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Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this rational at all. If a developer in SF is worth x dollars to you, why are they suddenly worth less if they move to a lower CoL area? If you're paying salaries that are livable in a high CoL area, you aren't discouraging people living there, you're freeing people to move wherever they want.

I'm a Silicon Valley based dev who really wishes he could move far, far away from here without taking a huge pay cut, so I'm obviously biased. That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be?

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> That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be

Because your salary is much more influenced by market supply and demand than the value you create for your employer.

The market for remote work isn't geographically constrained, so it doesn't make sense to make pay offers as if you were hiring in specific geographically constrained markets rather than the unconstrained remote work market.

As the devils advocate: Why not? The competition for that employee is largely local offers, remote is a small part of the overall market. Plus many other companies hiring for remote do local adjustments too, they just aren't public about it.

This all sounds weird for me to say because I certainly want devs to get paid, but this is the reality of the situation

Can you name any of these non-public local adjusters? Cause all the remote workers I know make the same salary as their local counterparts.

Agreed. Though I can imagine some companies reasonably applying constraints in certain areas: working hours overlap, travel costs, and (especially where they don't do the fraudulent "honest this person whom we treat daily like an employee is not one" contractor lie) compliance costs and obligations.

That may indirectly imply some geographical constraints which could affect the shape labor market and the resulting supply/demand math leading to a salary. But it's definitely not what most companies do in their cost of living adjustments.

It's a negotiation, right? And at least some of the cards are known, such as an admittedly noisy estimate of what people will accept as a salary.

Basically the company shares in your lowered living costs if you are somewhere cheap. Hopefully they won't eat the whole savings, something should be left for both parties.

What do you think is the likely outcome here?

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