7 ms·

"what do you mean i can't collect silicon valley salary while working from Montana?"

ilovecaching 4y ago
I don't think they are asking to not take a cost of living adjustment. I think they are asking to be able to work somewhere in the world other than Seattle.
flerchin 4y ago
Why would that be unreasonable when making Silicon Valley profits for my employer?
- ddalex 4y ago
  Because salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.
  - ppg677 4y ago
    Newsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.
    - pc86 4y ago
      Pointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.
    - rrdharan 4y ago
      Why would you think that puts upward rather than downward pressure on wages?
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Right. So salary will trends towards rural Montana salary not SF or Seattle salary.
    - selfmodruntime 4y ago
      Once US employers give up on the idea of office work entirely and start looking into cheap east European developers, you‘ll be in for a world of hurt. I can‘t deny their expertise and quality of work, and they‘re starting to constantly outbid anyone on work for hire platforms
    - weberer 4y ago
      And how do you think that will affect SF and Seattle salaries?
    - eddieroger 4y ago
      Seemingly not if companies are moving back to in-person. Can't be in person at Amazon in Montana.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Salary is never a function of profits, it’s a function of market rates for the skills you provide. Plenty of developers will make Silicon Valley profits for a company, some will even do it very cheap because they hail from regions where their cost of living is dirt cheap. Edit: you can downvote me all you want, doesn’t make it less true.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Because the reasonable thing for your employer is to pay less to someone else - someone who gets them even higher profits.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  It's not, but it's a corporation not a workers' co-operative. They'll get someone to do the same thing from Islamabad like Digital Ocean.
- bko 4y ago
  Wouldn't it be just as likely to pay Montana salaries to people even if they choose to live in Silicon Valley? A lot of people arguing for ability to work from anywhere don't realize they are now essentially competing with the entire world, or at least the entire population of engineers in their timezone.
  - llampx 4y ago
    We already know we are competing with workers from all over the world. Go to Bengaluru, India or other IT-centric cities and marvel at how many silicon valley names you see on the skyscrapers, each of which has thousands of workers. This has been the paradigm since at least the early 00s. Remote-first may have accelerated it but it didn't bring it about.
  - matwood 4y ago
    IT workers have been competing with the entire world since the late 90s.
  - cultureswitch 4y ago
    This is a relatively neutral effect because I also have more choices of employers as a result. It's just a merging of labor markets. If anything, remote work is a net positive for everyone involved (and actually, everyone): less wasted time, money and emissions, fewer reasons for everyone to be living all bunched up in expensive cities.
- knorker 4y ago
  Because your Warsaw coworkers are making the exact same profits for that exact same employer, yet paid much less. Seeing SV people whine about this is quite offensive, and a little bit racist.
piva00 4y ago
If the company was willing to pay SV salaries to hire someone what does it change for the company if the worker is not in SV, specifically?
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Because it would be ridiculous to not pay market rates. The market rate for a dev in Nebraska is different than in SV. So what changes is you’re a company that overpays.
- siva7 4y ago
  That it can hire the same guy for less in Nebraska.
  - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
    couldn't it do that before they hired them for more in SV?
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Not if they wanted someone local who would come in to an office.
      - piva00 4y ago
        And that's the issue at play here, isn't it? The hiring was done when work was remote, paying SV rates for that, then the company decides to move the goalposts and now there's this weird justification being played to side with the company. Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?
        School-Cotton 4y ago
        AFAIK, the default expectation at most places was that the pandemic wasn't permanent and eventually people would be back in person. > Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker? I don't tend to analyze things along "class struggle" lines. Obviously, as a worker, I would prefer to make as much money and have as good of work conditions as possible, but I don't necessarily think any deviation from that is "unfair".
hotpotamus 4y ago
One of the problems I've always had with remote work is how do you justify large differences in pay between the US, Europe, and Asia if the location of an employee is not supposed to matter?
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Some people have convinced themselves that they are amongst best simply because they are paid a lot, which obviously means that they deserve the pay no matter where they are. So they can just work remotely, because it doesn't change the value they produce, right? And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location. The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    Paying people obscene wages in SV really makes them overestimate their own abilities by a large margin.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  The C-Suite has been trying to outsource for 30+ years now. It doesn't work because the talent just isn't there.
