Why would anyone accept a pay cut if their job is remote? I get it if location based pay is used for jobs that require in person. But how can the employer have it both ways? Why would the employer want to subsidize more expensive lifestyles for a remote position?
Employers don't pay high because CoL is high; they pay what the market allows them to pay.
People fear loss more than they welcome gain. There is a lot of demand for good engineering talent and there just aren’t enough engineers with these skills. While many people fear that remote would decrease salaries in high col areas, I believe the opposite will happen.
Of course the second order effects are somewhat difficult to predict. If you can get SF salaries in eg Ohio, it might reduce the number of people flocking to SF reducing the talent pool.
People are not accepting cuts and that is leading to positions being eliminated (layoffs) as employers are realizing they can pay sometimes 50% less than their high cost of living area wages.
Cutting costs usually lets those people get bigger bonuses, so the incentive is towards forcing the issue.
The system used to get demand numbers is a survey, and has been done the same way for decades, so it's pretty reliable compared to counting job ads on job boards. Job ads often will contain lots of duplicates (search spam) and fake jobs.
Recruitment Tech founder here. The job market is still tight. There are two open jobs for every available person. Source: Fed Chair Jermaine Powell. This means you lay off, someone else will hire quickly.
> However, many of these layoffs are single-digit percentage layoffs from companies that are still hiring across the board. That's not so much a traditional layoff as a pruning of the workforce.
100% this is the story. The pruning seems to take two forms: classic "underperformance" and, as much as I hate this, people who just won't come back to the office, or have moved to lower cost areas and will not accept a pay cut.