> Or put another way, your competitors can compensate me less and I'll consider it a better deal.

It seems a lot of people disagree with you:

> In an accompanying survey of more than 1,200 technology professionals, Hired found that 75% of employees would begin looking for a new job if their salary were to decrease, while 45% of candidates disagreed with using the cost of living of the employee's location as a baseline.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-jobs-salaries-are-flatten...

I'm one of them. If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less.

Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?

But what if you turn that around? If you are currently remote but considering an offer from a place that's in-office, wouldn't you want a higher wage to compensate you for the extra hassle of commuting? That's extra free time you're never getting back.

There are people who prefer to work in an office, and some who have that preference even if it puts them on a train for an hour or two a day. As long as we don't get legislation to force employers one way or another, I'd expect employees to self-select into those who like being around others all day, and those who prefer to work in a private office. It's a serendipitous solution we've been presented to all those open plan offices that a certain set hate: you can have your own private office with a view, but you'll pay for it yourself.

But shouldn't the employees that require extra subsidies (office space, commuting reimbursement, office utilities/supplies) receive the same overall compensation as those working from home with lower expense to the company? It seems to me that if being in the office is an optional preference for some, they should carry the cost of it.

Yes, that was my poorly-explained point: given that some people prefer to add the cost and time of commuting (possibly in order to rub elbows or attend happy hour), and others prefer to add the cost of a home office (possibly in order to retain focus or make lunch for the family), the costs might turn out similarly, and therefore I hope that remote working doesn't result in systematically lower salaries for those who prefer it.

I'll make whichever argument gets me the most money in a salary negotiation.

Which is short sighted if you value your time at all. Spending an hour more a day commuting is directly decreasing the value of your life.

You miss my point, then. If I have to spend that extra hour, I will argue that it needs to be compensated. If I get to WFH, I may argue that I'm paying for dedicated office space at home and that the value of my work is the same here as in the office.

I cycle into my office every day, 1h round-trip. It certainly increases my quality of life and I'm glad I had the choice (not requirement) to return

If you didn't have to commute, you'd have an extra hour per day to cycle wherever you wanted instead of having to specifically bike that path. Hell you could still bike that path if that's what you like. In the absolute best case scenario, commuting is breakeven, but realistically you are objectively worse off for it.

Except that’s not how it often works. sometimes one needs a little motivation to keep up a routine.

That is not the purpose of a commute, nor is a commute required to accomplish that goal. Think of all the other routines you maintain just fine without having to worry about getting fired from your job if you don't want to one day. If this was really the thing you wanted to do most, you'd find the motivation on your own just as you do with all the other things. If you need to be forced to do something, even if you derive some benefit, it's still not what you want. If I chase you with a machete, you may derive some benefit from being highly motivated to run, but that doesn't mean you should be thanking me.

Life is full of objectively bad things that nevertheless have a silver lining. It's good to look on the bright side when faced with problems you can not change, but it's important not to be fooled into thinking that these things aren't problems, especially when they are within your power to fix. That's how people wind up justifying all sorts of terrible situations like abusive relationships and terrible jobs.

Sure but I don't need a commute to enforce a routine for me. And yours is a very specific example, you bike to work, which means you 1. Like biking, and 2. Your workplace is close enough to your house to allow you to bike. I for example like to weight lift and I live quite far from work. I keep a routine for myself which a commute would not be conducive to.

When this came up before, I was reminded of this video:

https://youtu.be/vMed1qceJ_Q

I love using a bike to get around and do all of my daily activities. But I hate just riding around in circles for no purpose other than exercise or getting out of the house.

it increases the value of my life and many others. Stay home pretty please, I am sure you will be very successful by switching jobs every few months!

Should I get a higher wage for living in a more expensive area in the city?

My wage is related to the work I do. How I choose to spend my money is a personal decision.

Your wage is related to how much other people are willing to get paid to do the same job.

Your wage should also be related to how much work you have to put in. I would expect more money if I was going to work 10 hours a day than 8. And I consider commuting time similar to work time. So, given two otherwise equal job offers, one of which requires a 2 hour commute and one which requires no commute, for me the decision is an extremely easy one to prefer the latter. Effectively, the latter is paying me much more per hour of labor.

Never underestimate the gap between what people say they will do and what they'll actually do.

If you poll employees about literally any topic where one answer benefits them and the other answer doesn't, people are going to respond with a preference for the answer that benefits them.

But in the real world, they still have to go out and find that better job that pays more and doesn't factor their location into cost of living. They're out there, but there far more rare than these articles suggest.

Your compensation could change because of market forces, modern salaries are a product of supply and demand. Previously both supply and demand for high paying jobs was restricted to relatively small geographic areas. Now that remote working is in the supply can move out of high cost areas. However, the converse is also true, the demand can reach people who were not previously eligible. Some of those people would be happy with a significantly lower compensation package.

So to summarize, your compensation could decrease because there are now a lot more people competing for your job. Or it could increase because there are a lot more companies competing for your services.

> If my work is bringing in $X in revenue whether I'm sitting in a chair in an office building you're leasing or at home, I don't see why my share of that should be any less.

This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market, with the tacit assumption that the total revenue generated by your employment will exceed the total cost of your salary & other costs over the course of your career.

And yet that cost goes down when employers don’t pay for your office space…

And my cost goes up when I pay for my own office space.

But you don't have a commute and can do stuff at home during work.

So? That doesn't net me money during salary negotiation.

If it means that some actually-a-dog2 realizes that they prefer it enough to work for 5% less, then you need to compete with that.

Let's say you get paid $100/hr for 8 hours per day of work, or $800/day. Now let's say you have to commute an hour round trip to and from work. Since you need to commute to get paid, it takes you 9 hours to earn that $800. Thus your real hourly wage is $88.89/hr. The person who doesn't need to commute works no harder, but it only takes them 8 hours to earn the same wage. They effectively have an 11% higher wage than the commuter, all else being equal. They could work for $95/hr, making them the more attractive option for the employer, while still being better off than the commuter.

> This is a common but fundamental misunderstanding of what determines your salary. Your salary is determined by the market...

Location based adjustments are replacing this misunderstanding with a different misunderstanding which is roughly "The market rate for the position is determined by where *the employee* lives, not by the many others elsewhere that would be qualified by the job"

I'm on the other side of the coin. I view the associated costs of working in an office as built into my salary. For example, if I go to an office, I suddenly now have to buy gas/repairs for my car, I have to buy office clothes, and I have suddenly lost days per year to commutes. If I work from home, I see myself as freed from those costs.

Put another way, I see my salary as the sum of the cost of the work that I do PLUS the costs associated with me getting the job done. Working from home is simply more economical (and my work/life balance is significantly improved).

