I mean, it sounds like a win-win situation to me. If a family can save, say, $3,000 a month on rent, and the company can save, say, $1,500 on an engineers salary, both are actually better off.

I guess the risk of moving out of the Bay Area is that you somehow are betting your future on a single company. If you decide to get a new job, you might be too far away from a decent tech hub. Another issue for families is moving both working partners. If the partner works at a company that might not be as flexible or open, moving somewhere else is going to be a tough decision, as it's always going to be better to have 2 jobs in the Bay Area, than just one outside of it.

Are we competitive with Google engineering salaries? Probably not. But most Bay Area startups can't complete with Google on comp anyway.

Are we competitive with other Bay Area startup salaries? Likely. Six-figure engineering salaries, healthcare, retirement package, etc is the norm.

We saw several great teammates move away from the Bay Area and thought there might be others. This experiment is primarily to find people who already want to leave (for good reasons) but feel stuck because they like working for growing tech companies.

My guess is that with all the whining CEOs in the Bay Area do about "how hard it is to find talent", this is the start of a long-term trend. Rents in the Bay Area have gone up about 10%/year for the last five years running (anecdote: my room cost 850/month five years ago, I moved out when it hit 1300/month) and with the new "Affordable housing" mandates (which the SF electorate voted for) coming into play, pretty much all construction is going to stop, because the economics of cross-subsidizing 1/3 of units (the new requirement) with the other two is pushing the unsubsidized units out of reach for all but the highest income-earners.

This place is mortgaging its future, and people are right to want out.

Source: http://www.sfhac.org/real-numbers-behind-prop-c/

To be clear, I have no issues with divorcing salary from location for a remote company. But it probably means you're paying generous salaries for people living in cheap locations and you'll have trouble hiring anyone who must must must live in SF for... reasons.

Of course, for an all-remote company to adjust salaries by a five or ten thousand bucks based on location if someone moves, like some do, that just seems like they're trying to nickel and dime the person under the guise of being fair.

I understand paying remote workers less than someone on site since there may be productivity gains that come from that. However, remote is remote. Once someone is a remote employee it should make no difference if they're in Manhattan or Milwaukee.

For what it is worth - we're not out to benchmark against "Bay Area rates". We generally will lose in head-to-head compensation with any large, on-site technical organization in the Bay Area (Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) - but we try and be consistent and competitive (6 fig eng, health, retire, etc.) anywhere else in the world - no matter where you are (suburbs of Chicago, middle-of-nowhere-Kansas, metro Pittsburgh, Barcelona, etc.). Check out a few of our other comments for more details.

Scenario A: More companies pay equally remote vs. local

Scenario B: cost-of-living adjustments mean companies pay the local prevailing wage of where the employee is located.

My prediction is that we'll get about 80% scenario A and 20% scenario B. Remotes might take a hit but it won't be large, and that's based on elasticity of demand -- I suspect companies have a less elastic demand for talent overall, vs. employee willingness to move.

Manhattan and SV don't have a monopoly on great engineers for the vast majority of engineering roles.

Remotes won't take the hit. It's those who for some reason (family, prestige, other) are stuck in these centres.

This may not be something new for you guys, as you've been running remote agile teams, but how are you planning to deal with time differences? Are you reserving the right to ask remote employees to start their day at a particular time? Are you going to take time zones into consideration when building your teams?

Time differences haven't been a big issue - it can be tricky to get everyone on a call when they need to be - but usually a little flexibility by all parties go a long way. Also, you can arbitrage time differences to knock down annoyance from on-call rotations and the like.

We ask employees to have their own "consistent" hours so that the rest of the team knows when they'll be available or not.

We do consider time zones when hiring - for example, we might explicitly hire Asian/Pacific for support scheduling reasons.

I have no idea what that means.

To be honest - I wish more companies were remote welcome. It is just better in so many ways.

It cuts both ways.

In a way, yes. I am 100% remote and live in a very remote area. I doubt I could get a similar job anywhere in the state, but I did it anyway. Why? First, I love where I work and before moving away and I worked from home long enough to see that it was good. Am I stuck with this company? Yeah, pretty much. Chances of finding remote work are slim, but I accept that. My work/life balance and happiness living where I never thought I could is nearly priceless. It is a trade off, but one that I'm happy with. It may not be for everyone.

When I was younger I'd hop jobs every couple years, get a nice raise, learn something new and move one. Now I just don't care. I found a place I can see my self working at for many more years. When there is a mess in the "office" microwave, I know who to blame and you can't put a price on that.

I mean, yeah if you move to rural South Dakota you won't find much, but there are plenty of growing tech centers like Raleigh, Boulder, Austin, etc. that have much lower cost of living, but still a lot of availability in local tech jobs.

Also to note, the 3-9 month job search should be much more sustainable in Nowheresville, whereas in SF you are going to be screwed if your job search is extended.

Because where I'm sitting, facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, which are 5 of the top 6 most valuable US companies, are HQ'd in the Bay Area or Seattle. So if you want that caliber of job, with the opportunities and pay ($200-300k+ for mid-level people), you really do have to live in SF/Seattle.

I don't work a BigCo job for other reasons but the reasoning does seem sound.

Amazon recruiters have also been pinging me for jobs they have in SoCal, although I wouldn't say that LA is significantly cheaper than the Bay Area or Seattle.

while i'm commenting, i'll note that i don't feel boulder really competes with NC's research triangle, or austin. boulder county population is 310k, and a sizable chunk of that is tied up in and around the university and government research facilities that i feel don't impact local tech industry that much.

Home to UNC, Duke, and the somewhat famous Research Triangle Park, a suburban campus containing R&D for Red Hat, IBM, and several big pharmaceutical companies.

The Palo Alto of the South.

I used to live in South Florida, and I bet I could exhaust the search space of "tech jobs south of Orlando" in about two weeks of interviewing. After that, you're looking at a move. It's not like the same companies will interview you over and over until you pass.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13896328

> We do not adjust salaries when employees move. We try to pay similarly regardless of location.

- offering a perk to some employees that you don't offer to other employees could get you in trouble

- say all delocated employees are from SF are young white males, and an older black woman want a delocation bonus to move from a non-SF city to somewhere else (hint: I bet your lawyer is gonna say you need to cancel the perk, or offer it to everyone​, and I would agree with that lawyer)

- as an new employee eligible for your delocation reimbursement, I'd rather it just be a bonus, as I don't wanna have to explain to the company exactly what I spent the money on (why is it any of your business that I spent $8,000 at Kink Movers to relocate my 50 Shades Of Grey Inspired BDSM Dungeon?)

As a perk, you'd only get $4-5k back (30% marginal federal income tax, 9% marginal CA income tax, 6.5% Medicare and social security tax).

One thing I wish is that {insert current employer} would do the same thing and then subsidize Fiber in the new area to ensure high quality VC.

EDIT: My question is why it is hinged on moving away from a city. I think it is a legitimate question. Someone living in NYC or Seattle might have similar issues with the cost of housing.

As an experiment, we wanted to start with the obvious high cost of living center - the Bay Area. In the future, we may open it up to more cities, maybe even a blanket package as you describe.

If the experiment "fails" - we'll just stop offering this for new employees.

This is one of the richest areas in the US and the overwhelming sentiment is, "we need people to stop moving here". You can actually get votes here by making it harder for companies to hire, on the theory that traffic, pollution, etc. won't be that bad.

It's unlike any other place in the US. Truly one-of-a-kind.

They might want the jobs if they were going to the local poor. Not jobs that outsiders move in for.

See Kim-Mai Cutler's brilliant article. https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/