Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

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399 pointsivanche401 comments

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities.

My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies:

  South East England, outside London: 1x
  London: 2x
  New York: 3x
  San Francisco: 6x

On making hay: A friend of mine is currently earning around 3-4x in Romania paying almost no tax.

That is true, it might be the end of the sustainability of overpopulated cities ...

Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

It's not that complicated. Build more housing and better transportation options. If particular kinds of businesses have a hard time thriving (like grocers), actually pay attention to what kills those businesses and fix it. It's often some sort of overboard regulation like zoning.

>It's not that complicated.

On paper.

How dare you make housing affordable. I just spent 20x the median annual American salary on this house, and now you want to make it affordable?

One day the fed will do the unbelievable, it will raise interest rates and all those mortgages will be underwater.

It really isn't all that complicated though, and just takes money to fix the urban planning mistakes that have been made in many metropolitan cities.

Montreal is probably the most livable "big" city in North America, and it's mostly because of three things:

1. Excellent transportation. The metro is for the most part consistent, extremely affordable (it's ~$85/month, and about half that for students and youth), safe, and works as a great mainline transport. Busses are also very frequent - most coming at most 15 minutes apart during regular hours, and usually every half hour or so past 1am. You can get almost anywhere in the city in an hour or less using public transit.

2. Renters are protected. The Regie Du Logement heavily favours renters in housing related disputes, and as such, the prices also favour renters. Most individuals pay $1000 or less in rent, for entirely adequate housing, and if they want to move, it's almost certainly an option.

3. Permissive zoning. With the exception of the downtown core, there are grocery stores and pharmacies everywhere. Combined with depanneurs (corner stores) being within 500m of just about any point in the city, you are never far from milk, eggs, bread, beer, wine, and other necessities. Combined with businesses themselves being able to set up shop nearly anywhere as well. Ground floor business with residential above is the norm for nearly all "main" streets.

Yes, there are difficult things for existing cities to recreate, but it is almost entirely due to poor urban planning choices being made by the municipal (or state/provincial) powers that be.

I have to point out here the co-existence of permissive zoning AND rent protection. This is the way.

I'm not sure if rent control exists in Montreal, but advocacy organizations in US metros often push rent control as a standalone solution to various housing crises. But rent control requires the existence of a decently functional housing market to do its job correctly.

Yes, I have seen a lot of US cities that used rent control to do nothing except reduce accountability. You can build a decently functional housing market without rent control. But with rent control you don't need to build a functional housing market so the suffering continues.

All true, but don't underestimate the impact of the FLQ/PQ crisis. Several hundred thousand people moved from Montreal in the 90s, and immigration and money shifted to Toronto and Vancouver. Montreal was a renters market for 2 decades as a result, and Toronto experienced a boom that hasn't stopped since.

You’re forgetting - there just aren’t that many people who want to live in Montreal. That keeps costs down significantly.

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work

if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate

Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so

of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

Utilities, deliveries, etc... Urban areas are way better in many ways.

Heck just roads. At a certain level of rural you are paving and patching 10 miles of road per person. In the city you are paving like a few feet per person.

But add on top of that the cost of public transit infrastructure. 1 mile of underground BART line cost $1,500 per person. And that ignores maintenance.

Pro-tip, most US cities don't have anything like that. Midwest are all buses except Chicago. I can't think of a single Southern city with a rail transit system.

Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people.

Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to day costs.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

We're not talking about taxes, but environmental cost. San Francisco provides a bunch of (human) services walnut creek does not.

As one example, muni costs money and sf pays more for BART than WC does. These are still cheaper and more environmentally efficient than everyone owning cars.

If Walnut Creek paid an extra $9000/year for each resident then they could easily offset whatever extra environmental cost. Carbon offsets etc are not all that expensive.

1. Carbon offsets do not reduce emissions

2. Bart and muni are not the majority of the $9000 difference. The majority of the cost is various social services. The actual cost of muni per sf resident is something like $500, which is still significant (muni is not a great rapid transit system), but that's far less than the cost of carbon offsets for every resident.

What are these numbers comparing? Property taxes?

Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

Sure, here’s an analysis from Australia:

https://www.crcsi.com.au/assets/Resources/b6e1625f-d90b-433d...

Orders of magnitude may be hyperbolic, but costs alone are twice as much from that study. Note that some of those costs are directly paid by households and not through taxes. For example, you need a car and drive further distances increasing fuel and maintenance costs.