In a free market where remote jobs are more desirable than in-office jobs, then eventually, the in-office jobs have to start paying a premium in salary to attract those who would rather want a remote job instead. It isn't "how much is your labor worth?" but rather "how much more do we have to pay someone to come into the office everyday?"

Of course, given your preferences, it doesn't sound like they would have to pay you more to come in the office vs. working at home as long as they pay you what you think you are worth. That is, whether the job is remote or not doesn't affect your pay requirements. If enough people feel the same, then there won't be a pay discrepancy between remote and in-office jobs.

> Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?

The problem is there are likely very competent engineers living in low cost of living areas who would gladly bid lower than your high "city salary" to maintain their preferred way of life.

Given two comparable candidates, the company will go with the one with the lower salary demands.

> The problem is there are likely very competent engineers living in low cost of living areas who would gladly bid lower than your high "city salary" to maintain their preferred way of life.

And there always have been. There’s always been a pool of labor either in the Midwest or Ukraine that companies could call on. Maybe trying to hire top talent while playing arbitrage on salaries either isn’t that easy, or isn’t worth the (relatively) small amount saved?

You haven't calculated the cost of living yet. If I need to be in an office, I have to live within x minutes of that office and any travel has to be on the weekends or paid time off.

This leads to the phenomenon of cities, where a million shmucks try to do the same thing at the same times and drive up their own real estate prices in the process.

Contrast this with moving to a holiday home or holiday destination, probably with a vastly lower cost of living, or going away for a "weekend" but during odd days and missing all the traffic. Sounds amazing to me.

Aha. Interesting. So you're saying an Indian engineer should earn the same salary as a Californian engineer if they're both bringing in the same revenue?

Interesting.

But it won't happen.

Or... you're not suggesting Indian engineers are worse, are you? Because that would be kinda racist.

On the other hand, someone living anywhere in India on the same salary (per contract) as someone living anywhere in the US is earning a higher net paycheque because CoL in India is lower.

Oh my! What should we do to resolve this?

Indian engineers in India did tend to be worse on average than American engineers of any ethnicity when I did a lot of hiring about 10 years ago. As far as I could figure out, the main reason for this was the large number of Indian technical schools with very outdated curriculae and low standards for matriculation, along with a rote learning style. Engineers from these schools needed to have every little detail meticulously specified to get anything done correctly. Pair that with frequently mediocre english, and you have a recipe for disaster.

That's kinda racist. You can't possibly be saying that there's no way there exists an Indian engineer that can compete hand-in-hand with a Silicon Valley engineer on an intellectual level (connections is a different thing).

So this being the case. Why does the Indian still earn less than the Silicon Valley peep?

Please tell me how saying Indian engineers trained in India are worse on average than Indian engineers trained in the United States is racist. Maybe you should also share your special definition of racism, I'm sure it'll be an entertaining read.

You didn't answer my question.

Let's suppose such Indian engineer who lives in India and has the exact same skills as a Google California engineer (including English fluency) exists.

Why does he earn less than the Californian one? Because his Indian colleagues are not as good as him?

On the flipside, I'm sure you'd agree there are incompetent Californians, yet they earn more than highly skilled Indians.

Tell me how exactly that isn't racist.

> Put another way, if I'm worth $Y to you sitting in an office, and I can accomplish the same work at home, from anywhere, just as effectively, why should I get paid any less?

There is something called Win-Win situation. Now you may call it management mumbo-jumbo. But what I see happening is if I save, say 15 hours of weekly commute and getting ready for work etc, I would be willing to take a cut that would seem reasonable based on my money/leisure need. If I keep looking at company's benefit and not mine (or maybe I have none) then of course pay cut seems insulting.

Office perks like almost free meals and stuff are fair game but wage differences are not going to fly assuming they want the same quality of labor remote.

There might be faster career progression for in office people though, and that will be a harder and longer thing to quantify.

I think the angle that's not fully communicated here is that the default expectation is 40 hours of work a week at 8 hours per day. At a company that expects you to be in the office for those 8 hours, many people actually spend more than 8 hours in service of the need to be in the office for 8 hours. That is, if it takes you 30 minutes of travel each way to satisfy a mandate to be in an office for 8 hours, you're really spending 9 hours "on company time", but you're only being compensated for 8. People who don't have, because of whatever reason, travel time can roll out of bed and immediately be ready to work (I have the past 18 months). Why should the employee take a hit out of their non-work time to do travel that the company insists on? If you want me to travel, pay me for it and recognize that you're paying for my time to not be productive because its being eaten up with travel (or recognize that some of the 8 hours of company-time is going to be eaten up with travel so you're only getting 7 hours of work time out of it). Someone could choose to move closer to the office, there by reducing the amount of time used for travel, and the unproductive-travel-time compensation should be reduced.

Historically, both employers and employees have incongruent and hazy understanding and a polite agreement as to how this kind of time gets accounted for (how much it is and who is accountable/responsible for it), especially in salaried positions/knowledge workers. That's probably going to change. If anything, the work-from-wherever trend will help people get a better understanding of and draw the line between work-time and personal-time, productive time and non-productive time, total compensation, and what, exactly, they are being compensated for, and how this time is grokked and tracked.

In that model, why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment? You picked where you live and what company you applied to work at; they didn’t pick where you live.

If that means that you want to only apply for remote positions, that’s certainly your choice; I don’t blame you in the least for it, but expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you chose to live seems unlikely to happen, to put it mildly.

Expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you choose to live used to happen: if you moved to San Francisco from the midwest in order to work at a company in San Francisco, you would expect a cost-of-living-in-SF to be factored into what was being offered and what you'll accept as compensation; and if you didn't then you were underwater.

I don't have a clear cut way to interpret this interaction either in the past or going forward (everyone's motivations are different). But now physical location factors into the calculation on both sides differently than it did in the past. In the past "travel time to sit at a desk in a specific location" was always completely assumed to be a burden incurred solely by the employee (it had been the government who made allowances for pre-tax commuter costs in some cases). That is no longer the case.

When it comes down to it, getting paid for 8 hours of company time but 2 of them being travel time and 6 being productive is getting paid 33% more. The negotiation may be less directly about money: rather than "I want more money for that 40 hours" it could be "I'll work 32 hours for that money"

Or for that matter, why wouldn't folks decide to live farther away from work to maximize their compensation? I think a lot of people wouldn't mind spending a few hours each day on the train for a 40% raise.

There are a lot of discrimination landmines when you ask employees to live in particular locations. In general, the safest thing to do is to require them to show up in person, and they will decide how far they are willing to live. In fact, if I recall correctly, you can't even ask people if they own a car. Being prescriptive about location can become a lawsuit for class discrimination.

