> Imagine delivering a million dollar feature, working nights and weekends, but somehow it's discounted because of where you live?
There is a flaw in going down this path of logic.
For a number of years after I started working, I tried to make sense of two things?
1. How is the value of what I provide to my employer correlated with my salary?
2. What exactly am I getting paid for? Presumably if I do this better/more I can get paid even more (e.g. working hard? delivering something? You can come up with many ideas here).
And the more I observed, the more I realized something:
In a decently sized company, it is very hard to figure out how much value (in $) your work contributes to the company's revenue. There are always exceptions (e.g. sales, etc). But generally your work is so intertwined with others that it's a lost cause trying to figure this out. You could do everything perfect and some other department down the road completely screws up thus negating all your contributions (not unusual).[1]
Because of this, almost no employer tries to determine your value to the company. They may have vague ideas that you're a critical employee, etc and give you nice bonuses/salary increases, but they're not going to even try to see if someone in another unrelated department's contributions are more or less than yours, and adjust salaries because of it.
So the answers to my questions above:
1. Fairly uncorrelated. A lot closer to 0 than to 1.
2. No one knows what you're getting paid for. Almost every company/boss will list some items, but they are either lying or deluding themselves: No matter what they tell you, you'll find no shortage of counterexamples in the company that proves them wrong. They say role X pays more because it deals with more complexity than your job? Likely it won't be hard for you to find jobs in the company with less complexity than your role (or role X) that pays more. Person is paid more because he puts in nights and weekends? Same thing - easy to find someone who puts in less and gets paid more. Role X gets paid more because it requires specialized knowledge and an advanced degree? Trivial to find counterexamples. Role X is critical for the company and if the person screws up it would be very expensive? To be frank, in every case of this being invoked I've noticed that people fulfilling role X get paid less. I happily moved from a role where my screwup would be very expensive to one where it wasn't, had fewer hours, a heck of a lot less complexity involved, and required almost no specialized knowledge, and quickly got a promotion with higher pay that way.
Because of all this, the reality of salaries are simple: They'll just invoke the market. It doesn't matter whether you made the company a million dollars or something close to your salary. If you happen to have special skills that are hard to find and that are in demand, that's your bargaining advantage.
There is almost no reason for a company not to save the effort and just go with the market. To the point that it's not even immoral to behave this way unless taken to some extreme.
Getting back to:
> Imagine delivering a million dollar feature
You'll almost never show that you did this. And if you did, you'll rarely be able to show that they needed you to do this vs the guy who'll take 10% less pay.
If you want higher pay, don't appeal to moral/ethical arguments - they will simply demonstrate your admission of a disadvantage. Instead, demonstrate you have skills they need that they won't find easily. Until you can find a way to differentiate yourself, you are not worth more than a remote worker in a low COL area (including those in other countries).
[1] As an aside, one of the perks of having a salary is that you are immune from these events - you'll still get paid even if your contributions amounted to nothing for the company. As such, there's also a reason your salary will be lower than investors - you're not taking on the risk they are. But this is a separate topic.