If your employer thinks you're in California, they'll tell the California tax authorities that you are. CA will use that as evidence that you owe them a big chunk of your income. If you don't pay, you'll have to fight. To win, you'll probably have to prove that you misled your employer, which will probably result in your getting fired for it. If you lose, CA can force your employer to take the tax out of your salary, so you'll pay California anyway plus you'll probably have to pay the place you actually live if you've done anything to establish residence. Along the way, any number of other unpredictable problems can arise (bad credit rating, legal threats, ongoing disputes with entities that don't understand or care that you've surrendered, etc.)

Good luck with all of that.

I think it’s gonna get really weird. If a company pays the same in seattle as SF (or near), and A person lives in SF, I’d rather pay a friend in WA state a few hundred a month to “rent a room” than 10% of my income to California.

That said there’s probably a bunch of laws around faking residency for tax purposes which id imagine has some hefty consequences.

Many faang companies pay the same 'higher' salaries at the same rates across seattle, sf, and nyc. The fangs used to do that when i worked there, but i wonder if they pay more in sf now? I'm sure some companies will want to pay you less if they can get away with it. But twitter will probably have to pay almost as much to keep their devs if they move. that's the key, keeping your workforce.

Patently untrue -- there are fixed ratios for each band v city. With all due respect such a bold claim deserves a link.

It used to be that way 3 years ago when I worked at Google. I don't have a link, it was personal knowledge. I'm 100% sure of it. They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.

> They actually paid more for the zurich office cause taxes were so high.

Google pays for cost of labor, not cost of living. While related, it isn't the same: for example, Google London pays much less than NYC, and Tokyo even less than that; yet Pittsburgh pays only slightly less than NYC despite being far and away the cheapest of the 4.

I believe Google's competitors tend to follow this model more than cost of living, especially internationally.

There are lowcost areas of CA.

So you'll make 4.5x a local salary instead of 5x.

You and your employer need to know where you actually live to pay state and local income taxes.

Falsifying this, to my knowledge, is not only a bad idea, but could easily be a termination-level offense and could be illegal.

I’m guessing you’re being downvoted by those who think your comment is encouraging unethical behavior.

While I certainly don’t think it’s ethical to do so, I did wonder the same thing - would companies start putting measures in place to verify you’re working from the same general area as your initially provided address? Eg, sifting through VPN log files to geo locate IP addresses etc.

They don't care as long as you show up to critical work meetings and are available when you need them for high-profile projects. I had a coworker (while at Google) who moved to Uganda without telling his manager, because he felt like it. His manager called a meeting for the next day, he hopped on a plane that night, showed up for the meeting, flew back to Uganda afterwards until he got bored there, and his manager was never the wiser, except for it being a great story for friends to tell.

What's stopping people is largely that

a.) if you aren't in the office, you miss out on critical opportunities, and if you aren't in the office too much, your boss may decide you're not worth keeping. (Officially, Google has a "if you don't show up for 3 days in a row without telling anyone you're considered to have voluntarily resigned". Unofficially this gets bent by high-performers all the time, but legally they can do it.) This is also why ambitious people at the satellite offices - NYC, Pittsburg, Seattle - move to Mountain View, because the high-priority projects require facetime and rarely go to remote employees.

b.) Hopping on a plane to make a meeting gets old really quickly, and also pretty expensive if you aren't pre-IPO. I know people who would commute from LA -> MTV, Uganda -> MTV, Seattle -> MTV, or do frequent business trips from Zurich or Sydney -> MTV. They hated it. You think the commute on 101 sucks, try adding the TSA to it.

Note that that comment is identical to a different one posted by that user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162716

Location should not affect salary since when it comes to remote work it is completely irrelevant.

Until you and a remote candidate in Idaho are equally qualified but the Idaho candidate is willing to take 2/3 of the pay and live like royalty.

Should it be a race to the bottom? Also, I think it's pretty rare in tech to have multiple qualified candidates to choose from. Typically the candidates have multiple offers, not the other way around.

Compensation is not based on the value provided to the company. Compensation is based on "market rate" as in, the lowest amount of money a candidate is willing to accept to do the job. The information asymmetry is such that candidates accept offers for far less than the company is willing to pay.

That's not what market rate means. Market rate is a surveyed bell curve for the job across multiple companies.

Yes, the rate the market pays. That’s different than the value a candidate can bring to the company.

Good for the Idaho candidate, living in SF shouldn't warrant some kind of salary privilege (much of which just gets funneled to landlords and increasing housing prices).

Is it good for the Idaho candidate to get paid less for the same work? If a company is willing to pay $x for a role because it will give them $y benefit where $y > $x why should any candidate accept less than $x? How much of a delta between $y and $x is even acceptable? Why should we celebrate companies playing candidates against each other for the benefit of the few?

This realistically isn't a major concern because the pool of qualified software engineers in a state like Idaho is far too small to make a noticeable dent in market salary levels.

You're assuming the availability of mobile tech work will not enable more people to move to places with low cost of living, such as Idaho. I believe that it will.

A few people will do that, yes, but there are a couple million software developers in the US, and most of them are not going to suddenly move to sparsely populated interior states. They'll spread out from the SF bay area a bit.

Actually, there is good reason to be within 30ms ping (99th percentile). Half that, plus the 5ms algorithmic delay from Opus (in CELT-only-restricted-low-latency mode) gives 20ms, which is the lower end of uncanny valley for real-time interactive audio (certainly for musicians in a band, but I'll presume relevance for verbal communication to set in at the same psychoacoustic threshold).

If you introduce any amount of latency by executing the encoder/decoder pair, you'll have to subtract double the latency from your ping-allowance.

If you try to have correctly-lipsynced audio in a video call, I only know of one setup to offer similarly-low video latency: a rolling-shutter in the camera, a line-by-line display (CRT should do well), and up-to a few lines algorithmic delay for e.g. running non-buffering JPEG (8x8 DCT and an online entropy coder (no pre-analysis for optimal Huffman tables or such) to save like 80-90% bandwidth). Analog TV camera+screen hardware should also work, but it's really inefficient and not easy to emulate with digital hardware.

Some companies agree with that and some don’t. For companies that disagree with you statement, the rationale is really simple: the company is ready to pay top $ because cost of life is high. They know that the rent you’ll pay is high hence the money. They’re reducing their net profit (ebitda) to lay the high salary you need to pay your rent. They do that because your rent in SF is what it is. But for those companies, there’s no way they reduce their ebitda for you to profit off that.

The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

> most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

I think most companies fall under "what's the minimum we can get away with?"

I would think that most companies pay based on what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates. Location should not matter beyond what the manager in charge or salaries think it matters for the employee willingness to stay at the company, and as such it depends.

Managers, probably. Companies + investors = less likely.

>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates

Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.