Many people have purchased a house that they intend to remain in, the friction to move houses is often larger than friction to change jobs. Also, there may be a spouse who just doesn't want to move house.

I agree with you on those points. I purchased a house I intend to remain in and my spouse doesn’t want to move either.

None of that is remotely* a concern of my company, though…

* pun was accidental, but pleasing enough to leave it in there.

> why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment

The closest homes to work are $1.15MM and $1.5MM. I’m not sure if the CEO is paid enough in cash to qualify for one of these homes on salary alone.

>The closest homes to work are $1.15MM and $1.5MM. I’m not sure if the CEO is paid enough in cash to qualify for one of these homes on salary alone.

Obviously yes? You realize that most people mortgage their homes? A 1.5M, 30 year mortgage at today's rates (3.1%) translates to $76,863/year which seems pretty doable for a CEO (unless you're the garage startup type).

It appears that most people are considering the following two scenarios:

1. most employers will pay the same regardless of where I live, and my job security will be the same as before.

2. most employers will pay a bit less if I work remotely, but that's worth it to me since I can pay less for rent and have a higher quality of life. And yes, my job security will be the same as before.

It shocks me that people are not considering the following scenario:

3. most employers will realize that a person living 100 miles away represents the same value to my company as one that lives 5,000 miles away. The latter, of course, is far cheaper, more motivated, and far less likely to cause any problems since they also have far fewer protections. And no, they are not any less talented.

So far, the pandemic has been all about the workforce side of the story. We're about to find out what the employer side of the story looks like. I personally don't mind a future where everyone in this world get equal access to job opportunities, but I don't think that most people advocating for remote work are quite as aware of the long-term ramifications on the US workforce.

The point 3 is similar to the relocation scare of a few years ago to India or similar.

It hasn't happened.

Why? Probably because knowledge work is not at all zero sum. It grows with knowledge workers. So India's knowledge workers got jobs on top of existing ones.

Assuming the same happens now for rural America then it might be a net positive and might even revive some of the dying regions.

> The point 3 is similar to the relocation scare of a few years ago to India or similar.

> It hasn't happened.

We think it hasn't happened. And yet, the likelihood of talking to a CX rep from a Fortune 500 company who is based in the US is very low. Did that somehow help the US-based CX reps?

Perhaps you're thinking that it will be different with knowledge workers. Consider the well-publicized fact that a lot of Boeing software is written in India. How many other corporations are following suit behind the scenes?

"you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent"

I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.

There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.

In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.

The US saw a giant outsourcing of manufacturing, and now that US Megacorps are globalized and not locally owned, they don't have any reason to care about local talent, the same will start to happen in services.

I do however think that communicating matters a lot, and people will just find themselves back at the office.

I don't think people realize how quickly this can happen.

Now that we can work 'remote' - everyone is thinking about all the projects they can do for x% the cost, they're looking to trim the budget, and there's a pile of solid applications from Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain on their desks.

> I have some sorry news for Americans thinking this way on this one: you just outsourced yourselves.

> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.

> In some aspects, relationships do matter, so those have face-to-face types of interactions will be obviously harder to displace.

I have some sorry news for non-Americans who think most of the high-paying American jobs (especially at banks) have anything to do with being smart or working hard or getting paid half as much.

Those personal, face-to-face relationships referred to matter a lot. As humans, they will always matter.

The main way that remote will impact workers is by allowing people (mostly Americans or folks who could live/work here via a visa) who would already be naturally good fits for the job to live and work in a different place, but probably close enough to travel to meetings and clients as necessary (with a lot of necessary).

Back office work may be sent abroad or (more likely) contracted out, but the core of the businesses that involve trust and/or personal relationships will be collocated for many many decades to come.

Having worked for years with overseas contractors, I’m really not too concerned about my job security

So being a 'contractor' and 'not connected' is a problem.

But once they have the PM, designers, architect and devs. 'on staff' and all 'over there' - then you are the 'not connected' contractor.

Moreover 'they' are getting better across the board.

Japan made crap until they made the best cars in the world.

China made crap but now they have the top 5G gear and all of the patents, and would wipe out a big chunk of Western companies were it not for 'security' and other issues.

Americans are fairly instantly replaceable with Canadians, Aussies, Brits, and almost as easily replaceable with French, Italian and Germans etc.

'Remote Work' is like an 'unlimited, free H1B' program.

Many jobs are safe, but many are not.

> Remote Work' is like an 'unlimited, free H1B' program.

As someone who manages people in many different countries from the US I can definitively say this is not true. You have to comply with local labor laws wherever you hire your employees. For example, many countries like Poland, England, and France require very longer notice periods and changes in job responsibilities can be a sticky legal issue. HR has to be equipped to handle all of these nuances.

Japan made crap and then they made the best cars in the world. And then they also starting making some real good salaries. This was a great development all round.

If every third-world country follows the South Korea / Japan playbook, the world economy would absolutely explode with growth, and US workers would certainly benefit from this.

The problem with overseas contractors is - you get what you pay for. There are still excellent contractors out there who charge more, but still less than what employees get paid here. The second problem is discoverability. It is difficult to find those excellent contractors from all the not-so-good ones out there.

In typical SFBA companies I meet mostly token Americans. So there's a huge foreign workforce with many years of local experience, a non-trivial proportion with already with citizenship. With the current trends in American politics I'd expect a large number of them to be open to going back home for only $100K or so. I would. Living 10-11 time zones from CA is a big deal though.

In every post about remote work, this argument always gets trotted out. The easiest retort is “if it were that advantageous for companies, it would have happened already.”

Outsourcing has been around for decades now and the overwhelming evidence is that it only gets you so far. “You get what you pay for.”

Sure there’s probably some offshore/nearshore firms that hire great developers but the lions share of them are low-skilled, associate-level developers that are usually paraded around as senior/architects. I say this as someone whose worked in a large consulting firm and had to work with numerous offshore/nearshore teams.

> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.

Citation needed. My experience working with both proves the exact opposite. I think the Human Development Index of a person is more important in a knowledge economy than whether they're willing to work for 23 hours a day for 24 cents. And the first world countries absolutely dominate the world in this regard.

When I moved from the third to the first world, I was shocked by the high standard of personal "development" - for lack of a better term - of the average person, or even people lower down on the social ladder.

> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.

I've worked with remote developers from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in US companies, and talent in those areas can command SV-level compensation.

Truth is, if you can compete with domestic US talent, you can command US-level compensation, either through immigration or the "outsourcing" you're trying to spook people with.

If the work being done doesn't require talent that commands US-level compensation, then that work was already outsourced 20 to 30+ years ago.

Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably, and cost more than it saved. Time zones didn’t work. Language problems. Lack of communication.

