> you have basically handed your wallet to the "wallet inspector"

By accepting location-based pay, you concede that your employer has the right to treat you like a child receiving an allowance; that your remuneration is based on the lifestyle that they think is appropriate for you, and not on the market value of your work. But your choice of lifestyle, your needs, etc, are strictly none of their business and it's exceptionally inappropriate for employers to act like your parents. Once you let these people "inspect your wallet," you are establishing an abusive relationship and will get hustled around the clock.

Interesting choice to invoke market value to argue that the salaries that the market has settled on for remote work are too low.

The market value of work isn't the amount of revenue that the work brings in. If you think you can capture the full value of the work you do for yourself, you're always free to work as a solo entrepreneur instead of working a traditional job. That's kind of an upper bound on what the company could pay you, but the market value of the work is based on the number of employees the company needs and the number of qualified employees they can find. Remote work floods the supply with lots more available workers than they can find in any one city, so salaries for those roles go down. That's not treating you like a child, it's just how a market works.

Not too long ago, I remember threads on HN where people were saying that $200k or $250k wasn't enough for a SF dev and using real estate prices and general cost of living as justification. You can't have it both ways - either your general cost of living is taken into account in your salary (location-based pay), or it's not. If it's not, get ready for a market where the average senior developer makes $90-110k/yr, total comp.

I'd argue that this isn't really what location based pay is worried about. In this case, you're being paid specifically be close to some location or collective building because your employer values that collectiveness. That's okay. That's the company communicating "we value the ability for you to be here, in person, with this group of people - so we're going to incentivize it".

The problem with location based pay is when an employer says, "You can work from anywhere you want, but we want to know where that is so we can pay you less". You provide them the same value from mid-city America as you do in rural America. They simply want to pay you less when they can.

No, you are compensated for how much someone doing the same work would demand.

Like the original comment said, most programmers probably need to read a book about negotiation so that they can clearly communicate their skills and why they are not easily replaceable. Once you're established as an unique professional with an unique skill mix, you'll be compensated for how much the team to replace you would cost.

A candidate can't ask for an obviously uncompetitive salary, but they can ask on the high end for what a company expects to pay for an employee.

I don’t understand why pepple keep repeating this. Obviously we are paid what they can get away with. We’re just trying to change what that is. If everyone starts accepting location based pay, we’ll be fucked in the long term.

Or, well. It’s strictly better for me if I get paid SF wages anywhere in the world.

There is, obviously, incredible incentive to defect. If you're going to demand 100% of SF wages, I can improve my lot by demanding 99%. Then the next SWE can undercut me at only 98%, and so on.

Setting aside that obviously, on an individual level, an employer will typically want to pay you as little as they can get away with, this isn't how location based pay works at a macro level.

Saying "You can work from anywhere you want, but we want to know where that is so we can pay you more" is an equally (in)valid statement since it's about pay distribution.

A high local real estate price is a reason you can't profitably work for less and its something you can profitably express to an employer if they will take it into account in order to access the local labor market.

A lower local real estate cost is a reason you could work for less not a reason you ought to want to.

You absolutely should try to have it both ways to the greatest extent possible because they are too.

I am not sold on full remote working for most companies. I am not even convinced the little covid experiment demonstrated anything, as companies still benefit from employees knowing each others from before the lockdown. Long term the effects in term of productivity, employee morale or culture may be quite different. A compromise is having more local offices, but even then, everywhere I saw it before, it creates a “them” vs “us” between offices, people feel remote from the centres of decision, etc.

But -- and I feel like I'm alone in this -- my personal observation is that even for teams that knew each other before full time WFH I've noticed the teams _mostly_ are not doing new and challenging projects. There's a ton of work and small iterating possible in any company, but I notice all the challenging projects have been punted - or are moving very slowly.

My personal conclusion is that remote work does not, in fact, work well, at least for some types of projects. I can totally see UI-heavy stuff working out, for example, but not embedded or high complexity projects.

I have become interested with the real value of software, and how getting rid of stupid high wages could be a great thing for the industry.

As an analogy, if a country has reasonably priced infrastructure workers (laymen and engineers) it can afford to build the infrastructure it's community needs. If you blow your annual budget building 6 miles of train line, you'll never have high speed rail. Real world example: Australia, one of the richest countries in the world, notoriously high infrastructure costs. While the rest of the world is speeding away with high speed rail, we could barely afford a two stop tram extension in the CBD.

Now have a think about all the software that doesn't get written because it's prohibitively expensive to make it, lots of boutique applications for specific needs, or local communities that need software to help with problems in their community. There are probably a lot of companies that could really do with an inhouse software team, but would never entertain the idea on account of the cost.

Also Australian workers are no doubt well paid compared with some, but compared with the U.S. or Western Europe? Taking into account cost of living etc.? Certainly engineers in Australia in general don't seem to be getting SV wages.

That being said, the original poster is a little bit off, as both Sydney and Melbourne have inner-city transport options and infrastructure that outcompete practically all American cities in that regard, and punches pretty damn well on a worldwide basis (behind only a few cities that are notable specifically because they are world leaders).

Cost of living allowance/adjustment (COLA) was a retention strategy originally designed to give workers being transferred overseas and to large metropolitan areas more money, not less. You should do some reading up on HR practices if you want them to stop taking advantage of you.

My simple counter was that "if I save 20% of my salary per month, I will have 4k in the end of the year. If I take an €60k (net) job in Frankfurt and again I save 20%, I will have 12k". Why would I 'sell myself short' for 8k of savings per year? It only made him angrier because my narrative did not match his sales-pitch. I never got to work for Amazon (or anyone else in Bratislava).

Location matters.

If you want €100k then don't look in Bratislava.

If you want a 'slow calm life' (away from the madness of London/Paris/etc.) go to Bratislava or Ljubljana and be happy with the €40k.

> You can't have it both ways..

No but people love to complain.

PS/Addition: it feels like "bait and switch". It's like hiring me in Bratislava, giving me a small (net) salary and ask me to work from London. I wouldn't accept that. The employee would also feel cheated the other way around. And with that said this is my favorite cities' cost comparison: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jsp

Many IT companies in Bratislava hire local people for local salaries... and then make them travel to other countries exactly 49% of the year (so they still pay taxes locally); the remaining 51% of time working for a foreign client remotely from a local office.

My friend had a job where he had to fly to a Western country every Monday morning, and fly back home every Friday evening, to maximize the number of working days within that 49% of the year. (This way you can work abroad for 36 weeks a year, instead of "mere" 26.) And of course he had to spend 8 hours working each Monday or Friday, so he left home on Monday soon after midnight, and arrived home on Friday shortly before midnight, so he basically spent the whole weekend sleeping. (He already quit that job.)

If i live in a low COL area and i apply, why wouldn't i want the competitive advantage of being able to charge them half as much and make twice as much profit as my competition?

People outside the bay area can make a good living charging well below crazy SF rates.

This isn't even an argument to me. It's not even a discussion. Of course when you have a pool of talent, and that talent is competing for a single job, they will use every tool possible. If you can work for half the price of some SF guy paying massive SF rates, why wouldn't you use that tool?

Yea sure, i could make $200k a year - that would be neat i suppose, but it's insane imo. The number only exists because of SF specific problems. And i'm not in SF.