You’re ignoring the fact that people take up space.

Every single cabin in the woods running off solar used to be an area with trees.

EDIT: And don’t even get me started on those cabin dwellers buying cats and letting them roam the forest like the invasive bird and mammal eating machine that they are.

There's not enough tax base to support infrastructure like installing broadband, repairing and winter upkeep of roads and electric grid, fire stations, hospitals. Even businesses like nursing homes which one expects would benefit from lower property costs do not prosper due to lack of population and supportive medical services. Lower COL areas are net users of tax revenue from the country due to inefficiency, cities are net generators to the country.

That's only a result of the resources made available by the inhabitation of rural lands being under-valued on the market due to subsidies. Say goodbye to affordable food prices if we don't subsidize rural locales.

If you have to subsidize something, you only want to subsidize as much as necessary. Farmers can get their subsidies. A remote worker moving out of SF with a fat paycheck doesn't need the subsidy.

They're already more efficient though, and there's no benefit to the current residents (tech rich or not) from massive incoming population growth.

There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

The scope of what I'm talking about is bigger than yours. Cities are more efficient, and we need to move more people into them (not just the ones that are big right now, just to cities in general) to give ourselves a better shot at keeping our planet habitable in the long run.

To your second point - degradation of infrastructure is not an issues with cities, it's an issue with management and investment. On a practical level, with additional people should come additional industry and tax revenue which should in turn allow metropolitan areas to keep pace infra-wise.

>There won't be equivalent investment in services, recreation, leisure facilities to cope, so they'll degrade.

That's what happens in suburbia. You build a lot of infrastructure for very few people. That infrastructure was partly funded by private companies or federal government incentives. Once you have to collect property taxes and maintain the infrastructure you've overburdened yourself and can no longer meet your obligations precisely because there are not enough people living in that area.

> some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

Barcelona comes close. Perhaps not so much these days, but its a city that was really built with that in mind. And some of that persists.

Japan doesn't do too badly either. Some brief research is showing me that the configuration of apartment we would recognize as a 2BR would rent for something like $1200 or less in a lot of the Tokyo metro.

Where would people go? Underpopulated cities? Rapidly expand towns?

There is a massive population outflow from high COL coastal cities to smaller interior cities happening right now. SF, NY, LA, and Seattle are all shrinking.

Here's a great, interactive map based on Redfin data:

https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/migration/

If you want to maximize earnings, I almost wonder if it would be cheaper to rent the cheapest possible place in a remote area with a higher COL/salary, and then just live in a cheap area.

Yes, but until remote work is the norm it's a quality of life trade-off. Living in low COL area around London for instance is complicated by the fact that the entire commuter zone, for certain classes of housing, is basically priced at central prices less cost of commuting.

If you want a comfortable family life, with a bunch of kids, then you're looking at a long commute.

Housing in the UK is severely messed up though. It's actually better in most of the US.

Yeah, at least the US has multiple cities with similar pressure on price, the UK market is so unbalanced by London.

But anecdotally a huge swath of the younger population is moving to Birmingham or Manchester to escape the South East price crunch.

It's essentially insane for anyone not on or approaching 100k GBP to even bother with the South East at all imo.

I think GP means “rent an address” somewhere expensive, claim you live there, and actually live someplace cheap, working remotely.

Similar to how Apple keeps all its intellectual property in Grand Cayman I keep everything I know about tech in the heart of SF.

Or let the company pay you the million dollar mortgage while you rent in some backwater town.

How is he acomplishing that? You couldn't do that in the US unless you had a C2C contract

Yep people who work remote from a low COL area will benefit now and will benefit possibly even more once market pressure would start ramping up.

Whilst everyone wants to get paid as much as possible getting paid period is even better.

If you have a competitive advantage that would increase the likelihood of them making you an offer by asking for less because your housing costs only 50-25% of what it would in SV you’ll use eventually.

And whilst yes in a perfect world everyone would understand that they are eventually playing themselves but this is essentially the prisoners dilemma on a bigger scale and someone will flinch eventually and then the race to the bottom will start.

Eventually we may bounce back again towards working from a centralized location and then history will just repeat itself.

My firm works with a huge telecom company, some 15 years or so.

The first time i saw them going from central to decentral i was line :why? My colleagues, working longer with them, where like : meh its not the first time.