There’s a reason London and New York work well together. Time zones and language. And a relatively short plane hop.

> Well, I worked for “megabank” back in the 00s and they tried to outsource to India. It failed miserably,

Your one anecdote is pretty meaningless, you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

My "anecdote" isn't "pretty meaningless". The bank I worked for didn't spend hundreds of millions of pounds on a whim. They spent the money with the aim of saving more money by outsourcing technology work to India.

It failed, and it failed miserably, and my former employer learnt a very expensive lesson. My colleagues in other investment banks reported similar stories in the 00s. That's far more than one data point.

Investment banks are not like other companies. They particularly enjoy writing their own code and systems, so when they tried to outsource and discovered that they weren't correct, or on time, they brought it all back in house.

> you just need to look at the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies, it keeps going up.

That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue? Does Wipro, for example, publish its revenue figures for its IT outsourcing arm, and break that down further with key indicators? I can say with some confidence, that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup, won't be the "drivers" of that revenue, and that's what the original article in this thread was talking about.

You are just adding more anecdotes which I already told you is meaningless.

> That's "pretty meaningless" without any data backing it - what's driving that revenue?

All the big IT Outsourcing companies are listed on the Indian stock exchanges, you can go to their sites and read the annual reports to see what is driving that revenue. Majority of their revenue comes from the US. Also check the share price of those companies for the last 20 years, where your bank failed, other succeeded in outsourcing their operations.

How is revenue tied at all to efficacy? Your analysis is too shallow to have any meaning.

Its not my analysis, those are the facts, their revenue keeps going up, their profits keep going up, their share price keeps going up, their clients keep going up. Now you do the math.

That has nothing to do with quality of work. Ok their financials are going up. Maybe they’re charging more, maybe they’ve reorg’d, maybe they laid off a ton of people, maybe they made good investments and sold. I’m not taking “they’re making more money” to mean anything other than the sole fact that a number on the balance sheet went up.

You dont have to speculate with maybe's. You need to look at the facts

All the big IT outsourcing companies are publicly listed, you can go to their website and check their annual reports to see how their revenue is going up for. You can see the number of employees keeps going up, the number of clients keeps going up. All these figures are available for 20 years now.

The context you trimmed off your quoted line completely changes the meaning of what you quoted.

It was “Simply put: if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in,”

Companies requiring employees to be in the city 9-6 aren’t off-shoring and probably aren’t out-sourcing that work.

> There are people 2x as smart and who will work 2x as hard for 1/2 the salary among remaining 7 Billion people on this planet and if the bank can hire them instead of you, eventually they will.

I think the bank can and does hire them already. In big tech companies, a lot of employees come from developing countries and they're paid the same market rate as anyone else (and companies pay for their relocation).

Moving staff from China or Poland to the US is a non-trivial exercise with all sorts of limitations, and FYI, that definitely lowers the local market rate.

The 'True Shift To Remote' is a big game changer because institutionally, people at the office had a kind of existential value proposition: "We are Here!" - but that prop is distinctly diminished if they don't think they have to be.

BigCorps are making the shift.

It will be interesting to see it play out.

You responded to something the author did not write using a quote taken entirely out of context. While the text of your message is fair and probably true (although outsourcing comes with chunky quality issues that frankly have not been solved yet), it is not at all topical.

I disagree that it was out of context either of the comment, or in the issue at large.

It doesn't matter that in this comment, the particular context was ostensibly 'move to the city to work in the office then get paid more'.

It's irrelevant - excessive demands in whatever form will be acquiesced by hiring better talent, elsewhere.

American workers making any kinds of special demands are going to get outsourced.

The tone of the article (and others is): "American Workers Leverage Over Big Corps" just like in this article: "Wall Street Grudgingly etc.". We saw the same with Apple yesterday.

In reality, the articles should be: "American Corps. looking overseas to diversity talent". Because that's what's about to happen. Anyone who thinks that these companies have any loyalty to their local nations, founding staff or culture, (and this applies broadly to the modern world) is mistaken.

It is possible to find companies that indeed do have loyalty. Personally, I have long ago resolved not to work for companies that outsource (offshore, same thing) engineering. It seems there may be a resurgence here in America of people willing to put their money where their mouth is: Buy local, hire local, keep the money here.

> I disagree that it was out of context [...] of the comment

It is not about your opinion, you are quite simply not responding to the posted comment. Because charitable reading of your comment required it, I have read the original comment that you claim to speak of again.

That comment says:

- Remote work can be done for a lower salary, because you can live anywhere

- If you demand that I come to the office, you should pay for the difference

You have responded to these points by saying that if you want more money, cheaper workers can be found "elsewhere" (i.e. abroad, so remote). This is not topical, because you address a claim that was never made.

> In reality, the articles should be: "American Corps. looking overseas to diversity talent". Because that's what's about to happen.

I've been hearing that since 2006. Yet American programmers still exist and still command a relatively high wage.

> Canada, Taiwan, Poland, Brazil, Spain

One of these is not like the others

It will be interesting to see whether companies can make a hybrid model work reliably. I tend to think that combining remote with on-site leads to worse results, because it’s easy to leave the remote people out of the loop.

The one true hybrid work model for tech (in my opinion anyway) is to just have everyone meet in-person in some cadence for sprint planning/PI planning/whatever your cycle is. Everybody syncs up every so often, and then you leave everyone the fuck alone while they go work. Zoom can handle one-off meetings for pairing or other quick questions, but planning out work/carving out architecture solutions is something better done face to face.

The odds are overwhelming that you do not and will never work on the kind of problems where such a minute advantage (if it even exists, which I doubt) makes any kind of difference to the bottom line. Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial. Requiring any sort of on-site time is a thought that belongs in the past.

I agree most business related coding is trivial, but all of the things that a software engineer does that surround the coding are not trivial. All of the best software engineers I know recognize this, and all of the less effective ones depend on them to fill in these gaps.

I’m sure this varies by company.

> Most business related coding is at the end of the day exceedingly trivial.

It is technically trivial. Building business software is fundamentally a communication/knowledge problem with technical aspects.

Definitely this, in fact I suspect that some larger organizations that get this right might become more competitive to smaller firms than before the pandemic, simple because meeting happy people will have their opportunities to steal focus curtailed and actual work time for people will be more clearly boxed out.

That's what the theory says, but my experience disagrees. I find that when the remote workers have to be kept in the loop or the work doesn't get done/get done properly, then managers make sure they are always up to date.

I've not found that to be true in my career. Where remote work is the exception, rather than the rule, the remote employees are frequently in the dark, and often simply fail to work out. Managers can only do so much when you're missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings.