And thats exactly how a company should operate - maximize profit while minimizing cost. And conversly, as an individual, you should do the exact same, which is get paid as much as you can for your work (or do the minimum amount of work for the pay you get). When both of those strategies meet in the middle, you get a paid job position.

Agreed entirely. It depends on what specifically we're discussing. I often look at hiring.

> If Google cuts your salary 50% because you move to a cheaper area, maybe that doesn't make a difference to you but it is free profit for Google shareholders. It makes it more obvious to people that the amount they are paid and the amount of marginal profit they earn for the company is WILDLY incommensurate, even for over-compensated Silly Valley engineers, and would be even moreso if you move somewhere cheaper and take a pay cut.

I wouldn't work somewhere that did this for this very reason. But there's a huge difference to paying someone based on their finances, and negotiating hiring pay. I'm just talking about hiring pay being negotiable.

I feel like people saying "just move to a low COL area" have never actually lived and worked in a low COL.

If you lose your job or get fired, there's no one to back up that "half as much, x2 profit" unless you find remote work again, and then you're also at the mercy of whatever people feel they can get out of you. Without competing offers or local competition, you're at the mercy of the market.

People are underselling the competition that nuclei of talent can produce from top competing companies.

Also, people need to remember that "cost of living" is not actually one thing. It's not like I get a "living" bill once a year that I have to pay. Even in relatively cheap areas, there are some things that cost the same as or even more than they do in major metro areas. Don't do math based on some web-based COL calculator or even on housing prices and assume that it will apply across the board.

I have absolutely seen offers within the last six months where the candidate would be worse off financially despite living in a "cheap" place because the pay reduction was more than the all-in cost of living a similar lifestyle (yes, if you're willing to downgrade lifestyle you can offset this, but you can do the same thing in SF. Most people I've seen actually want to UPGRADE lifestyle with larger houses, more land, nicer neighborhoods, etc.).

Ok hold up in what world does $250k in SV suck? Median household income here is around $120k last I checked. Making more than double that cannot be described as sucking, come on.

I'll believe this only insofar as $120k in the Midwest means you are "set" in the sense that you can max out your retirement, buy a home, have nice cars, etc. and basically live on autopilot from a financial sense.

This type of housing setup that would cost $300k in, say Dallas, will cost $2.5 million on the peninsula. Between property taxes, mortgage insurance, interest, and principal payments and a jaw dropping $140k down payment, that is a monthly payment of $14k or so.

Your take-home after taxes on 250k in the bay is probably around 160k, or 13.3k a month. Whoops, no “American dream” home for you.

Then again I would describe most of the houses here as somewhere between a hovel and a shack in terms of build quality. But I’m getting used to it after 6 years.

I would agree if it weren’t for the fact that this is still a completely reasonable expectation in most of the rest of the country.

Of course it’s going to cost a crazy amount of money. It’s not even an option in Manhattan, but plenty of people would disagree it “sucks” there.

In Manhattan thats the expectation. You’re in a super dense area filled with high rises. Life is good for apartment dwelling.

In Mountain View, you’re in a suburb that’s mostly single family homes that you’re constantly reminded you won’t ever be able to afford.

> How is it reasonable in the least to expect a big house with a garage and a yard

That’s the lifestyle of the peninsula. It’s reasonable to expect the lifestyle you are constantly surrounded by. Back to the Manhattan analogy, $250k absolutely would not be considered good money if it could not afford you the ability to live like the average property owner.

The Bay Area is a stark contrast between the people lucky enough to have purchased 10+ years ago + some FAANGs and everyone else. Everyone else is stuck in a terrible apartment telling themselves stories about how they’ll get out after making their money or whatever.

It’s nice living in a walkable apartment with no car in Manhattan (or nyc in general). It’s dreary AF on the peninsula.

No, it's not. Should you be able to afford a home in Beverley Hills? Should you be able to afford a home in San Francisco itself? 40 years ago that was the norm.

Yes, it is. The norm in cities in the US until very recently was that you could get a middle class job, buy a small home, raise a family, etc. This phenomenon of only being able to lick the boots of the homeowners near the good jobs is relative new.

> able to afford a home in Beverley Hills

We’re talking about the entire Bay Area, not a specific suburb. Anywhere within an hour commute of Google HQ is like this.

> Should you be able to afford a home in San Francisco itself? 40 years ago that was the norm.

Yes. It was the norm. Then the nimby dickheads stepped in and pulled up the ladder behind them by blocking everything they could and pushed through a very favorable proposition to existing homeowners (prop 13).

Your opinion might be that it’s fine to block out an entire generation from the bay and rent seek. I personally think that’s a shitty drag on society propped up by government created housing scarcity.

If you're aiming for $50k/y in profit after all COL, your required pricing is different in SF than it is in rural America.

If you live in rural America and compete at hiring with SF people, it's your competitive advantage to keep the same profit as them but negotiate a lower price. This increases your relative value in the hiring process.

Sure, i _could_ keep the same SF rates, but then my competitive advantage may just be my skill. If i want more than skill alone, i could lower my rates.

I'm not making less profit. I'm competing to get a job.

That is how you negotiate when you’re struggling to find a job. By doing this you’re admitting that you’re not going to be as good as the high CoL candidate so you adjust your price to make your offer more attractive to the company. That’s a terrible position to put yourself in (but entirely understandable if you can’t get offers otherwise).

If you’ve passed the same bar and the company is truly fine with remote, there no reason to accept anything less than what they would pay a local. Speaking from experience in several tech companies in the bay, a proven remote employee is just as valuable as a local and getting decent software people is fucking hard.

It’s unlikely as a candidate that there is even any competition for the position you are filling (as in not multiple candidates that have passed the bar being picked over). Talking you into cost of living adjustments or whatever bullshit is just salary negotiation, not competition with other engineers.

Get multiple offers if you have to, but there is literally no reason a company willing to pay Bay Area salaries can’t pay that to a remote employee. Accepting less is just letting them convince you your labor isn’t as good as Bay Area SWE labor.

Yup. That's what i said.

If you see no reason to negotiate, why negotiate? Set your price at what your think your value is. Don't indulge COL requirements of another location.

> It’s unlikely as a candidate that there is even any competition for the position you are filling (as in not multiple candidates that have passed the bar being picked over). Talking you into cost of living adjustments or whatever bullshit is just salary negotiation, not competition with other engineers.

As someone who hires, i disagree. Every one of our hires has been a debate on expected output when compared to cost. But we're a fully remote company.

edit: Oh, and we're not flush with VC cash. We also can't afford any SF employees for this reason. We're much more willing to hire a junior engineer if their priced accordingly. Likewise, if we hired someone at $250k/y, we'd expect twice the output of him/her - and that's unlikely.

I don't get why this is controversial.

Just because someone is charging $200k doesn’t mean they are worth it.

Companies previously established artificial constraints such as colocation that forced higher salaries. If colocation is no longer a requirement, it’s only natural the associated premium is going away. That is, if you want the benefit of living in, say India, then you’ll also have to incur the cost of competing against someone like Ramanujan (famous mathematician) rather than whoever just happens to be within commuting distance of Mountain View.

You are competing on price instead of quality. I'd rather compete on talent and keep the money, thanks.

The era of $400k total comp software development is going to end someday and more accessible remote work is only going to hasten it.

Well, the same argument has been made before regarding offshoring and so far that hasn't seemed to have spurred any major declines in total compensation.

