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If you move from an SF office to an Austin office, do you think you deserve to be paid more than your Austin coworkers? Is your work somehow more valuable now t
by fzeroracer 6y ago
If you move from an SF office to an Austin office, do you think you deserve to be paid more than your Austin coworkers? Is your work somehow more valuable now that you've moved?
- mrfusion 6y agoGood question. I’d actually say everyone should be paid according to their value to the company. Why should the company get to save 100k just because the employee lives somewhere cheaper.
- fzeroracer 6y agoGreat, if you agree that everyone should be paid according to their value, then we can go ahead and drop salaries by a good what, 40-50%? Since Silicon Valley (and many other tech hubs) has resulted in massively inflated software engineer salaries due to the high COL rather than any actual demonstration of performance. Why should people in SV earn 120k+ per year over someone out in the rust belt doing the same work at 50-60k a year?
- klipt 6y agoYou're welcome to start a SV company offering rust belt salaries, but you probably won't hire anyone good :-D
- mrfusion 6y agoI don’t follow. Companies wouldn’t pay the high salaries if it didn’t provide greater value to the company. They’re not charities.
- neonate 6y agoThe counterargument is that it's not the same work because you can't abstract the work away from where it's happening and who it's happening in proximity with. Now if it turns out that location and colocation don't matter like people thought they did, then we're about to see a major shift in this disequilibrium, of the sort you describe. It's not as if companies want to be paying that extra 50%.