- sh-run 6y ago
  Exactly this. I work for a FAANG and live in Texas. If employees leaving the bay area could leave and maintain the same level of pay, I'd expect a bay area salary as well. With the lack of a state income tax and relatively low housing costs I'd be living like a king! According to NerdWallet's COL calculator I could pay off my house after a year with just my salary increase. Edit: And if I moved to the bay area I would absolutely expect a COL increase
bradhe 6y ago
> I am still worth the same amount as I was before! True, unless the company thinks you're more valuable by having you on-site.
kojeovo 6y ago
> "you get paid differently depending on where you live" If I'm relocating to SF from middle of nowhere where I got paid 80k, without a cost of adjustment increas I can't afford SF.
fma 6y ago
And the dev in Eastern Europe is wondering why is the dev in San Francisco getting 10x as them.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The dev in Eastern Europe may do well to be reminded that the dev in SF is losing almost all of that on costs of living, and may actually be worse off in terms of disposable income (relative to its purchasing power in the area).
  - pashamur 6y ago
    That might be true for someone that spends most of their income, but if you're attempting to save (to FIRE or something else), you'd be much better off in SF, since your post COL-adjusted take home is still significantly better. 10 years of working in SF and saving frugally, and you can go to the aforementioned places in Eastern Europe to retire for life. The engineer in Eastern Europe cannot do the same.
Jare 6y ago
> my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value Now change the second "is" in that sentence, to "was". Offer and demand are (largely) what determine your salary. The value you create is what sets a ceiling to that price. It's that simple. FB becomes willing to hire people who live anywhere, and stops believing that candidates in SF or other expensive locations provide more value. They will have a way larger pool of candidates, and they will likely find people who provide just as much value for FB (sorry to burst any bubbles here) but are willing to do so for less money than currently happens.
sudoaza 6y ago
The $150K is so you can have certain lifestyle there but not save enough to leave and become competition, it's the cost of labor reproduction. In Tulsa your cost of reproduction would be lower, paying you too much might allow you to leave the shackles of capitalism.
not2b 6y ago
You are appealing to a concept of justice. Zuckerberg sees it a different way: how little can he get away with paying? If he can make a profit paying you $150K, he can make even more paying you $90K. He'll take it if he can. Whether he can depends on whether you have competing offers. If the economy tanks, maybe you won't. If all their employees work from home, that's going to tend to equalize the salary levels across regions, and the number they settle to likely isn't going to be the SF Bay Area number.
milesskorpen 6y ago
Wages aren't set based on a calculation like "how much is this person worth?" — that just sets the max salary. Companies want to pay their workers as little as possible; they can just get away with lower salaries in other markets than they can in San Francisco.
RyanGoosling 6y ago
The rent you pay into the SF housing (renter) market is half your value. You pay the Administration that owns that real estate a large portion of your salary.
sirmoveon 6y ago
Your value to the company is relative to the job market you are competing in. You might be worth 90k in the SF market, but in a global market, competing against cheap labor and other regional bureaucratic regulations, your value will be less.
sys_64738 6y ago
These companies already have CoL adjustments based on whether you live in the Bay area, Boston or Austin.
kthxbye123 6y ago
"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks..."
freetanga 6y ago
I think the 150k is “the value you bring to the company” adjusted to “the location the company forces you to be at”. If they demanded you to be in SF, one can guess a part of your comp was to adjust for crazy costs of living there. If you move away, that is adjusted. Having been an expat, there are purchasing parity tables that are used in these relocations. Imagine you were hired on Tulsa money and then forced to move to SF on the same amount...
valuearb 6y ago
They can’t pay you less than your worth as a remote engineer. I’ve contemplated moving back to the valley but keep getting offered nearly as much money to work remotely from Arizona. If Facebook wanted me to work for less the answer is .. no. On the other hand if I worked for Facebook I would strongly consider taking a payout if it meant I didn’t have to work in their open floor plan from hell environment.
mnm1 6y ago
That's one way to give the middle finger to your employees, lower morale, and have them underperform. Businesses do stupid things like this all the time, against their own interests just to save a little money. Another example is not giving even inflation adjustment raises. The employees will respond accordingly and lower performance, work less, try less. Not enough to get penalized, just enough to stay in the boundaries. Or they'll leave. It's especially stupid to do this to remote employees for obvious reasons.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Its also meaningless for stay-at-home employees. How exactly does the distance to your house, affect your pay? Why?
koheripbal 6y ago
