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Comment by goatinaboat | Hacker News Reader

If you’re going to pay people differentially based on where they choose to live, why not pay them differentially based on whether they have kids, too?

This opens a whole can of worms. If a person moves to a lower COL location but then has kids would they break even?

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The pay difference is nothing new, global companies with offices in different countries already pay employees different salary based on where they live. This is not caused by working remote.

Why do you think so many software companies have offices in india? Because it allows them to pay less based on cost of living.

Yep this. Let's equalise SF salaries with Europe and India first. What's that? You don't want to? Yeah I didn't think so. I guess this is what Marx was thinking about when he wanted the workers of the world to unite. Without unity it's super easy for capital to flow to the cheapest labour possible. So far software engineers in the U.S didn't really feel it, but things can change.

All the turmoil we are starting to see in the first world countries is due to this. With the rise in productivity in third world countries the wages will keep moving towards a median.

"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music

movies

microcode (software)

high-speed pizza delivery"

It's nothing new, but it doesn't make the sense it once did.

Those adjusted costs were based on the local job market. They needed to be competitive with the other options you might have had. Once you are working remote, you are not likely comparing "I can go down the street and work THERE for x" any more. You are instead "I can go online and work THERE instead for Y". Your physical location is not a variable in that comparison except for companies that hire based on some data security or legal requirement that work be done within the borders of some certain country.

Yes. But economics is different for local and remote work:

Like it is natural to pay the same price for something we both order from China, and in the same time it is also completely normal that we will pay different prices for potatoes at our local market.

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