I've worked in remote-only environments, and (effectively) local-only, both of which worked pretty well. Local-first/remote-rarely hasn't worked.

I've not worked in anything close to 50-50, though, so perhaps that has a better shot at succeeding.

> missing the critical water cooler/hallway/impromptu meetings

Maybe that's the crux of it. I've never worked in an environment where things like that amounted to much. If one of those meetings started to become important, it would always end up with "let's find a meeting room and include Charlie and Susan and get this hashed out."

I'd go so far as to say that if that's the way a team is primarily communicating, there is something structurally wrong.

> while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in

I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around.

That'll probably eventually change, but it could be a useful indicator. The median employee that chooses to live in X may be more productive that the median employee that chooses to live in Y. But that's yet to be seen

> I think most companies still consider your location when determining your pay. Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage. Not sure about the other way around.

Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over how work is done and how it is compensated, but I believe market forces will kill efforts like ZIP code based compensation.

In reality, if you're top tier talent, you can command top tier compensation no matter what your ZIP code is. Facebook's strategy relies on every other company colluding with them to suppress compensation based on locality.

> Truthfully, I don't see this working out in the long run. Companies like Facebook are making desperate grabs to keep control over how work is done and how it is compensated, but I believe market forces will kill efforts like ZIP code based compensation.

I think you're right, but I don't think the end game is that everyone gets FAANG-level salaries everywhere.

When companies realize that they can hire people for a fraction of SF Bay Area salaries while still paying them 20-30% more than their local salaries, the overall compensation structure will slide downward toward that number.

Then the next step is when they realize they can hire foreign people in similar timezones at another lower step on the compensation ladder (while still paying more than their local jobs would offer). The compensation then slides further down toward this average.

> In reality, if you're top tier talent, you can command top tier compensation no matter what your ZIP code is.

Works in theory, not as much in practice. There's still value to having people collaborate in person (I say this as someone who has primarily worked remote long before COVID). Companies paying top dollar have a lot of leverage to get employees to move and work in-person still.

"A fraction?" How much less do you think they can pay? This sounds suspiciously like the myth of off-shoring, get the same work for a fraction of the cost, but from what I've heard the competent ones quickly command more pay and are certainly not "a fraction" of a SF salary.

> "A fraction?" How much less do you think they can pay?

Half of Bay Area FAANG salaries is still more than a huge swathe of localities in the country - let alone the continent, where you'd likely plumb a quarter or an eighth and still be above local averages.

I think this would be an interesting hypothesis to entertain if it wasn't already falsified by the observation that FAANG (& similar) pay much more than a 30% premium over the "median" tech job not just in the US, but in pretty much every market where they compete.

An instructive example would be India: TC for senior engineers at Google, Amazon, Uber, etc is already north of $150k there. Note that this is _already higher_ than the median tech salary _in the US_. Meanwhile there are still places in India paying new grads $10k.

You see something similar in Ukraine, where 40-50k was a reasonable rate for senior engineers, and then Lyft enters the market and starts giving seniors 6-figures.

I think the answer, as always, is that there are just not enough sufficiently talented & qualified engineers, even taking into account the global talent pool, to balance the rapidly increasing demand for those engineers. If it was just one or two companies paying this level of outsized compensation I'd be skeptical of the long-term trend, but it's not - this is pretty much all modern tech companies, because the unit economics of software businesses make good developers extremely valuable.

I was curious what the story looked like for South America, and, hey, turns out these tech companies already pay 6-figures there too. Heck, Coinbase is offering _mid-level_ engineers in Brazil 6-figures for remote roles.

> An instructive example would be India: TC for senior engineers at Google, Amazon, Uber, etc is already north of $150k there. Note that this is _already higher_ than the median tech salary _in the US_. Meanwhile there are still places in India paying new grads $10k.

Keep in mind these companies are really trying to get the 1% of developers in that market. Anything below the 95th percentile is unemployable. [0] [1] [2]

[0] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

[1] https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/india-s-ta...

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/95-engin...

I would be wary of the 95% figure. Another user on HN (who currently works at FAANG) pointed out that he took the test used in that survey and failed. The interface for the coding test was not reflective of how actual software development is done (ie no syntax highlighting, memorization, etc). Even accounting for the diploma mills and the private universities with underresourced CS departments, the 95% figure seems unusually high.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument that that's true, I think that only enhances my point: there aren't enough engineers that these companies are willing to employ such that they would tip the scale on the supply/demand balance sheet and push compensation down (in real terms; obviously every additional marginal engineer pushes down compensation in counterfactual terms).

It strikes me as unlikely that big tech companies could save a large fraction of their engineering salary payments by firing a ton of engineers and replacing them with newly-hired engineers in different countries, and the only reason that they haven’t done this is that they simply have not had this same realization that you have had. It’s possible, of course, but I have a sneaking suspicion there’s more to the story.

I think some companies might do that. I think they'll wind up losing money as a result.

If you're willing to pay more for identical work because your employee chose to live somewhere more expensive, you're encouraging your employees to live in the most expensive places.

On the other hand, if you offer a fair wage for the work done regardless of location, your employees get better value by living somewhere inexpensive, which lowers the required compensation for the same employee.

I think Facebook is simply creating more problems for themselves by bothering with this.

If the cost of living adjustment were “perfect” then it wouldn’t encourage employees to live in any particular place, right? Presumably the whole point is to give each employee the same “effective compensation” for their particular place of residence. Of course, it’s not so easy to agree on what the ideal method of cost of living adjustment would be.

A "perfect" CoL adjustment can't exist. If it's fairly applied across distinct individuals then it won't be perfect for some of them, and if it's applied consistently to a fixed individual that person has enough tweakable parameters to warp the situation to their advantage and actually prefer one location over another. E.g.:

(1) Bob is optimizing long-term savings, and Joe is optimizing purchasing power for nearby activities like bars and restaurants. After subtracting other comparable expenses, any salary surplus strategy which is a "perfect" cross-city CoL adjustment for Bob will when applied to Joe cause him to prefer a cheaper CoL location because his dollars will go further. Supposing the employer doesn't have power to discriminate based on such preferences, no fair CoL adjustment is perfect for both individuals.

(2) Bob is still optimizing long-term savings. MegaCorp chose a "perfect" CoL adjustment based on Bob's preferred standard of living, but the multiplicative nature of price increases in a high CoL city means that Bob can save a ton of money with a mild decrease in his standard of living. He's incentivized to live somewhere more expensive because doing so will maximize his potential savings with minimal impact elsewhere in his life. If the employer isn't discriminating based on what's paid for rent and other expenses, the CoL adjustment is gameable.

The thing is that even if the cost of living adjustment was perfect, that still incentivizes living in a high cost of living area.

