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> Hence the company should have one uniform rate for full time work at home employees, high enough so that they can get fill all their openings. There’s a comm

> Hence the company should have one uniform rate for full time work at home employees, high enough so that they can get fill all their openings. There’s a common misconception that engineers are paid for the value they provide or according to how expensive their cost of living is. It’s not true, though. We’re paid market rate, which is a balance of supply and demand that determines whether or not someone is incentivized to take and keep a job relative to their other options. If someone lives somewhere where they have more local options, it makes sense to pay them more even if they’re working remotely. If you try to push companies to having one WFH rate for everyone, the end result isn’t high salaries for all. The end result is a median salary for everyone that eliminates anyone living in a high cost of living area. The company starts scouring the country and eventually the world for bargain employees who will accept lower and lower salaries. The end result is a much lower fixed salary for everyone. So no, you do not actually want a one-size-fits-all WFH compensation if you live basically anywhere in the US, unless you’re cool with salaries going down to match the much lower global median wages for developers.

lamontcg 5y ago
Wages are sticky and employers have gotten used to paying a certain rate for employees and employees have gotten used to be paid that rate. If Google wants to try to cut that rate, its likely that someone else who is hungry for Google engineers (like Facebook which is going full-time WFH) will be willing to pay that rate (also understanding that they have some terrible PR issues and will need to pay a bit higher due to that). That is likely to cap how much Google is actually able to do this if someone can phone up Facebook and get an immediate >20% raise over what Google will "calculate" their pay should be.
- usaar333 5y ago
  Right, this makes little sense unless there is little market competition. Alternatively, this might just be a morale thing and remote workers in the Bay Area don't actually make financial sense due to productivity losses. Google will placate existing employees, but they won't hire new remote workers at Bay Area rates.
ghaff 5y ago
Even within the US, if a large company were to have uniform pay scales everywhere, they'd probably be pegged to somewhere like Chicago rather than SF. Effectively, that already happens to some degree today. If you want to work at Google or Facebook and land a job in the Bay Area, there are a lot of tech employers who probably won't salary match.

lamontcg 5y ago

Wages are sticky and employers have gotten used to paying a certain rate for employees and employees have gotten used to be paid that rate. If Google wants to try to cut that rate, its likely that someone else who is hungry for Google engineers (like Facebook which is going full-time WFH) will be willing to pay that rate (also understanding that they have some terrible PR issues and will need to pay a bit higher due to that). That is likely to cap how much Google is actually able to do this if someone can phone up Facebook and get an immediate >20% raise over what Google will "calculate" their pay should be.

usaar333 5y ago
Right, this makes little sense unless there is little market competition. Alternatively, this might just be a morale thing and remote workers in the Bay Area don't actually make financial sense due to productivity losses. Google will placate existing employees, but they won't hire new remote workers at Bay Area rates.

ghaff 5y ago

Even within the US, if a large company were to have uniform pay scales everywhere, they'd probably be pegged to somewhere like Chicago rather than SF. Effectively, that already happens to some degree today. If you want to work at Google or Facebook and land a job in the Bay Area, there are a lot of tech employers who probably won't salary match.