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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

That’s a straw man. The real question is why do they have to lower your salary if you move? Is your work less valuable?

I agree. This type of action is signalling the company doesn't actually pay you for your knowledge or output. It pisses me off. Flip the argument around; if FB hired you to work remotely from Montana, then you decided to move to San Francisco, would they INCREASE your pay based on COL?

If the answer is "no, of course not", then why is it okay for them (or any company) to pay you less, if you move to a lower COL area? It absolutely isn't fair, and companies want to eat their cake and have it too.

> if FB hired you to work remotely from Montana, then you decided to move to San Francisco, would they INCREASE your pay based on COL?

If you actually transfer to an SF team then yes, most large, multi office companies would adjust your pay to the SF bracket. If course that requires that an SF team has headcount and wants you. You can't just move because you feel like it.

Facebook absolutely would increase pay.

https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/1264057310021685248

At my employer if you were hired in SF and moved to Montana, you'd take a pay cut. If you were hired in Montana and moved to SF, you'd get a pay raise. Either one requires approval.

I'd be surprised if this isn't the norm in companies with a distributed workforce.

> This type of action is signalling the company doesn't actually pay you for your knowledge or output.

And you win the Nobel prize for stating the obvious.

Tech salaries today in hotspots like Silicon Valley are probably on the order of twice what they were in the early noughties. Why? Because everyone’s so much more productive these days? Or because that’s what the market dictates?

At the company I work for, HR defines pay bands based on the HQ location and there's a % modifier based on where you live. So yes, if you move to a higher COL area, you get paid more. If you move to a lower COL area, you get paid less. Honestly, I thought this was a normal and uncontroversial practice until this.

Frankly, the calculus of your pay probably depends a lot less on your knowledge or output than you seem to think. Geography and luck play as large of a role.

Devil's advocate here, I don't personally think a company should adjust pay based on location and tend to agree with the thrust of your point. But one might think of it as FB (or whomever) paying an employee enough to live up to a certain standard of living/being able to save money in their given locale, rather than a strict salary number. Because that number is different depending on locale, it would make sense to vary it based on locale. X salary allows one to live a "good life," being able to go out regularly, afford luxuries, live in a nice place in a nice area of town, in San Francisco. X salary * .7 (or whatever) allows the same lifestyle in Cleveland. Your work isn't devalued, you're getting the same lifestyle.

I tend to think I should be paid X and should I choose to live in a more expensive region, that's the price I pay for choosing to reside in that region. If I decide saving million dollars is more important to me, then I move to Cleveland, maybe don't have the same scene as SF, but am able to save more, my choice.

Company should pay me X money for Y hours of work. Company should never care where and how I live. If I move somewhere cheaper (and can still do the same job as before), is my work worth less?

No, but your pay has little to do with what your work’s worth. That’s a contributor, but the most important factor is the market, by far.

No, but once you go remote your competing against a much larger labor force. You might have been in the Nth percentile of local labor but now anyone anywhere can be your peer.

It's not a straw man at all. It's in Facebook's vested best interest to prevent tax evasion of its salaries by its employees regardless. This is completely independent of whether salary is location-based or not; the tax fraud temptation is always there and it could pose real problems for Facebook if it were occurring en masse, perhaps even with tacit knowledge by many employees (i.e. teams chat amongst themselves).

If you move from an SF office to an Austin office, do you think you deserve to be paid more than your Austin coworkers? Is your work somehow more valuable now that you've moved?

Good question. I’d actually say everyone should be paid according to their value to the company. Why should the company get to save 100k just because the employee lives somewhere cheaper.

Great, if you agree that everyone should be paid according to their value, then we can go ahead and drop salaries by a good what, 40-50%? Since Silicon Valley (and many other tech hubs) has resulted in massively inflated software engineer salaries due to the high COL rather than any actual demonstration of performance.

Why should people in SV earn 120k+ per year over someone out in the rust belt doing the same work at 50-60k a year?

You're welcome to start a SV company offering rust belt salaries, but you probably won't hire anyone good :-D

I don’t follow. Companies wouldn’t pay the high salaries if it didn’t provide greater value to the company. They’re not charities.

The counterargument is that it's not the same work because you can't abstract the work away from where it's happening and who it's happening in proximity with. Now if it turns out that location and colocation don't matter like people thought they did, then we're about to see a major shift in this disequilibrium, of the sort you describe. It's not as if companies want to be paying that extra 50%.

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