Despite the headlines, this has little to do with companies taking advantage of remote workers to safe cost and more with companies using pre-pandemic comp mech

Despite the headlines, this has little to do with companies taking advantage of remote workers to safe cost and more with companies using pre-pandemic comp mechanisms in a post-pandemic. Comp in the vast majority of companies is based on cost of labor in the market the employee is located at. Software developers are cheaper in Alaska than in SF and even cheaper in Costa Rica, Ukraine or India. And yes, also cheaper in Sacramento than in Palo Alto, even though the difference is much much smaller. Companies are just sticking to that model because it requires little changes on their part and there are so many unknowns about how work will look in a few years. I'd argue that a reasonable model divides roles into ones that benefit from being local and ones that don't. Only ones that need to be local and in person should be subject to local labor costs. Unfortunately, this also might mean that salaries for remote folks will adjust across geographies and could probably roughly align by something like time zones, resulting in lower pay for your average Bay Area developer who's salary is high because they are in the Bay Area and not because they are world class (I expect comp for world class developers to go up regardless of location)