It's much easier to move from an expensive city to an inexpensive city than vice versa since your savings will go much further in the inexpensive city.

Compensation should be adjusted to value created not expenses incurred.

Then some of my coworkers should pay the company.

Ha, spat my coffee out at that one

Most of tech either isn’t remote or hasn’t been for very long, so strong candidates with large scale prod experience are still concentrated in markets where these skills are most valued and attainable. If you want those candidates, you have to compete with offers from local big tech.

> strong candidates with large scale prod experience are still concentrated in markets

As I keep asking when this comes up, if this is true then why are salaries for FAANG engineers so much lower in London? London, as you may know is 100% not cheap, and yet salaries there for FAANG tech people are approximately 50% of those in SF/US.

Because in the UK (where all of my ancestors are from) they don't value software engineers like they do in the US.

In the 1990s we were paid and managed like accountants. When the Web went mainstream, Bay Area VC companies created a sudden shortage which slowly spread.

ISTM that the main cultural difference is that UK companies consider developers as cost centers, not profit centers. Therefore, the bean counters have an incentive to either eliminate us or consider us as interchangeable cogs in the system.

But FAANG do. So why don't they raise salaries?

> I think Facebook is simply creating more problems for themselves by bothering with this.

This was always the policy, they paid wages based on the market. They did, however, pay identically in all of their US offices (prior to Covid) which is perhaps why people are surprised about this (entirely normal and expected) practice.

Given that I don't live in the US, I don't like this policy, but it's been around forever basically, at all large tech companies.

> If you're willing to pay more for identical work because your employee chose to live somewhere more expensive, you're encouraging your employees to live in the most expensive places.

I think the salary adjustments aren't so extreme that you're actually indifferent from living in an expensive place. Also, most employees aren't unattached 20 year olds. I choose to live in a high cost area because my family is here and this is where I grew up.

> On the other hand, if you offer a fair wage for the work done regardless of location, your employees get better value by living somewhere inexpensive, which lowers the required compensation for the same employee.

Would you be okay if the 'fair wage' was based on a global developer workforce? For instance, median programmer salary for the UK is ~$41k while the US is $74k, not to mention salaries in developing countries. Everyone assumes that fair consistent salaries will just take inflated San Fransisco levels and apply them globally when in reality, its more likely that we readjust all salaries based on lowest cost of living.

This works great until they start offshoring jobs to countries where software engineers make less than the total median American wage. Then do we all hope Polish or Indian immigration services approve us for a work visa?

Practically, what does this look like? There's $3M beautiful coastal homes in my area, and a few miles inland, you can get what might be called a 'starter home' for $900k. Is my wage going to be based on the extremely expensive coastal area, or the marked up, but still comparatively affordable inland area? It's all the same 'location' if we're talking at the county level.

I would think they use a metro-area scheme similar to what the government uses for their employees https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality

Because, I mean, waterfront property has a premium everywhere, and even in the same exact "starter home" location I'm sure you could teardown and fit a $3M home. Those choices aren't determined by the metro area.

If I were looking for work and I were a top tier candidate, I would not let companies play games by determining pay based on my location. I'd work with a company that pays me well no matter where I choose to live. After all, where I live should only concern them if there's some kind of tax implication.

Top tier candidates aren't stupid, and ones that would willingly subject themselves to that are probably just looking for a year or two stint to bolster their resumes. Either that or they aren't as smart as they make themselves out to be.

> Facebook does for instance, even going as far as tracking your IP to make sure you're being honest. If you choose to move to a lower cost city, they'll adjust your wage.

That's the official HR policy.

In real life... key contributors are magically exempted. If you aren't making SV rates no matter where, that's a career red-flag.

Any Facebook employee that wished to would surely find it trivial to use a VPS or something to mask their true location.

Technology is not always the solution. If your employer asks you to affirm something, and you do that, and then cheat (because, let's say, cheating is technologically trivial), then you take a huge risk. A lot of people will not take that risk. It's enough to make example of 1 or 2 people who are caught, and the rest will fall in line in no time.

Is my opinion, the company is cheating the employee by paying them less for the same work just because they live somewhere else.

One side fully presented the terms at the start. The other lied. If you don't like the terms, don't accept them. It isn't like facebook is the only employer.

It has never worked differently. If you want to average out the pay you'll be paid much more closer to Bangladeshi pay than to SV one.

It’s more a legal thing. Companies have to follow the local labor laws and pay taxes to the appropriate states.

Not sure the courts will really care about your opinion when there was an employment contract in place?

'Nobody forced them into slavery, why didn't they just go somewhere else?'

Slavery, by its very definition, involves force. From Merriam-Webster's dictionary:

Someone who is legally owned by another person and is forced to work for that person without pay

That's the point I was trying to make. Generally employees do not actually have much of a choice, if any. Especially if they have families to provide for so the distinction is rather moot

Employees can find another job. Or they can choose to have no job, and potentially starve to death etc. But the latter is the default of the human condition, and has little to do with the whims of corporations.

Ah yes they can just choose to starve to death! Couldn't slaves make the choice to be beaten to death or executed for not working? Thank you for proving my point

If you're suggesting that human beings are "slaves" to the natural condition, yes. Work or starve has been the default state of humanity (and all forms of life on Earth) since the dawn of time. It's not "slavery" or "capitalism" or anything else, it's the default state of being.

Oh my apologies, I guess that excuses paying people so little that they can't survive off the wages and need food assistance from the government. Capitalism truly has all the answers!

Companies were in a race to the bottom for wages, and many still are. People working these jobs sure maybe they can get an education, or get a foot in somewhere else. What about the next person to fill the shitty role they left? It's a continuous cycle of shitting on the lowest paid people in society and it needs to stop

Does an unskilled laborer have options in silicon valley? What options are those?

Seems like goalposts, wasn't the thread about Facebook monitoring it's employees'? What unskilled labor is that?

The post I initially responded to was about employers in general, and that post was responding to something about Facebook. This transitioned the conversation to the overarching theme of employer/employee relationship and pay

Slavery isn't just chattel slavery, it comes in many forms, including wage slavery.

The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass had this to say on the subject[1]:

> [E]xperience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other

From Wikipedia[1]:

> Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery#History

Working at FB isn't wage slavery, though, is it? If they can work there, cant they go get a similar job?

The issue goes far beyond Facebook and extends to nearly all US companies. It seems disingenuous to suggest otherwise

People actually were forced into slavery, and actually are not forced to work for Facebook.

Do you often exploit slaves as a rhetorical tool?

Have you heard of the concept of 'wage slavery'?

People at the lowest paid tiers of society do not have a choice

You and the company still needs to know/decide which locale you get taxed in and which regulation to follow.