Yes, but things are different this time (famous last words, I know). Prior to COVID-19, offshoring was competing with the convenience of having everybody in the same physical space. Now, with every tech company currently having nearly all of their staff working from home, they are learning to make the equivalent of offshoring work; they have no choice in the matter if they want to continue operating. It's a small, small jump from there to outsourcing to low cost of living regions or even real offshoring.

I'm not sure I buy this when the vast majority of these CEOs have magnitudes more money than they could feasibly spend even if they used a flamethrower. Honestly I don't see tech becoming less useful/profitable in the future, quite the opposite. As long as these $400k employees are netting people higher up a lot more, it isn't going to stop. One could argue that there's still room to pay the employees even more. (and let's be real, most people aren't getting $400k tc)

The situation in the valley developed in the 90s and 00s, so that companies could be located close to their investors. That was a time when remote work tools sucked and work practices forced people to be in the same office as the founders, so it made lots of sense that the proximity to capital spiked rents and comp to match.

But now, post-pandemic, remote work is the norm. The founders can relocate to the valley because investment finance is largely a relationship game and those are still way better done in person, but there’s no longer any reason the technical team needs to be located near the founders or even each other.

There is huge disparity in engineering salaries — if you work for a smallish company in a rural area you’re probably making $80k/yr for doing the same job someone in the bay gets $175+ for. Ideally it will work the other way around though — the folks making $80k are much more likely to jump ship for a remote job that pays $125k than the folks making $175k are to jump to the same job.

Of course, if organize via collective bargaining we can likely push that even higher, so listen to your union organizers.

But I do agree with you, it's high risk and there's a lot of luck involved. And it's much more important to find a job that's a good fit for you.

When we think of SF software, we think of software created by a company whose core product is the software itself, especially when the end-users are individuals or other software companies.

This is quite a bit different than most software developed outside of the bay area. Most of it is either in-house stuff or industry-specific B2B stuff. In these situations, the software doesn't have to be pretty, it doesn't have to use cutting-edge tech to woo investors, resource utilization is much less important, and hell - it usually doesn't even have to scale. It just has to work. It just has to make someone's job incrementally better, and it'll be a success.

This software can be tremendously valuable, and creating it has its own unique challenges, but the job is indeed a bit different than software engineering in the bay, and the compensation is different as well.

And my current job quite often has multiple teams from multiple employers/agencies from multiple time zones - even being able to have key meetings with all hand present would massively speed up - we could have avoided so many problems and delivered things months quicker.

They’ve actually seen a huge increase in productivity by moving to a virtual model during the pandemic — exactly because nobody is wasting 2 hours of their day waiting on elevators or waiting for meetings to start. People have more autonomy to block off their day and there aren’t the distractions present in a normal open office.

If I were to informally poll all of the product development organizations I work with, I would expect to see at least 90% of folks want to maintain the remote workplace going forward. They’ll still probably go back to some level of in-person work later this year, but the difference is that remote will still probably be the default for most folks. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to a model that assumes all or even most of the team is located in the same room — it’s just too much better to do things this way.

Trying to get things done properly is very hard if we could have even kickoff meetings with every one in the room and have printed designs stuck to the wall

And frankly most of the dev projects I work on are globally distributed anyway, so you’re never getting everyone in the same room to begin with.

But many engineers can work in the Bay Area for 10 years to become a millionaire then move elsewhere, buy a house cash and retire early (or work a lower pay job if they feel like it).

This sounds good on paper, but what you’re saying is establish roots in one place and then rip them up (take your kids out of schools, away from their friends, leave your friends, hobbies, etc). 10 years isn’t exactly an in-n-out stint on an oil rig.

Raises tend to be percentage-based. The junior making 200k in SF may be worse off than the junior making 100k in Pittsburgh.

But the senior making 400k in SF is much better off than the senior making 200k in Pittsburgh.

Since Silicon valley is that one weird place where it takes five years for a junior to become a senior, taking that job in Pittsburgh is quite short-sighted.

You’re correct, but that’s not what’s happening here. Facebook isn’t paying remote workers uniformly less than in person workers. It is paying different amounts for different remote workers depending on where they live. That makes no sense given that, as you observe, there is a single national market for remote workers. The fact that Facebook can do that is an indicator that it either has market power in the employment market for programmers, or that we’re in an odd situation where the market hasn’t reached equilibrium.

No. If you have a monopoly on a skill/knowledge/certification/etc, then in theory you can extract rent from the business, potentially up to the profits of the business (well, profits less the returns required to cover risk of capital). The maximum you can earn is far more than the value you create.

However, what it does not justify is location-based pay. From the company's perspective, there is no significant difference between a remote worker in New York City or Birmingham, Alabama.

I think supply and demand is still a big part of the answer. By square mileage the potential locations where employees can live has grown by 200x by opening up to remote work anywhere in the US (napkin math, US is 3.8 million sq miles, bay area and tri-state area combined are ~20k sq miles). But obviously the number of available engineers hasn't expanded by nearly that much, engineers are much more concentrated in the areas where most of the jobs have been concentrated up until now. I.e. companies still can't afford to limit their supply to remote only, just as they increasingly can't afford to limit supply to bay area only.

Then there's also the perhaps more controversial issue of skill & experience. The most in-demand engineers are the people with experience at Google, FB, etc. and these people are concentrated in the places where these companies are. Ambitious people also have self-selected to live in these hot markets for years. You could argue that these proxy factors shouldn't matter and companies should be measuring skill directly, but as an industry we still haven't cracked that problem. So on average, a remote engineer in NYC probably is more valuable to most companies than one in Birmingham, Al. Like it or not, there's still a lot inertia to overcome here (and maybe even a little bit of validity to these patterns).

There are plenty of developers who speak great English in the EU, many natively in the UK and Australia and Canada.

Why are these not all getting heavily poached by SV?

Because SV value in-person developers, so have driven up the pay for developers in SV, but in Europe a mid-level developer is still on something like €40-50k.

The “external factors” you speak of are the market conditions in which the market operates. You can change the external factors and the market will rebalance to a new equalibrium but that doenst mean the market was wrong before and correct now.

In the end, employers are free to make whatever excuse they want to try to pay less, but I will respectfully decline to take a 50% pay cut to produce the same value for them :)

My friend who works remote makes just as much as I used to working in the office (when I was in industry). He's not getting "location-based" pay, so I'd say that "the market" has not unanimously decided on that quite yet.

- I have a family with children. Should I get paid more than an employee who lives alone? - I have a big house that has a large mortgage. Should I get paid more than an employee who lives in a cheap apartment? - I have purchased a yacht that requires maintenance. Should I get paid more than an employee who hasn't?

Sure, the last one is ridiculous, but honestly, they're _all_ ridiculous. The idea that your employer should be able to look at your expenses and judge which ones are valid and which ones aren't, and then adjust your pay "appropriately" is offensive on a deep level.

The language itself, "should I get paid" assumes a parental allowance relationship and we should get out of the habit of using it. "Get paid" is a day-labourers colloquialism. The form of the phrase itself defines you as the passive subject.

Bill for work, draw a salary, agree to compensation, accept consideration, negotiate a package, earn bonuses, settle invoices, sell services (not time), sell equity - do not "get paid" by anyone. It's a psychological impediment that keeps people poor.

Penniless immigrants come to the US and within one (at most 2) generations become the 1% exactly because they DON'T think the way you do.

Mindset is everything.

