Microsoft hasn't been top paying in a lot of markets outside US for years, let alone competitive with I'd imagine most people on hackernews consider "top paying"
Wouldn't a role in UK be essentially paid nearly 50% less in total compensation?
Let's do the math:
$400k salary in SFBay is $238k net. $300k in any state that doesn't have an income tax (like Texas, Florida, Washington) is $211k net.
Factor in cost-of-living differences, and as an employee, I'd be much better off earning $300k remotely than $400k in SFBay. From an employer's perspective, that means I can offer 25% lower pay and be more than competitive with top paying companies in my field - if I offer a remote option.
This gap will only increase, as states are constantly planning ways to squeeze more taxes out of their major tech hubs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2021/12/31/calif...
I therefore believe these economics will drive remote work adoption.
A $400k wage in SFBay for Microsoft (which I've never heard of for a regular position) won't just translate to anywhere else in the world. When starting salary in SF for Microsoft new college hire might be $120k+, in the UK it's £40k.
I realize you are specifcally talking about relocating to work remotely only within the US, but what I'm getting is that today Microsoft pays wildly differently based on location, and proposes to continue to pay wildly differently based on location with people relocating to work remotely.
I don't know if there will some special exception for United States, but the poster I replied to specifically brought up International.
Will Microsoft pay 1:1 for SF employee relocating to Texas while paying a UK employee 1/4 the wage? If so, why... it doesn't make good business sense.
In the US it is easy (from a legal POV) to move between California and Texas or vice versa so an American employee would probably move to California if a much larger salary depended upon it. If an employer doesn't really care if someone is in any particular location within the US, they may nonetheless feel happy paying what they valued the employee at if they did force them to move to California, say. Of course, they may also attempt to pay less, but that's a risky strategy since the employee could just as easily then request to move to the expensive location.
The UK worker earning 1/4 the wage does not have this freedom. Very few UK workers can move to the US (or any other economy than Ireland) and so the market rate for developers in the UK is very specific to the UK. Only a fraction of the best developers who both want to leave and be able to leave. There's a certain local demand and supply and the salary has found its natural resting point, protected by a moat of visas and regulations.
In the remote game, people living in the US have a formidable economic foe.
But there is a reason why companies haven't done this massively before, both for international remote and US remote. Very few companies pre-Covid were fully remote, and it might just stay that way.
If it was so easy to reduce payroll cost (the biggest cost in the budget of all tech companies) then it would have been done years ago, COVID or no COVID.