> I suspect HN's opinion on location-based pay might change over time as Americans realize that US salaries are the outlier on an international scale
The world's most valuable tech companies still do the vast majority of development work in their home countries, and the trend to keep core development at home has only accelerated in recent years. A lot of things would have to change - including that - in order for this belief to age poorly.
Also fwiw, we built our team fully-remote pre-COVID as well, with location-agnostic pay. It only becomes clearer that this has been the right move with each passing year, and we're continuing to lean into this as a result.
I will say, though, that this can depend on what type of company you're building. If your company's core competency is something other than software (e.g. sales), building an extremely high-performing engineering culture may not be the most important thing to your company, and the tradeoffs you have to make in order to do so may not be worth it.