This is a fundamental Microeconomics supply-demand pricing question: Do you sell an item based upon the cost to produce it, or the price customers are willing to pay for it? Employment is no different. There is a struggle between buyers of your employment, and you (the seller) of your time/expertise. If those prices overlap, then there is a spectrum of possible transaction prices that can occur. As you can imagine, if there are many buyers, and few sellers, then the price is driven to an auction level where buyers must compete with one another for the employee. If there are more sellers than buyers, then the price is driven down towards the cost of that employee (and associated education). Typically we exist in the middle where negotiation tactics dominate where within that range the price settles. That's why there are policies such as "don't share your salary" - to create information asymmetry favoring the employer. ...and why people with poor negotiating skills typically earn significantly less than those who demand more. Generally, when demand for employees is high, companies try to make the market less efficient by creating hurdles to employees leaving (like the agreements between tech companies not to "poach" employees from one another), and bonus programs that vest over multi-year periods. This is relevant today because allowing employees to work from home greatly increases the supply of potential employees (both domestically as well as internationally), thereby forcing employees to accept closer and closer to their cost-basis. By microeconomic principles alone, it would be surprising if this didn't significantly drive down tech wages.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  This is exactly right. I'm surprised that so many people, who are otherwise highly educated and intelligent, struggle with this concept. There's no universal rule of "fairness" saying how much a company should pay you. It's not dictated by COL calculations and logical questions of value. The company looks at you and your competitors (alternative candidates), and puts forward a number they think is high enough for you to accept, but not so high that they could snag an "equivalent" candidate for a lower price. You win that battle not by whinging about COL adjustments, but by eliminating your alternatives (metaphorically speaking, of course). If the company truly needs what you do, and you're the only one who can do it, then you set the terms.
hhujhyyy 6y ago
I think that some people in SF aren't probably worth SF salary. They are viable due to people used to working in co-located env and to having some superior peers. Also laws require equal pays for similar position in many countries. Opening remote might make market more competitive. Speaking for myself, living outside US: I am able only to command 1/3 of SF salary(top in my market) although I could easily replace many people working in FB, earning much more than I do. Only if they were hiring in my city. (Pretty sure as had offers from Amazon, Gooogle etc. but they would require moving or local projects weren't interesting).
jordhy 6y ago
Actually no one can precisely predict how much an employee is going to net for the company - companies lose a lot of money in bad hires. You are being payed according to a scale that works out to keeps costs down, as much as possible for a specific cost center.
ponker 6y ago
But that's not how prices are set. The company isn't looking to hire you (unless they are, in which case you are set regardless of what happens to the world)... they are looking to hire someone who can do the job. So they start at $1. Will anyone take the job for $1? Not in Menlo Park. So they go to $2. Still nobody. $150K is where they have to be right now to hire the quantity and quality of people they want to, given the conditions of employment (for Facebook, the two biggest ones are that you have to move to the Bay Area and that they fire people very eagerly). If you decide to move to Tulsa OK and you are a Jeff Dean sort, they'll just say "thank you for not quitting." If they reduce your pay to $90K... even if you hadn't moved, eventually they would have gotten around to firing you and replacing you with someone in Tulsa for $90K.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
> has always struck me as bizarre and one-sided in favor of the businesses Companies exist to extract the highest amount of profit from their employees.
dntbnmpls 6y ago
> But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of "cost of living". See if it makes more sense going the other direction. Imagine you started in Tulsa making $90K. After a few years facebook wants you to move to SF. Would you still be happy with $90K in SF since that's what your worth to facebook? Of course not, you'd want cost of living adjustments.
matchagaucho 6y ago
Compensation can be structured with both fixed and variable components. The fixed portion covers basic needs: Shelter, food, transportation, healthcare, etc... The variable portion is typically performance based. Usually RSUs or stock. Could also be a cash bonus. Moving to OK will reduce basic needs and fixed comp, but variable comp could remain unchanged. More employees living in OK could mean more profit, hence more cash bonus.
hartator 6y ago
> my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. It's more about competition than value you're providing. In SF, you'll find another 6 figures very easily not so much in the middle of nowhere.
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dexter0 6y ago

