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Comment by geoduck14 | Hacker News Reader

Ok, help me out here. I currently work for a company that has offices all over the globe. Pre Covid, I was in the office 5 days a week.

I work in Texas, with pretty low COL. The people who work in DC, NY, or SF all get paid more than I do. Should I get paid the same as them?

Our company also has people in India (some are outsourced, but we have many full time associates). Should I get paid the same as them?

What, then, is the value of my work? If I ask my employeer to disregard location based pay, how much do I get paid?

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You determine the value you're willing to work for: not just your employer. It sounds like you've never looked for a job while still employed. Take your location out of the equation: Is another employer willing to pay more for your skills? If so, you should be interviewing. When I'm hiring an employee I'm looking for anybody that has the skills I need, not their location. I'll pay top dollar to get hard-to-find skills regardless of where that person is located. I'm not going to tell them "Well you live in India so I'm only going to pay you half of what you're looking for" because they'll reject my offer and take one from another employer. If your colleagues are making more than you and your skills are comparable then you need to begin interviewing immediately because you're undervaluing your own work.

It's shocking to me that I had to read a whole blog post and scroll through 50+ comments on HN to find someone who understood how salaries work. Well said.

I feel like this entire discussion can be summed up in four sentences: "Feel like you're not making enough? Find another company that will pay you more. No one will pay you more? Keep adding skills until they do."

Everything else is just window dressing for the negotiating table.

> I'll pay top dollar to get hard-to-find skills

I feel like that's more true at a small-scale company than a large company with thousands of employees. Maybe the large company has already found those "hard-to-find skills".

Small-scale companies are probably more likely to have shapes for hard-to-find people. If you can hire one person to do three jobs you need 1/3rd of a person for, that's more valuable than finding three people who can do that; especially if those three people would have needed to be in close communications with each other.

Big companies tend not to have as many places where they need one person to wear many hats; so their hard-to-finds will tend to be finding deep experts, but there's probably not a lot of positions that really need that.

So what? Don't work for a large company if they're not willing to pay your salary.

IMO, assuming everyone is WFH, Location based pay should only be considered within a same timezone and in same country.

Even if market rate price for developers in India was same as SF, to maintain its "output/$ per employee", the salary may differ.

For instance, a company whose main operations are happening in PST, engineers whose main hours are offset 13h30min are less valuable to the company than those with 0h0min offset.

Sending a PR for review or reviewing a PR from someone with more than 8h time zone difference usually means you have to wait a full day of turnaround time.

Now within a same time zone but different country (or even states in the US), the differences diminish but there are still local labor laws and taxes that affect what the ratio of "what the employee provides" vs "what it costs the employer"

So at the moment, people living in SF and [some remote town in the middle of california with fiber internet] should be paid the same, but, people in TX should not. (This only applies to 100% WFH companies whose majority of workforce is all in California)

What about the people in PST who work outside of normal office hours? Should they be penalized because they are effectively working in a different time zone? Should those in different time zones that decide to work PST regular office hours be paid more?

I'm in Europe. I'd work US hours for a US salary.

The value of your labor is how much the company is able to leverage it for a return. It has next to nothing to do with where you live. It's on the company to answer this question, not you or some third party to the negotiation between you and your employer.

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