It truly is. I may have a passion for Alizé and Cristal and to afford that passion I may want to live in a rural setting. That’s my business. Who are these people to try and tell me that whether I live in SF or Nebraska, they’re only going to let me drink André?

If an employer has nothing to do with your lifestyle choices, then they won't pay for them. For a truly remote position, they won't pay extra if you life in NY/SF vs Nebraska.

However, I think the world hasn't adapted to that market economics yet, so in this time of transition people talk about location-based pay as a stopgap measure. Software development doesn't benefit from a centralized location, so in the future developers won't naturally live in big expensive cities and employers won't pay them wages that permit them to do so.

To be honest, I think the best thing would be for SW Devs to have a guild that aids in collective bargaining. Otherwise, the power balance will gradually tilt too far towards employers. Other professional jobs (e.g. medicine, law) have similar arrangements, and that's the only reason why pay can remain high in them.

Sort of like a worker’s union?

No one making these decisions actually has this idea. It's just more acceptable PR than "we're going to lower your pay because we think you will accept it because we think that you won't or you think you won't have better options."

Should you? No. Do you have to? Yes.

If you have a family of four, a yacht and a mortgage maybe you need to make - say - $200k/y. Cool. But what about some single guy with none of those things, he can work for $100k/y and make the same profit as you.

Are you saying he shouldn't use his competitive advantage over you to get hired?

This isn't about the employer. It's about the employee, and what their life allows them to work for.

So rather than compete in the job market based on your skill set and what value they bring to a company, you should instead focus on not starting a family and living as cheaply as possible in order to make yourself attractive to companies. I'm sure employers would love for you to center your life around making yourself as cheap to hire as possible, but from the point of view of the employee it sounds extremely unhealthy.

Maybe. I got into this market because i was able to apply at a much cheaper position, beating out other more skilled employees. I levered my lower pay to offset my lack of history in the market. Were there more skilled people applying? Definitely. Did they apply at a higher rate? Definitely.

Sure if you wanted to go to extremes you should live as cheaply as possible. But you could say that about anything. Instead, live how you want to live and expect to deal with that cost of living. You said it yourself, "skill set and what value they bring". What value you bring to a company is relative to what they pay you. If you cost $500k/y but your skillset is that of a junior engineer, do you honestly think your value is the same of a similar junior engineer working for $100k/y? Unlikely.

If you want to live in a city you are simply required to make more money than someone living in a rural environment. If i have a huge mortgage i can't work at walmart. I need to make more. These are all relative values based on COL, how much you spend, etc. This shouldn't be a controversial statement, in my view.

Mind you i'm very liberal. I believe in worker rights. But forcing everyone to be paid for insanely high COL SF rates seems bonkers. Absolute bonkers.

(off-topic) this reminds me of a job interview I had early in my career. The person interviewing me was one of the directors of the company and he asked me why I'd requested such a salary.

Initially I was thinking he'd want me to answer some bullshit about Bringing Value To The Company etc but he started probing about my personal life - do I have a wife/kids, what do I spent money on, how much is your rent, how much disposable income do you have and why do you want more.

Needless to say I wasn't impressed by this and decided to cut the interview short.

(I actually took the job despite this because I wanted to get on the internet train, and I don't regret it. Also, it took me a bit over a year to take over that manager's role and make X2.5 of the original lowball salary)

Except that it seems that there are a whole machine gun worth of bullets just in this HN thread.

The market value of your work depends, in no small part, on whether or not that work includes showing your face X days a week at an office in San Francisco.

However, that this not the argument these people are making. The argument I see time and again is that your compensation should be location-adjusted based on cost of living. And by making that argument, they are clearly saying you are—or are not—entitled to a certain degree of living, which is where it gets creepy, inappropriate and inevitably abusive.

And why do I say creepy? Because saying that a person does or does not deserve a certain lifestyle, and saying that they will or will not facilitate that lifestyle for you, crosses a boundary into your personal life that degrades you as an independent individual who is entitled to decide whether or not you do basic things like saving money. Instead of treating you like a person, they treat you and force you to conceive of yourself some sort of "lifestyle consumer." Sure, some people just have no leverage. But normalizing this way if thinking is going to lead us down an even worse labor path than we are on right now. Your employer is not your legal guardian.

Employees have no more reason to be concerned about the value of their work to employers than employers have to be concerned about the value of their pay to employees.

If you want to be logical about it the only thing that matters is the market. But both sides try to bring in irrelevant arguments in hopes of getting leverage in negotiations. Sometimes it even works!

There isn't one market. A remote SV developer should be able to command more if they can sell a connection to SV. Same for a FAANG company.. you can get paided more for being associated with a faang

Pay market rates. If you want people on location in SF, pay SF market rates. If you want people occasionally on location in SF, pay SF market rates. If you want people to travel rarely to SF pay local area rates to the nearest office the person lives by.

SF is neither the center of the universe nor where all the interesting problems/projects reside.

One change. For those you only rarely require to travel to any of your offices, pay the same regardless of where they live. All remote locations are the same as far as the company is concerned [1].

For a company with N offices, there are only N+1 locations as far as pay should go: the local rate in each of the N office's local area, paid to people who are required to be on location there more than rarely, and the rate for everyone else.

On those rare occasions when someone in the everyone else group is required to come to one of the offices, treat it like any other required business trip and the company pays for travel and lodging and food.

[1] to a first approximation. If the company needs a job to be done on a particular daily schedule, then there are two remote locations as far as the company is concerned: time zones where that schedule is reasonable, and everywhere else.

The point is that you as a company do not care where your remote workers are except perhaps they need to be in a timezone close to that of whichever office of yours they are working most closely with.

If you can pay remote workers what would be a good wage in El Paso or Tulsa or Boise and that is sufficient to get you enough good workers from such places to fill your needs, you don't care that it is not enough to get workers from Boston or Minneapolis or Chicago because you don't specifically need workers from Boston or Minneapolis or Chicago.

(i'm being ironic here, btw)

Say hi to Doc Brown for me, thanks.

You claim that you should be paid based on market value. You are probably speaking about the pre-covid market value.

But once you open up to full-remote working... The market broadens immensely.

Your "competitors" in the market are not bay-area people anymore. It's the whole US. If your company has branches in other countries too (think FAANGs) and the workforce was already spread across timezone then now most of the world is filled with potential competitors for your job.

And now with a huge supply of workers, your market value decreases a lot.

And to be 100% honest: as an european, if you (an american) think you're worth 250k and your employer is thinking of firing you and offering me 125k for your job... Well good luck with your next job search.

Agreed, not just American, anyone roughly in the same time zone. There are lots of well educated people in Peru/Chile/Brazil that would work 24hrs a day for a $25k salary.

i can’t understand this pov at all. unlike a child allowance, you can say no and court a different parent.

you are simply labor, and location based pay reflects this. the only ones complaining are those receiving less pay. it’s like when people complain (loudly) that “stealerships” add a markup above msrp for high demand cars, but the same people don’t complain about discounts from msrp for basic cars. if you don’t want the car at the offered price, move on!

Its not about the location, employer should always try maximize profit, if they can get the same service with lower expense, they should.

