6 ms·

A few months back I was talking to a manager at [huge established software company]. He was making the case that obviously anyone who has moved away from the Ba

by floren 5y ago

A few months back I was talking to a manager at [huge established software company]. He was making the case that obviously anyone who has moved away from the Bay Area should have their pay cut. He personally has not been in the office for a single day since spring 2020, but since he telecommutes from Berkeley rather than Omaha, he sees no reason to cut his own pay. Later that same day I spoke to someone who's managing at [online payment processing company]. Shortly after bragging that he frequently spends only 2 hours a day actually working, he expressed that full-time remote work will never work out because you can't tell if someone is actually contributing. I refrained from pointing out that ICs actually have targets to meet and code to produce, and that you can put them on a PIP if they fail to meet expectations, while he's busy proving that management can apparently get by just phoning in to the occasional meeting. edit: company names changed because it feels a little weird to call them out like that, I dunno

colordrops 5y ago
Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. If you contribute the same work, it seems that it shouldn't matter where you are located, but companies are sociopathic by nature and will reduce costs anywhere they can get away with it. This opens the door to the next step of having salaries match the lowest common denominator - if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live. Regarding not being able to tell whether someone is contributing if they aren't in person - this manager is just plain dumb, as they aren't measuring the right criteria.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I find it interesting how well this tracks: From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs.
- eloff 5y ago
  I don't think that's guaranteed. I work remotely and I just exclude companies that do cost-of-living adjustments. Those companies might end up paying less, but they also have fewer applicants to choose from. You tend to get what you pay for in life. Hiring is really difficult right now, it's not wise to make it more difficult by driving away applicants.
- cottager2 5y ago
  Have you heard of supply and demand? Suppliers have a price point at which their willing to supply a good. That price point is dependent on the input costs of producing the good. For knowledge workers, the input cost is your cost of living. It’s not so much that it “makes sense” to lower the salary of people in low cost of living areas, but it’s very likely the supply curve has shifted.
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    Paying employees more or less depending on where they live is an instance of price discrimination, in a sense. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it does mean that it’s not inevitable. Laws against certain forms of price discrimination already exist.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The typical use of price discrimination (or price segmentation) is when a seller of goods or services sells the same goods/services to entities that can afford to pay more at a higher price than to entities that can only afford to pay a lower price. The objective is to maximize sales by getting more money from people who want to spend more money, while also getting some money from people who want to spend less money. Offering people less money because you think they will accept less money because they are not likely to get a higher offer due to where they live is more accurately described as arbitrage.
      - thewakalix 5y ago
        No, it’s not more accurately described as arbitrage. Arbitrage involves buying something and then selling it for a higher price in a different market. That might describe something like a temp agency, which buys labor from employees and then essentially sells it to other companies. It does not describe most businesses, which directly use the labor provided by their employees rather than reselling it. I agree that “price discrimination” isn’t quite right; it’s more of a metaphor. It works if you imagine that companies are selling money that is bought for the price of labor. In different markets, people will accept more or less money for the same labor, or equivalently spend less or more labor for the same money, which allows for price discrimination.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  > Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward It's not a trend we're heading toward, but it's well established practice in the economy. People working in Asia or Eastern Europe, for USA companies, make less, and they do the same job. Fact that it's going to be applied to people working remotely, not at the office, is just an implementation detail.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  In my experience, it's very easy to see how a software engineer works. Just look at the commit logs. Sheesh. I managed an SWE group for years. It was easy-peasy to unobtrusively keep an eye on things.
  - Arcuru 5y ago
    That is an extremely poor way to view the work output of a SWE. I sincerely hope that is not how you actually determined productivity for your team.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    As I grew more experienced at my job, I submitted fewer and fewer CLs, with fewer lines. Eventually, I was just making config changes. You probably would have thought I wasn't very effective but the reality is the small number of changes I made were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I've seen other folks who are commit fiends and a lot of their code just didn't stand the test of time, or lacked good tests, or failed at scale, or were just copies of something elsewhere with the class names changed. I reserve my greatest praise for those who delete code without visible regressions or increased complexity.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I really enjoyed the read. Thanks! Personally, I agree with you. I work somewhat differently, but am highly effective. I managed a team of very high-functioning C++ programmers, for one of the top imaging companies in the world, for 25 years. I kept employees for decades, and that’s no secret. I mention it frequently, here, and my entire career is an open book. I've been an active software engineer for over 35 years, and shipping software, that entire time. There's a [vanishingly small, I know] chance that I used a couple more techniques than simply counting CIs.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      The dao of programming right here
