If you’re mad at anyone, walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing.

If a company places it's headquarters in a HCOL area and requires everyone come in 5 days a week, then yes, they have a responsibility to pay a salary high enough that their employees can survive there.

If employers don't like the fact that COL is too high, THEY can go ahead and march on city hall to advocate for political action. Companies have a MUCH larger sway with local politicians than the average employee does. That, or they can increase the salary or change the attendance policies.

Google, for example, has been trying for over a decade to build some medium-density housing near its campus. This goes beyond just advocating for political action (which they're also doing) -- they're actually offering to finance the project and assume all risk -- all the city has to do is stop saying no.

But every time it comes up for approval, local residents show up to complain, and the city council finds some arbitrary reason to say no.

They don't want to do that because they've already spent a bunch of money on their fancy HQ and don't want to see it empty out.

There are plenty of employers with < 1000 employees, however, crowding these downtown areas. They have way more flexibility in being able to move out of these city centers and into more affordable locations for everyone. They don't because part of the reason for their offices in these downtown location is rich people showing off to other rich people. You gotta "look" successful.

If an office is moved to a less densely populated area, the average commute time of all employees collectively ends up increasing.

The way rich people actually show off to other rich people is by doing what's right for their companies, thereby increasing the value of their equity - which then allows them to buy luxury goods and impress other rich people that way.

Not necessarily. I've lived in rural areas and the number of miles you could travel per minute is significantly higher than the miles per minute in an urban area. My current commute time would be the equivalent of around 15 miles in the very much less urban area. Also when you factor in that property is cheaper for things like parking and factor in extremely easy door to door parking, commute times drop down even more. At one point I lived in a condo and had to walk 8 minutes from my condo door down the garage to my parking spot. I now have a house and my car is directly out my side door.

Population density relative to commute doesn't seem to be such a clear cut relationship. In theory in a dense area you have to travel less, in reality people work where they can and don't want to move constantly so commute times can get quite long.

It is almost like, in any context, centralization is bad. I am not sure why we has a civilization have to keep learning this lesson, over and over and over again

Anytime you centralize anything it results in bad outcomes.

Diversity, Diversification, Distributed Models, etc are ALWAYS preferable, I dont care if you are talking about Stocks, People, Housing, Power, Government, you name, Consolidation and centralization is always bad

Decentralization of cities - competition - sometimes helps even more, but the societies that never centralized never got as far. (And that decentralization can backfire sometimes too, e.g. military competition instead of economic.)

This is my problem with the studies on suburban sprawl is they do not factor in all of the things, they are generally only looking at one thing namely car and home pollution

Then you have Higher Crime, and a whole host of other matters that come with Dense Urban Centers that you do not get when people spread out.

On Balance I will take suburban sprawl over Urban Density every day, and twice on Sunday

Suburbanites are at very high risk of life-altering consequences from the actions of other humans. Many of those actions are crimes (DUI, distracted driving, reckless driving), but worse, some are not even crimes (incompetent driving, tired driving, intentional killing of annoying cyclists). That we feel so differently about these compared to more traditionally urban forms of crime is just cognitive bias with a helping of racism.

And with respect to density, produce for NYC was grown within sight of Manhattan as late as 1960. The impact of the belt of suburbia from Richmond, VA to New Hampshire is far more harmful that the cities.

Sometimes, it's clearly the right choice (where are program settings settings? `~/.config`).

It's also VERY simple. If all you want is client/server version control, and you don't mind the constraints, SVN's UX and learning curve beats git's by a long shot.

Decentralization buys you flexibility, but entails tons of complexity.

I can not envision any scenario in which I would choose SVN over git

No, they don't. The employee gets to decide if the salary is high enough to meet his needs. If it isn't, the employee can negotiate for more, or go elsewhere.

Nobody is obliged to work for a company they find unacceptable.

If an employer doesn't pay their employees enough, those employees should leave, their employer will eventually die, and that'll add another data point to tell the shareholders to either elect CEOs that will pay more or to stop backing companies in high-CoL areas.

And saying companies choose where the highest concentration of available talent resides is dishonest.

I don't see why employers can have efforts to address climate change and social justice problems, but cost of living for their local communities is too much.

Yup, there's a low supply of employees and a high demand for them. So guess what the absolute dumbest thing is an employer can do when employees start clamoring for COL adjustments?

Or the company can walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing, because they're unable or unwilling to pay enough for people to live in a viable radius.

Or the company can relocate or establish a satellite office in a lower cost of living area.

Or the company can pay people commensurately with the cost of living in the area.

Or the company can deal with the inevitable attrition of their workforce as it happens, all the while denying that they have any agency and deflect blame onto individuals.

No, but they can move to a lower cost area, allow WFH, or gasp pay a fair wage for the region. Employers don't have a right to cheap labor

This is just suppliers (of labor) advising that their costs are going up, and thus so is the price of their economic input. It's just business.

