The main goal here appears to be securing their talent, as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold onto staff and create a stable enterprise. I imagine that only becomes more difficult when you’re a distributed team.
From the employee perspective: Will you really switch jobs now that your salary is top of market for your location? Any job nearby won’t pay you anywhere near that salary! You will have to move to the valley.
So it obviates job choice based on salary being a deciding factor in your life, your location and your connections. (Just because SF and other places have opportunity doesn’t make it attractive to all - opportunity cost like being away from family or friends can outweigh it.)
It’s then entirely up to you where you live and how beneficial you make that salary to you and your family.
The community where the staff live benefits too. Their surplus income will most likely be spent locally and depending on how they’re taxed, the local authority will benefit too.
Basecamp also has a sideline benefit: the massive PR that comes from awareness of this. And I bet they get droves of great talent jumping all over their new positions this year, from everywhere, _especially_ the valley!
Great tactic. Putting people first.
But we are the ones who decide whether paying the countryside person less is "fair". The moral weight of our actions are mostly independent of what a free market gives.
The market is a tool, not the objective.
This perspective I agree on. Specifically, markets are a tool for finding prices, because we've observed all throughout humanity that alternative methods of pricing (and hence resource allocation) go poorly. It's the least worst system! If you need to do that thing (establish prices and distribution of resources with minimum waste) then the market is a great tool.
If you're trying to solve some other problem (establishing "fair" pay) -- then I agree that appealing to the market is like pounding nails with a saw. It isn't even supposed to do that thing.
In Buffer's case, they're trying to go after fairness, which is fine. But this overall post above (bringing us back to topic) is that they're starting to introduce factors that are swinging them back towards the market. The market is pretty tough to ignore in the long term, irrespective of our feelings about its fairness.
On the other hand, I'd take the opposition position of yours and say that we should be incentivizing people to live in big cities for [many reasons](https://www.city-journal.org/html/why-big-cities-matter-more...). It is not perfect or tradeoff-free, but nothing ever is.
They do have places where your value is tied to your location. They're called offices.
I'm all for personally earning more money, but this also disproportionately rewards people who live in cheap places.