If you're aiming for $50k/y in profit after all COL, your required pricing is different in SF than it is in rural America.
If you live in rural America and compete at hiring with SF people, it's your competitive advantage to keep the same profit as them but negotiate a lower price. This increases your relative value in the hiring process.
Sure, i _could_ keep the same SF rates, but then my competitive advantage may just be my skill. If i want more than skill alone, i could lower my rates.
I'm not making less profit. I'm competing to get a job.
That is how you negotiate when you’re struggling to find a job. By doing this you’re admitting that you’re not going to be as good as the high CoL candidate so you adjust your price to make your offer more attractive to the company. That’s a terrible position to put yourself in (but entirely understandable if you can’t get offers otherwise).
If you’ve passed the same bar and the company is truly fine with remote, there no reason to accept anything less than what they would pay a local. Speaking from experience in several tech companies in the bay, a proven remote employee is just as valuable as a local and getting decent software people is fucking hard.
It’s unlikely as a candidate that there is even any competition for the position you are filling (as in not multiple candidates that have passed the bar being picked over). Talking you into cost of living adjustments or whatever bullshit is just salary negotiation, not competition with other engineers.
Get multiple offers if you have to, but there is literally no reason a company willing to pay Bay Area salaries can’t pay that to a remote employee. Accepting less is just letting them convince you your labor isn’t as good as Bay Area SWE labor.
Yup. That's what i said.
If you see no reason to negotiate, why negotiate? Set your price at what your think your value is. Don't indulge COL requirements of another location.
> It’s unlikely as a candidate that there is even any competition for the position you are filling (as in not multiple candidates that have passed the bar being picked over). Talking you into cost of living adjustments or whatever bullshit is just salary negotiation, not competition with other engineers.
As someone who hires, i disagree. Every one of our hires has been a debate on expected output when compared to cost. But we're a fully remote company.
edit: Oh, and we're not flush with VC cash. We also can't afford any SF employees for this reason. We're much more willing to hire a junior engineer if their priced accordingly. Likewise, if we hired someone at $250k/y, we'd expect twice the output of him/her - and that's unlikely.
I don't get why this is controversial.
Just because someone is charging $200k doesn’t mean they are worth it.
Companies previously established artificial constraints such as colocation that forced higher salaries. If colocation is no longer a requirement, it’s only natural the associated premium is going away. That is, if you want the benefit of living in, say India, then you’ll also have to incur the cost of competing against someone like Ramanujan (famous mathematician) rather than whoever just happens to be within commuting distance of Mountain View.
You are competing on price instead of quality. I'd rather compete on talent and keep the money, thanks.
The era of $400k total comp software development is going to end someday and more accessible remote work is only going to hasten it.
Well, the same argument has been made before regarding offshoring and so far that hasn't seemed to have spurred any major declines in total compensation.
Yes, but things are different this time (famous last words, I know). Prior to COVID-19, offshoring was competing with the convenience of having everybody in the same physical space. Now, with every tech company currently having nearly all of their staff working from home, they are learning to make the equivalent of offshoring work; they have no choice in the matter if they want to continue operating. It's a small, small jump from there to outsourcing to low cost of living regions or even real offshoring.
I'm not sure I buy this when the vast majority of these CEOs have magnitudes more money than they could feasibly spend even if they used a flamethrower. Honestly I don't see tech becoming less useful/profitable in the future, quite the opposite. As long as these $400k employees are netting people higher up a lot more, it isn't going to stop. One could argue that there's still room to pay the employees even more. (and let's be real, most people aren't getting $400k tc)