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Comment by murukesh_s | Hacker News Reader

What about living cost? I agree the difference now is higher than adjusted for living cost, but it's really unfair for someone living in the high cost area to get paid the same salary as someone who need to spend only a 5th of that to get the same quality of life.

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That's the thing, you don't get the same quality of life. If you're in the valley, you have many orders of magnitude greater job liquidity than anywhere else, which is why you're paying the living cost premium. Otherwise, why would you live in a high-cost area?

There are a zillion reasons to live in high cost areas aside from job liquidity.

The magic of concentrations of people is that the advantages scale faster than population growth because of the network effect.

Which, separately, is why cities are awesome and population density is a good thing for the planet and most people, even if it upsets some people that they can't have a big yard.

I think you might be blinded by your love for high density. Traffic, long commutes, higher crime, higher rent compared to the average salary (adults need roommates), long lines for anything decent, crappy parking or crappy public transit... These are all reasons that almost every large city in the US sucks.

Smaller cities like Boulder, Fort Collins, etc offer a decent amount of variety while eliminating the majority of the problems with the large cities.

Career is about the only thing a big city can be critical for and you have to be in the right city for your field.

It doesn't have to be a huge city. I'm in a midsize city not in the Bay area, and I agree with everything you're saying about places like Boulder.

I wrote this to contrast any size city with places like the endless suburbs or rural areas, not to create a hierarchy of "biggest is best".

Problems do also scale with size, so it's not like the massive benefits of cities are tradeoff-free. For as great as San Francisco is purported to be, they have a huge homeless problem that they seem to do relatively little about.

That's my point: Getting paid less on top of not having those advantages isn't appealing to me.

However, your argument is not valid: Large size doesn't imply high cost. Neither Shanghai (most populous city) nor Manila (most dense city) have higher costs of living than SF.

> Manila (most dense city)

This comment doesn't take away from your point - but isn't densest either Dhaka or Mumbai?

Apparently not, Manila is considerably more dense than both, at least unless I'm reading the table wrong:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population...

Woah! If that is true... wait. I see that they've shrunk the square-mile definition of "Manila" proper in this table.

That makes sense. Thank you for the reference.

You know - it's funny. Paris rates above Hong Kong (which does not even appear in the table), and Paris never felt (to me) as dense as HK. Even Manila never felt (to me, subjectively) as dense as HK.

unfair for someone living in the high cost area to get paid the same salary

Unfair how? The ENTIRE POINT of paying in currency rather than in square feet of living space is that it abstracts all of this - you earn the cash proportionate to the value you create then spend it however (and wherever) you like

The salary is compensation for your work and is typically based on your skills, experience and responsibilities. As a remote worker you have the option to choose your location to get the quality of life you want. Should I get a 50% raise just because I decided to move from Canada to California to enjoy the weather?

If the company forced you to be in a high cost area, then by all means they should adjust for it. If they want their employees to be in a specific area they could add a bonus for it.

Think of it the other way. Let's say we have two people with exactly the same skills and experience, the only difference is that one lives in SF and the other in Sri Lanka. They both provide the same value to the company but according to the calculator, if the person in Sri Lanka gets $100,000 the person in SF should get $438,000. Is that fair?

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