Great explanation of a bad practice. A company should pay for the value they get, which is independent of the location. These calculations never seem to take into effect all the cost savings of having a remote person (office building/parking/food/working space/etc). Instead, they almost always mark the employee as a second tier of worker

> Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy. We believe that it is healthy for the company when unhappy people leave.

What??? Only in SV could a company get away with saying it’s “healthy” to not pay people their value. Usually, golden handcuffs refer to retirement and other benefits, not base compensation.

those arguments look just slightly in bad faith since they act like they're only competing for talent against local non-remote companies for every location when they're not. They're also competing against other remote companies, specially those that don't do location-based comp.

  Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.

Those people will be still be in golden-handcuffs until they find another remote job.

  A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.

Come on, you can still pay top dollar globally and hire evenly around the globe if that's what you want. It's just cheaper their way.

Honestly, the whole thing is just a huge rationalization. They could just have said "we adjust for location because we can".