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Comment by wan23 | Hacker News Reader

All of this talk about what companies should pay is missing the point. The market determines what salaries will be. Someone good enough for Facebook is good enough for a number of bay area companies that would pay top dollar, so Facebook has to make competitive offers. If someone lives in a place where she doesn't have access to those other high offers, then she should expect to make somewhat less. It has nothing to do with what people deserve or their value to the company.

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I guess you are missing the point.

When remote becomes norm, isn't it the case that it would not matter whether the employee is in California, Utah or in Thailand?

So when a rockstar employee of FB decides to work out of Sydney (because sea, sun, fun) at same salary (because remote is norm); what happens when a recruiter finds another great talent at same or some other city in Australia?

Businesses hire you with the understanding you'll be working in a specific timezone-- being remote is irrelevant. If you go half way across the world and your team is 12 hours ahead of you, standups (and other synchronous tasks) become impossible. If you need something from that teammate, you send a message, and wait 24 hours for a response. It obliterates collaboration and slows the business down.

12h is maybe too much but I have worked with people from +/-4h, what you want most of the time is a decent overlap between all team members. Besides there are some roles such as SRE that need people 24/7 around the world

The rockstar's locally inflated salary goes down of course.

The interesting thing to ponder - an employee would not not be obligated to tell HR where one is working from. So company keeps paying $xyz irrespective whether the employee is in in Sydney, Singapore or Sacramento.

That means when remote work is a norm salary shouldn't go down when the employee moved to Sydney from SF.

> an employee would not not be obligated to tell HR where one is working from

Unfortunately, that’s not how payroll taxes work. You absolutely need to provide your employer with your real address. If you move out of state (or out of the country) there are very real tax liability issues that they will need to address. If you work for a decent company, they may even help you address your personal tax liabilities too.

A lot of remote FTE contracts I've come across not only demand your updated address during the duration of your employment, but also for 3 or so years after.

Suppose that Facebook found in a particular country it could legally pay women less than men for work of the same value. Should it do that?

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