>The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF.

The buyer (Facebook) may not be playing all their cards. They may very well intend to reduce SF employee headcount, but want to experiment, and so saying otherwise will allow them to do it in a slow, controlled manner.

Relocating for most people is actually a bigger deal than it may seem.

I personally have no problem with it and did just that at least once, but after returning I asked around and most if not all of my friends and family would not do the same even for - and this was especially shocking to me - 4x the salary.

Apparently flexibility is rare and sought after.

Was that 4x the salary truly 4x, after subtracting out the costs of living?

I got an offer for an on-site job in London the other day, that would technically be ~1.5x salary boost - and ~5x the salary I had the last time I worked for a local company. But after subtracting out the costs of living, it turned out it would be effectively a 3x salary decrease, and at the same time a significant degradation in the standards of living. Turns out, London isn't a particularly friendly place for a couple with a toddler to move to.

Given that it was Zürich where CHF = PLN looking at sticker prices(with exceptions), my cost of living as a percentage of salary actually went down since I was renting a room instead of a whole apartment.

In terms of what I could nominally save every month the difference was enormous.

But yeah, with a child on board I would definitely have to get something larger paying somewhere in the order of 25-35% of my salary. But that's just CHF = PLN again, so no increase here.

> it turned out it would be effectively a 3x salary decrease

What do you mean by 3x decrease? X/3 ?

Right. Bad phrasing. I meant X/3. I.e. after subtracting the essentials, I'd be able to afford 1/3 of good and services equivalent to what I could afford in my current location on previous salary.

If you're only being offered 1.5x your salary to move to London, then assuming you're in Poland, your current salary is very high for your region.

The salary I referenced is high for the region in general (and I had it on a remote contract with an US company, though in hindsight, it was under market rate), but not necessarily for our industry, for the position I would be otherwise aiming for locally.

From my calculations, London works out quite well if you're single and willing to sacrifice heavily on the living space. It also works out a-OKish for two-income families with children at kindergarten age. Not so well with a toddler; I was shocked to discover that daycare costs more than rent on a two-bedroom flat west-side.

A lot has changed over the years here.

My friends in Warsaw are pulling anywhere in the range of $55-65k per annum before taxes - that's at corona rates, which knocked close to 8% off our currency's value.

I moved to the Bay Area for a 2.5x increase in TC and none of my former coworkers followed up for referrals

Later I asked one of them if they wanted to know the salary range difference preferred not to think about it

Lowering salaries all of a sudden for a large % of their workforce who are currently very productive, would be a bad move, destroy value instantly that would take long to recover. It makes sense to pay to keep that value, at least for a while, and let market dynamics slowly do their thing.