  - matwood 4y ago
    There's talent, but unless the company is huge and can open a whole office, things like time zones, culture and language are very hard to overcome. And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.
AdrianB1 4y ago
That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?"
- mjr00 4y ago
  > That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?" Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication. We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually matters. You still see a ton of offshoring for projects where the result doesn't matter so much, like government IT contracts. If Amazon/Google/etc had any data supporting that you could successfully get devs in Bangalore to code stuff up at $2/hour, they'd be doing it.
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    You can still save salary by hiring Europeans who speak english well enough. The average Swede or German has little communication problems in English and costs about a third as much as the average US Dev
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Your average German developer as good as your great developers in India, and cheaper. If you want low quality engineers in India there are a lot of them for cheap, but if you care about quality, those people have moved to positions that are willing to pay more for quality. Most of the average in Germany being better than India is in Germany there are many opportunities for bad engineers to self select into something not engineering. However the nature of India is bad engineers will persist as engineers because there is nothing else they can move to that is better than being a bad engineer.
    - AdrianB1 4y ago
      Not sure the average German software engineer costs 1/3 of the USA one, but I am sure Germany is still in Western Europe and considered a high cost location. The average German still makes 2-3 times more than the average Bulgarian or Romanian, Indian or Costa Rican.
otikik 4y ago
Should we pay less to people without children or dependent family members, given that their cost of life is smaller? What about paying less to non-smokers, since their healthcare needs will be smaller?
- knorker 4y ago
  Not sure if you're making my point, or arguing against it. The employer has been paying a premium for having employees local. Now employees are getting upset because they're losing the premium. As if they are some dirty European or Indian. It's actually quite offensive to hear these complaints from US employees.
- zxcvbn4038 4y ago
  Your not supposed to do that but just the same I would not discuss marriage or family in an interview. Where I always ran into trouble was child care. I had one boss who moved his parents to the US from China to raise his son, often commented that he never raised a finger to raise his child, expected everyone else to do the same. He had no sympathy for child care needs. My next boss raised two kids in NYC, knew all the hoops you had to jump through, was very accommodating of child care needs and schooling. Completely different experiences.
eternalban 4y ago
The value extracted from a worker is not a function of their location. SV salaries are for technical ability and competence. And I like Montana so no offense to you folks out there, but sure, pay provincial salaries and get provincial work quality.
- knorker 4y ago
  Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less? SV employees are overpaid. They are being paid to work in SV. Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View. And the people doing the exact same work in Warsaw, with the exact same skills and performance, are being underpaid. I have no sympathy for the people on the SV side of this equation.
  - eternalban 4y ago
    > Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less? Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere. > Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View. This sort of (extreme) caricature strikes me as a form of coping, to be honest, and doesn't really reflect well on your mindset. "no sane person", seriously?
    - knorker 4y ago
      > Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere. I have a hard time following your logic here. The only way to get a SV salary has been to move to SV, because that's the only place the companies are willing to pay it. They'll want you there so much that they will pay the cost of moving, pay for a relocation consultant, pay for three months of hotel while you look, pay for immigration, visas (visas are not cheap), give an extra lump sum just for "extra costs you'll incur moving". Yet you think that it's possible for someone in Poland and India to just go "yeah, can I get the cash equivalent of all that, and also the SV salary?". I agree that remote work logically is remote work. But it's not that SV employees used to be paid "just right" and everyone else was a sucker. SV employees were and are overpaid. > "no sane person", seriously? It's hyperbole, sure. But survey after survey shows that even internal transfers within a company (say moving from the Poland office to Bay Area) makes for people who hate where they live, but they do it for the money. So the company is paying (bribing) people to move to SV against their will. Just like they're paying salary at all for you to do other things you wouldn't otherwise do. Compare this to finance. People who leave my company generally go to finance, because it pays 50-100% more. But then you work in finance. And if you already make $300k then (empirically) another 50% won't make you think finance is worth it. Some do leave. Just like some do move to SV. But they don't like it. Clearly the company wants people to live there. Clearly people don't want to. So if you don't do it, why should you be paid to live there?

