I suppose the answer is: There's little friction to move inside the US, but a lot of friction (well, a ton right now, but even pre COVID, there was still a lot) to move outside the US and keep working for a US company. Not to mention time zone issues.

I probably answered my own question, though I am curious what their rational is.

That bit about time zones, though, is interesting to me. In my experience working with a team on both coasts, one side's gotta give. Generally, it's the side with fewer people, but one side ends up syncing up their work schedule to either be early or later. Tough to avoid.

The only governments that have clued into this are the member states of the EU, and even then, some of them are starting to forget this point.

I live in a country with a land border to Africa, free immigration won't be fun for me, nor is it for the EU.

Furthermore, the EU doesn't have Free immigration. EU freedom of movement is only extended to member state citizens; and the Schengen area only dissolves "internal" border infrastructure. Both of those schemes are predicated on the existence of "external" borders which are not opened. If you don't already live in the EU, you're subject to the same types of visa categories and quotas you'd get if you were trying to immigrate to the US.

The reason why it seems like the EU has Free immigration is because there was a refugee crisis a few years back. This is, again, not Free immigration - it's just a particular visa category everyone agreed to for various historical fuck-Hitler reasons. You still have to actually prove to an immigration judge that you have a case of being a political refugee, which is far harder than most people think. Meanwhile, economic migrants still have to go through the process of getting work visas for particular approved professions, sitting on quotas, and so on and so forth. So you get none of the benefit of a Free immigration system but all of the downsides of political, economic, and racial ressentiment, etc.

As a foreigner myself I'd love all companies be open to hiring non-americans, but going from working within the employment laws of one jurisdiction to 150+ countries is not necessarily a good use of resources for a company.

It's a bit of a mess, but you can see most of these inside the "Location" dropdown on their jobs page: https://www.redditinc.com/careers#job-info

The good news is that some countries won't bother taxing you if you're working for a US company remotely - they're just happy to have expats spending in the local economy.

* I know it is not that, but it feels like that. Also thankfully not tied to the officially reported inflation rate in Turkey

I work for an engineering company in Switzerland, and half my team are German citizens who (pre-covid) made a daily commute all while enjoying the lower cost of living in Germany.

For every Swiss Franc that strengthened 15% against the dollar in 10 years there's an Argentine Peso that because 45 times weaker in that time period.

It has many cons for employees, but 'at will' employment presents benefits to employers that can be reflected in salary, since if that employee is no longer needed or the salary is no longer viable for the business case, the employee can be let go easily.

If you're employing people in countries where you have to spend months of negotiation, legals, or may even be unable to lay someone off at all, you're not going to be paying as much, since you need to cover contingencies. If US people move to such countries, they can also be covered by such laws, or may also be subjected to double taxation which will affect their pay too.

I know people in Europe who've been "employed" by US companies as contractors to avoid having these local legal obligations, and that would certainly open up the option of global pay levels, but I know there are legal and regulatory issues around this approach too.

Yes please, times 1000.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/24/chile-protests-constitu...

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3575

Internet connectivity is MUCH better than you're thinking. 3G and 4G in every town big enough to have a gas station.

The wired internet was so fast in Nairobi and Cape Town I legitimately thought something was wrong. After living in the US, Canada and Australia I've never used internet even half that fast, it was mind bending.

It's much, MUCH more developed than you're thinking. Hundreds of thousands of people in a very beautiful and modern city.

A lot has changed in 12 years

But without that, at least the telecoms should probably be reliable.

I'm just saying that as work from home becomes more common, it's only a matter of time before corporate starts measuring "output" now that they can't check up on you whenever. For programmers at least it's not so bad. For everybody else lower than management, I can only see people feeling unfairly shackled.

I am worried about the precedent this sets and the long term consequences. I can certainly imagine a scenario that plays out like the following:

Step 1 - Eliminate geographic considerations for salary.

Step 2 - Scale all salaries to expensive markets.

Step 3 - Slowly allow salaries to stagnate until employees in expensive markets are no longer receiving fair pay.

Step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave for other jobs.

Step 5 - Allow steps 3 and 4 to repeat themselves as many times as you like.

Step 6 - Company has now decreased employee salaries and physical expenses like office space.

Step 7 - Profit.

Or in the UK train drivers ;-)

Sure, the companies tried the standard approach of just secretly agreeing not to compete with each other for talent, but the DoJ didn't care for that, and so they just do the other thing: pay as much money as is necessary to get the folks they want.