But, I am saying, that if you accept an offer that is based on what your employer thinks is an appropriate lifestyle for you, adjusted to the cost of living in your area, and not on the value of your work, that will immediately establish what I consider is a particularly inappropriate relationship between employer and employee. Of course this happens all the time for many reasons, but what we're seeing now is employers inventing and normalizing yet another, new tactic to deploy when trying to get you to accept less compensation. It's just another trick. But what's particularly insidious about this trick is that what they're doing is openly laying claim to your lifestyle by saying that: suppose you're a senior developer, you are entitled to organic groceries, whereas a junior developer is entitled to conventional produce, regardless of where you live, that's what you deserve. But that's wholly inappropriate: your compensation should depend on what you produce, and your lifestyle should be none of their business. If I want to move to Thailand or the middle of a field in Nebraska and save money, that's none of their business. There is no "objective" lifestyle that a senior developer should be entitled to. But that's this new trick they are trying to pull, and it's nothing short of disturbing and creepy.

The same way employee should use whatever 'tricks' at their disposal to get a higher pay.

For a buyer, that means a lower price. For the seller, that means a higher price.

Not a single other factor matters.

I keep repeating this on HN whenever a comp conversations come up. Unless lotsofpulp's comment resonates deeply with your bone marrow level intuition of what gets you paid, you're totally missing the point (and making bad choices.)

If we can remove location-based pay as a negotiation tactic, merely by creating social disapproval because its 'invasive', and the like then that's wonderful for us as as employees.

Why shouldn't we work together to hobble employers at the negotiation table? They have enough power as it is.

I have worked with two kinds of employees that are willing to accept lower pay.

- those moving for a better lifestyle who have earned and saved considerably more elsewhere. I call these “working retirees”.

- those who have family sending them money to subsidize their cost of living in an expensive city.

When looking at an individual employee's decisions, these policies don't seem to help the company. I think they only really make sense when thinking about populations, where people are less mobile and more fungible.

> that your remuneration is based on the lifestyle that they think is appropriate for you

Often, these schemes happen because it's employees who have lifestyle expectations. "I'd love to work for your company, but I'm not cutting my standard of living." And that's reasonable. The raw amount of money means way less to most people than what it means for their lives. And straight cash compensation is only one factor in picking a job.

The truth here is that the Internet has caused context collapse in far more than work. Labor markets used to be local. They still mostly are, but for those of us lucky enough to be able to work remotely, that's changing. That's going to have knock-on effects in other markets (housing, food, education, etc) for at least a couple of generations.

As we jointly work out the new normal, I think it's worth starting with the assumption that people are not all complete assholes. Yes, by all means let's watch out for worker exploitation; there's a lot of it. But from what I've seen, so many policies are just well-meaning people tinkering with things that they inherited. We can be firm about negotiating for fairness without assuming everybody's out to get us.

Just about all benefits offered by employers, from maternity leave to health care, function as allowances for particular purposes. They pay a variable amount based on the varying needs of a workforce.

One could even relabel the location-based-pay as a "rent supplement". If everyone get the same pay but those paying crazy high rents get extra to ameliorate this, it sound better.

Which still isn't saying I like this idea. I don't think pay should be able to be easily translated to benefits and I think only things that are unalterably unequal, like health care and maternity leave, should be doled out as benefits.

But I don't think one can make the argument that "allowance" type pay is inherently offensive. I mean, one allowance thing that's totally reasonable is when employees have to go to conferences for a work and the employer gives them an allowance for the incidental expenses they're incur.

Understand and negotiate based off the value you provide, and what you can bring to the business. Chances are, your local cost of living has very little to do with that.

No, I'm just saying sometimes employers can reasonably take employee costs into account - health care, maternity leave, day care, etc. Not here, I agree employers should not consider this. But I think saying employers should never take variable employee costs into account is an argument that's wrong, so making that absolutist argument won't help the case.

It’s all negotiations. If you think it’s worth taking a $10k paycut for a $5k (for the business)/$12k (as an individual) health plan, then it’s win-win.

If you take a $10k paycheck because you live in Nebraska (and nothing else), and the Company is in SF? That’s just bad negotiating.

If the company is in Nebraska and only pays $10k less and can get plenty of takers locally - then they won’t get many people from SF, and they’re probably fine with that.

You're really not doing the HN user stereotype of entitled valley types any favors using very personal ego-centred words such as "offensive".

Of course, since there is more demand than supply of qualified workers, remuneration rises above that minimum. But as long as an Indian developer is "glad" to do the same work as you for 1/4 pay...

Local cost of living, if everyone is working remotely, has no bearing on the value you provide your employer. Discussing location based pay in that environment is rather absurd, is it not?

The difference now is artificial constraints within countries around locale are loosening, meaning locals can play the same game (and take advantage of similar bid/ask spreads personally). IT work in India happened because while super hard to get started/get over the bar, the wage differential was huge (between what a viable candidate would accept, and what the company was willing to pay). Multinationals who could get over the bar to take advantage of it have reaped trillions.

For jobs that are fundamentally local, it is different (plumber for instance). The number of those jobs is decreasing over time, however.

This will likely result in a 'reverse brain drain' as long as conditions persist, with rural areas benefitting from smart and ambitious people no longer being forced to relocate to a city to benefit. They'll pump money into the local economy.

For people already remote, they'll have more competition and will need to continue to differentiate.

For those in cities, well - it's gonna be rough.

Long term, it's likely that center of gravity will shift back to the cities - physical distance does have beneficial effects, and at least when there isn't a pandemic, it tends to override the other issues with city life (competition for space means high rents, noise, etc.). It might take awhile though.

If you're aiming for low/mid-level (generic) employee, you're eventually going to have a hard time competing with someone who can survive on less. It has been what is causing a lot of the angst in the middle and lower class (especially in manufacturing jobs), as their labor is easy to outsource in many cases to cheaper places.

Yes, everyone should learn about negotiation. And as the authors of Negotiation Genius point out, you're making the mistake most people make - only considering your BATNA and not considering the other party's BATNA.

Ask yourself what alternative Facebook has if you insist on a Bay Area salary while living in the Midwest. The answer will be "More than they had pre-COVID." This reduces your bargaining power. Allowing remote work has significantly increased their pool of applicants. For every one of you, there are probably over 10 people as good as you who are happy taking a 20-30% salary increase while still getting paid 30% less than SV folks.

While your advice is sound, you are only providing one half of the dynamic. One of the lessons in almost all negotiation books is to spend time understanding the position of the other side.

If you need someone in the same time zone who speaks English at a level that enables them to contribute work of the same quality and volume as a native speaker, you've really only added Canada.

If you discount the language requirement, you can add Central and South America.

Only if you discount both the language requirement and the time zone requirement can you add the rest of the world.

Time zone issues are a bit of a pain, but manageable. As long as you don't have to meet with them daily, you (or they) simply schedule the once-every-week-or-two-weeks meeting at a time that can work (a little earlier in the morning or later in the evening). It was quite customary to leave early or start late on some days to make up for having a 1-2 hour meeting in the evening or early morning. This is well understood.

To be clear: Those developers were "first class" employees - treated similarly to the ones in the US.

[1] Indeed, although their accents may have been difficult to follow, the reality is they understand a wider variety of accents than do most Americans, and so Americans complaining about their accent would be viewed as petulant.

Few good companies do things "based on price alone" That reasoning will not get you far.

Having said that, I did interview with an SV startup where probably over 50% of the employees were not in SV, so it may become the general trend.

