You’re missing the point. Location based pay is not the norm, the norm is paying you as much as it would cost to find an equivalent replacement. That just happens to be location-dependant.

It’s got nothing to do with discrimination, it’s purely about hiring for the lowest cost. They have to pay more in EU and US to get employees, and less wherever you live.

So if they quit, are you saying the company to refuse to hire a replacement from the US/EU due to some purely budget related limit? That is definitely not my experience working with a few remote first companies. They will try to find a suitable replacement in the relatively short period that is recruitment (1-3 months, depending on seniority). The cost difference for one employee is usually not big enough to worry about in the larger scheme of things.

The opportunity cost of not having that senior dev on board for more than 3 months is damaging for rest of the team and company goals/time lines. In the current market, my guess is that this person would be replaced with someone NOT in that location unless for some reason it is business critical to have someone in that area, which is almost never for software developers.

> The opportunity cost of not having that senior dev on board for more than 3 months is damaging for rest of the team and company goals/time lines.

I work with HR team who sets compensations for our global workforce. If you think that HR and leadership does not take this opportunity cost in consideration when setting policies, you are badly mistaken. They are very rational in their decision making.

But then, why would the company agree to an increase in compensation if OP moved elsewhere?

This is the point that doesn't make any sense. If it costs them X in OP's locale and 2X in EU, the company should kick them out if they decided to move and replace them with someone in the original locale, or maybe someplace even cheaper.

Most people who haven’t already moved countries won’t when offered that rebuttal. (Some can’t. Many more won’t, for some good and practical reasons.)

Because of that, the rare employee who does move can be paid the new location wage without increasing the costs of the people who don’t move. Companies don’t care about the costs of the <5% of people who move. They care about the costs of the >95% who don’t.

(Side note: There are companies who budget in headcount and work like GP suggests. I think most companies budget in money and work like you suggest.)

"It’s got nothing to do with discrimination, it’s purely about hiring for the lowest cost." - that's how pay gaps based on discrimination (e.g. based on sex or race) have been sustained as well.

Would you accept if your landlord got upset when he saw how much some people are being charged for rent in silicon valley, and decided to triple your rent?

If it makes your neighborhood and/or city very similar to these in SV, why not?

So, like full of homeless people and litter? No, thank you.

Why would it? Paying someone in (say) Warsaw a SV salary isn't going to make Warsaw like SV either.

If looking at it from a company perspective, I'm not sure I would see much benefit for them in doing so. If a company is based in the US/EU and pays the same wage to workers in someplace like Asia, they would not gain much(financially) by hiring in Asia in the first place (companies that have no need to hire in Asia). Why bother dealing with the grumbling at home about exporting jobs to outside locations if they are just going to pay the same anyway. Might as well be the hero providing jobs to local workers at home and keep the money circulating there. As for the other, age, gender, race etc. All of that is also at home, so not discriminating against it is beneficial. What is not at home are foreign located workers.

Talent is scarse. People are hiring outside of the US because there is no one else to hire from at current payrange in those locations. You could start a biding war and pouch from other companies but that may not be financially viable for your business.

> But should location based pay be just accepted because that's the norm?

If we don't accept location based pay and start paying a uniform global salary, the wages will sync to Asian job market level rather than rising to SV level. Any company doing so will not be able to hire anyone in SV.

OTOH any company paying SV level wages to everyone will do so only for a short while before they realize that they can increase the profit by reducing pay elsewhere. Why would they not do that?

Imagine paying someone in my town where the median income is $39k and the median property value is $87k the same as someone in San Fran where the median income is $120k and the median property value is $1.15M. that would be unfair to everyone in my town who can't work remotely with a tech company that's in that area.

To anyone who thinks that I agree with what I said you are misunderstanding the way I said it. I'm just stating how things are. Cost of living is what dictates pay along with the value that you provide to a company but with remote work that gets adjusted to what the local cost of living is.

Plus I don't work. I'm disabled I collect SSI I get like $10,000 a year. That's it! I can't have more than $2k in my bank account. I can't invest. So uh, have fun making tons of money I could only imagine.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, and I don’t think it is unfair or bad. Having more money and wealth in smaller towns will in the long term benefit the town, no? If anything in the long term it will be terrible for expensive cities, since people will eventually gravitate towards locations where they can have more for less. Personally for me the most important criteria is finding great schooling for my kids, I don’t want them to have to struggle like I did for the first 30 years of my life.

