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> The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people Or just maybe you are mischaracterizing an argument from peop

> The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people Or just maybe you are mischaracterizing an argument from people that take the notion of "equal pay for equal work" to heart and protested even against offshoring for similar reasons and against tax related shananigans that just transfer the social burdens of infrastructure onto income tax paying citizens. The non-strawman argument is "equal pay for equal work", not "SV pay for everyone". With pay from different locations, there is an argument to be made for varying salaries when the working conditions related to the office presence and the corresponding project involvements differ and one can argue it isn't equal work. With working from home, there can be variation in project involvement due to scheduling which again might be unequal work, but that would be more tied to which hours of the day are on the clock, if the hours worked are the same then an employer paying an employee less for living in a different city when all other working conditions are the same is merely the employer unfairly (ab)using their more powerful bargaining position to capture economic gains that should belong to the employee for making the choice to live in a cheaper area. So when you talk about fairness one can talk about two classes of employees (in office vs working from home) and then salaries tied to hours worked and the rest is discrimination. There are arguments to be made for allowing employers to do this, since perhaps as a matter of public policy it is better for people to concentrate in cities or for forbidding it for alternate reasons. But the public policy question wouldn't change the fact that employers are choosing to pay people based on criteria not at all related to work they do. There is still room in "equal pay for equal work" to tie office presence to a higher salary, if it is genuinely more valuable, just put the dollar value on that.

lhorie 5y ago
> The non-strawman argument is "equal pay for equal work" But that's also a logically problematic notion in the sense that it's a complete utopia given how our world currently operates (i.e. there's a reason why most of your clothes are made in China or thereabouts) and, on top of that, it's a self-defeating idea. The logical conclusion of that line of thinking - an ad absurdum, if you ask me - is that everyone gets paid the same for similar work, and therefore also have to accept 2M house prices, including the folks making your socks in Malaysia. In reality, though, you don't get to have a cake and eat it too, that's literally the basis of how inflation works (and why Austin folks resent Californians for example). You do raise a good point about strictly WFH jobs vs locality-dependent jobs (e.g. a McDonalds worker has to be physically present at a location) and I think it ties a bit into why management is often reluctant to go forward w/ WFH policies: management is largely about multiplicative effects, and there can be very tangible differences in in-office vs WFH depending on timezones (in fact, I know a consulting company that very successfully convinced their clients that offshoring is more expensive than a north american workforce due to time lost on back and forth communication with India timezones)

lhorie 5y ago

> The non-strawman argument is "equal pay for equal work" But that's also a logically problematic notion in the sense that it's a complete utopia given how our world currently operates (i.e. there's a reason why most of your clothes are made in China or thereabouts) and, on top of that, it's a self-defeating idea. The logical conclusion of that line of thinking - an ad absurdum, if you ask me - is that everyone gets paid the same for similar work, and therefore also have to accept 2M house prices, including the folks making your socks in Malaysia. In reality, though, you don't get to have a cake and eat it too, that's literally the basis of how inflation works (and why Austin folks resent Californians for example). You do raise a good point about strictly WFH jobs vs locality-dependent jobs (e.g. a McDonalds worker has to be physically present at a location) and I think it ties a bit into why management is often reluctant to go forward w/ WFH policies: management is largely about multiplicative effects, and there can be very tangible differences in in-office vs WFH depending on timezones (in fact, I know a consulting company that very successfully convinced their clients that offshoring is more expensive than a north american workforce due to time lost on back and forth communication with India timezones)