> You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. Part of that value calculus was that you are willing to relocate (or already reside in) the Bay Area. In other words, if the company offered only $90K and still required you to live in the Bay Area, you and most other qualified candidates would balk at the offer. > The only thing that changed is where I choose to reside. What difference is that to the company? Clearly the company is betting that if you walk away instead of accepting the pay cut, they will be able to find another qualified candidate among the now much larger talent pool they are able to court with remote work.

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alkibiades 6y ago

thats not how the free market works. im not sure where people got the strange concept they are paid what they are worth to the company. or that they are paid based on how hard they work. its literally just supply and demand like everything else.

ones_and_zeros 6y ago

It's not about where you live. It's supply and demand. Those companies artificially limited their supply and provided a ton of demand within their narrow market. They are now opening up to new markets and spreading out the demand accordingly. Forced analogy time: It's like if I decide I'll only buy peaches from the organic farm down the road. They charge $20/lb. I calculate that I get $21/lb worth of utility. The Farmer is happy. A few years later I decide that purchasing organic peaches online for $15/lb fits the bill, and utility dropped slightly to $19/lb but still better in comparison. The farmer is no longer happy.

aeternum 6y ago
The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF. Tech companies typically do increase your salary if you move to a higher CoL area.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF. The buyer (Facebook) may not be playing all their cards. They may very well intend to reduce SF employee headcount, but want to experiment, and so saying otherwise will allow them to do it in a slow, controlled manner.
- Tade0 6y ago
  Relocating for most people is actually a bigger deal than it may seem. I personally have no problem with it and did just that at least once, but after returning I asked around and most if not all of my friends and family would not do the same even for - and this was especially shocking to me - 4x the salary. Apparently flexibility is rare and sought after.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Was that 4x the salary truly 4x, after subtracting out the costs of living? I got an offer for an on-site job in London the other day, that would technically be ~1.5x salary boost - and ~5x the salary I had the last time I worked for a local company. But after subtracting out the costs of living, it turned out it would be effectively a 3x salary decrease, and at the same time a significant degradation in the standards of living. Turns out, London isn't a particularly friendly place for a couple with a toddler to move to.

enitihas 6y ago

> You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. You are in for some surprises then. Companies don't pay you just in relation to the value you deliver. Most companies pay the least amount required to get the value you deliver. Now if you are competing against engineers who are willing to accept lower salary due to low CoL in another area, the company would offer less. Offcourse, that is not how things should be.

matz1 6y ago
That is how thing should be. Let say I shop for a gadget. I pay for that gadget not because the value it deliver but the least amount required to get the value it deliver.
- enitihas 6y ago
  Sure, if you think human beings should be treated like disposable gadgets.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Well, if your labour is not, in fact, fungible it won't behave on the market as if it is fungible. You'll see this often for people paid a lot doing a single role for 30 years. Given the probability of a good replacement hire, they can't actually be replaced. Given their unique knowledge of that company, they're worth 50% to another. You'll also see this at startups where people will move from place to place keeping their income. But the median Facebook engineer's labour is fungible. It doesn't really matter which engineer is there so long as there is an engineer there. And human beings are not being treated as disposable gadgets. Their labour is behaving like any other good in the market. There are some specifics but for the most part it is true. There's no should to this. It's merely observational truth.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Is the price of a disposable gadget not based not the price of the labor that went into it? They're both subject to the same forces.

arkanciscan 6y ago

90k for an Oklahoman is a bit overpriced if you ask me ;-)

nopzor 6y ago

employers pay their employees based on supply and demand, not based on value. the supply and demand is historically based on a geographic locale. one could argue this is how you make your own purchasing decisions. now, with remote workers, this becomes interesting and not as clear cut. i'm not making a judgement on whether this is fair or not (that's a whole other topic), but rather just pointing out how the calculus is generally made today.