Apple makes about $435,000 in profit (not revenue) per employee, including non-technical employees. If they think that they need to pay staggering salaries to programmers to keep a good thing going, they will absolutely do it. Would they like to pay their programmers a third of what they're paying now? Totally. Would such a salary be fair? Totally. But those programmers would just call a Google or Facebook recruiter and be out the door the next day.

I always wondered why the FAANG companies don't move their main campuses to somewhere with a lower CoL (call it CoL') so they only need to pay $(CoL' + X' + Y) to keep the employee. Paying X' (where X' probably less than X) because they're no longer in local competition with the other companies. I wonder how long it would take to recoup the cost of moving the company in savings on compensation. There are countless places which have better quality of life than the Bay Area, while also having lower CoL. I chose to move to the Bay Area because Y was greater than what I could get anywhere else.

There is a reason why software is %20 of the economy and most economic growth in the USA now and why engineers are paid a lot and I believe they are correlated.

Seriously, what are you expecting workers to do exactly?

The only difference is the benefits of non-remote tech-hub work that have been driving the high wages in tech - concentration of talent, face-to-face communication/team-building, advanced urban infrastructure - are now gone. So tech workers will have the same amount of company choice, but can no longer benefit from tech hubs; tell me why companies are going to continue paying the same high wages again?

Concretely, if your work adds $300k/year to company revenue, it will at most pay you that much.

Of course, it prefers to pay you less, and to get close to that number it's best to be part of a big enough labor market that you can get job offers from several employers.

Here's the thing: In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.

What I just described is "supply and demand", with a bit of detail.

The bigger the labour pool, the worse deal you are going to get. You're now competing against the guy in Nowhere Town, this guy can do your job and he's willing to do it for less because he's never experienced an expensive reale estate market.

I run a small consulting practice. We are highly skilled and very experienced. We can often charge much less than our competitors because we don't have the overheads our competitors do. A 1 million dollar deal for my practice is worth a lot more than a 1 million dollar deal for Accenture. We can go down to 700,000 and still have over 90% profitability, Accenture will walk away at that price point because it's not worth their time.

If this was true, big cities would pay the lowest wages, while remote rural places would be where to go for really high pay.

I think the main thing missing from your model is that the employer pool is also growing.

The main thing missing here is that this is the tech industry where there was previously no demand in rural places, which makes the low supply in rural places irrelevant. Before the aggressive lockdowns across the country, tech companies didn't care about rural areas because the increased labor pool wasn't worth the compounding gains you get from a concentration of talent, face-to-face communication, and advanced urban infrastructure. Now they literally can't have that, they will give you a worse deal because they have access to a larger labor pool.

It's kind of absurd to suggest that increasing the labor pool alone will lead to higher wages. It's strictly worse for city dwellers who already benefited from an increasing employer pool, which is now offset by an increasing labor pool.

I think you’ve made a bigger over sight here though:

> In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.

What you would expect from this is a new equilibrium prices that is a) lower than the current highest paid region, and b) higher than the current lowest paid region. Which is a situation that doesn’t benefit anybody currently working in the large metros.

A worse (but likely inevitable) outcome would be if wages started trending towards a price somewhere in between San Francisco and Manila.

Now that supply is spreading across the country because remote work is easier, but that doesn't change the number of developers that these companies are competing for. I doubt that the supply/demand curves will move much at all.

This is a wild statement and I would guess it is coming from someone who hasn't spent much time professionally outside of tech hubs. There are tech jobs and competent developers everywhere. They just exist in a higher concentration in tech hubs.

Even ignoring the silly claim at the end, what you say isn't logical. New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.

This statement supports my point. A large proportion of devs currently live in a tech hub. They moved there because there was opportunity. Telling all the developers that the opportunity will come to them does not magically change the number of developers. So if demand for developers hasn't changed, and the supply hasn't changed, why would salaries change?

The only way the number of available devs changes is if some new untapped supply exists outside of the tech hubs. My argument is that it does not, the majority of devs that could already moved to a tech hub or figured something out.

Maybe as a rough generality. 1/3 of the developers I know were born in SV.

It’s probably not hard to guess the confounding variable.

SV is a 2m+ area filled with local schools, where many of the parents are developers and highly supportive of the education to be a developer. For someone to say “no developers are born in SV” is bewildering.

There's many great developers outside of SV but they're typically doing boring Windows-centric finance or engineering support work.

