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From TFA: > my salary was around €120 000 per year [...] For The Netherlands this is a good salary, and you'll have a hard time finding companies that offer be
by heresie-dabord 3y ago
From TFA:
> my salary was around €120 000 per year [...] For The Netherlands this is a good salary, and you'll have a hard time finding companies that offer better and let you work from home full time.
For his country, he was well paid and worked from home 100% as well.
> But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would've earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more. Not because I am somehow able to do my job better in the Bay Area, or because of any other valid reason for that matter, but because I would be living in the Bay Area instead of in The Netherlands.
He says it was "not fair" that he wasn't paid the same salary as people in a different country.
There are no Victim Points to be scored here.
The author has a poor understanding of economics.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y agoAlso the social safety net in NL covers a lot of things you have to pay for yourself in the USA.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago€120.000 a year puts him comfortably in the top 1% earners: https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/inkomensverdeling https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/inkomensverdeling, but he complains he'd earn twice as much if he lived in an area where the cost of living is much higher? I mean he lives in Amsterdam, which is more expensive than the rest of the country, sure, but nowhere near what it's like in SF according to https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp (Amsterdam is ranked 75, vs SF at 8), and I'm not sure if that index includes health care and social benefits like state pension, etc. Speaking of, that's only salary, ìt excludes stocks, bonuses, pension contributions, and other benefits. Then there's accessibility; living in central Amsterdam means he can fulfill most of his daily needs and transport by bike. Can't get much cheaper than that. TL;DR, he can move to SF if he wants to earn SF rates.
- username332211 3y ago> The author has a poor understanding of economics. Does he or does the company? If they had decent understanding of economics, they should have shut down their Bay Area operations?
- comprev 3y agoMaybe because they have the budget to poach other Bay Area engineers?
- immibis 3y agoThen why don't they poach similar engineers from the Netherlands and pay them half as much?
- delfinom 3y agoI mean, if they could they would. Why have any engineers in the US at all when you can hire them at 1/2 to less in India, South America and even Africa?
- Aurornis 3y agoDid this argument just come full circle back to literally what GitLab is doing by paying engineers in the Netherlands less? Regardless, it's silly to propose that engineers are interchangeable cogs in a machine and you can find perfectly identical talent anywhere. If that was true, companies would ignore all of these locations and skip straight to the cheapest country they could find. But network effects matter, and hiring out of the Bay Area taps you into a different set of experience and networks than almost anywhere else in the world. I'm not suggesting that every Bay Area engineer is better than every Netherlands engineer, but the Bay Area talent pool really is unique and well connected in a way that's hard to find elsewhere.
- brnt 3y agoBut that's not what Gitlab is saying, that BayAreans are better workers. They maintain that they're merely adjusting for regional CoL, for the same person in the same position. They can hardly get closer to saying people are interchangeable cogs.
- bgnn 3y agoI see your point. There are more factors than talent being different in the Bay Area I think. I work for a Bay Area start-up in the Netherlands. They opened their office here for a specific talent. This talent can be found in the Bay Area too, and they can pay the salaries there too but the employees in the Bay Area don't stay that long compared to here. For the company this is a big issue because you keep bleeding out know how. So the reason they came here was a combination of the talent, affordabile salaries (100-150k for staff level), and employee loyalty. We had only 1 person left from a team of 25 people in 6 years while half of the people in the Bay Area office is left. Give us 40 holiday days, 40 hour work week and a decent salary we will stay.
- dangus 3y agoNot paying location-based salary is arguably more unfair. If you pay the global median salary to everyone, people in high cost areas are screwed and you’ll never be able to recruit there. If you pay everyone in your company the highest salary, people in low cost areas live like kings while their peers in high cost areas live a more modest lifestyle. As a company you’re not out to solve global inequity, you’re out to hire good talent effectively and efficiently. Like leaving a 40% tip at a restaurant, overpaying the going rate on salary doesn’t really get you anything but feel goods at a certain point.
- adolph 3y agoPeople living in high cost areas have chosen that. It’s kind of like parking. If employees don’t pay for parking then an employer is subsidizing car driving over other options.
- dangus 3y agoDid they? The typical person in the US lives within commuting distance from their mother: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...
- adolph 3y agoYes, making a choice to "within commuting distance from their mother" is still making a choice.
- dangus 3y agoWhat percentage of people under the age of 30 live with their parents to make ends meet? Choosing between abandoning your family and maximizing your revenue isn’t exactly an even choice.