I don't think they are asking to not take a cost of living adjustment. I think they are asking to be able to work somewhere in the world other than Seattle.

flerchin 4y ago

Why would that be unreasonable when making Silicon Valley profits for my employer?

ddalex 4y ago
Because salary is not determined by how much profit you make but by the demand of your labour in the market.
- ppg677 4y ago
  Newsflash-- the "market" is becoming less constrained by geography.
  - pc86 4y ago
    Pointless snark aside, this is correct. But it is still constrained by geography and it's not all that surprising that employers would like to constrain it a bit more than it is. So this move makes total sense, and pretending that there is no correlation between your location and what you can command in salary is farcical.
  - rrdharan 4y ago
    Why would you think that puts upward rather than downward pressure on wages?
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Right. So salary will trends towards rural Montana salary not SF or Seattle salary.
  - selfmodruntime 4y ago
    Once US employers give up on the idea of office work entirely and start looking into cheap east European developers, you‘ll be in for a world of hurt. I can‘t deny their expertise and quality of work, and they‘re starting to constantly outbid anyone on work for hire platforms
  - weberer 4y ago
    And how do you think that will affect SF and Seattle salaries?
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    Seemingly not if companies are moving back to in-person. Can't be in person at Amazon in Montana.
xwdv 4y ago
Salary is never a function of profits, it’s a function of market rates for the skills you provide. Plenty of developers will make Silicon Valley profits for a company, some will even do it very cheap because they hail from regions where their cost of living is dirt cheap. Edit: you can downvote me all you want, doesn’t make it less true.
kgwgk 4y ago
Because the reasonable thing for your employer is to pay less to someone else - someone who gets them even higher profits.
nivenkos 4y ago
It's not, but it's a corporation not a workers' co-operative. They'll get someone to do the same thing from Islamabad like Digital Ocean.
bko 4y ago
Wouldn't it be just as likely to pay Montana salaries to people even if they choose to live in Silicon Valley? A lot of people arguing for ability to work from anywhere don't realize they are now essentially competing with the entire world, or at least the entire population of engineers in their timezone.
- llampx 4y ago
  We already know we are competing with workers from all over the world. Go to Bengaluru, India or other IT-centric cities and marvel at how many silicon valley names you see on the skyscrapers, each of which has thousands of workers. This has been the paradigm since at least the early 00s. Remote-first may have accelerated it but it didn't bring it about.
- matwood 4y ago
  IT workers have been competing with the entire world since the late 90s.
- cultureswitch 4y ago
  This is a relatively neutral effect because I also have more choices of employers as a result. It's just a merging of labor markets. If anything, remote work is a net positive for everyone involved (and actually, everyone): less wasted time, money and emissions, fewer reasons for everyone to be living all bunched up in expensive cities.
knorker 4y ago
Because your Warsaw coworkers are making the exact same profits for that exact same employer, yet paid much less. Seeing SV people whine about this is quite offensive, and a little bit racist.

piva00 4y ago

If the company was willing to pay SV salaries to hire someone what does it change for the company if the worker is not in SV, specifically?

nemo44x 4y ago
Because it would be ridiculous to not pay market rates. The market rate for a dev in Nebraska is different than in SV. So what changes is you’re a company that overpays.
siva7 4y ago
That it can hire the same guy for less in Nebraska.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  couldn't it do that before they hired them for more in SV?
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Not if they wanted someone local who would come in to an office.
    - piva00 4y ago
      And that's the issue at play here, isn't it? The hiring was done when work was remote, paying SV rates for that, then the company decides to move the goalposts and now there's this weird justification being played to side with the company. Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?
      - School-Cotton 4y ago
        AFAIK, the default expectation at most places was that the pandemic wasn't permanent and eventually people would be back in person. > Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker? I don't tend to analyze things along "class struggle" lines. Obviously, as a worker, I would prefer to make as much money and have as good of work conditions as possible, but I don't necessarily think any deviation from that is "unfair".

hotpotamus 4y ago

One of the problems I've always had with remote work is how do you justify large differences in pay between the US, Europe, and Asia if the location of an employee is not supposed to matter?

mardifoufs 4y ago
Some people have convinced themselves that they are amongst best simply because they are paid a lot, which obviously means that they deserve the pay no matter where they are. So they can just work remotely, because it doesn't change the value they produce, right? And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location. The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Paying people obscene wages in SV really makes them overestimate their own abilities by a large margin.
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
The C-Suite has been trying to outsource for 30+ years now. It doesn't work because the talent just isn't there.
- matwood 4y ago
  There's talent, but unless the company is huge and can open a whole office, things like time zones, culture and language are very hard to overcome. And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.