Comp is a retention mechanism that’s determined by supply and demand. Not a single reasonable company will be willing to pay you more that’s bare minimum to keep you to stay. Hiring isn’t about rewarding workers based on the value they provide, it’s about optimizing costs so you can maximize profits.

While location based term is a BS term, it is very real market mechanism. In your local market there’s less non remote companies than in high cost of living areas, that are willing to compete for you, so your price point is lower.

That's definitely not true. Indeed, I think that's a pretty bad way to think about comp, leading to an adversarial employer/employee relationship.

As examples, consider Netflix, which is widely known for paying above market, or Gravity Payments, which changed their minimum pay to $70k/year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Payments

I'm just about to post 3 new positions, and I have no interest in squeezing people on cash comp. I want people who are happy, relaxed, and feel like they're being treated well. And I also want a fair salary structure. Could I pressure bad negotiators and naive people and pay less? Absolutely. Will I? Fuck no. Maximizing shareholder value has been called "the world's dumbest idea". I wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly up there.

That's not a counterexample of what the post you're replying to is talking about. Netflix feels they need to "overpay" to get the caliber of talent they want, and also to make it harder for it to be tempted to leave. At the end of the day it's what they feel to be the "bare minimum to keep you to stay" for the kind of people they want.

>> I want people who are happy, relaxed, and feel like they're being treated well.

Right, same thing. You want that because that's what strong employees demand and is your strategy for getting sustainable quality output out of them. If you were just a good guy, you'd pay MORE than that :)

You can call maximizing profits maximizing shareholder value, and often they’re aligned. But it’s how businesses were always designed to work, long before stock markets. Is it fair? Most likely not, but it’s business 101, same as me writing reliable production code is engineering 101.

[citation needed]

As far as I can tell, that's a modern, MBA-ish fantasy about the nature of business. I have small business owners in my family going back generations. Maximizing profit was not the goal. It was making a living and being part of a community. This is definitely not uncommon. See, for example, the writings of the late economist Alison Snow Jones: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/1095.html

If that involves maximizing profits, then great, but if the owner enjoys doing work with happy, un-stressed people more than he does a few humdred extra dollars in his pocket, it’s clearly not (only) about optimizing profits.

Who taught you this? If there's a specific historian pushing this narrative I'd love to know who it is, because on the surface this claim sounds absolutely outlandish.

Feels like this reasoning changes for those starting in San Francisco or London, looking to relocate?

Hopefully they've learned enough about how much the company values them and how much it cares about them, that they don't just accept a relocation and whatever salary their company gives them. I'm not too hopeful though, given what working conditions they already accept while living in SF (or wherever).

Also, I guess YMMV but I haven’t found this approach to be very effective. Lots of companies will openly admit they just can’t compete with FAANG salaries for instance. The recruiter wants to sign you for the sake of their commission, but they lose people all the time and aren’t going to lose sleep over you walking away. Even if you really are 1 in a million, the recruiter is not incentivized to avoid missing out on those people at all costs. They’re incentivized to bring in a steady stream of pretty good people, and you’re still just one person.

I’m not saying there is no use in negotiating, but you’re basically hyping it up as if there is some magic incantation that will let you convince anyone to pay you whatever you want. I think that does a disservice to anyone looking for salary advice. In my experience, if you can get a 5-20% increase from their first offer that’s about all you can expect. You’re better off applying for higher paying companies from the beginning, and learning skills/playing the politics to get promoted to higher levels (e.g. senior, staff, principal engineer) where the comp you want is in band, rather than trying to turn a mediocre offer into an amazing one due to sheer force of negotiation.

The difference between their first offer and 15 minutes on the phone with the right attitude and tools is what a lot of people make in a year. On an hourly 1-year contract rate haggle, upping $10/hr is $20,000 in the contract value. I'd call that a valuable phone call and probably the best return on $15.95 anyone ever spent, especially because it was probably just for some cheesy ebook on negotiation.

Is that hype?

I may have to write that cheesy ebook. :)

But I suspect it's equally possible whether you're in a low or high CoL area, I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise. It's unrelated to the issue of whether the company will pay you more in certain locations than others.

Yeah. Anecdotally, many tech companies don't have big location-based pay differences across the US. But they mostly do that by not having offices or at least major offices in places like SV and NYC--and basically don't really try to salary match the big tech companies. I have a feeling that if you looked at most tech employers you'd see a lot more outflow to FAANG than the other way around.

But it should be just as easy to buy those as others. Right now everything is made China. It’s super hard to find made in [home country] stuff

It's the kind of tit-for-tat moral whataboutism that really doesn't do much to solve either problem.

> I don’t have a good answer to this, but I buy Chinese- and Bangladeshi-manufactured clothes anyway.

But that doesn't mean we should avoid the more difficult discussion. I know that I'm privileged, and I figure I should focus on what I do, not what's done to me. I expected more commenters on this thread to take that position. As it is, the insistence on discussing what we are paid just makes us look like prima donnas.

I quoted a figure that is usually reserved for the Thoughtworks of the world rather than individual contractors. They accepted without hesitation.

The project went well, and eventually ended in a support contract. Fast-forward ~2 years and there is a new head of procurement. In a conversation he balked at approving a purchase order for a large chunk of work that they want done this year and said something about wanting to negotiate closer to the work.

At the time I couldn't help think 'good luck with that'. If anything time has only strengthened my position. The only other person knowledgeable about the product at the company moved on to a new job. I'm the only person that now knows the domain (let alone the code base).

To your point, it's all about knowing the position that you're in. I'm not likely to be an asshole about it cough 2021 rate cough, but they're not likely to have success negotiating a better price either.

Firstly, yeah negotiate based on (potential) value delivered. It's the best way for any freelancer to base their pay. But for an employee things get trickier. You see a freelancer is part of the gig economy - if at the upper end but still it's a gig - you negotiate per gig and move on from the bad ones.

But we hate the gig economy with a passion at the bottom end - it's exploitation - and a hundred years ago workers unionised (or sometimes less usefully revolted) in order to stop it.

And asking an employee to negotiate for their own salary at odds with their co-workers is how collective action gets strangled in the crib.

And let's face it, collective action in the US looks like it was strangled in the crib anyway.

So looking at the next ten years we have a real issue over how to pre/re/distribute the wealth the century will hopefully bestow. And solid collective action will be a significant and important part of that.

Grabbing the most value for yourself and to hell with the rest is not going to be the path to utopia.

So, to start with, put unions on the boards of major companies, have them elected by the employee / members - and start seeing questions like "why can't we vote for the other folks on the board"

That argument is not going to convince anyone who is able to twist a prospective employer's arm into paying them top dollar. Never mind utopia. I got mine!

But employment (or rather the thing that the vast majority of people get paid via, which is normal employment right now) is protected because the vast majority of people get paid cia it. we want most people to have a reliable income stream for social reasons.

Setting employee vs employee is not a good path for that.

I work in Texas, with pretty low COL. The people who work in DC, NY, or SF all get paid more than I do. Should I get paid the same as them?

Our company also has people in India (some are outsourced, but we have many full time associates). Should I get paid the same as them?

What, then, is the value of my work? If I ask my employeer to disregard location based pay, how much do I get paid?

I feel like this entire discussion can be summed up in four sentences: "Feel like you're not making enough? Find another company that will pay you more. No one will pay you more? Keep adding skills until they do."

Everything else is just window dressing for the negotiating table.