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. I disagree. Buyers of labor (or buyers of anything) will continue doing what they always have, offer the least amount of money that they think sellers of labor will accept. “Cost of living adjustment” is just fluffy language to hide the underlying bet by the buyer of labor that the seller of labor residing in a particular area will not be able to find a buyer offering a higher price.
- tzs 5y ago
  I think the eventual outcome will be that each company will have N+1 salary scales where N is the number of locations in which they have offices. Each office location will have a pay scale for jobs that the company requires be done in that location, and there will be one pay scale for all remote workers.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  If you're a consultant that makes sense, for comapnies it's just what you need to pay to fill cost of living is one of the main factors in that need
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Why should companies subsidize landlords in Bay Area? The Bay Area has manipulated zoning and land use for a century for profiteering as well as race exclusion.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  > if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live. If full remote stays around or gets bigger then this is the end state. Everyone arguing against COL based pay seems to think they'd get to keep there high salary rather then everyone getting payed less.
  - astura 5y ago
    Yeah, and in the long term it has the potential to depress wages really, really low, because someone in, say, Costa Rica is willing to do the job for $30,000/year without benefits. At the start of my career, 16 years ago, I spent some time abroad in a small country with some very distant family. When the topic of my career came up in conversation I remember multiple people saying that software engineer simply didn't exist as a profession in that country because there were no software jobs available there.
- refurb 5y ago
  If you are shopping for a used car do you expect the price to be the same across the entire country? No. Each region will have its own supply and demand that affect prices. Employees are no different. If Google can find enough qualified people in Ohio for 80% of the salary, that’s the cost of an employee in Ohio. Just because it’s more in CA doesn’t change that.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    The reason car prices differ based on location is because it's resource intensive to buy a cheaper car from a distant location, so you only compete with locals on price. This is not the case with developers. Once a worker is remote, there is not much difference if they are 80 miles away or 3000 miles away. The reason for the salary difference is because the company can get away with it, rather than a factor of the local market.
    - refurb 5y ago
      There can certainly be frictions with hiring in different locales. 3,000 miles away can mean a 3-4 hr time difference. But regardless, there are plenty of engineers in the mid-west willing (and happy!) to work for 50% of what a FAANG is paid in the Bay Area. So it's win-win, the employer gets a cheaper employee and the employee gets a better salary than before.
- shagie 5y ago
  You remember complaints about the busses in San Francisco? There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas. A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Sounds reasonable but I highly doubt that this is the reason for lower pay in low cost of living locations.
cottager2 5y ago
Engineers have targets to meet, but management still has to trust estimates and scopes provided by engineers.
paxys 5y ago
Both engineers and managers at big tech companies can get by working 2 hours a day. And remote vs on-site doesn't affect that. This has been true since well before WFH. As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.
- vgel 5y ago
  > As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much. That's not just either, even if people didn't complain about it. Sometimes it takes a bad thing happening to someone for them to realize injustice that existed before. I would hope anyone against location-based paycuts within the US is also now against international location-based paycuts.
  - paxys 5y ago
    If someone is truly in favor of comp reform and thinks that everyone at the company should get paid based on their value rather than where they are located, are they going to be okay with accepting a salary adjustment that is ~50% of the way between Silicon Valley and India wages?
    - vgel 5y ago
