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Comment by JSavageOne | Hacker News Reader

Location should not affect salary since when it comes to remote work it is completely irrelevant.

Until you and a remote candidate in Idaho are equally qualified but the Idaho candidate is willing to take 2/3 of the pay and live like royalty.

Should it be a race to the bottom? Also, I think it's pretty rare in tech to have multiple qualified candidates to choose from. Typically the candidates have multiple offers, not the other way around.

Compensation is not based on the value provided to the company. Compensation is based on "market rate" as in, the lowest amount of money a candidate is willing to accept to do the job. The information asymmetry is such that candidates accept offers for far less than the company is willing to pay.

That's not what market rate means. Market rate is a surveyed bell curve for the job across multiple companies.

Yes, the rate the market pays. That’s different than the value a candidate can bring to the company.

Good for the Idaho candidate, living in SF shouldn't warrant some kind of salary privilege (much of which just gets funneled to landlords and increasing housing prices).

Is it good for the Idaho candidate to get paid less for the same work? If a company is willing to pay $x for a role because it will give them $y benefit where $y > $x why should any candidate accept less than $x? How much of a delta between $y and $x is even acceptable? Why should we celebrate companies playing candidates against each other for the benefit of the few?

This realistically isn't a major concern because the pool of qualified software engineers in a state like Idaho is far too small to make a noticeable dent in market salary levels.

You're assuming the availability of mobile tech work will not enable more people to move to places with low cost of living, such as Idaho. I believe that it will.

A few people will do that, yes, but there are a couple million software developers in the US, and most of them are not going to suddenly move to sparsely populated interior states. They'll spread out from the SF bay area a bit.

Actually, there is good reason to be within 30ms ping (99th percentile). Half that, plus the 5ms algorithmic delay from Opus (in CELT-only-restricted-low-latency mode) gives 20ms, which is the lower end of uncanny valley for real-time interactive audio (certainly for musicians in a band, but I'll presume relevance for verbal communication to set in at the same psychoacoustic threshold).

If you introduce any amount of latency by executing the encoder/decoder pair, you'll have to subtract double the latency from your ping-allowance.

If you try to have correctly-lipsynced audio in a video call, I only know of one setup to offer similarly-low video latency: a rolling-shutter in the camera, a line-by-line display (CRT should do well), and up-to a few lines algorithmic delay for e.g. running non-buffering JPEG (8x8 DCT and an online entropy coder (no pre-analysis for optimal Huffman tables or such) to save like 80-90% bandwidth). Analog TV camera+screen hardware should also work, but it's really inefficient and not easy to emulate with digital hardware.

Some companies agree with that and some don’t. For companies that disagree with you statement, the rationale is really simple: the company is ready to pay top $ because cost of life is high. They know that the rent you’ll pay is high hence the money. They’re reducing their net profit (ebitda) to lay the high salary you need to pay your rent. They do that because your rent in SF is what it is. But for those companies, there’s no way they reduce their ebitda for you to profit off that.

The other companies, who pay on value of output, will agree with that statement. As far as I know, most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

> most companies fall under cost of life approach rather than value of output.

I think most companies fall under "what's the minimum we can get away with?"

I would think that most companies pay based on what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates. Location should not matter beyond what the manager in charge or salaries think it matters for the employee willingness to stay at the company, and as such it depends.

Managers, probably. Companies + investors = less likely.

>what is needed to retain employees and keep churn rates down to acceptable rates

Ultimately, this value depends on the location. Assuming identical salaries, it is more expensive to retain someone for 5 years in NY than in Nebraska, because the person in Nebraska making $200k+ lives like royalty, and whereas NY would be a different story.

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