zamalek 6y ago

Someone probably used the argument that "you can reduce costs due to salaries" when pitching this to Zuck. They should have cited the rental savings instead. > Likewise, Twitter and Facebook will be competing against each other in the lower COL areas like Oklahoma! The market should recover when this new reality matures. Lots of engineers are currently willing to relocate and the current market is still incredibly competitive. Good talent is hard to find and easy to lose. That will not change.

jjtheblunt 6y ago

Maybe presence in the office, to teach others in the office, is (supposedly) work $60k in the example above? (Seems silly to me, but that's what the management could claim.)

kd5bjo 6y ago

Employment is a market, similar to many others. As long as there are a significant number of companies that want you to show up in an office, choosing to live in an area with fewer employers puts you in a different cohort with a lower market-clearing price. Also, the value you deliver to your employer will change whenever there’s a substantial shift in your working relationship. To the extent that your job requires collaboration, working in the same timezone as your peers has obvious benefits, for example.

coliveira 6y ago

This just shows that companies are on the look to exploit their workers as much as possible, i.e., to make them work for the lowest salary possible for that particular job. It really bothers them that you may take home more money than they can possibly get away with paying you.

Hamuko 6y ago

The $150k is not what your work is directly valued at, but rather an agreement of what it'll take for you to drag your ass to San Francisco, which is objectively a bad place to live if you're a human that has to make budgets, and come to work at Facebook. Also yes, if Facebook starts to hire remote workers, then your value will drop because they now have the access to a pool of workers who don't want to drag their asses to San Francisco and can pretty easily settle for less since their rent doesn't require them to bleed money.

volkk 6y ago
i'm kind of super interested (also scared) in the effects FAANG companies allowing remote workers will have. sure, maybe salaries at FAANG might decrease as supply/competition rises, but then all of the other companies that arent FAANG now have to sort of raise the lower boundaries of their pay since they cant just say "well you can go ahead to move to SF if you dont like it". Are we looking at lower high end of the spectrum but a higher median?
- ip26 6y ago
  It seems like the top end would drop a lot more than the median would rise. Given the poaching it seems clear SF has a scarcity of developers that satisfy FAANG, and scarcity drives price up radically. If remote work becomes more widespread, the scarcity condition would presumably evaporate. Socially speaking it could be a very good thing. Many of the big challenges we are facing (wealth disparity, political polarization, housing crunch) can be tied to the gross disparity in economic opportunity between places like SF, Austin, NYC, vs everywhere else.
  - mrkurt 6y ago
    Those companies already hire all over the world for the scarce, high dollar engineers. I don't think top end compensation will drop while those companies are monopolies. Most of those salaries balloon because they poach people from each other.
    - 6y ago

dqpb 6y ago

> one-sided in favor of the businesses Remember how Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and eBay colluded to suppress wages of Software Engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

renewiltord 6y ago
Remember how Facebook (the subject of this thread) chose not to?
- taude 6y ago
  FB was at least a few years away from growing into a Public company when all this went down.

polote 6y ago

> Why? My value to the company hasn't changed! I am still worth the same amount as I was before! Do we have stats about he difference of hours between remote and non remote employers? I thought the main goal to have those big tech campus is to have dev stay longer at work. If you are remote you will work less and then your value decrease

rob_b 6y ago
Being remote means you always have access to work, thus often resulting in you working much more than you would in an onsite only role.

jedberg 6y ago

You're not being paid based on your value to the company. You're being paid based on the minimum they can pay you to get you to work there. If you move to Tulsa, you're minimum goes down because they know there are fewer opportunities for you to work in Tulsa. As remote work becomes more prominent, then your salary would probably go back up as there will be more jobs for you in Tulsa. But it probably won't go back up to SF levels because everyone else has that opportunity too.