      I don't believe this scenario (a reduction in wages) is likely. Here's my reasoning. If a company was paying SV wages to someone, that must be because their labor is worth > that amount to the company. Salaries within SV, not hitting a profitability cap, exist on a supply / demand curve. Companies are rational actors, so they have no reason to be paying their SV employees any more than is necessary. The current pay dynamic for all companies (that I know of) is location-based pay. Either they only hire in one location (so are trivially location-based), or they pay US employees more than overseas employees. Maybe they, like Google, are moving to a more granular within-US system. Now, for the leveling. What mechanism would force a company to pay non-SV / non-US employees the same as SV employees? Possibly a law, maybe a union at a specific company, or simply social pressure from employees of the company. So the facts are: 1) the company can afford SV salaries, 2) that company pays less than SV salaries for workers outside SV, and 3) we assume a leveling event that changes that. Now a company has (roughly) two actions when this happens: bring SV employees down, or everyone else up. In the first scenario: you're an SV employee. You're being paid market rate for SV, and the company announces they're bringing your salary down. You'd quit, right? Other companies aren't doing this, and since your salary was market rate, you can simply hop over to another company in SV that's paying your old, higher salary. There's a coordination problem for the companies here: if they all made this change at once, nobody would move and the SV salary would reduce (at least in the short term). But that would be illegal (see the Apple/Google recruiter ban lawsuits). So instead, they would quickly attrite all their programmer talent to companies who haven't made this move, until they are solely employing non-SV programmers who are happy with whatever the below-SV-market-rate salary is. Which may be fine! Many companies locate outside SV and pay less in comp as a result. But the most successful American tech companies locate in SV (or similar CoL areas, like Seattle), so they must see something to hiring those programmers, even if they're more expensive. In the second scenario: the company brings up the salaries of non-SV employees. This has no effect on you as an SV employee, except perhaps making it easier to get a job in the area, since companies have less incentive to outsource. Now here's a major caveat: companies often outsource easier work to lower-CoL areas, but I think this is a broken / honestly somewhat offensive practice. I think it's OK to pay, say, someone who's main skillset is banging out internal apps using low-code tools less than a senior full-stack engineer with deep performance / kernel tuning experience. People able to do the former are more common than the latter! But companies, falsely and offensively, assume the former = non-US, the latter = SV, and then assign their pay in that way. But why shouldn't someone in SV trying to break into programming be able to earn $40k doing the internal apps? And, conversely, why should a high-skilled engineer in, say, India be forced to move to the US to earn wages at American companies that are equal to their skill? (sans timezone issues, etc., if that's important for the role, which is a separate discussion). If Google can pay an L4 280k in SV, they can afford to pay an L4 in Minnesota, or India, or anywhere the same amount. They wouldn't pay an L4 that much in SV if they weren't worth that much (and, realistically, they're worth much more). Conversely, if Google wants to hire a contractor for cheap, that's fine! That job just shouldn't be tied to location either. Why shouldn't someone in the US be able to take that job, if they want it?
RandallBrown 5y ago
If anything people that work from home should get a raise since the company doesn't need to pay for their space in an office.
- brutus1213 5y ago
  When my team when remote, it was clear people worked extra hours. I actually was concerned about burn-out.
jbay808 5y ago
Location is one factor in cost of living, but there are a lot of others too: the type of car you drive (if you drive a car), the quality of food you buy/coffee you drink/restaurants you frequent, the number of kids you have, the schools they go to, etc. Should companies adjust compensation according to these variables too, or just city?
- sigzero 5y ago
  No because everything you listed is a personal choice.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - samstave 5y ago
    I have gone through a fair bit of your comment history and I find that you are much like me. I disagree with your comments on this though... I'd appreciate it if you would expand on what you feel is actual 'choice'
  - tauntz 5y ago
    ... but so is location.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      To an extent. But this is a terrific reminder to me that the life I’ve been able to live would have been impossible if I didn’t have the right combination of timely luck and dangerously stubborn determination to escape my home town when I did.
  - jbay808 5y ago
    Location is only not a personal choice because of the location-based pay! It's funny, because that logic means that location-based-pay becomes its own justification. The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city. But the moment that my company discriminates pay based on anything that has an associated cost, it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies that pay differential. If part of my pay was tied to wearing an expensive suit, then my clothes would no longer be a personal choice, thus justifying the extra pay for the suit. If part of my pay was tied to me driving a fancy car, then my car would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for the fancy car. If part of my pay was tied to enrolling my kids in a particular school, then enrolling in that school would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for that, and so on...
yibg 5y ago
Prices for a lot of things are regional dependent though, not just salaries. Produce and dinners out costs more in the bay area than Omaha too. Same for salaries in Vietnam vs Omaha. I get that in a sense it doesn't seem fair for the same work and person to get paid differently solely based on where they live, but the market and costs are different too so if you pay everyone the same that also has issues. Besides, if everyone is paid the same why would it be valley salaries not Omaha salaries for everyone?
rfreiberger 5y ago
Just speculating but I would guess that's a reason for asking people back in the office. If you're getting paid the same amount as an engineer in the Bay Area but living South Dakota, I'm sure this causes some alarm for the company. We can't force a pay cut but what if we require physical presence a few times a week. I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.

