Can I ask which country?
Usually what I see is that remote jobs will offer a slight higher wage than the going rate in lower cost of living areas. That way you’re in a situation where moving to a higher cost of living area and making a more regionally average salary isn’t all that attractive.
> When you do exactly the same job in the same company, same department, same team, with the same output — then definitely it's discrimination.
But that’s my point as well: if you’re in San Francisco paying $5,000 a month in rent for an apartment and your coworker in Cambodia is also getting an SF salary living in a mansion with servants because your company is location blind that’s also a form of inequity.
My point is, people are going to have different lifestyles that cost different amounts and give them different benefits. Companies should fuck off pretending they care about fairness or cost of living. Just call it what it is - competition-based pay. You pay someone in SF more because you are forced to by market conditions, and if you could, you would pay them less, with zero concern for their rent or mortgage. And since you CAN pay someone in Kansas City much less, they do.
We've already seen the prevalence of remote work change the equation. Many places now pay SF 110% and everyone else in the US 100%. The COL difference between SF and KC is not that 10 percentage points. Nor could you compensate someone for the discomforts - both political and meteorological- of having to live in Missouri, who God himself has abandoned.
The guy who doesn’t have kids paid it indirectly in his social contributions. The next guy next to him too. And the next guy. And so on.
It's incredibly hard to budget for children though, you can't really foresee how much they will cost. One child eats little, one eats much, one is picky, one not, one likes soccer, the other one likes lego. Very hard to predict, except maybe year 1-2. But then one might be good with breastfeeding while the other might require formula and the cost of the first one is 0 while the second one could be very high
And I'm not saying it should be more, I was more saying it in jest to help deter comments like "but you get tax kickbacks!". I do think that we should be doing more for children - free school lunches with no means testing, free childcare from birth instead of just when they enter the public school system, and so on - but the child tax credit is the most visible "kickback" so I made a joke about it to acknowledge it.
My point here, more generally, is that companies shouldn't be trying to play this game with "fairness". Just call it what it is - capitalism and the invisible hand of the free markets. If people have problems with how that system allocates capital, then do something about it, but don't try to pretend any of its machinations have any relation to notions of justice or fairness.
(And I say this as someone not overly invested in that world - I have a 17 yo stepdaughter, and I am fortunate that in addition to my excellent healthcare, my company pays 100% of the premiums for my partner and kid, not just me).
It’s kind of like parking. If employees don’t pay for parking then an employer is subsidizing car driving over other options.
Choosing between abandoning your family and maximizing your revenue isn’t exactly an even choice.
Otherwise, see The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen.
https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest...
This is rarely about avoiding paying a FAANG engineer $500K and letting them work from Bali. They're weaponised in ways to give a plausible defence to why two people with the same role and experience are paid vastly different amounts for doing the same job.
If you pay the global median salary to everyone, people in high cost areas are screwed and you’ll never be able to recruit there.
If you pay everyone in your company the highest salary, people in low cost areas live like kings while their peers in high cost areas live a more modest lifestyle.
As a company you’re not out to solve global inequity, you’re out to hire good talent effectively and efficiently. Like leaving a 40% tip at a restaurant, overpaying the going rate on salary doesn’t really get you anything but feel goods at a certain point.