As for the location-based pay part, I bet none of the people who were furious about getting "adjusted" after moving out of the Bay Area ever complained about their colleagues in Bangalore working the same amount as them and making 1/5 as much.

I'm in management now .. as an engineer, I most certainly used to work over 8 hours a day (probably 12 hours, counting all the time I spent studying to keep up). Now, in management, the hours have actually gone up .. I now have to worry about things my team is doing 24/7, have to deal with a ton of human, infra and organizational issues, being open to meetings at any hour of the day, in addition to staying technical (my direct code contributions have gone down but my engagement with codebase and overall non-code issues has skyrocketed). I am in a large company and do AI research (so work and what I enjoy are the same, and doing cutting edge research is pretty much as hard as it gets).

Point is .. when people boast how little work they do, it makes me wonder who is the poor slob who gets to do extra. We are software professionals, and professionals need to act by a certain creed and abide by an unspoken ethic. Maybe this is my immigrant roots showing .. as I grew up, my folks always taught me to make sure I'm worth the salt I'm paid. I certainly have had periods where I was in a funk (especially early on in my career) but when a job just didn't gel, I left and tried to find something more engaging.

I certainly don't feel I can coast for a few months. Who the heck are these companies that are so relaxed. Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers). It could be certain areas of a large company, and it could be for some short period where people can get away with coasting. I don't think this is really sustainable with how competitive today's software landscape is.

work-life balance should not come at the expense of some of the workers pulling more than their fair share of work.

I.E a junior that is just learning terraform vs. a staff that has used it 3 years?

Maybe not. In the corporate world, 90% of work is work that was generated by other work. Some people are really good at not causing work for other people.

Pls don't say FANG (or MANG or whatever). People I know at the senior level work really hard too (from my peers).

They spend a lot of hours but they don't really accomplish that much. The thing about FAANGs is that above the $250k line, it's all politics. If you're any good at the game, you figure out that you'll always do better using political position to take credit for someone else's work than taking the chance of your own labor (how much can one person do?) being appreciated.

Always get a team if you can: it diversifies your apparent contribution to the company.

It's common for office workers to have at least 3-4 meetings a day which basically destroys the day already. You'll have only tiny snippets of productive time left, which are then again interrupted by email and chat. It would actually be a challenge to come to 2 hours of productive time in such a day.

It used to be that only managers were stuck in meetings and email all day long but now the same applies to office workers that actually need to produce something. A meeting is not a product, your customers didn't order a meeting and you can't ship a meeting.

Anyway, thanks for picking up the slack. I'm back to playing flappy bird now.

It's either this, or they have some unrealistically narrow view of what constitutes work.

I've worked with engineers who were concerned they only "worked" 4 hours per day because they only counted time spent writing code in the code editor. Had to remind a lot of people that communication, meetings, and other job-related activities are also work.

But there are also a lot of people who do the 2 hour per day thing by shifting as much work as possible to other people. They might do bursts of intense work when they know other people are watching, but it's back to the minimum as soon as they're not being closely observed any more.

The other half of that equation is to change jobs frequently. It can take a year or longer for some managers or companies to catch on to employees who aren't really doing much work, at which point the person can easily move on to the next job and start the process again.

That's not just either, even if people didn't complain about it. Sometimes it takes a bad thing happening to someone for them to realize injustice that existed before. I would hope anyone against location-based paycuts within the US is also now against international location-based paycuts.

If a company was paying SV wages to someone, that must be because their labor is worth > that amount to the company. Salaries within SV, not hitting a profitability cap, exist on a supply / demand curve. Companies are rational actors, so they have no reason to be paying their SV employees any more than is necessary.

The current pay dynamic for all companies (that I know of) is location-based pay. Either they only hire in one location (so are trivially location-based), or they pay US employees more than overseas employees. Maybe they, like Google, are moving to a more granular within-US system.

Now, for the leveling. What mechanism would force a company to pay non-SV / non-US employees the same as SV employees? Possibly a law, maybe a union at a specific company, or simply social pressure from employees of the company.

So the facts are: 1) the company can afford SV salaries, 2) that company pays less than SV salaries for workers outside SV, and 3) we assume a leveling event that changes that.

Now a company has (roughly) two actions when this happens: bring SV employees down, or everyone else up.