Even in California, SF has different payroll taxes and regulation than other cities in the area. Massachusetts requires employers to open a unemployment account in state. If the employee moves to a state the employer doesn’t have a employees previously, you need to register in the state and it might mean you have to now pay sales taxes on revenue in the state.

So unless you become an independent contractor and deal with this things yourself, the employer needs to know where you live most of the tax year.

More and more remote companies use PEOs. No need to incorporate in 50 states, you just pay someone else to.

We use it too, but doesn't change the fact the the employer needs to tell the PEO where the employee is located. PEO also have limits, like MA example, the company still needs to open the unemployment accounts directly with the state. Sales tax is another thing that you have to do directly.

My point was that main reason companies need to know where the employee is compliance, employment law, taxes and potentially IP protection. While the employer wouldn't care about the location because of pay scale, they still need to know for other reasons.

Until we can all live in some United Kingdom of the Internet, the unfortunate fact is that local laws apply to companies and employees when the employee resides in the jurisdiction.

I worked at a company that switched to a PEO, people seemed weirdly outraged.

Playing games with your employer probably isn't the best idea if you're looking for a long term relationship with them.

It's not just the company caring for their own purposes (although there's that as well), there are external requirements which depend on the employee location which force them to need to know. Such as which taxes and how much they are required to deduct and even which health plan choices are available.

Facebook probably has really good data on IP geolocation, probably much much better than anyone, both through data users willingly provide and data from attackers they are certain to be fending off constantly. They'll know you're on a VPS.

I wouldn’t be so confident as to think Facebook won’t catch me lying for years.

Don't you have to give them your legal address when you start working for them?

I believe Facebook could catch them if it wanted.

Ultimately it's the employees that will make the choice, not the company. My wife works for a large NYC-based bank which has been trying to mandate 100% return to office since October 2020. They keep pushing it back by a month or two at a time due to employee backlash, and a year later still maintain that things will be back to "normal" soon. It's become a running joke among employees.

At a certain income threshold, rent becomes irrelevant. The difference in top decile salaries between, say, NYC and Pittsburgh is far more significant than the slight difference in a rent.

That doesn't sound right if you're talking about multiple people (ex: family with two kids and you want a room for each).

Rent is only part of it though. I'd gladly pay the equivalent rent in a better city assuming I keep my salary. I'm just trying to get a better quality of life.

For many, time is the more important consideration. Working from home allowed me to reduce a 1-1.5 hour commute to nothing, work out on my lunch vs after work…at the end of the day those can easily add up to a couple hours per day that could be spent doing something else.

> Like all industries that can move to remote, I suspect we will soon see a split. Some companies will embrace it, some won't.

I actually wrote more about it in my blog post, "Remote working and the elephant in the room": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/remote-working-and-the-elep...

To me, it feels like we have people in the industry with wildly different preferences in regards to working, preferences that are oftentimes at odds. For a long time, the trend of working at the office has been set by the folk that are more comfortable with this mode of work and that has been considered "normal", however in the past few years many have also gotten a taste for the remote work alternative.

Personally, i wouldn't want to go back to the office, resigning and looking for a remote opportunity (or even starting my own company) being preferable to that. For other folks, the opposite is probably true. Neither is wrong, it's just that they're at odds - some people would feel as uncomfortable with remote work and async communication, as i would with in person work. The long term consequences of this remain to be seen, however.

I wonder if the remote firms will be at an advantage because of reduced real estate expenses. Offices aren't cheap, and the past couple decades have seen a downward spiral in square footage per person at offices. Now it's reached its final form, roughly zero square feet per person. Combine that with a drastically expanded recruiting pool and it's easy to see how remote work firms could come to dominate.

I’m considering hiring in person only for tech ventures (software dev, product managers, designers etc, standard affair)

My observations are that people that could afford to migrated to a lot of the same areas

I think there is a market need for it. Something as simple as going to a local event after work with some of the people you enjoy being around (not company mandated nor suggested) requires nearly zero planning compared to trying to coordinate coming out from home

My hunch is that there is an audience for it

I bet local businesses (bars, lounges, similar things) would even give discounts to attract that kind of crowd again. The after work and well compensated crowd that acts spontaneously.

Its funny to even mention it, but people with bad commutes wont even apply or pretend they dont have a bad commute, and people with a reason to be home (that many other companies now cater to) also wont show up.

I still think there is enough talent.

> you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent

The corollary of what you said is to pay remote employees with the same title less, which they won't all accept... especially the ones living in the same geo area due to the fact that they were commuting before the pandemic or are still occasionally commuting in and haven't moved to a lower COL area yet.

I think the bigger effect is this will create I believe a new round of Off Shoring for a set of jobs that used to be considered immune or at least resistant to off shoring.

I could be wrong but your statement of "if you want me to be in the city from 9-6 every day, while your competitor says I can live anywhere and remote in, you'd better be paying me extra to cover my increased rent" will hold true for for the global workforce as well, and I am not just talking the traditional off shore to India or china, but it could be that EU companies find cheaper information workers in US Mid West, or US Companies finding cheaper employees in EU, or Australia , etc

The high salaries of NY, LA, Silicon Valley, etc I think will be the first losses in this battle, many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that.

It will be interesting but the employees pushing for full time remote should be advised to be careful what they wish for, as they just might get it and not like the consequences

> many companies have already told their employees that if you choose to go remote to a Lower cost of living state your salary will be adjusted to reflect that.

But at the same time, that makes the company vulnerable to the employee seek another company that will allow the remote work with a better compensation. Unless the ceos get together and conspire to suppress wages like they have done in the past, it is really uncertain how the workforce landscape will shape itself in the near future.

It's also going to give rise to a class of services to undermine this. You can just have your official address be wherever and so long as the tax benefits make sense financially you'll make more money with a fake address in a state with no income tax while mostly living somewhere else.

I think this leads to stronger evidence for property tax as the primary form of taxation. If you're paid in crypto and not paying property tax on that PO box that like 18 other people use for separate companies (address as a service or AAAS lol) the company won't know, the state government won't know either. Even if you're paid in cash it's hard to really track down.

So we will continue to wind up with different types of tax havens throughout the world. The long-term ramifications IMO are that nice places to live are going to charge very high property taxes and very high costs for obtaining citizenship, and you'll pay that for safety and security and for things that you enjoy (maybe it's walkable, maybe there are lots of parks, maybe the security is strong, maybe everybody looks like you or something).

I'm not arguing the ethics of this or anything, I'm not sure where I stand or what makes sense - just an observation.

> You can just have your official address be wherever and so long as the tax benefits make sense financially you'll make more money with a fake address in a state with no income tax while mostly living somewhere else.

