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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Without revealing too much, this was a remote office, rented by the company, with folks in a variety of roles, including management. Not a couple of random remote employees.

The question of paying remote employees the same as "regular" employees is complex. Switching to the hypothetical:

If a company is headquartered in Louisville, KY, and somebody wants to work from e.g. Los Angeles, it would be ludicrous for the remote employee to accept the same salary in LA as in Louisville because the cost of living is much higher in LA. Considering the opposite situation, I find it unlikely that a company headquartered in LA is going to jump at the chance to pay an LA salary to somebody in Louisville.

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I've always found this incentive structure perverse. Take Peter Norvig and place him in LA vs Louisville. In either case he's a remote employee working from a home office. <very profitable company> will want to pay him differently depending on where he lives and depending on where their HQ is. And yet his output is the same. Let's say he prefers less dense cities, maybe then his output is even higher in Louisville, as the lower cost of living affords him a better home setup and a social circle that all can afford to live nearby each other.

Society seems to want to cram people into as small a space as possible near work places, optimizing for business progress. Seems to me to make sense in the short term and fail in the long term. Here's to hoping a silver lining of the pandemic is better utilization of space towards human happiness and the health of the global ecology. :)

The elasticity of talent of the average engineer is so much higher than that of Peter Norvig it doesn't really make sense to discuss it. For an individual person it doesn't matter where they work if theres no replacement, but for any engineer, it matters.

A company will pay as little as it can to any employee. Including Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig's minimum acceptable offer is just far higher than Average Joe/Jane Progammer's minimum.

Right now, LCoL area employees complain about getting paid less in absolute terms. If they get bumped up to HQ payscales, the HCoL-area employees will (rightly) complain that they're now being paid less in relative terms than the LCoL-area folks, despite producing the same value as them. So there's no winning, no "fair" answer.

If they are remote employees, why would the employee's city matter to the employer in either of the cases you mentioned (beyond any tax or employment law implications)? If the company is sure enough that the remote candidate from Louisville is talented enough for the job, it makes no financial sense for the company to lose that candidate over salary if they would have paid the same amount to a candidate in a different, more expensive city.

One exception I can see is if the company would pay a premium for remote employees living in a city where they have an office, so that they can be asked to come in if there is an emergency.

I don't think you'll get an LA salary in Louisville. But you can get a high salary for Louisville from an LA company.

In the long run I imagine this affects the cost of living in an area for people that work for companies in that area. Ex. what happens to smalltown Iowa when people get remote jobs and drives up prices for housing and food?

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