by floren 5y ago

colordrops 5y ago

Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. If you contribute the same work, it seems that it shouldn't matter where you are located, but companies are sociopathic by nature and will reduce costs anywhere they can get away with it. This opens the door to the next step of having salaries match the lowest common denominator - if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live. Regarding not being able to tell whether someone is contributing if they aren't in person - this manager is just plain dumb, as they aren't measuring the right criteria.

birdyrooster 5y ago
I find it interesting how well this tracks: From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs.
eloff 5y ago
I don't think that's guaranteed. I work remotely and I just exclude companies that do cost-of-living adjustments. Those companies might end up paying less, but they also have fewer applicants to choose from. You tend to get what you pay for in life. Hiring is really difficult right now, it's not wise to make it more difficult by driving away applicants.
cottager2 5y ago
Have you heard of supply and demand? Suppliers have a price point at which their willing to supply a good. That price point is dependent on the input costs of producing the good. For knowledge workers, the input cost is your cost of living. It’s not so much that it “makes sense” to lower the salary of people in low cost of living areas, but it’s very likely the supply curve has shifted.
- thewakalix 5y ago
  Paying employees more or less depending on where they live is an instance of price discrimination, in a sense. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it does mean that it’s not inevitable. Laws against certain forms of price discrimination already exist.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The typical use of price discrimination (or price segmentation) is when a seller of goods or services sells the same goods/services to entities that can afford to pay more at a higher price than to entities that can only afford to pay a lower price. The objective is to maximize sales by getting more money from people who want to spend more money, while also getting some money from people who want to spend less money. Offering people less money because you think they will accept less money because they are not likely to get a higher offer due to where they live is more accurately described as arbitrage.
    - thewakalix 5y ago
      No, it’s not more accurately described as arbitrage. Arbitrage involves buying something and then selling it for a higher price in a different market. That might describe something like a temp agency, which buys labor from employees and then essentially sells it to other companies. It does not describe most businesses, which directly use the labor provided by their employees rather than reselling it. I agree that “price discrimination” isn’t quite right; it’s more of a metaphor. It works if you imagine that companies are selling money that is bought for the price of labor. In different markets, people will accept more or less money for the same labor, or equivalently spend less or more labor for the same money, which allows for price discrimination.
justapassenger 5y ago
> Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward It's not a trend we're heading toward, but it's well established practice in the economy. People working in Asia or Eastern Europe, for USA companies, make less, and they do the same job. Fact that it's going to be applied to people working remotely, not at the office, is just an implementation detail.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
In my experience, it's very easy to see how a software engineer works. Just look at the commit logs. Sheesh. I managed an SWE group for years. It was easy-peasy to unobtrusively keep an eye on things.
- Arcuru 5y ago
  That is an extremely poor way to view the work output of a SWE. I sincerely hope that is not how you actually determined productivity for your team.
- dekhn 5y ago
