Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this sounds like some of the highest paid people in the world complaining that they are unable to practise lifestyle arbitrage by combining their high salaries with a low cost of living. This is simply not an option for the vast majority of the world.

So we see this "pay me, but no-one else, for the value I create" nonsense, as though programmers alone should be exempt from the dynamics of supply and demand.

If we're going to go down this path, then let's pay nurses and doctors for the value they create, which has been proven to be extraordinarily substantial this year. Let's pay supermarket cashiers, truck drivers and shelf-stackers - the people who had to literally risk their lives so that the rest of us could have food available during this pandemic - for the value they created in the rest of us not starving. Let's pay child care workers and teachers for the value they create, which I wager will often be far greater than what some programmers contribute.

I'm not quite sure what you're going for here, but your last paragraph seems pretty reasonable to me. Was it intended as "look at these stupid ideas like the one you've just suggested", or something else? If it's something else, I'm not sure I understand what it is from what you've written. Otherwise it feels like a bit of a straw man you're arguing against, because I didn't understand the blog post in the way you're characterising it.

I think he/she is saying labor rates are a supply/demand calculation, not a value one. The I-beam in your house might be the most valuable thing to the structural integrity, but it's probably not the most expensive thing in your home. Scarcity dictates that something else less valuable to your existence may cost more. You may not value that scarcity enough to pay that premium, but value alone does not set price. Air is the most valuable thing to my life, and I pay nothing for it.

So, a nurse or teacher provides a very valuable service, no doubt. Salaries won't naturally go up until availability goes down.

You feel like a spoiled rich kid compared to a teacher or truck driver, but you're piss-poor compared to the people who own the corporation you work for.

By demanding to be paid closer to the value you create you're not robbing nurses from their unfairly small salaries, you're demanding a few more crumbs from the pie shareholders are taking.

I believe that this is a false dichotomy, or perhaps even a straw man.

Engineers aren’t asking to be paid the value they create, they’re just objecting to pay cuts for physically moving while doing the same job.

If engineers are not paid based on their local market, and also not paid based on the value they create, what is their pay based on?

I can think of a few other alternatives:

- some new "remote workers" market that doesn't exist at the moment

- the pay of the lowest paid region in the world

- the pay of the highest paid region in the world

I can't see the last option being reasonable in any way, and the second option also doesn't seem like it would work in practice. My guess is you'd see something in between the first two.

This would take a long time to stabilize, so it's not straightforward for companies to implement I think?

I work fully remote from a very low CoL area (house under 100k, monthly expenses for a family of 4 under 2k, etc.) and if I demanded SV pay I'd immediately be fired because my neighbour, who also has a low CoL, will apply for my job and work for 70% less.

That being said, I still do much better than I would with local employers, and I like not stressing out about heavy liabilities.

> Engineers aren’t asking to be paid the value they create, they’re just objecting to pay cuts for physically moving while doing the same job.

While ignoring that their pay in their current location was as a consequence of a location specific market, while if the market becomes the whole of US, the market rate will obviously change.

If you have to discard this for the argument to hold water, it is a bad argument.

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