Show HN: SuperPayr. Developers should get paid based on skills not location | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: SuperPayr. Developers should get paid based on skills not location

superpayr.com

1 pointjustkd3 comments

It's a nice idea, but I'm afraid I can't see it working. There are certain parts of the US employment market that effectively pay software developers many times what they'd earn in most of the world doing the same job. A new graduate might be earning more in those places than a senior at a good company in much of Europe, and an order of magnitude more than developers in some countries. How are you going to convince all employers everywhere to match that standard, when it would cost them a huge amount and they can just hire through someone else in their local market instead, and when that wouldn't take into account the local cost of living, rules and expenses for international hires, etc?

Thanks for your comment and question. What do you think about this argument: Actually what we try to do has been done by, for instance, Google: They find people with great skills and ask them to work for them in California. They pay them so much that they will work for them and even move to Cali (at least before Covid-19).

Now in a Covid-19 context remote work obviously created a new way to think about salaries. If you sit at a desk in Cali or in Germany and do basically the same work, it will be very hard to communicate why the US developer should earn so much more or why the German one should earn so much less :) At the end of the day we could thus start with just a few companies being willing to pay the global price tag of the skill. The result may be that these pioneering companies will hire better talents. This will also cause other developers to demand the same. As this shift slowly progresses it might become a standard in how developers are paid.

Hi HN, I am Karan. One of the co-founders of Superpayr. I wanted to ask your opinion on a product we thought is necessary: The way we see it is that no matter where you live, your salary should be based on your skills, not the place you are living. We want to do something about that developers (with a comparable skill set) earn so differently due to their location.

Superpayr analyzes your skills and puts a global price tag on them. We want developers to earn the same based on skills not based on location. What's your opinion on this? Do you think you can get behind this?

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