Nuance is required here I think; with regard to working remotely - I've been working remotely now for 14 years. In my albeit limited experience (6 different employers, ~60 interviews) companies that were hiring remote before 2020 offered pay at the same rate/range as if they were hiring locally from their home base. I didn't run into a company that adjusted pay for geographic location until 2019. After 2020, I saw a marked increase in the practice. So much so that it became one of my first questions for recruiters/screeners. The entire industry view of remote work has now changed, and it at least appears that ideas around comp are as well.

Remote workers in the US in cheap cost of living states are the new offshore workers, with less legal hoops to jump through because they’re US citizens.

Most companies don’t have set salaries in practice anyway, so it ends up being whatever they successfully get away with.

So in practice, yes, but companies aren’t so deliberate about it as to have it in policy.

It depends what they mean by pay. Everyone company I know will absolutely do base salary for your region, while stock grants will be pretty universal between regions within countries.

Depending on the company sometimes the differences in base salary will be very minimal, say $225k in Ohio versus $250k in SF.

There are a lot of companies that don’t adjust salaries when engineers go remote, but they also only let engineers they are committed to keeping go remote in the first place.

Not a great example.

An engineer that started on-site with regional pay that now went remote does not equal “we’re a company that hires remote worldwide and we don’t adjust to regional salaries”.

A good example would be a company that hires new staff in multiple countries and continents that pays everyone regardless of their location.