maximente 6y ago

why does it bother you? you're thinking like some individual laborer in a weirdly abstract sense, not like the person paying them. hint: you aren't paid based on your worth, you're paid based on, in general, the lowest that your employer can afford to pay you to not leave for a competitor. capital on the aggregate always tries to get labor to work for the lowest possible price that they can. that's why negotiations go on between workers and employers. that's why if you don't negotiate, you get bowled over. software engineers seem to think that they are this ultra elite labor class whose "value" is somehow tied completely to their intrinsic skills. that all goes out the window when software engineers begrudgingly accept massive pay cuts to take their insanely comfortable salary and lifestyle to a low COL area. that ought to tell you everything you need to know about your intrinsic "value": you lose immense power when you don't live in a place where you can quickly and easily get a job with a competitor. if software engineers learn anything from this, it's that they are being paid a premium to essentially not change companies.

jpeg_hero 6y ago

I always see comments like this from individual contributors. I'll give you the managers perspective. You may be worth $150k, any one individual engineer could be worth multiples of that! Look at your entire engineering team, from best to worst. Is not there some inflation of salaries in the SF Bay area? The bootcamper that is making $110k out of bootcamp? Are they really 73% as effective as you? The marketing person down the hall? Do you contribute more then that person today? Yeah, probably. Without marketing to get the word out and sales to actually bring in the cash, how much would your contribution be worth? You have to look at the whole system as a manager. And yes we pay the bootcamper $110k because we hope they'll grow into be a great engineer like you.

brmgb 6y ago
That has absolutely nothing to do with what he said which is in no way linked to its status as an individual contributor. The real point is it's not about what you are "worth" but about your market value. If you are away from Silicone Valley where you could find a similarly paid job, your options are more limited. That's a loss of bargaining power and Facebook thinks they can get away with paying you less.
amscanne 6y ago
You’re acting like the company is assigning value to people and paying them accordingly. That’s not how it works. Pay is determined by the labor market. Substitute wizzle for “senior engineer”, and wozzle for “bootcampers” or “marketing”. Facebook pays $150k for wizzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones. It pays $110k for wozzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones. People (reasonably) want a specific combination of wizzles and wozzles, for growth, different roles, etc. At no point does Facebook assign a price for wizzles based on their expected individual contribution. Maybe there are some “market makers” in some industries, but I don’t think it applies in tech.
- jpeg_hero 6y ago
  Well said, totally agree with the way you phrased it.
6y ago

mc32 6y ago

I kind of understand where you’re coming from and as an employee I agree... but on the other hand when you relocate from TUL to SFO you expect a COLA, right? Why would COLA only apply one way?

kgin 6y ago
If the company honestly didn't care where you lived and you took it upon yourself to move to SF, you wouldn't get an adjustment. But if the company needs you in SF, then they'll need to pay what it takes to hire someone in SF, regardless of where you lived before. It's only a cost of living adjustment to you. To the company, it's what they have to pay to get an SF worker. It just happens to be higher than what you were making before.

kgin 6y ago

In the big picture, wages are set by how much it would cost to replace you with an equally-qualified worker. In a location-agnostic situation, this would mean "how much it would cost to replace you with an equally qualified worker anywhere in the United States?" (Or world, really, but let's stick to US for now) What Facebook is probably signaling with this location-based cut is that this is the direction they are headed. They can't afford to immediately cut their Bay Area workers' salaries to this US-average-number (because they would lose their current workers faster than they can replace them) but they are not going to give preference in the future to Bay Area workers and will not pay new Bay Area workers higher salaries unless their physical presence in the Bay Area is explicitly needed.

mech422 6y ago

Of course, programmers in Oklahoma are not idiots either.. They know that not only does the company have a wider choice of employees - the employee has a wider choice of employers. They also know SV companies pay more then $90K, and if they already have a decent gig they will not 'settle' for what they could get at a small company. They may not ask for the full $150K - but they are going to ask for say $120-125k. End result is salaries will start to homogenize around the country. P.S. We've seen this in AZ as more tech comes in, salaries have been getting closer and closer to SF.

