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All of your examples are geography dependent and is not actually equal work - the Oklahoma barista can't do the same job as the SF barista, because telecommutin

All of your examples are geography dependent and is not actually equal work - the Oklahoma barista can't do the same job as the SF barista, because telecommuting baristas is not a thing. But if the job role is to maintain a server fleet, and you can realistically do the job from anywhere, then you should get paid the same amount whether you happen to be in SF or Oklahoma, since you can complete the job in the same manner. Equal pay for equal work makes sense - what doesn't make sense is to assume that the pay will normalize into bay-area level pay, versus bay-area level pay being lowered because companies realize they can pay everyone 70% as much and have the employees live in lower cost of living areas.

darth_avocado 6y ago
How is a Barista's work different in SF vs Oklahoma? Making coffee is the same process (and I'm talking about regular baristas). It is unequal pay for the same work, in different locations.
rapht 6y ago
^ This exactly. The market will actually tend to equal pay for equal work: this has already happened in numerous industries in the form of layoffs of people in one expensive location to be replaced by people doing the same work in less expensive locations, until people doing the actual same work, including notably dealing with the same kind of constraints, roughly have the same pay whenever/wherever possible. There are of course a lot of variables in what makes company consider that 2 people do "the same job": sometimes, a company will value a certain proximity of a team, which you could interpret as considering someone further away from where the team is based cannot actually do "the same job". Either way, there is no reason why geographically-independent jobs should not end up aligning to some global, geographically-independent wage... and as always, this will not benefit those who are highest-paid doing said job...

darth_avocado 6y ago

How is a Barista's work different in SF vs Oklahoma? Making coffee is the same process (and I'm talking about regular baristas). It is unequal pay for the same work, in different locations.

rapht 6y ago

^ This exactly. The market will actually tend to equal pay for equal work: this has already happened in numerous industries in the form of layoffs of people in one expensive location to be replaced by people doing the same work in less expensive locations, until people doing the actual same work, including notably dealing with the same kind of constraints, roughly have the same pay whenever/wherever possible. There are of course a lot of variables in what makes company consider that 2 people do "the same job": sometimes, a company will value a certain proximity of a team, which you could interpret as considering someone further away from where the team is based cannot actually do "the same job". Either way, there is no reason why geographically-independent jobs should not end up aligning to some global, geographically-independent wage... and as always, this will not benefit those who are highest-paid doing said job...