Some day soon, hopefully, companies that fail to do this will fail to stay in business.

No, but it's responsible for not paying well, while mandating that everyone working for it must live in the most expensive region in the country.

> If you’re mad at anyone, walk down to city hall and tell them to build more housing.

Or walk across the street to a competitor. It is the Bay area, after all.

Just like how if you don't like the mandates issued by your government, you are free to move to a different country. Or to petition it to change them. They are still mandates, though, despite you choosing out of your own free will to submit to them, by virtue of not leaving.

This website also has mandates about how its posters are expected to behave, that you submit to - despite being here voluntarily.

You choose the company you work for, and you can leave at any time, and you don't owe them a thing.

So no, it's not at all "just like"

Feeling good makes people happy. What's measured to produce that feeling is the outcome of the am-I-good thing in your brain's evaluation of whatever you did, and Goodhart's law is always in effect. You can pay the cost of being good and earn a good evaluation—or you can do whatever you want, enjoy the rewards, and trick the am-I-good thing into always saying yes.

Since the latter method makes you feel good cheaper and faster, I'd expect it to be fairly common. In my experience it is.

So it's really option 3: do bad things and don't feel bad, with views on right and wrong aligned suspiciously precisely with your personal interests.

(Hopefully I've made it clear I'm not endorsing this, just describing it.)

> tech jobs are a dime a dozen

Be that as it may for some, I am a mix of a software engineer and a systems engineer. It's difficult for companies to find a place for me, much less test me. Personally, I'd like this saying to die, because even in a white-hot market like I started my search in it still takes months of rigor to filter out the BS and find a company that isn't going to string me through the ringer just to dump me at final interviews for something entirely arbitrary while giving me glowing feedback along the way.

The first words were “I'm leaving my company”. Am I missing something?

Uhh, surely I'm not the only one seeing the obvious flaw here, right? Is the inevitable outcome here that pay bands will now cover a range where nobody is actually in the lower half, ever? That lower half of the range will just be there as a sort of psychological buffer?

For example, Google's board stipend is $100k, which is about half the median total comp of an average employee (less, counting benefits). Walmart I think pays their board $60k.

You may be thinking of executive comp, but even then it is generally not significant amount. You could completely eliminate and redistribute executive compensation at Wal-Mart and it wouldn't really make a measurable difference in employee hourly salaries.

But, to your point regarding prorated comp: I've been a salaried employee at a company like Google. I've also been a board member.

First, like many senior tech employees my total comp market rate is in the seven figures. A pro-rated 1.2M stipend would be appropriate to compensate me for my time. The average board retainer for less profitable companies is closer to $30k/yr. These are not entry level positions and the retainers are shockingly low in the vast majority of cases. (In my case, I'm on the board of a non-profit and I actually pay them)

Second, I think you are underestimating how little some salaried workers actually work. I think if you try you can find more than a few Google employees who only work one month a year ;) Conversely: I work far harder in my role as a board member than I used to in my salaried role. It's different for everyone of course, but I assure you no one is seeking out board seat retainers as a way to get rich. It's just not worth it.

Can they be leveraged for networking to get a CEO job in the future?

Looking at some other companies, Activision-Blizzard's CEO alone makes enough to pay every employee a $15,000 bonus. Reed Hastings at Netflix makes enough to pay every employee $3800. And that's not counting any of the rest of the executive staff, or all the other ways money flows out of a company to non-employees, like dividends and stock buybacks.

https://www.equilar.com/reports/83-equilar-associated-press-...

I think there's certainly a lot of room for wages to go up, though i'm skeptical that it will come at the expense of things like executive pay or share buybacks.

As you say, most goes to investors. Which makes sense as they actually own the company.

So... seems fair to me. Maybe salaries will actually increase enough that people won't have to switch jobs every three years to get a raise.

They can't, though; if you do that, now there are people in the bottom half, and they're upset that they're 'below average'.

You basically need a vanity range for pay.

Every time you read that headline, the company could have just cut pay by 15% and gotten the same profitability. Higher pay will force medium-small companies to hire less people

Some SV companies make Billions in profits per quarter. Some don't. I've seen far too many employees try to justify why they should be making Meta compensation elsewhere. It doesn't and shouldn't work that way

Every place I’ve worked for the past 10 years has had salary bands, and I’ve always been paid far more than the highest band offered. Because I’ve never been an employee, it’s simply never applied to me. I don’t get counted in the diversity statistics either, which is also great.

I guess transparency regulations take the feeling of pressure off those who aren’t competent negotiators, but if the goal is to decrease inequalities, they won’t accomplish that.

Such an elegant implementation of the 'no assholes' policy.

When I was an employee in Germany I always thought it would be fun to get stuck in B) and get an "offer" for like 5x my current salary and see what happens.

The only people who were upset were those who found out some people were way over the new pay band and generated a bit of gossip over how those people were way overpaid for the quality of their work