What about (iii) pay a salary that would be in between absurdly high and absurdly low?

Bottom line you want the best people, which are spread around the globe, but within each country is a different price point for what you pay the best people. Bidding too high is wasteful to your resources, too low makes it impossible to compete in higher pay areas, and middle ground is the worst of both worlds: loose out on high pay areas, be wasteful in low pay areas.

I hope future generations will better understand that accumulating wealth should not be the goal of life.

Maybe future generations will not have to worry as much about accumulating wealth when countries work harder to ensure a high quality of life in the middle class. I doubt that will happen for the west until they figure out how to relieve all the pressure the housing market is putting on their citizens.

Who cares if you don't have Bay Area engineers? Their ability isn't based on where they live, is it? If they want to lower their costs of living so they can compete they can "just move".

The world is moving towards more closed borders, so moving is getting harder. But in the end we’ll all need to move to low-income countries like Yemen, Togo, and Ethiopia, to lower our costs, and be most competitive for employers?

That argument goes both ways of course

Maybe the best engineers want to live in SF?

Maybe. But I don‘t think so. Many moved away during the pandemic, when they had the chance.

Most engineers seem to life in SF out of necessity, more than anything else. After all, that is where most jobs are.

Define best engineers first. I seriously doubt that hiring in SF will give you the best engineers, it might have one of the best ratios of good:bad engineers compared to many other places but it's not a given whatsoever that hiring one living in SF will be a slum dunk. I worked with many terrible engineers from SF over the past 20 years.

Which makes the point: why would a company pay such a premium on hiring from a single location if, in the end, it can only get the best engineers from there if it pays an even higher premium than the ridiculous salaries from the place? It doesn't make much financial sense, seems to be mostly based on "feelings" during hiring, like yours.

> seems to be mostly based on "feelings" during hiring

Silicon Valley has a local bubble economy. If overpaid engineers spend their money for overpriced health insurance, rent, mortgage or juiceros the boat stays afloat.

But if the SV companies start sending money abroad the bubble would deflate...

Not for a second.

Location-based pay means the company pays more for areas where the supply is priced higher. It's not about cost of living, because the company won't pay me more if I prefer a Ferrari over a Fiat.

Location-based pay pays people more if they're in a market where they have other options, so they don't go to those other options.

In essence, if you have location-based pay, you're incentivizing your employees to move to an area where they'll have vastly more employment options than to stay with you.

Indeed.

Also buying power is just not the same based on your location. A hundred dollars in the US and in the Netherlands will literally not buy the same things.

Another point is taxes, sometimes even though gross is lower, the net is higher (i.e. Belgium and Estonia)

The Dutch Prime Minister gets paid €186k annually [0]. He has 13 years of tenure in this role and 22 years total in the politics industry [1].

I'd hope a high performing, vastly experienced engineer in NL could aspire to that, though they might not get the same benefits or future opportunities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_the_Netherla...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rutte

A prime minister usually has quite good offers after the political career. Rutte has been trying to get the leader role for NATO, for example, which is probably a step up in salary (?)

Is that a universal rule that experienced engineers salaries should be similar to heads of state? I'm not grasping the connection...

Taking the CoL in NL, particularly the Randstad area, that salary is not outrageous. Especially, if you're a new expat on a single income, without any social net, and with any hopes of owning property, within a reasonable commute distance from your work.

It's fairly universal that politicians are underpaid relative to the level of responsibility they hold.

I'd quite like my country (UK) to be run by folk who are competent, rather than by only those who can afford to run for office without being paid for it. Yes, MPs get a lot more than the median income. But many people who are well-qualified to be MPs are also well-qualified to hold roles that pay at least as well if not more, and without needing to run for election to get the job.