They'll pay more to people living in SF because those people have better alternatives and can negotiate harder, and the factors that cause that are the same factors that make housing in SF expensive.

You would have to pay me more if competing employers are willing to pay me more. Right now that depends on which job market I live in. Remote wages seem relatively lower, which isn't surprising when few companies have embraced remote yet.

You should ask yourself: do I want to hire people who decide relocating to Silicon Valley would be good for their career, or those who can't or won't?

Yeah. Google makes like a million dollars per engineer, so it's either "make less money on this engineer than you'd like" or "don't hire this engineer and make nothing". It would be stupid if they were doing it for no reason, but competition is higher for engineers in SF.

Got a link for your ‘Google earnings per engineer’ $1 million figure?

Not OP but the $1m figure doesn't really matter. Their point is google makes $x per engineer, you can make $x - (large number) or $0. Whether it's $1m or $10m, it doesn't change the fact.

Google made $65 billion in 2014[0], and had ~20k engineers[1], which puts the number per engineer at $3.5 million. [0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [1]https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Googl...

> I'm saying a company would be pretty dumb to pay someone more just because of where they chose to live. Profit maximization and all that.

That's only the case if skilled engineers are fungible entities with a smooth supply/demand curve. That is absolutely not the case.

No but they will pay them less.

Paying person A less than person B means paying person B more than person A.