Do you not expect governments to use their powers to issue subpoenas to banks or get location history from mobile networks or license plate readers to figure out this fraud if their tax revenues suffer?

A few years ago, Connecticut had Newegg send them a list of all purchases shipped to the state, and then mailed everyone a tax bill with penalties for failing to pay use tax. The onus was on the recipients to prove they already paid the use tax.

> Do you not expect governments to use their powers to issue subpoenas to banks or get location history from mobile networks or license plate readers to figure out this fraud if their tax revenues suffer?

Well let's not be so hasty to call this fraud. I don't know the legal details but lots of individuals and corporations do things for financial/tax reasons that undermine the spirit of law and we don't call it fraud. Also things can change. I think there is a more broad discussion to have here on taxes and such. Like why am I paying more in taxes than Buffet (contrived example)? Isn't that fraud?

But I think the underlying thing to noodle on is what if a lot of people do it and just ignore the government? Or how will the government know if you're paid in BTC from an overseas company? That's where I think property taxes (and probably sales taxes) come into play because the police or tax authority can show up at the door and seize the property.

And in the case of San Francisco PO box let's say I buy a 2 bedroom house and then it costs whatever and I say ok I rent it out to 15 people with 15 bunk beds and rent it out for whatever + something so I profit (hell maybe it's even a co-op) and then you just tell your company that's your address and where you reside but you drive around in a van full-time or just 1 month in SF, spend 8 months in Oklahoma and 3 months in New York or whatever.

From SF/CA perspective you are living and paying taxes there, but the point is that your company pays you the higher wage while not living there (and taxes are deducted and soforth) but you're saving by getting the higher wage without the cost of living (again this would be a financial calculation to see if it's worth it and all that so I don't want to argue details at the moment b/c idk). In a sense you're tricking your company because they have this policy of "if this is where you live and pay taxes then here's your paycheck" but the actual living part doesn't need to be done where you "live".

Another example is living in Texas or Florida where there's no income tax. Set up a PO box, say that's your address, and there ya go. (Over-simplifying it a bit).

No doubt in my mind that schemes like this are occuring. Question is what happens when everybody does it? And what does the world look like when every person has access to the equivalent of a tax haven and is instead choosing where to live based on other factors?

A couple things:

> why can't we just regulate #of people in a house.

Well, tell that to the families of service workers who can't afford rent. What's the right number of people per address? Etc.

> The onus was on the recipients to prove they already paid the use tax."

Sure but if you live somewhere else you can just decline. What will Connecticut do when 50,000 people living all over the world just don't pay the tax? What will the U.S. do if there are millions? It seems like it's hard enough to go after corporations and they have big legal entities and property in the U.S. to seize and litigate over. Hell, maybe you get enough people doing it and law firms start representing people with medium net worths and so now every time you go after someone it costs so much money you go bankrupt over the tax. The problem for the governments is ability to enforce, which is why I think long-term everything rests on enforcement of property taxes. And you'll pay property tax because you want roads, police, etc. and if you don't pay the tax then they can block you from your property. Probably in-person sales taxes as well because you can also enforce those decently enough.

The scenario is like a lion trying to crush ants. It's probably not effective.

Also please don't take this as an anti-anything statement. I'm just trying to think through and predict future outcomes and just have some fun with scenarios :) I pay all of my taxes, and probably pay too much even...

>Well let's not be so hasty to call this fraud.

I am going to refer to it as fraud, because that is the usual way the word is used in the context of the legal consequences one opens themselves up to making intentionally false claims about your residence in order to evade taxes. The law does not require anyone to pay taxes on unrealized gains of stocks, so no, it is not fraud if Buffett does not pay tax on unrealized gains of stocks.

>A couple things: > why can't we just regulate #of people in a house.

I never wrote this, so I am not sure who you are responding to.

>It seems like it's hard enough to go after corporations

It is not hard if they are evading taxes by committing clear fraud with no plausible deniability, such as claiming they were physically in one place when in reality they were in another place. The news articles you see are for cases where there is a lot of gray area in the law.

>The problem for the governments is ability to enforce

It is called freezing bank accounts. It is where much of the power of the US comes from, and many times why opposing entities who do not trust each other choose to do business in the US.

> I am going to refer to it as fraud, because that is the usual way the word is used in the context of the legal consequences one opens themselves up to making intentionally false claims about your residence in order to evade taxes.

> The law does not require anyone to pay taxes on unrealized gains of stocks, so no, it is not fraud if Buffett does not pay tax on unrealized gains of stocks.

You're not violating the technical aspect of the law anymore than Buffet would be. Can you tell me the proper amount of time someone must live somewhere in order for them to truly live there? Pass a law? Those won't work. Already people are doing this - what do you think people who are living in vans do? They claim residence somewhere, maybe their parent's house and then they just live in the van or maybe they have some other place they stay. People do this with Florida to evade New York City taxes, etc.

> I never wrote this, so I am not sure who you are responding to.

Just pre-empting a response. Long story short the first answer many have is legislation but it is too burdensome to address any actual issues.

> It is not hard if they are evading taxes by committing clear fraud with no plausible deniability, such as claiming they were physically in one place when in reality they were in another place. The news articles you see are for cases where there is a lot of gray area in the law.

I think you're operating in the current model but not thinking about what can and is likely to happen in the future. The U.S. already can't go after many people who are outright breaking the law. Once this reaches a critical mass it's basically like trying to stop people from pirating songs. It's just not going to work. The lion and ant thing is really great here to help visualize.

Also, who is to say where you really live? Ok maybe you do live with 14 other people in bunkbeds in San Francisco. Is (insert company) going to fly/drive/walk someone out there and show up and check on you? It's impossible to enforce. So you can definitely draw a Bay Area salary and effectively live somewhere else. You can even do it in other countries. Plenty of digital nomads. Have you ever heard of one being prosecuted?

> It is called freezing bank accounts. It is where much of the power of the US comes from, and many times why opposing entities who do not trust each other choose to do business in the US.

The dysfunction and instability of the stability of the U.S. democracy is eroding power like this, for better or worse. You can't freeze a Bitcoin address, etc.

I think on the whole you make a very good point, but don’t underestimate the impact of time zones & differences in language & culture.

Communication may not be geographically limited anymore, but there are still barriers to overcome.

The companies I've seen adjusting salaries are adjusting for "market rate" of salaries, not CoL. This can result in moving to an area with a higher cost of living and a lower salary.

“Cost of living” was always code for “employer bets you will accept lower pay because you will not have a better option “.

Pay is usually max(COL, local market rate). You don't need a super high COL if the local market is very competitive, but COL can raise the pay because you still need to convince people to move to your location and most people won't do that if it has an abnormally higher cost of living without a corresponding pay increase.