  As I grew more experienced at my job, I submitted fewer and fewer CLs, with fewer lines. Eventually, I was just making config changes. You probably would have thought I wasn't very effective but the reality is the small number of changes I made were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. I've seen other folks who are commit fiends and a lot of their code just didn't stand the test of time, or lacked good tests, or failed at scale, or were just copies of something elsewhere with the class names changed. I reserve my greatest praise for those who delete code without visible regressions or increased complexity.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I really enjoyed the read. Thanks! Personally, I agree with you. I work somewhat differently, but am highly effective. I managed a team of very high-functioning C++ programmers, for one of the top imaging companies in the world, for 25 years. I kept employees for decades, and that’s no secret. I mention it frequently, here, and my entire career is an open book. I've been an active software engineer for over 35 years, and shipping software, that entire time. There's a [vanishingly small, I know] chance that I used a couple more techniques than simply counting CIs.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    The dao of programming right here
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. I disagree. Buyers of labor (or buyers of anything) will continue doing what they always have, offer the least amount of money that they think sellers of labor will accept. “Cost of living adjustment” is just fluffy language to hide the underlying bet by the buyer of labor that the seller of labor residing in a particular area will not be able to find a buyer offering a higher price.
tzs 5y ago
I think the eventual outcome will be that each company will have N+1 salary scales where N is the number of locations in which they have offices. Each office location will have a pay scale for jobs that the company requires be done in that location, and there will be one pay scale for all remote workers.
sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
If you're a consultant that makes sense, for comapnies it's just what you need to pay to fill cost of living is one of the main factors in that need
erosenbe0 5y ago
Why should companies subsidize landlords in Bay Area? The Bay Area has manipulated zoning and land use for a century for profiteering as well as race exclusion.
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
> if you can get good enough devs at a quarter of the cost, the salary will be that rate no matter where you live. If full remote stays around or gets bigger then this is the end state. Everyone arguing against COL based pay seems to think they'd get to keep there high salary rather then everyone getting payed less.
- astura 5y ago
  Yeah, and in the long term it has the potential to depress wages really, really low, because someone in, say, Costa Rica is willing to do the job for $30,000/year without benefits. At the start of my career, 16 years ago, I spent some time abroad in a small country with some very distant family. When the topic of my career came up in conversation I remember multiple people saying that software engineer simply didn't exist as a profession in that country because there were no software jobs available there.
refurb 5y ago
If you are shopping for a used car do you expect the price to be the same across the entire country? No. Each region will have its own supply and demand that affect prices. Employees are no different. If Google can find enough qualified people in Ohio for 80% of the salary, that’s the cost of an employee in Ohio. Just because it’s more in CA doesn’t change that.
- colordrops 5y ago
  The reason car prices differ based on location is because it's resource intensive to buy a cheaper car from a distant location, so you only compete with locals on price. This is not the case with developers. Once a worker is remote, there is not much difference if they are 80 miles away or 3000 miles away. The reason for the salary difference is because the company can get away with it, rather than a factor of the local market.
  - refurb 5y ago
    There can certainly be frictions with hiring in different locales. 3,000 miles away can mean a 3-4 hr time difference. But regardless, there are plenty of engineers in the mid-west willing (and happy!) to work for 50% of what a FAANG is paid in the Bay Area. So it's win-win, the employer gets a cheaper employee and the employee gets a better salary than before.
shagie 5y ago
You remember complaints about the busses in San Francisco? There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas. A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Sounds reasonable but I highly doubt that this is the reason for lower pay in low cost of living locations.