brogrammernot 6y ago
AZ salaries, when factoring in COL, are more than most tech jobs in California. This is leaving the allure of non-valued startup options but on average the salaries I’ve seen (yes, n=1) are in the realm of the upper curve of Bay Area salaries .
- wikibob 6y ago
  Do you have some reliable data you can share on AZ salaries? Glassdoor is obviously not reliable.
  - mech422 6y ago
    I actually haven't looked for a job locally in 3-4 years. I'm currently working remotely for a SV company. I did do a few interviews with AWS for a TAM/Engineering type role earlier this year. They had no quibbles with $175K. I actually lost interest when I found out it was a 25% on-premise role at client facilities. If I had known everyone would be working remotely now, it might have been different.
    - wikibob 6y ago
      Based on Levels.fyi data for salary by level, how much would the level for that role have paid in the Bay Area?
- 6y ago

mrkurt 6y ago

I'm disappointed that all the replies to this sentiment are "lol, it's supply and demand". I mean, maybe that's it but it's not a very useful thing to think about. As someone who's run two remote companies now, I have struggled with this dilemma as an employer. Because I agree with you, if a person is worth $x to the company, their location doesn't change that. The flip side, though, is that I also want people to be on relatively equal footing. Not everyone can move to optimize their relative adjusted income, and the problem with a salary number is that it doesn't reflect status. An entry level SF salary will get you a house + a lake house in Oklahoma. A person who owns a vacation home is living an entirely different life than someone with a roommate in Oakland. If you _don't_ adjust salaries for cost of living it makes that even worse, because suddenly you're probably paying less than someone in SF or NYC needs, more than what most people need in other states, and paying a crazy high localized salary to someone in Vietnam. All that said, we're doing the same salaries regardless of location. And I'm still not sure that's the right choice.

Vysero 6y ago
"Not everyone can move to optimize their relative adjusted income"-- Yes and not everyone can get married, and have a partner to share the load with either. So does that mean a bachelor and a married man should be paid different salaries? Not everyone can find the time to run a side business. So should those who can be penalized? You pay your employees what they are worth to the company and forget entirely about what they are and are not capable of doing outside of the company because it's really none of your business. If that means you can't find employees because you aren't willing to value an employee correctly than your company will fail, end of story.
- mrkurt 6y ago
  Single and married folks with families get paid differently. We pay ~3-4x more for healthcare for people with families than individuals. You've sort of dismissed my point, though. The dilemma is that salary choices create friction within companies. It's not as simple as "pay what it takes to get someone" and "it's none of your business" because it does, in fact, have repercussions on how well a company works.

dudul 6y ago

Salaries are mostly driven by how hard it is to find an employee, not the value they produce. If the model is to hire someone to be in the office, you obviously need to pay based on your location and local cost of living to be attractive. Completely logical to pay $300k in SF and $90k in Tulsa. Now, if you really go all in with distributed workforce, the problem becomes "why pay $300k for the guy in SF while I can hire the 'same' guy in Tulsa for $90k?" Instead of the guy in Tulsa being upset that they're not being paid as much as their buddy in SF, it's the one in SF who should wonder if they'll be able to keep their salary at $300k for long.

causehealth101 6y ago

Let me preface by saying this policy is a serious threat to my compensation - so I hear you loud and clear! That said: this is the reality and, as unfair as it sounds from the employee's perspective, it makes perfect sense. Facebook does not pay Bay Area compensation to its employees in other parts of the world. It should be no different for those in different COL areas around the US. Not only does this suck for current employees, but new hiring will be a nasty wake-up call. If a candidate in a different city thinks they'll cross their arms and demand Bay Area pay, there will be multiple other qualified candidates in that city & around the country more than happy to accept a competitive offer tied to their COL. *Spelling

sh-run 6y ago
Exactly this. I work for a FAANG and live in Texas. If employees leaving the bay area could leave and maintain the same level of pay, I'd expect a bay area salary as well. With the lack of a state income tax and relatively low housing costs I'd be living like a king! According to NerdWallet's COL calculator I could pay off my house after a year with just my salary increase. Edit: And if I moved to the bay area I would absolutely expect a COL increase

bradhe 6y ago

> I am still worth the same amount as I was before! True, unless the company thinks you're more valuable by having you on-site.

