Your compensation is driven by several factors, the two biggest being how much value you generate and how easy you are to replace. It has nothing to do with your needs. Even Google's official compensation policy explicitly notes that cost of living is not a factor and only local competition density is.

The reason these adjustments are being made is because the whole world isn't remote yet. The engineer in Brooklyn could more easily go get a better offer at a Wall St job then the person in Kentucky.

People who believe that we're all going to be remote and keep our Bay Area/NYC compensation levels are laughably naive. It is possible that, your compensation relative to your cost of living might improve, but long term we will see equilibrium end up closer to average remote compensation than average BA/NY compensation.

It's true employees might more easily switch jobs, but hiring remote adds a LOT of candidates to a companies hiring pool as well (which is why they're doing it). Furthermore, a push for a stronger remote technical culture with more async communications, more documentation, etc is inevitably going to make the outsourcing efforts of the 2000s a lot more viable. There's still time zones and language barriers, sure, but remote work solves several other challenges.

Finally, even if your current employer keeps your compensation the same, you have to question how it will affect your next job search.

People seem to be thinking that they are going to take Bay Area compensation and go settle in the middle of the country and live like a king. Short term that may happen, but long term it's an absolute guarantee that tech compensation stagnates or goes down because the supply of the labor pool increases so much with remote candidates. That's a major rationale for companies going remote in the first place.

An element that is often missing from the conversation is the opportunity cost of the employee. A significant portion of a worker’s compensation should to go paying his opportunity cost. I think that despite similar productivity and the recent rise in remote work, an employee’s opportunity cost is reduced if they move to a remote mountain town.

It happens because pay is balancing employee demands with company number needed. Employees in lower cost areas will very often accept lower pay. It's still often very high pay for that area. I grew up in oklahoma where median entry pay for tech is roughly half of bay and fb is way above median pay in the bay. So to many people from back home even if fb gave an offer 30-50 percent less it'd still be much better than most local options. While I expect more companies being remote to put some pressure on salaries upward I do not expect it to ever be equal to hcol areas. I expect it'll converge to like 20-30 percent lower. Noticeable but still massive gain for those places.

The primary factor that defines compensation is competition; the market-clearing wage is a supply/demand thing - ask yourself whether junior developer productivity is that much higher now than a few years ago despite soaring pay.

Your value-added just represents a ceiling on how much its rational to pay you in some sort of vague career-adjusted terms; the vast majority of people don't even have jobs where that can be measured. Even those where it looks simple (say, sales) are actually much harder than you'd think.

> why should they pay them differently?

tl;dr: because they can. You’re not paid based on how much value you provide - you’re paid the smallest amount possible to stop you from quitting.

This actually happened to one of my former teams. We lost 50% of the team in the space of a few months. As far as I know everyone got 10%+ raises from value-focused employers over the regionally paid company.

> I don't understand this take at all, it's effectively saying that your pay should be driven by your needs as opposed to the value you create.

Yes? Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?

Look, I'm all for less exploitation of workers, but I don't see how it's suddenly outrageous for American workers to experience employer relationships the same way those in India, Australia, or Vietnam do.

Your pay is driven by your political status. It has nothing to do with value generated or with needs.

If an employer is defining it according to your needs, that's a sign you have relatively low status. It's not a sign that the employer is correct.

This is partly why remote has huge potential benefits for employers. Committed remote means huge savings on office space. But it also lowers the chances of collective political activity, including unionisation.

> Do you imagine a skilled programmer living in India gets paid the same for the same work as a skilled dev living in Indiana?

I know of several expats that do exactly this, working remotely for US based companies.