cottager2 5y ago

Engineers have targets to meet, but management still has to trust estimates and scopes provided by engineers.

paxys 5y ago

Both engineers and managers at big tech companies can get by working 2 hours a day. And remote vs on-site doesn't affect that. This has been true since well before WFH. As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.

vgel 5y ago
> As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much. That's not just either, even if people didn't complain about it. Sometimes it takes a bad thing happening to someone for them to realize injustice that existed before. I would hope anyone against location-based paycuts within the US is also now against international location-based paycuts.
- paxys 5y ago
  If someone is truly in favor of comp reform and thinks that everyone at the company should get paid based on their value rather than where they are located, are they going to be okay with accepting a salary adjustment that is ~50% of the way between Silicon Valley and India wages?
  - vgel 5y ago
    I don't believe this scenario (a reduction in wages) is likely. Here's my reasoning. If a company was paying SV wages to someone, that must be because their labor is worth > that amount to the company. Salaries within SV, not hitting a profitability cap, exist on a supply / demand curve. Companies are rational actors, so they have no reason to be paying their SV employees any more than is necessary. The current pay dynamic for all companies (that I know of) is location-based pay. Either they only hire in one location (so are trivially location-based), or they pay US employees more than overseas employees. Maybe they, like Google, are moving to a more granular within-US system. Now, for the leveling. What mechanism would force a company to pay non-SV / non-US employees the same as SV employees? Possibly a law, maybe a union at a specific company, or simply social pressure from employees of the company. So the facts are: 1) the company can afford SV salaries, 2) that company pays less than SV salaries for workers outside SV, and 3) we assume a leveling event that changes that. Now a company has (roughly) two actions when this happens: bring SV employees down, or everyone else up. In the first scenario: you're an SV employee. You're being paid market rate for SV, and the company announces they're bringing your salary down. You'd quit, right? Other companies aren't doing this, and since your salary was market rate, you can simply hop over to another company in SV that's paying your old, higher salary. There's a coordination problem for the companies here: if they all made this change at once, nobody would move and the SV salary would reduce (at least in the short term). But that would be illegal (see the Apple/Google recruiter ban lawsuits). So instead, they would quickly attrite all their programmer talent to companies who haven't made this move, until they are solely employing non-SV programmers who are happy with whatever the below-SV-market-rate salary is. Which may be fine! Many companies locate outside SV and pay less in comp as a result. But the most successful American tech companies locate in SV (or similar CoL areas, like Seattle), so they must see something to hiring those programmers, even if they're more expensive. In the second scenario: the company brings up the salaries of non-SV employees. This has no effect on you as an SV employee, except perhaps making it easier to get a job in the area, since companies have less incentive to outsource. Now here's a major caveat: companies often outsource easier work to lower-CoL areas, but I think this is a broken / honestly somewhat offensive practice. I think it's OK to pay, say, someone who's main skillset is banging out internal apps using low-code tools less than a senior full-stack engineer with deep performance / kernel tuning experience. People able to do the former are more common than the latter! But companies, falsely and offensively, assume the former = non-US, the latter = SV, and then assign their pay in that way. But why shouldn't someone in SV trying to break into programming be able to earn $40k doing the internal apps? And, conversely, why should a high-skilled engineer in, say, India be forced to move to the US to earn wages at American companies that are equal to their skill? (sans timezone issues, etc., if that's important for the role, which is a separate discussion). If Google can pay an L4 280k in SV, they can afford to pay an L4 in Minnesota, or India, or anywhere the same amount. They wouldn't pay an L4 that much in SV if they weren't worth that much (and, realistically, they're worth much more). Conversely, if Google wants to hire a contractor for cheap, that's fine! That job just shouldn't be tied to location either. Why shouldn't someone in the US be able to take that job, if they want it?

RandallBrown 5y ago

If anything people that work from home should get a raise since the company doesn't need to pay for their space in an office.

brutus1213 5y ago
When my team when remote, it was clear people worked extra hours. I actually was concerned about burn-out.

jbay808 5y ago

Location is one factor in cost of living, but there are a lot of others too: the type of car you drive (if you drive a car), the quality of food you buy/coffee you drink/restaurants you frequent, the number of kids you have, the schools they go to, etc. Should companies adjust compensation according to these variables too, or just city?

sigzero 5y ago
No because everything you listed is a personal choice.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- samstave 5y ago
  I have gone through a fair bit of your comment history and I find that you are much like me. I disagree with your comments on this though... I'd appreciate it if you would expand on what you feel is actual 'choice'
- tauntz 5y ago
  ... but so is location.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    To an extent. But this is a terrific reminder to me that the life I’ve been able to live would have been impossible if I didn’t have the right combination of timely luck and dangerously stubborn determination to escape my home town when I did.
- jbay808 5y ago
  Location is only not a personal choice because of the location-based pay! It's funny, because that logic means that location-based-pay becomes its own justification. The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city. But the moment that my company discriminates pay based on anything that has an associated cost, it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies that pay differential. If part of my pay was tied to wearing an expensive suit, then my clothes would no longer be a personal choice, thus justifying the extra pay for the suit. If part of my pay was tied to me driving a fancy car, then my car would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for the fancy car. If part of my pay was tied to enrolling my kids in a particular school, then enrolling in that school would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for that, and so on...

yibg 5y ago

Prices for a lot of things are regional dependent though, not just salaries. Produce and dinners out costs more in the bay area than Omaha too. Same for salaries in Vietnam vs Omaha. I get that in a sense it doesn't seem fair for the same work and person to get paid differently solely based on where they live, but the market and costs are different too so if you pay everyone the same that also has issues. Besides, if everyone is paid the same why would it be valley salaries not Omaha salaries for everyone?

rfreiberger 5y ago

Just speculating but I would guess that's a reason for asking people back in the office. If you're getting paid the same amount as an engineer in the Bay Area but living South Dakota, I'm sure this causes some alarm for the company. We can't force a pay cut but what if we require physical presence a few times a week. I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.