Sadly some careers pay more then others but that’s life. It’s why I worry about the education system eventually crumbling, since teaching and in some countries even healthcare professionals are woefully underpaid. I wish it wasn’t the case but some people get lucky and others successfully follow the money, whilst society allows governments and or private industries to milk human kindness for as much as it can get away with.

Yeah I don't think it's unfair or bad either I think everyone should be making a whole lot more money and universally I think people should be getting money.

This doesn't make any sense. Your pay should be based on the value you provide to the company you work for.. Not based on whether it is fair to your neighbor or not.

> Your pay should be based on ...

So do you advocate uniform global salaries across different locations in different countries?

Even from a lefty perspective: people vary wildly in the value they produce. A society that paid based on output would be as if not more unequal than today's. Plus it does nothing for the people who need money to live but can't or don't do economic production: children, elderly, disabled, caregivers, etc. Socialists will sometimes emphasize the share of productivity captured by capital to argue for redistribution to labor as a class, but for individuals to be paid their own productivity is AFAICT not any serious movement's demand.

And then obviously from the capitalist perspective, your employment only exists to the extent that the employer derives more value from your work than they pay you.

This. For all the talk that says software benefits the world, software developers do forget what's the perspective from the other side.

Should and I agree.

The norm isn't location-based pay, it's location-based summary rejection. I think it should be clear why we accept summary rejection based on location.

I agree with you it's horseshit. What you're saying sincerely makes total sense to me. Has to feel terrible. I would feel detached from my work as well, I think.

You're experiencing alienation from the fruits of your labor. Your labor being exploited to maximize profit. Unfortunately, the comments here are right. It "makes sense" in the sense these experiences are characteristic of life within capitalism as a laborer.

Functionally, your location is being "colonized," so to speak, by capital. I don't know if there's a real phrase for it, but I suppose it could be described as "telecolonization." Management has found a resource (your labor) that can be cheaply extracted by alienating you, the "telecolonized," from the value your labor creates.

It is bullshit. If you want solutions, your recourse is either collective action/unionization or finding a new job. You're being exploited by capital more than your coworkers. That is the context from which this sense of unfairness arises, I believe.

You don't know the worst of it. In my country, it is almost always better to be "exploited" by US companies than to be "treated well" by local employers. Sad but true.

The USD exchange rate is just too good for exporation of goods and services. They simply offer more, despite the wage arbitrage. More money, more benefits. The typical US software developer salary is a truly ridiculous amount of money here due to the 5x multiplier, and even a fraction of it outcompetes every local enterprise I've ever seen.

I know exactly how it feels to see people in developed countries making 10 times what people here make on average.

Yep that uneven competition for labor prices is also exploitation.

> If you want solutions, your recourse is either collective action/unionization or finding a new job.

You really think they won’t just stop hiring people from that country if they “took action”? Or if they could get another job at a higher rate they wouldn’t?

My take on the subject is they are providing the OP with an opportunity which they otherwise wouldn’t have due to the current job market in their country in exchange for a rate of pay that is relative to said job market.

Maybe it sucks, maybe it’s unfair (it isn’t) but it is preferable to the alternative which is to not have a good paying job.

Would it be less exploitative if firms refused to hire people in lower cost countries?

Yes, because the workers would not be contributing labor to the company's output.

To put it another way: Yes, zero exploitation of OP's labor is less than "some" exploitation of OP's labor.

It clarifies things for me to replace "cheaper labor" with "more profitable labor". Why would a company refuse to hire more profitable labor? How could the company not having any relationship with OP exploit his labor more than hiring him as more profitable labor?

The employee is welcome to work for a local company at local rates. It seems they prefer the colonizer? Is that exploitation any more than the US employee not getting paid 2x or 5 or 100 their current rate?

> It seems they prefer the colonizer?

Sure, because the foreign company exercises their access to capital to compete at a wage level that local companies can't compete with, but is still as low as possible to extract maximum value from the investment made by purchasing the worker's labor. Why do you think there's such inequality in economic opportunity, such that exploiting labor in this fashion is possible, in the first place?

> Is that exploitation any more than the US employee not getting paid 2x or 5 or 100 their current rate?

I'm not making any comparative assertions here. You seem to be making the case (by implication of your question) that in your opinion it's good for OP he's getting the opportunity to be exploited. And I'm just saying, it's exploitation. It is what it is.

Actually I agree

You know why, and yet you were asking why.

> If the company is willing to pay me that amount in a different location, why can't it pay me the same here?