I feel like that's more true at a small-scale company than a large company with thousands of employees. Maybe the large company has already found those "hard-to-find skills".

Big companies tend not to have as many places where they need one person to wear many hats; so their hard-to-finds will tend to be finding deep experts, but there's probably not a lot of positions that really need that.

Even if market rate price for developers in India was same as SF, to maintain its "output/$ per employee", the salary may differ.

For instance, a company whose main operations are happening in PST, engineers whose main hours are offset 13h30min are less valuable to the company than those with 0h0min offset.

Sending a PR for review or reviewing a PR from someone with more than 8h time zone difference usually means you have to wait a full day of turnaround time.

Now within a same time zone but different country (or even states in the US), the differences diminish but there are still local labor laws and taxes that affect what the ratio of "what the employee provides" vs "what it costs the employer"

So at the moment, people living in SF and [some remote town in the middle of california with fiber internet] should be paid the same, but, people in TX should not. (This only applies to 100% WFH companies whose majority of workforce is all in California)

1. How much do you value commuting by bike 15 minutes, instead of taking the tube for one hour? 2. How much do you value walking 15 minutes to the nearest forest, instead of being surrounded by highways, buildings and artificial parks? 3. How much do you value having a proper lunch break, instead of taking a sandwich in front of the computer? 4. How much do you value your male CEO regularly staying home with sick kids, instead of women getting that task by default? 5. How much do you value not having to see beggars and homeless people everywhere you look? 6. How much do you value living in a 9-5 culture, instead of a "constant death march" one? 7. How much do you value pedestrians being given priority, instead of a honk? 8. How much do you value breathing in fresh air, instead of getting smog alerts every week?

I could go on and on.

Once you put a value on all of the above, location-based pay actually makes sense. Maybe not based on your exact zip code, but when moving from a large city to a smaller city, or from one country to another, you get certain things "for free" that you might value more than total compensation.

In your book "I want to live in Sweeden. I am happy to give up 15% less. But I won't do it to somehow spite my company for paying more to its German employees."

He's be an idiot to think like that.

More likely you switched from a bad company to a good one.

Another way to look at it, if these social changes were to happen in Germany, would you expect salaries to go down as a result?

I very recently learned a damned hard lesson in this. I believed in the product, I was given interesting problems to solve, there were good benefits, there was a good culture, I had stock options. The pay was shit, the options evaporated during a merger, and I want to buy a home.

Next round, I'm getting paid my worth and it's going to remote. "Believing in the product" is just a load of bullshit that C-suite spin to enrich themselves. They believe in nothing but their own bottom line, so why shouldn't you? Figure out what you are worth, what working conditions (overtime etc.) you can tolerate, and do good work for good money.

I don't know. I understand that, but on the flip side I got lucky and currently my equity is worth money. In SV equity can make up a large portion of your compensation, it shouldn't be ignored.

Sure, generally equity from a public company is worth more money. But equity at startups can still be valuable. A better conservative approach to startup equity would be to negotiate first for a good base salary and then negotiate for equity. VC-funded startups can pay well.

Don't count your chickens before they have hatched.

However, you have to look out for #1 and "interesting problems to solve" won't pay the mortgage, so you better make sure that despite how great the job is, you are paid at least the market rate.

With an actual objective look at it, I couldn't care less for any of the products of my past (or current) companies. However, I'm able to care about doing my best work for whatever the company is building but I also haven't had to contend with having to build stuff that I actively disbelieve in (like no advertising for example). I do like the fact that my companies have used reasonably recent technologies and at times also "too new technologies" - as in "the newest JS framework that nobody knows yet and that screws up all the time and you can't google for troubleshooting". So that keeps me interested enough. However, I am not someone that will work 80 hour weeks just because I am allowed to work on project X or with technology Y or because I "believe in the product". That's what many companies are trying to achieve. You believe in Facebook and their product, you get 'great perks' and are willingly staying at the office for way longer than you should for your own good.

The other end of the spectrum is unionized workers that will drop everything as soon as the clock hits 5p.m. And no I'm not talking Walmart cashier type work here. It can be understandable enough I suppose given how some companies treat workers but so far my companies have been treating me well enough.

My main contention with "believe in the product" is that it's a canned phrase that I've heard time and time again, to encourage employees to "pull through for our mission" through "sacrifice from your family that is appreciated." The only people who ever benefit from that are the C-suite; customers get broken software coded by broken developers and support has to break themselves fixing the mess. It's a meme, by the purest definition, and it seems to work: people (myself included) get riled up in cameraderi and put themselves and their family second.

If they truly appreciated our sacrifices, we'd have money in our bank accounts, not "belief in the product."

Charging customers variable rates based on location is the de-facto norm amongst enterprise software vendors and most professional services segments, FWIW

The mistake I see in compensation discussions is to assume that abandoning location-based pay means everyone gets paid as much as the company's most expensive location.

In practice, prices for services start to trend toward the least expensive locations once location is removed from the equation. There's a reason why the price of electronics manufacturing went down when it moved to locations like China, not up when manufacturing in China became accessible to to the expensive locations.

It isn't an unreasonable argument. The author of the piece glosses over the level of preparation/skill and automated vs non-automated manufacturing[1] in their clothing worker argument. And of course the cost of goods for a shirt that cost $10 in labor vs one that cost $1 in labor won't retail for the same amount.

[1] Jobs that train "on the job" (erroneously called "low skilled") typically have a wider workforce to choose from and thus get more workers competing for jobs and thus and lower wages.

What is the supply of workers? All things being equal the company will pay the least amount possible.

What is the demand for those workers? All things being equal the worker will work for the company that pays the most.

When you move from San Francisco to Des Moines, Iowa you shift markets. If you move from San Francisco to “the metaverse” you shift markets.

Facebook may have moved from a small handful of people able to do a job to a whole world of people. You may have moved from a small handful of opportunities to a world of opportunities.

It’s difficult to predict how prices will change, but they almost definitely will, and it’s not a matter of “holding out” or “negotiating” in the long run.

I hate how this always comes up as if the hiring model is in any way balanced between an employer and employee.

I was once asked by a New York based company, at one of their remote offices, what I wanted for a salary. I said “$180k, what you’re paying for this position in NY”. They said “No. We know what you were making before, so we’ll offer you $5k over that.” It was never a negotiation.

That is not true at all. It only works if both parties have something of value that the other wants. It's always a negotiation, but the only thing that ever matters in a negotiation is the BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) on both sides.

If your BATNA is unemployment and their BATNA is a minor delay getting someone almost exactly equivalent to you, then you'll take their offer and they'll politely decline if you ask for more. If your BATNA is one of a few other competing offers all of which excite you, and their BATNA is having to settle for someone who doesn't bring your particular expertise to the company, or worse, having to start their search over again, you're in a much stronger position to ask for more money.

I usually politely sidestep the "what's your current salary?" with a "in rolling to accept at least x, but we can negotiate if both parties are satisfied and get to offers". If a recruiter insists, I tell them I have a personal rule to never disclose that. I think I have lost a single prospect, which likely was never real to begin with. Likely just fishing.

While I'm at it, I never mention who my current employer is either. I usually obscure it on my cv of I'm still employed. I also had a request recently to provide a scan of my passport on initial application, which i also declined.

Honestly, recruiters think they can ask for any and all personal information they want. If you have value, no one will drop you because of it.

