Hacker News Reader

Comment by claydavisss | Hacker News Reader

"No career advancement" is actually just fine for a lot of people, particularly older workers.

People should not underestimate the value of getting an "urban" salary in the sticks, it can be the equivalent of a huge relative pay increase.

One day someone will figure out how to be a salary calculator for remotes and this benefit will go away as employers will try to tailor the salary for local cost-of-living.

View on HN

Large MNCs and the like already do this today. Their HR departments likely have tools to calculate cost of living globally. Or they have local partners who do it for them.

I didn’t end up working for them for completely unrelated reasons, but one company I was considering a few years ago used the US government pay scales for locality-based supplemental pay.

They were unrelated to the government, but I think one of the original founders had military experience so they went with what they knew. Not a perfect solution, but an easy one.

Do you think it was beneficial using the government scale? Or do you think the salaries were lower?

Sorry, I should have been more specific. They used the US Government locality pay supplements to determine a percentage that you got in addition to your base salary, they did not actually use the pay scale itself.

Have you looked at Gitlab's salary calculator?

Not a great example. They just pay low period. Their target is 50th percentile. That's hardly going to result in a big paycheck relative to most SF startups, let alone the big companies.

I know their pay isn't good but it is calculated based on where one lives and is similar to what the parent-post mentioned.

This was discussed fairly recently. There are some oddities to the calculator. For example, the entire state of Oregon and the entire state of Massachusetts are on a single pay schedule even though there are enormous CoL differences between the main urban areas and the rural areas of those states.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com