It will perhaps lead to an equilibrium where salaries are consistent across the US. I'm more curious about the effect it will have on the economy.

But, now I wonder why is the boundary the US? Why not pay the same in Canada or Europe or Asia too? Are they any less valuable?

Radically different legal system.

Starts to matter in a hurry as soon as an employee runs off with your IP to start a competitor.

Step 7 - Watch your lovely forum turn to shit

Step 8 - Fail and declare bankruptcy/get sold to Yahoo

Alternative step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave that market for a cheaper market but keep their job.

I have a feeling that a lot of people in their 30's and 40's no longer really care to live in expensive markets, but traditionally felt it was hard to move and accept much lower wages. Decoupling the job from the location frees a lot of people to move that wanted to.

They can solve that by paying accordingly more for their top technical positions to make those jobs competitive in expensive markets.

[I'm not arguing in favour of this, btw. - just pointing out it's an easy problem to solve]

The number of companies this would be a problem for is tiny.

Is the food at an expensive restaurant better? - sometimes but that is not always why it is expensive.

1. Scale all salaries to expensive markets

2. Stagnate vs inflation, until salaries track mid-market cities (Denver, Austin) instead of San Francisco / NYC. A bout of high national inflation would make this easier.

3. This works well, but only for a while. To be easily productive remotely you should be a Sr Engineer. Juniors will have a harder time. So will managers. Companies focus (even more!) on only hiring experienced devs. Increased competition drives more work outside of the USA.

4. With lots of remote opportunity, there's even more mobility for individual employees. One company is functionally like any other... all of them take place out of the same room in your house, and only differ by who is on the video chat this week. The "shared culture", both company culture (we're all in this mission together!) and regional culture (east coast / west coast) starts to fade. Fading culture amplifies communication overhead, which slows velocity. A very few companies will overcome this with incredible levels of intentionality, but most will fail to do so.

5. To try to solve the culture problem, companies open smaller landing-zone offices in a couple of hub locations. Remote folks fly in once in a while to get excited and pick up a free tshirt. These smaller hub areas become a good place to onboard Jr employees (making hiring easier), and provide a nice environment for executives to meet with customers.

6. Living physically close to the hub office provides greater executive visibility, and greater promotability for folks who care about that. This reinforces the HCOL compensation premium for leadership only. Jr folks (generally young) are happy to scrape by in the city as always because "dating is the killer app for cities." But they move out as they gain seniority / age / start a family, depressing housing costs for ~10-15 years until population growth catches up again.

7. Startups are primarily founded 2 ways: Senior/stable founders launch distributed companies with their former co-workers around the country. Nobody wants to move. Juniors/new grads launch out of the city of their university, with people they met in school.

8. Weirdly, this means that it becomes somewhat efficient for super-tiny startups to locate just outside of major cities, because if you only have a few people it's probably cheaper to live there than buying tons of plane tickets to visit VCs in those areas. Have to raise that next round! But as soon as the company hits mid-size they are quick to move out to cheaper areas.

9. Given all the above, we'll see an averaging of salaries for all areas, with the exception of executive leadership. Vibrant HCOL downtowns will fade and hollow out, suburban hub offices will be more common. Cities with strong tech universities will do best, as always, since they provide the flow of new-grad startups and academic partnerships.

Outside of those, almost every community is eager to bring in high paying jobs.

That's pretty different from new high paying jobs becoming available to the local job market.

For one thing it means local engineering talent doesn't have to move away to have a career.

It has increased some costs, but nothing like Bay Area peninsula for example. You just don’t get the critical mass and no building like that in SD or any other place I’ve seen, save for Manhattan.

The next item on the list would be other things that vary within the US, such as the enforceability of non-compete clauses. Reddit can’t change the law for each state, but they can agree to not add those clauses for any US employee. How they would be held accountable is not a question I know how to answer beyond the realm of public opinion/memory.

Again, I congratulate Reddit for the steps they took so far.

Honestly it's a win-win-win - a win for the company that has far larger talent pool, win for the employee who gets paid more and can move to a more desirable, low cost-of-living location, and win for the "left-behind" areas of the country where many rich techies will move to.

This will reduce class divisions and equalize our communities without any coercion and continue to allow highly-skilled labor to extract maximum income from capital. I very much like this shift towards remote work - it is the silver lining to come out of the pandemic.