- adolph 3y agoLiving with others (parents, partners, etc) is something that decreases core costs of domiciling anywhere you go. That is an excellent method of maximizing revenue while not abandoning your family. Otherwise, see The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen. https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest-American/dp/1250153778/ https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest...
- ctrw 3y agoWomen get paid 70% of what men do. So any woman who wants to be paid the same as a man has a poor understand of economics.
- seattle_spring 3y agoDebunked time and time again. The oft-quoted "70%" stat is referring to all men vs all women. Within the same job, the pay is much closer to 95%. Any difference is still worth understanding and closing, but there are plenty of pretty reasonable explanations for why a 5% pay disparity may exist between men and women.
- ctrw 3y ago[flagged]
- epylar 3y agoIf women have even roughly equal access to the same jobs, your point is a good one. If not, it is missing some nuance.
- scott_w 3y agoIt’s fair to say both are. GP is strongly implying women get paid 70% for the same work (illegal in the UK at least) whereas P misses the subtlety that women don’t have equal access to the job market. Compare the rates of women in software engineering vs childcare. Then compare the salaries.
- armada651 3y ago> The author has a poor understanding of economics. Because as we all know the laws of economics are fair and just. Truly a business man who strictly follows the laws of economics would always compensate people fairly for their value delivered to the company. In all seriousness, how does this make economic sense? The company is incentivizing that people move to areas with a high cost of living, but why exactly? What economic benefit does that bring to the company? The only reason that's ever been explained to me is that the cost of competing for talent is higher in those areas than others. However someone's location is a poor indicator for talent potential, so why would you compete in high cost areas?
- rmk 3y ago> In all seriousness, how does this make economic sense? The company is incentivizing that people move to areas with a high cost of living, but why exactly? What economic benefit does that bring to the company? It doesn't always bring an economic benefit to the company, which is why there are debates over companies calling employees back into the offices. That is almost always based on gut feeling and herd-mentality, than on any concrete data. However, companies have to recruit from labor markets, and as such, they are bound by its vicissitudes. Despite the pandemic scattering many software people all over the country, the vast majority of competent software developers with cutting-edge work experience are still to be found in the Bay Area. Therefore, it makes sense for the company to insist that other hires also live in the Bay Area. Perfectly understandable. If the company is able to compete effectively for talent in the remote market and able to make it work (timezones and cultural differences do matter, even if it were possible to recruit remote workers easily), then it would do it, sooner or later.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago> The company is incentivizing that people move to areas with a high cost of living, but why exactly? Is it? Are you better off if you earn more but live in a high cost of living area? I hear about people working in SF for the big tech companies but living from a car because they can't afford to live there.
- Pull_Re_Quest 3y ago
- k__ 3y agoHow come it's okay for a company to say they don't give me a raise for increased costs of living, but it's okay for a company to pay less, because I live in an area with lower costs of living?
- HDThoreaun 3y agoYour salary is a negotiation. Your company wants to pay each employee as little as possible. If you are unhappy with your salary you should look somewhere else. In fact, that is why companies pay people in expensive areas more. Those expensive areas have more available jobs so employees are more likely to leave. If you want those employees to stay you need to pay them more than employees who have a harder time leaving.
- CalRobert 3y agoBecause ultimately you have less bargaining power? Besides, your alternative isn't making more money. It's not getting the job.
- blueboo 3y agoIf it’s bargaining power, then it’s a power dynamic that may merit being called out, just like gaps in pay by other characteristics. Some of those characteristics were given protection in law after enough noise was made.
- ianbutler 3y agoYeah this is an insane line of thought. You won’t fix pay, you’ll just see jobs stop existing by going this route. Market dynamics in labor are a good thing and you can change your location to benefit from them.
- ahtihn 3y agoOf course pay is about bargaining power. How do you think a salary negotiation works? Why do you think a software engineer gets paid more than a nurse in most places?
- 3y ago
- blueboo 3y agoApproximate same work, approximate same cost of living, different salary. What’s not to resent?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago"Approximate same cost of living" is incorrect: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp
- trhway 3y ago>But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would've earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more. why wouldn't he come here then? (he could have easily come on L1, great visa, spouse can work too, straight path to GC)
- baner2020 3y agoI feel you have less empathy for a another worker and stressed that others are competing with you It’s ok for enterprises to pay different prices/salaries in different locations yet individuals don’t get to do the same is a flaw in how we are taught what we can ask for We are trapped in the matrix , need a red by pill