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Comment by watertrash | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions that this will allow the company to recruit from areas where pay is much lower than the Bay Area, but I wonder if this will affect the pay of current workers.

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Right away? No, not in most cases. For future hires, how could it not?

If high COL located companies starting going fully remote, it's a huge opportunity for workers in medium or low COL. For workers still determined to live in a high COL, it will absolutely put downward pressure on their salary. Their labor market is being exposed to a lot of competition that wasn't there before.

I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.

>I think if this trend of going fully remote holds up, it becomes much harder to justify living in an expensive city, especially as workers age.

There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.

These benefits exist in many big cities that are not also expensive.

Maybe in North America. In a lot of Europe, you can get pretty fast internet in small cities (fiber speeds)

In the US, the bigger and older cities have worse internet. The newer areas in newer cities have fiber.

You don't need to be paying $2,500 a month for a studio apartment in Manhattan or San Francisco to get good Internet and reasonable delivery times. Sure, you'll get speedier delivery, and that's worth something, but it's a hell of a price to pay for it.

I'd make a distinction between medium to large cities and expensive cities. I don't think people want to move out to the country, but finding some balance between lifestyle and cost is a lot easier to do when you can pull a higher salary from remote work.

> There's still distinct benefits to big cities. You can order stuff online fast, even groceries. You get good Internet connectivity, which is a thing that you need for remote work. Lots of services around.

Define “big city.” I live in a medium-sized city in a low cost of living area and my house has AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, and cable available to it. I dare say that’s better than most people in the Bay Area have access to. And yes, Amazon delivers here too.

A big thing for me is being able to walk to a ton of different things, no car or even bike needed. In the US, for practically any area with densities lower than those of cities you're going to need a car.

I'm sure that the reduction of CoL opens up plenty of financial room for a car, but it's a whole extra set of things to have to worry about that I personally would rather not.

Agree.

Further corollary: more workers will be concentrated around 2nd-tier hubs where their wages will be lower than 1st-tier, but higher that median wages. 2nd-tier median wages will then drive up housing prices which will rinse & repeat COL increase trends seen in the Bay Area.

Hopefully these other hubs will have better development zoning & housing policies than San Francisco / Bay Area.

But new hubs could emerge, though.

And if people can increasingly work anywhere in some number of different timezones--and the same is true of most of your competition--what justifies paying a premium because some people want to live in Manhattan or SF any more than because they want to live in an expensive beach or mountain community.

The common thinking is that it will reduce pay, but it may not be as much as most people think. A good example of this is Facebook's new compensation structure for remote work. For engineers remotely working from low cost of living areas base salaries are only 10-15% lower than in the Bay Area, and stock compensation is the same. So a senior engineer (E5) might go from making $400k to $370k in total compensation, while also substantially saving on California's income taxes.

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