I wouldn't call myself a source of advice on remote work necessarily because I kind of fell into remote work by accident pre-COVID, and COVID has really solidified the situation. But it also seems like remote work is going to be on the rise outside of the context of COVID. I live in a city with very little tech industry and so I only rarely here from recruiters, and those that do contact me are usually talking about relo to a different city. Just over the last two months or so I've started hearing from recruiters at nearly the level I did when I lived in San Francisco - and they're mostly not talking relo.

because this isn't how market economics work. You're not payed for being a rockstar, you're payed for the least amount of money you're willing to work for. Indian rockstar coders may be as productive as American ones, the difference is their cost of living is lower, so they're willing to do the same work for less money. Same reason your barista in SF makes more money than the same barista in Podunk Idaho despite serving just as much coffee.

For example, when many people have children, it locks them in to their current job, at least for a while. They have to depend on the parental leave, they need stability and insurance coverage while dealing with a newborn, and their time is taken up with new responsibilities so severely that there’s no way to study, practice and prepare for intense interviews.

If market compensation was truly based on some notion of all the external factors that make a person willing to accept a certain amount of pay, then you should see people getting pay cuts when they have children. But you don’t. In fact, having children is historically correlated with raises, one theory being that it communicates fealty to your employer that you are accepting a life responsibility that yokes you to that employer more strongly - but this affect varies across different cultures and different types of companies.

The same is true for working remotely. There is no “market rate” for a person already working for you aside from what you already pay them. There is no comparable substitute person in the new geographic market that you can swap in for them. They already work for you.

Any salary arbitrage by location would already have to have been priced in when you hired that person in the first place. Them moving to a new location doesn’t suddenly mean they are fungible with a new local substitute - and in fact it’s quite the opposite.

Likely those high cost of living places will quickly drop in cost as most people spread out.

It would be interesting if a bunch of people leaving the Bay Area ended up congregating in certain low-COL communities. I wouldn't be surprised if a sort of rural gentrification occurs in the handful of Midwestern towns that have gigabit fiber. Would those areas remain low COL? Would the existing inhabitants become a sort of underclass?

You'd see something like that, but keep in mind that outside of dense urban cores, you mostly don't have the same constraints on available real estate that drive existing residents out by rising prices (and the SF Bay Area's lack of housing inventory is largely self-inflicted, unlike, say, Manhattan).

So, yes, some competition from well-heeled newcomers will drive prices up a bit (encouraging new construction), but without a constraint on housing inventory that drives the newcomers to compete with each other, what you get is just a bit of urbanization, rather than gentrification per-se.

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

Without being overworked, can a remote manager manage more people than an on-site manager? I don't know any remote managers

Are you sure you've diagnosed this correctly? The managers I know are ready to get back to the office for the exact opposite reason - managing remotely is much harder and more time-consuming.

>why would someone earning 150k in sf should earn the same in Deroit?

Just replace Detroit with [Some other place] and replace SF with Detroit

You're not paid based on the value you create. You're paid as little as a company can get away with paying you.

If the same person relocates to Bermuda why is Reddit not giving them the same money they would give in the top tier US cities? Even better, Reddit will save even more money on them because they wont have to pay payroll taxes.

Or if an employee moves to Mexico City, or even Canada, why would their pay be adjusted down?

I don't know a single compagny that pay the same wage worldwide.

Basecamp.

According to the current status quo it is OK to discriminate remote workers, but that is not an inherent property of the system, just an implementation detail. People are pro/con whether they think they are benefiting from the current state of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_union

Whether you work for Google from SF or Chicago makes no difference to the company as long as you are doing the same work. I'd argue that someone working for Google in the UK should also be paid the same.

Tax rates are very different in the UK and SF or Chicago. Level of social services provided to people is very different, nearly everything is different. I am not saying whether person should or should not be paid the same, but rather pointing out the fact that things are different between UK and SF/Chicago. Most of Google Engineers in the UK pay 40-45% income tax https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates

e: removed the fluff, see child post

You mean, you're from England. The other parts of the UK set their own taxes.

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/articles/scottish-i...

That's not the case. Scotland is the only constituent country of the UK where powers to set income tax have been devolved. Income tax in Wales and Northern Ireland is still controlled by Westminster.

Also seen by some as the value of their houses rising, which they might welcome; and this only happens if there's some demand from other workers to work remotely from their area, which brings money into the area's service sectors. This could breathe new life into many parts of the country that are currently without any particular reason to go on existing.

I could see smaller townships deliberately incentivizing remote workers and designing things around them as a primary source of monetary influx.

This is already in progress and we'll get there before you know it.