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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, I hate the policy of paying based on region (I won’t work for those companies)
You’re providing X value, and the company needs to make >X, often by some multiple mX profit so to speak.
My costs are my business, and I shouldn’t be punished for making different life choices.
If remote employees tend to produce a lower multiple, that’s fine. Just provide a salary at the reduced rate. Should be the same everywhere though, imo this is unfair hiring practices
I should add, it’s up to the employee what they’d accept. I had a few awesome job offers from Europe, but they couldn’t even come close on salary. That’s fine, didn’t work out, still respect them as it was the same salary everywhere
It’s about market prices. If you can find someone to overpay market rates to you then more power to you. But I know of 0 companies that do. I’ve worked for remote first companies that specifically didn’t hire in expensive areas so they could find more affordable talent. This is how markets work.
I always approach each conversation the same. I won’t interview until we discuss potential salary range. If it’s within a range I’d accept for the work, we interview. The argument I’ve made in negotiations is always similar - if you’re willing to pay X (regardless of location), it should matter more about what I can offer in return. If you’re penny pinching to try and cut that employee cost 10-20% have at it. I know my worth and can provide significant multiples over that. I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.
It can be in certain cases but not in all. I may have to hire someone with a certain clearance for example. Or, we don't have a business subsidy setup globally. Or we have TZ preferences because of communication issues. As a manager I wouldn't want to hire someone half way across the world because my 1-on-1 time with them would always be awful for one of us. So I don't.
You are of course free to set your own market rate. I think it's great you want to discuss salary expectations up front because there's no point in everyone wasting their time. At a smaller company you'll have a better chance of getting sway with it, but keep in mind they tend to pay below market rate anyways.
At a medium to large company they source data which describes for certain roles what market rate is. We know this because companies participate in giving this anonymized data so we can slice it up by region as well. From this we can calculate a "comp ratio" and your salary will gravitate towards 1.0, which is perfect market price for your role in your region. This is how budgets are set. Every region is put into a bucket (premium, average, bargain for example) and priced by that bucket. We can then open a role in "average or below" regions, for example if we don't want to pay extra. We tend to want to offer below 1.0 so we have room for negotiation and also for merit increases.
> I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.
I don't doubt that but it's not really a surplus value theory thing here. If I could get the same person close to me VS far away for the same money then I'd hire the person close to me, which is almost always in a big city and not the rural south.
The employer is paying the SV premium because either they want the employee physically in SV for job duty reasons, or because other SV companies do, so if you're not in SV then fewer employers are trying to hire you for SV salaries, which reduces your salary offers.
If they truly don't care then why not hire two equally good people in Warsaw? It's because they do care.
SV employees do not want all remote to be equal. They would very much be on the losing side of that bargain.
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.
This sounds like circular reasoning to me. “You can’t collect an SV-level salary working remotely from the Bay because the company could just hire someone from Nebraska, and the company won’t pay him an SV-level salary because he’s not located in the Bay.”
Do you also find this circular reasoning: “You can’t get paid SF rates for a haircut when your barbershop is in Nebraska because people will find a cheaper option and people getting haircuts in Nebraska won’t pay SF rates because they are not in SF”?
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?
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".
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?
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?
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.
> And to your point, the most talented come to the US where they can make the most money.
I don't agree with the "most talented". For sure a lot of talented people move to the US as they can make more money but that's a subset of the talented people, a subset that intersects with the ones that are willing to work harder/longer, or with less social benefits, etc. I've worked with a lot of talented individuals that were unwilling to relocate to the US even though they could get much better pay, simply because they were happy enough in their societies and weren't all in chasing only money.
Different people value different things, reducing that to a simple transactional value is rather inhumane.
I work with a company that has an office in Inida. It is really hard to manage people in that office, the timezone means that just to have a conversation someone needs to work bad hours. I've had to be in 5:30am meetings to catch them before them get home, other times they have put their kids to bed and then called me.
The only way you can make this work is if the people "there" are mostly self directed. that means the management needs to be able to make the right decisions when faced with a question, without calling back to "the main office". If any of the words or similar phrases are uttered it cannot work.
For most it is working because talent is not what they are looking for, but cheap labor. I saw companies that prefer to pay 3 people in India to deliver less than 1 person in UK just because they want to have people in low cost locations no matter what the productivity is. They believe most/all people are equal in skills and output, it is linked to the the "equality" part of DEI.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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?
[p.s. I don’t think we have an argument to be honest. You are arguing facts on the ground, and I am arguing that these facts are distortions that need to be addressed. Peace out. (I sometimes get irritable in the morning. Appy logies fellow code slinger.)]
You are having a hard time because you already have your little thesis in hand regarding “SV salary” and are not listening to what I am saying.
I am saying that you as an engineer are providing quite a lot of value in today’s world and if the collective you are unable to take the necessary measures to negotiate value for value employment agreements with international corporations, it does not invalidate the fact that a competent SWE working in location X (given that X is effectively and practically accessible to employer) is creating a given measure of units of labor and intellectual value that is independent of location X.
I do not agree that SV salaries were excessive. Have you seen lawyer rates? All they do is jaw bone. We are creating the very fabric of tomorrow’s societies. We are creators and builders. What is excessive is the greed of the C Suites. They should be spreading those corporate profits wider, and yes, pay equivalent pay to whoever is pulling their weight.