In the first scenario: you're an SV employee. You're being paid market rate for SV, and the company announces they're bringing your salary down. You'd quit, right? Other companies aren't doing this, and since your salary was market rate, you can simply hop over to another company in SV that's paying your old, higher salary. There's a coordination problem for the companies here: if they all made this change at once, nobody would move and the SV salary would reduce (at least in the short term). But that would be illegal (see the Apple/Google recruiter ban lawsuits). So instead, they would quickly attrite all their programmer talent to companies who haven't made this move, until they are solely employing non-SV programmers who are happy with whatever the below-SV-market-rate salary is. Which may be fine! Many companies locate outside SV and pay less in comp as a result. But the most successful American tech companies locate in SV (or similar CoL areas, like Seattle), so they must see something to hiring those programmers, even if they're more expensive.

In the second scenario: the company brings up the salaries of non-SV employees. This has no effect on you as an SV employee, except perhaps making it easier to get a job in the area, since companies have less incentive to outsource.

Now here's a major caveat: companies often outsource easier work to lower-CoL areas, but I think this is a broken / honestly somewhat offensive practice. I think it's OK to pay, say, someone who's main skillset is banging out internal apps using low-code tools less than a senior full-stack engineer with deep performance / kernel tuning experience. People able to do the former are more common than the latter! But companies, falsely and offensively, assume the former = non-US, the latter = SV, and then assign their pay in that way. But why shouldn't someone in SV trying to break into programming be able to earn $40k doing the internal apps? And, conversely, why should a high-skilled engineer in, say, India be forced to move to the US to earn wages at American companies that are equal to their skill? (sans timezone issues, etc., if that's important for the role, which is a separate discussion).

If Google can pay an L4 280k in SV, they can afford to pay an L4 in Minnesota, or India, or anywhere the same amount. They wouldn't pay an L4 that much in SV if they weren't worth that much (and, realistically, they're worth much more).

Conversely, if Google wants to hire a contractor for cheap, that's fine! That job just shouldn't be tied to location either. Why shouldn't someone in the US be able to take that job, if they want it?

I'm still living in the Bay Area due to family but that's one of the reasons why we haven't looked seriously about moving. I felt like the WFH train was going to stop eventually.

Regarding not being able to tell whether someone is contributing if they aren't in person - this manager is just plain dumb, as they aren't measuring the right criteria.

I disagree. Buyers of labor (or buyers of anything) will continue doing what they always have, offer the least amount of money that they think sellers of labor will accept.

“Cost of living adjustment” is just fluffy language to hide the underlying bet by the buyer of labor that the seller of labor residing in a particular area will not be able to find a buyer offering a higher price.

Just look at the commit logs.

Sheesh. I managed an SWE group for years. It was easy-peasy to unobtrusively keep an eye on things.

I reserve my greatest praise for those who delete code without visible regressions or increased complexity.

Thanks!

Personally, I agree with you. I work somewhat differently, but am highly effective.

I managed a team of very high-functioning C++ programmers, for one of the top imaging companies in the world, for 25 years. I kept employees for decades, and that’s no secret. I mention it frequently, here, and my entire career is an open book. I've been an active software engineer for over 35 years, and shipping software, that entire time.

There's a [vanishingly small, I know] chance that I used a couple more techniques than simply counting CIs.

Yeah no. I've had to do a lot of investigative, hacky "PoC" work with lots of debugging, design, coordinating work (whiteboarding, email threads, etc) for the last ~5 or so months. I'm a software engineer but if you looked at my actual commit logs for the last quarter or so, it'd seem like I haven't done much. Some people work differently and have different workload, I've been shifting to some more active work now (and I'm glad because I enjoy coding way more) and my commit log "landscape" will probably be very different in the next few months, but if you just looked at the last few months it'd look like I didn't work a single day.

I really hope people don't base productivity just on commit logs, seriously.

I was a very good manager for 25 years.

I guess maybe I ended up doing OK. Read the testimonials on my LikedIn.

I’m pretty aware that CIs are simply one single data point.

Some of the days with the fewest commits, are the ones I did the most work.

It's not a trend we're heading toward, but it's well established practice in the economy. People working in Asia or Eastern Europe, for USA companies, make less, and they do the same job.

Fact that it's going to be applied to people working remotely, not at the office, is just an implementation detail.

The objective is to maximize sales by getting more money from people who want to spend more money, while also getting some money from people who want to spend less money.

Offering people less money because you think they will accept less money because they are not likely to get a higher offer due to where they live is more accurately described as arbitrage.

I agree that “price discrimination” isn’t quite right; it’s more of a metaphor. It works if you imagine that companies are selling money that is bought for the price of labor. In different markets, people will accept more or less money for the same labor, or equivalently spend less or more labor for the same money, which allows for price discrimination.