kojeovo 6y ago

> "you get paid differently depending on where you live" If I'm relocating to SF from middle of nowhere where I got paid 80k, without a cost of adjustment increas I can't afford SF.

fma 6y ago

And the dev in Eastern Europe is wondering why is the dev in San Francisco getting 10x as them.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
The dev in Eastern Europe may do well to be reminded that the dev in SF is losing almost all of that on costs of living, and may actually be worse off in terms of disposable income (relative to its purchasing power in the area).
- pashamur 6y ago
  That might be true for someone that spends most of their income, but if you're attempting to save (to FIRE or something else), you'd be much better off in SF, since your post COL-adjusted take home is still significantly better. 10 years of working in SF and saving frugally, and you can go to the aforementioned places in Eastern Europe to retire for life. The engineer in Eastern Europe cannot do the same.

Jare 6y ago

> my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value Now change the second "is" in that sentence, to "was". Offer and demand are (largely) what determine your salary. The value you create is what sets a ceiling to that price. It's that simple. FB becomes willing to hire people who live anywhere, and stops believing that candidates in SF or other expensive locations provide more value. They will have a way larger pool of candidates, and they will likely find people who provide just as much value for FB (sorry to burst any bubbles here) but are willing to do so for less money than currently happens.

sudoaza 6y ago

The $150K is so you can have certain lifestyle there but not save enough to leave and become competition, it's the cost of labor reproduction. In Tulsa your cost of reproduction would be lower, paying you too much might allow you to leave the shackles of capitalism.

not2b 6y ago

You are appealing to a concept of justice. Zuckerberg sees it a different way: how little can he get away with paying? If he can make a profit paying you $150K, he can make even more paying you $90K. He'll take it if he can. Whether he can depends on whether you have competing offers. If the economy tanks, maybe you won't. If all their employees work from home, that's going to tend to equalize the salary levels across regions, and the number they settle to likely isn't going to be the SF Bay Area number.

milesskorpen 6y ago

Wages aren't set based on a calculation like "how much is this person worth?" — that just sets the max salary. Companies want to pay their workers as little as possible; they can just get away with lower salaries in other markets than they can in San Francisco.

RyanGoosling 6y ago

The rent you pay into the SF housing (renter) market is half your value. You pay the Administration that owns that real estate a large portion of your salary.

sirmoveon 6y ago

Your value to the company is relative to the job market you are competing in. You might be worth 90k in the SF market, but in a global market, competing against cheap labor and other regional bureaucratic regulations, your value will be less.

sys_64738 6y ago

These companies already have CoL adjustments based on whether you live in the Bay area, Boston or Austin.

kthxbye123 6y ago

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks..."

freetanga 6y ago

I think the 150k is “the value you bring to the company” adjusted to “the location the company forces you to be at”. If they demanded you to be in SF, one can guess a part of your comp was to adjust for crazy costs of living there. If you move away, that is adjusted. Having been an expat, there are purchasing parity tables that are used in these relocations. Imagine you were hired on Tulsa money and then forced to move to SF on the same amount...

valuearb 6y ago

They can’t pay you less than your worth as a remote engineer. I’ve contemplated moving back to the valley but keep getting offered nearly as much money to work remotely from Arizona. If Facebook wanted me to work for less the answer is .. no. On the other hand if I worked for Facebook I would strongly consider taking a payout if it meant I didn’t have to work in their open floor plan from hell environment.

mnm1 6y ago

That's one way to give the middle finger to your employees, lower morale, and have them underperform. Businesses do stupid things like this all the time, against their own interests just to save a little money. Another example is not giving even inflation adjustment raises. The employees will respond accordingly and lower performance, work less, try less. Not enough to get penalized, just enough to stay in the boundaries. Or they'll leave. It's especially stupid to do this to remote employees for obvious reasons.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Its also meaningless for stay-at-home employees. How exactly does the distance to your house, affect your pay? Why?