AdrianB1 4y ago

That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?"

mjr00 4y ago
> That is the opening question leading to "why hire anyone in USA or Western Europe when Asia exists?" Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication. We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually matters. You still see a ton of offshoring for projects where the result doesn't matter so much, like government IT contracts. If Amazon/Google/etc had any data supporting that you could successfully get devs in Bangalore to code stuff up at $2/hour, they'd be doing it.
- selfmodruntime 4y ago
  You can still save salary by hiring Europeans who speak english well enough. The average Swede or German has little communication problems in English and costs about a third as much as the average US Dev
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Your average German developer as good as your great developers in India, and cheaper. If you want low quality engineers in India there are a lot of them for cheap, but if you care about quality, those people have moved to positions that are willing to pay more for quality. Most of the average in Germany being better than India is in Germany there are many opportunities for bad engineers to self select into something not engineering. However the nature of India is bad engineers will persist as engineers because there is nothing else they can move to that is better than being a bad engineer.
  - AdrianB1 4y ago
    Not sure the average German software engineer costs 1/3 of the USA one, but I am sure Germany is still in Western Europe and considered a high cost location. The average German still makes 2-3 times more than the average Bulgarian or Romanian, Indian or Costa Rican.

otikik 4y ago

Should we pay less to people without children or dependent family members, given that their cost of life is smaller? What about paying less to non-smokers, since their healthcare needs will be smaller?

knorker 4y ago
Not sure if you're making my point, or arguing against it. The employer has been paying a premium for having employees local. Now employees are getting upset because they're losing the premium. As if they are some dirty European or Indian. It's actually quite offensive to hear these complaints from US employees.
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Your not supposed to do that but just the same I would not discuss marriage or family in an interview. Where I always ran into trouble was child care. I had one boss who moved his parents to the US from China to raise his son, often commented that he never raised a finger to raise his child, expected everyone else to do the same. He had no sympathy for child care needs. My next boss raised two kids in NYC, knew all the hoops you had to jump through, was very accommodating of child care needs and schooling. Completely different experiences.

eternalban 4y ago

The value extracted from a worker is not a function of their location. SV salaries are for technical ability and competence. And I like Montana so no offense to you folks out there, but sure, pay provincial salaries and get provincial work quality.

knorker 4y ago
Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less? SV employees are overpaid. They are being paid to work in SV. Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View. And the people doing the exact same work in Warsaw, with the exact same skills and performance, are being underpaid. I have no sympathy for the people on the SV side of this equation.
- eternalban 4y ago
  > Then why are exactly the same workers in Poland being paid much less? Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere. > Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View. This sort of (extreme) caricature strikes me as a form of coping, to be honest, and doesn't really reflect well on your mindset. "no sane person", seriously?
  - knorker 4y ago
    > Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere. I have a hard time following your logic here. The only way to get a SV salary has been to move to SV, because that's the only place the companies are willing to pay it. They'll want you there so much that they will pay the cost of moving, pay for a relocation consultant, pay for three months of hotel while you look, pay for immigration, visas (visas are not cheap), give an extra lump sum just for "extra costs you'll incur moving". Yet you think that it's possible for someone in Poland and India to just go "yeah, can I get the cash equivalent of all that, and also the SV salary?". I agree that remote work logically is remote work. But it's not that SV employees used to be paid "just right" and everyone else was a sucker. SV employees were and are overpaid. > "no sane person", seriously? It's hyperbole, sure. But survey after survey shows that even internal transfers within a company (say moving from the Poland office to Bay Area) makes for people who hate where they live, but they do it for the money. So the company is paying (bribing) people to move to SV against their will. Just like they're paying salary at all for you to do other things you wouldn't otherwise do. Compare this to finance. People who leave my company generally go to finance, because it pays 50-100% more. But then you work in finance. And if you already make $300k then (empirically) another 50% won't make you think finance is worth it. Some do leave. Just like some do move to SV. But they don't like it. Clearly the company wants people to live there. Clearly people don't want to. So if you don't do it, why should you be paid to live there?