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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

> Also if the value and quality of work is the same... shouldn't the pay remain the same.

Why would this apply to remote workers but not local workers? Are you saying that you should pay convenience store workers the same everywhere, in New York and Lincoln, NE?

You could turn it around, and I’d say that if rent goes up, wages should go up too. People should get CoL adjustments separately from raises. If we get CoL adjustments for inflation over time (you get paid more in 2020 because 2020 is more expensive than 1990) why wouldn’t it also apply to location (you get paid more in NYC because NYC is more expensive than Lincoln, NE).

(I’d also argue that the value & quality of local workers in dense cities is higher.)

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Local workers don't compete with local workers in other locales, but remote workers do.

EDIT: But this implies that people in big cities can expect to see their pay go down to match the greater competitiveness of remote workers, not the other way around.

>But this implies that people in big cities can expect to see their pay go down to match the greater competitiveness of remote workers, not the other way around.

It really depends how fully remote a company goes. To the degree there's still some company advantage to anchor locations that some employees come into on a semi-regular basis, a company might still want to pay some premium for employees to live in that area. However, to the degree that a company were fully remote (and ignoring that some functions will still be physically close to customers), then high CoL vs. low CoL becomes purely an employee decision, it's hard to see the company paying those premiums. So, leaving aside real world messiness, the expectation would be that salaries head towards one (country-wide) value for a given set of skills.

if they work for the same company and deliver the same value... yes that is exactly what I'm saying.

The thing is, they’re not paying less for remote workers. They are paying more for local workers living at high cost areas

This is just marketing spin, I’d like to think that the people in this discussion are talking about the merits of a pay differential, and the way you phrase it is not really the point under discussion here.

Categorically, the value of remote workers is lower than the value of local workers.

This is largely due to network effects and the higher efficiency of communication with co-located teams. I’m a software engineer, and like other software engineers, my job is something like 50% communication and 50% coding/testing/operations. As you go up in seniority and expertise, the ratio shifts more and more in favor of communication. A fresh graduate or more junior employee might have a larger share of coding/testing/operations.

The communication side of my job is suffering like never before during mandatory WFH.

My communication with the guys sitting beside me has gone down but my communication with those in a different building has gone up.

This might be on you and the company you work for. Many companies have remote work baked into their culture and from my experience, the quality of communication tends to be quite high

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