koheripbal 6y ago

This is a fundamental Microeconomics supply-demand pricing question: Do you sell an item based upon the cost to produce it, or the price customers are willing to pay for it? Employment is no different. There is a struggle between buyers of your employment, and you (the seller) of your time/expertise. If those prices overlap, then there is a spectrum of possible transaction prices that can occur. As you can imagine, if there are many buyers, and few sellers, then the price is driven to an auction level where buyers must compete with one another for the employee. If there are more sellers than buyers, then the price is driven down towards the cost of that employee (and associated education). Typically we exist in the middle where negotiation tactics dominate where within that range the price settles. That's why there are policies such as "don't share your salary" - to create information asymmetry favoring the employer. ...and why people with poor negotiating skills typically earn significantly less than those who demand more. Generally, when demand for employees is high, companies try to make the market less efficient by creating hurdles to employees leaving (like the agreements between tech companies not to "poach" employees from one another), and bonus programs that vest over multi-year periods. This is relevant today because allowing employees to work from home greatly increases the supply of potential employees (both domestically as well as internationally), thereby forcing employees to accept closer and closer to their cost-basis. By microeconomic principles alone, it would be surprising if this didn't significantly drive down tech wages.

nmfisher 6y ago
This is exactly right. I'm surprised that so many people, who are otherwise highly educated and intelligent, struggle with this concept. There's no universal rule of "fairness" saying how much a company should pay you. It's not dictated by COL calculations and logical questions of value. The company looks at you and your competitors (alternative candidates), and puts forward a number they think is high enough for you to accept, but not so high that they could snag an "equivalent" candidate for a lower price. You win that battle not by whinging about COL adjustments, but by eliminating your alternatives (metaphorically speaking, of course). If the company truly needs what you do, and you're the only one who can do it, then you set the terms.

hhujhyyy 6y ago

I think that some people in SF aren't probably worth SF salary. They are viable due to people used to working in co-located env and to having some superior peers. Also laws require equal pays for similar position in many countries. Opening remote might make market more competitive. Speaking for myself, living outside US: I am able only to command 1/3 of SF salary(top in my market) although I could easily replace many people working in FB, earning much more than I do. Only if they were hiring in my city. (Pretty sure as had offers from Amazon, Gooogle etc. but they would require moving or local projects weren't interesting).

jordhy 6y ago

Actually no one can precisely predict how much an employee is going to net for the company - companies lose a lot of money in bad hires. You are being payed according to a scale that works out to keeps costs down, as much as possible for a specific cost center.

ponker 6y ago

But that's not how prices are set. The company isn't looking to hire you (unless they are, in which case you are set regardless of what happens to the world)... they are looking to hire someone who can do the job. So they start at $1. Will anyone take the job for $1? Not in Menlo Park. So they go to $2. Still nobody. $150K is where they have to be right now to hire the quantity and quality of people they want to, given the conditions of employment (for Facebook, the two biggest ones are that you have to move to the Bay Area and that they fire people very eagerly). If you decide to move to Tulsa OK and you are a Jeff Dean sort, they'll just say "thank you for not quitting." If they reduce your pay to $90K... even if you hadn't moved, eventually they would have gotten around to firing you and replacing you with someone in Tulsa for $90K.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

> has always struck me as bizarre and one-sided in favor of the businesses Companies exist to extract the highest amount of profit from their employees.

dntbnmpls 6y ago

> But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of "cost of living". See if it makes more sense going the other direction. Imagine you started in Tulsa making $90K. After a few years facebook wants you to move to SF. Would you still be happy with $90K in SF since that's what your worth to facebook? Of course not, you'd want cost of living adjustments.

matchagaucho 6y ago

Compensation can be structured with both fixed and variable components. The fixed portion covers basic needs: Shelter, food, transportation, healthcare, etc... The variable portion is typically performance based. Usually RSUs or stock. Could also be a cash bonus. Moving to OK will reduce basic needs and fixed comp, but variable comp could remain unchanged. More employees living in OK could mean more profit, hence more cash bonus.

hartator 6y ago

> my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. It's more about competition than value you're providing. In SF, you'll find another 6 figures very easily not so much in the middle of nowhere.

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