Yes: having CoL-adjusted salaries. Maybe you left this as the obvious answer, knowing that the people who frequent this board would downvote it.

That’s penalizing those living in a lower CoL area. “Here’s a giant paycheck for those of you who want to live in the Bay Area where you can eventually buy a $2 million house.”

Subsidizing high-CoL people who get the advantages of being in a city is not fair at all. It’s only tolerated because high-CoL cities tend to be where the talent is most concentrated so you have to compete for them.

For example, Google will not pay Zurich engineers Bay Area equivalent salaries despite there being similar CoLs.

I’m a programmer living in a low CoL area. My salary (for 25 years now) has reflected that. I think it’s fair. I don’t make the same money as I would in an urban center, but, then, my longest commute during that time was 20 minutes. Usually about 5.

Why do you think that’s fair? Why should you be expected to subsidize a co-worker who does the same thing as you but demands to live in a super expensive city?

Would you think it’s fair if you lived in the same city but your company paid more money to people with more expensive houses?

Google actually pays Zurich engineers more than Bay Area, something like +15% IIRC. I was close to moving out there at one point and know a few people who did.

No, not when it comes to TC. L5 TC when I left Google was just under $500k once stock and target bonus were counted (for new stock grants not counting appreciation). Zurich TC was like $250-300k USD for L5s in my same group.

Wouldn't the neutral solution be to pick a target standard of living (roughly approximated by something like a 75th percentile market rate salary, or whatever metric you chose) and pay that for any given location?

I'm aware of several teams that have done this with success in the past. Everybody, no matter their region of choice, gets compensation enough to enable an appropriately comfortable standard of living desired based on the actual costs of living where they choose. This is what we're talking about when we advocate for adjusting salaries for COL. It creates incentive for your employees to live where they actually want to live, work, and be happy - rather than wherever they feel like they can extract the most cash value from the company.

Those measures tend to be pretty dumb though because “comfortable standard of living” is very subjective. I know people who think a 2BR apartment in Manhattan is awful compared to an acre on the edge of a town with a manufactured 3 bed/2ba home, 2 car garage, and a workshop.

So the equivalent “comfortable standard of living” they’re used to in Manhattan would require a $5 million annual salary.