There are lots of areas that are having difficulty with gentrification and the associated difficulty of actually being able to hire people to work the service jobs in those areas.

A company that is paying significantly more than exacerbates the inequities in those areas. A big tech company having remote workers living like royalty in places as the cost of housing there goes beyond what the regular person who lives there makes can become a PR nightmare.

No. Each region will have its own supply and demand that affect prices.

Employees are no different. If Google can find enough qualified people in Ohio for 80% of the salary, that’s the cost of an employee in Ohio. Just because it’s more in CA doesn’t change that.

But regardless, there are plenty of engineers in the mid-west willing (and happy!) to work for 50% of what a FAANG is paid in the Bay Area. So it's win-win, the employer gets a cheaper employee and the employee gets a better salary than before.

If full remote stays around or gets bigger then this is the end state. Everyone arguing against COL based pay seems to think they'd get to keep there high salary rather then everyone getting payed less.

At the start of my career, 16 years ago, I spent some time abroad in a small country with some very distant family. When the topic of my career came up in conversation I remember multiple people saying that software engineer simply didn't exist as a profession in that country because there were no software jobs available there.

Should companies adjust compensation according to these variables too, or just city?

Google's revenues, however, are not limited based on employee location and I sure as hell don't see why pay should be.

It's funny, because that logic means that location-based-pay becomes its own justification. The city I live in is normally a personal choice. But by paying based on location, the city I live in no longer becomes a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.

But the moment that my company discriminates pay based on anything that has an associated cost, it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies that pay differential.

If part of my pay was tied to wearing an expensive suit, then my clothes would no longer be a personal choice, thus justifying the extra pay for the suit.

If part of my pay was tied to me driving a fancy car, then my car would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for the fancy car.

If part of my pay was tied to enrolling my kids in a particular school, then enrolling in that school would no longer be a personal choice, so it would make sense for them to pay extra for that, and so on...

You still have the personal choice to live in the city of your choice, either by not working for a particular company because they don't offer you the ability to work from your preferred city, or working for the wage they are willing to pay you to work from there.

> it suddenly stops being a personal choice, which justifies the extra pay for living in that city.

I don't think "justification" enters the consideration for extra pay for living in city X or less pay or no job for living in city Y. You are offered a set of terms of employment working from a given place. There is nothing stopping you from attempting to negotiate different terms. Maybe you can improve on those terms. Some people have enough leverage to work from anywhere they want without any pay decrease. Not me, but maybe you!

But anyway, if you follow the logic of the thread, it was: (A) location-based pay is justified because of location-based cost of living --> (B) then is car-based pay justified because of car-based cost of living? --> (C) no, cars are a personal choice --> (D) your car is as much a personal choice as your location; it's only not a personal choice to the extent that your employer pays you to choose in a particular way, so using that reasoning to justify location-based pay is begging the question --> (E) your reply, that location is a personal choice, which is a counter to the claim (C), not to my response (D).

As far as negotiation goes, you might be amazed the extent to which companies are willing to shoot themselves in the foot to stand by their non-negotiable policy. I've seen it. And the calculus is this: you might be so skilled that you're a bargain even at $1 million, but if they pay you that much, it increases the market value of other skilled workers in your area. And if the market discovers this information, that might cost the employer a lot, even though it has nothing to do with you. So they'll tell you you can have the $X you want, but only if you move to a city where other skilled workers are already being paid that much, even though they don't actually care what office you're at, or even if you work remote full-time anyway.

Cost of living doesn't justify location based pay. It happens to correlate, but if a company could offer you an less pay in a high COL area without you declining the offer, then they might. They could even move their entire operation to an area with 1/4 the labor rates, like the Philippines, but there are big reasons they don't.

> then is car-based pay justified

Car based pay doesn't exist AFAIK, so what's the point? Companies pay what they have to pay to hire/retain the employees they want. There are a myriad of factors affecting any labor market, including all sorts of day to day personal costs like housing and transportation, but those are distilled through the personal choice of the employee. The main input to what employers pay is what other employees pay - it's a feedback loop at an unstable local equilibrium.

That said, if a major company or three decided to move to globally uniform compensation (the same pay in Czechia as Chicago), well that would be an interesting experiment to watch, though I wouldn't want to work there.

One would never have been an acceptable candidate sans [skills] [suit] [car] [lifestyle]

I disagree with your comments on this though...

I'd appreciate it if you would expand on what you feel is actual 'choice'