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If anyone's curious about the underlying details: Each state has an associated salary band. For certain metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to e
by vitus 5y ago
If anyone's curious about the underlying details:
Each state has an associated salary band. For certain metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to encompass certain counties), as noted in the article, there is an overriding (typically higher) salary band.
This leads to quirks like someone in Milford, PA (~70 miles northwest of NYC) being paid top dollar, as part of the NYC metro area, but someone in Bethlehem (80 miles west of NYC) being paid 15% less. Or, if you live in Santa Cruz, you'd be paid about 10% less than if you continued working out of the Mountain View office (just 30-40 miles to the north).
(The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower band than California.)
- jsjohnst 5y ago> The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower band than California The majority of Tahoe is in California.
- vitus 5y agoYes, and California outside of the Bay Area is all the same salary band, whereas if you move across the border to NV, you get bumped down a band.
- rowland66 5y agoIf Google is going to allow US employees to work from anywhere in the US, they should not be adjusting wages based on an employee's residence. Where an employee chooses to live becomes no different from what car they choose to buy. Google should pay a consistent wage scale based on a median cost of living across the US. This would probably be an unpleasant adjustment for many Googlers in high cost locales.
- agnosticmantis 5y agoIs there a public data set of these salary bands? Combining that with housing data would allow one to optimize the salary-to-expense ratio. I think that’d be a valuable service.
- vitus 5y agoI'm not aware of any public datasets, unfortunately. There are many internal maps; in short the winner was "cheap housing in the Atlanta metro area". (I'm glad that Atlanta's finally seeing increased engineering investment! It always felt like a shame that our only tech presence in the area was for datacenter work, given the proximity to Georgia Tech. I guess Google Fiber too...)
- agnosticmantis 5y agoThat’s interesting, thanks for sharing.
- CydeWeys 5y ago> (The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower band than California.) Nevada doesn't have a state income tax though, so most people making that move will barely see a change in net pay. Washington is 10% off Bay Area/NYC peak salary for similar reasons.