>> I never mention who my current employer is either

Why is this? It's typically the most relevant information to a new position, and usually trivial to determine without you volunteering it.

Don’t worry, Equifax takes care of that for us. Both who you’re currently working for, and your current salary. It’s a service it offers to HR departments across the US.

One time they thought I worked on staff at the local zoo. Seriously.

It would be a waste of effort for HR. They don't have time for that I don't think. They want to get to a number not do forensics on your background.

Suppose you are just finishing a Ph.D. and took a few years off. Suppose you took a year or two to do freelance or work 1099. Suppose you went abroad to work for a year or two to take of your dying parent. These are all things I have run into.

Edit: One more good one. I've known people who won a green lottery or married an American citizen they met abroad. Showed up in USA with lots of skills having made much less in Eastern Europe.

In the other case, the company needs to accomplish something, believes you can do it, and you have a list of companies sending you offers.

Thats not so far fetched! Many of us hit that point in our careers.

So, 99% of the workforce? Or, 99.9999% if you consider that companies just don’t give a fuck unless you happen to be Guido van Rossem?

HR departments, who approve/deny pay changes, don’t care. My current company is being forced (with the approval of the board) to compensate high performers in alternative ways (like stock grants, or vacation time) if they’re outside of the “approved pay bands”.

I know someone who 100% qualifies for a title of “high performer” (they promoted him to a director a month after this) who would have had his pay cut in half if he moved away from his current location due to “remaining competitive with the local market”.

It’s not a zero-sum game at all. Employees from wealthy countries can gain labor surplus through technology transfer a number of ways or even find business partners and employers.

Mutually beneficial exchange is the name of the game. It’s true that different folks achieve different relative success compared to their peers. That’s okay and good when it’s the product of honest just exchange.

Over 25 years in tech, I've hired many dozen developers. Only maybe 3-4 of the candidates I've given offers to in that time have tried negotiating.

I've never given an offer where there wouldn't be at least some room for us to negotiate.

Meanwhile I always negotiate when I receive offers, and have usually ended up with substantial increases over the initial offer.

That was 15 years ago, people didn't talk about this stuff as much back then, and hopefully I'm wiser now.

Next time I have a salary negotiation, if ever, I'm definitely going to scour HN for advice and read some books.

I’ve hired many engineers. Neither myself, nor any cofounder has been insulted or angry by a counter-offer. Sometimes we said to ourselves “this is kinda high for someone at their experience level” and held firm or met in the middle, but most of the time if you ask you’ll squeeze at least 5K more out of it even if your counter was 30K higher than the offer.

The closest I've seen was someone with wildly out of line expectations (a developer who asked for basically the whole employee option pool to himself). Even then we gave a counter-offer (that he declined).

Personally I'd see it as a sign they're not someone I'd want to work for.

If someone takes it as some perceived slight that you've asked for a higher amount, then consider they'd probably be equally offended if you asked for a raise down the road, and then you'd be in a bad spot...

Of course being able to not worry about being turned down is a luxury we can't always afford.

(Also, I have at times thought I massively overshot, and kicked myself because they immediately accepted; you'd be surprised how much of an increase you can ask for sometimes)

part 1: https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

part 2: https://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/

- It's rare that employees in expensive areas do not get to work remotely - because there would almost always be someone of similar skill in a cheaper location to hire

- It's rare that a company that has in-office workers in an expensive area would hire someone working remotely - because they are certainly paying the local workers more than what would be considered normal for a remote worker... because those local people need to earn more to have the same quality of life. And if they hired the remote worker for that "normal remote rate", they would need to cut the pay of their local workers (otherwise they _are_ scaling pay based on location).

_(Note that certain "this is one of only a few people in the world that meet our criteria" situations would not follow the above)_

So it seems like either

- This world does not have in-office worker in expensive areas, or

- All areas have the same cost of living, or

- There is a hard split between companies that hire remote workers and those that do not.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

It seems we are in a vicious cycle of high salaries -> higher housing costs -> even higher salaries -> even higher housing costs.

To prevent the same problems elsewhere, it might seem useful to not increase salaries too much. But the real problem is that housing cost depends too much on what the buyer can pay.

So go find what the negotiation wonks call your BATNA and then see if it's better than the paycut. If it is, now we're cooking.

It is a perfect strategy to save time reviewing resume’s today, and eliminate the need to in the future.

When did we ever get the choice?

I'm not really saying it's right, just that if a company is set up to be able to handle you working at great distance and cross timezone, then probably the outcome is that they can get it cheaper than you are.

And it's nothing new, it's just that we call it 'outsourcing' when they're Indian, and 'remote working' or 'digital nomadism' otherwise.

I'm no 'SJW', far from it; in my book the modern free market capitalist employer embraces remote work, but certainly doesn't pay SFBA rates through the nose for it.

(To go with such remote friendly trends though, CoV has also brought anti-globalism trends, so who knows, really! I'm quite looking forward to reading about what's happening, in ten or twenty years' time.)

You could be a resident of San Francisco but just rent a token shared bedroom with a bunch of people just to have an SF address, or even a UPS box, and actually be on working vacations in random houses across the country close to 100% of the time, and I'd say they shouldn't have a right to know exactly where you are through your journey, only what times you will be working. Everything else including location should be abstracted out if it's defined as a remote job.

This increases the burden on both the employer and employee.

Don't expense anything from the state you are in.

Have everything shipped to an address in California and forwarded.

This is the snail mail version of a VPN, and I'm not sure why people are downvoting me on a hacker site. Hacking the world is what we do. This is how we stand up for our privacy. If you use VPNs at all in your online life to conceal your location there is no reason you can't invent a VPN for packages and mail as well.

Remote workers should be allowed to move and live wherever they want as long as they can be online at hours that are useful for the company, and they should be treated as a black box that gets work done and paid according to what they get done, not where they get it done.

The issue is the current regulatory and taxation structures aren't built for that. You're encountering friction because of these current systems.

The way to properly address this js to overhaul the system itself, this is by legislation and having representation that is aligned with what you want.

"Hacking" around it isn't the way to go.

To take a coding analogy, you're currently frustrated with the limitations of the architecture, which is understandable and I emphasize. But adding hacky patches to get around it isn't the way to go.

Unfortunately architectural overhauls in society are slow and take a long time.

I strongly encourage you to get involved in any grassroots movement to further the way you want to the world to become.

I agree with this, but it will take decades, and I'll leave it to politics experts to deal with that. There are things I want to get done in my life, and I will get them done without needing to involve myself in that mess. If it needs me to move into another country or jurisdiction to get those things done, I'm open to that.

I respect those that want to go fight that battle, but everyone needs to pick their own battles to fight, and I have enough battles I'm fighting already.

> adding hacky patches to get around it isn't the way to go

I disagree. You should fix the architecture but you should also feel free to use hacky patches until the fix is done.

Meanwhile it isn't the taxation structure I'm arguing against, it's the salary discrimination by location.

If a company values my work at $X/year they should give me $X/year independent of all other considerations, and also give someone else who accomplishes the same exact work $X/year independent of other considerations.

I think even for privacy reasons it's perfectly reasonable to never give out your address. You can always give out a UPS box as your primary address.

You could also have 2 residences in 2 states or even 2 countries and have them both with weight=0.5 and no primary node.

The entire idea of a "residence" address is an invented notion and de facto optional. You could always be on the move in an RV for example and still go show up for remote work every day.