They go from central to decentral every five or so years for two reasons : getting rid of old workers, and hiring cheaper new workers.

They will probably do the same every few years..

> A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries.

... and the beginning of a new wave of entrepreneurship. The best talent goes towards companies that are too big to take risks. If you're ultra-competent, and the fat juicy wages aren't there to tie your resources on maintaining the status quo at some giant tech firm, maybe taking a punt on your own product (or teaming up with a friend) might be a little more appealing.

This is why it will always be worth paying inflated salaries for FAANG companies. Taking all the top talent is a moat.

I've run a smart consulting business for 16 years now. I've watched over the years as many I've worked with have gone to FAANG.

There may be opportunity costs involved, but there is no way FAANG can grab all of the top talent. Some of it is going to make its own way simply because they want to write their own rules.

You don't need to grab all of the top talent, just enough to keep them from coalescing into a threat.

The few that slip by get acquir-hired in a few years.

Extremely relevant for Canadian talent pools. Bleed to SF/Bay area is real.

The other side of this is how so many people starting or running companies still dont have a realistic view of what to pay engineers.

They're pricing a budget out to rationalize an equity raise and are completely inept at what is necessary to get their highly specialized engineers.

Sure there are a lot of engineers working at noncompetitive companies making 80-180k and lower outside of the bay area.

But if you expect to spend less time on recruiting and less time on attritition for your skillset that only exists in the bay area or HFT firms, wake tf up!

What makes you think their salaries are inflated and others are not lowballing?

I meant inflated relative to the mean. In principle I agree with your sentiment.

Until their competitors are providing the same products for less, or they are forcibly broken up by the government.

I don't think any company can afford to employ a significant percentage of the world's tech workers. Google has 150,000 staff, and even if half of them are developers that's only about 0.25% of the number of developers globally. Employing people as a moat only works within a large city (or a few dozen large cities). It can't be done if people can work from anywhere.

They don't need to. They just need to set the market rate so that start ups can't easily hire or retain the best; they're all competing to get into FAANGs, or failing that, companies that have the coffers to be second tier. The startup is left with the people willing to take a pay cut.

What's the real pool though? Most of the world's developers are either trash compared to the standard or working in a trash environment like Europe. It's basically SEA and the US in the leagues that matter which is a much smaller pool.

I'm in Europe (geographically anyway, technically the UK isn't in Europe right now). It isn't trash but I'd gladly swap my job for a remote one that pays NY wages.

I believe you're confusing the continent Europe with the European Union. UK is certainly in Europe.

As a British person who has been living through Brexit for years now, I am acutely aware of the difference. When Brits talk about whether they're in Europe or not it's always with reference to the EU. That's the one that actually makes a difference.

Not even homogenization, for the US this will be the precurser to the next round of Layoff's, and all those people that took part in the #LearnToCode and other movements to retrain people displaced from other employment into Programming jobs / office style jobs are going to be shocked when their nice remote job is outsourced to another nation.

Round 1 was the manufacturing Sector, Round 2 will be the office sector.

Economically the US is on a down hill path, and there is not a money printer large enough to fix this problem

I hope you're right

That's what I'm looking for - increasing salary 4 times for similar stuff while having living costs of 400-500 USD / month

Many companies tried and failed since the 90's, because most coampanies' software dev is a core group of skilled people using vague specifications to build a product for their first time.

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop.

Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC.

I don't believe Big Tech will ever go fully remote. There are inherent advantages in physical colocation. I see this as a means of satisfying the ever-increasing demand. The Bay Area in particular is both largely exhausted in available talent and saturated in how many more people can be supported (given available housing and infrastructure).

Disclaimer: I work for Facebook and have gone remote.

Those can’t-loopers are interviewing for many scores of jobs before they wiggle slightly higher on one interview and get hired.

The ones who can code interview at a couple places and pick from among their offers.

I don’t think you can extrapolate from how many terrible coders you see in interview pipelines that the industry is overall terrible.

The interview selection processes working is what you’re seeing.

> London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC.

I don't know. NY seems to be consistently more expensive judging by [0], particularly rent. Overall NY taxes are only 1-3% lower from my calculations, so I think overall NY'ers don't have it much better. The UK is also particularly generous when it comes to tax-advantaged investment and has state healthcare.

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

I've lived in both NYC and London (although not in London for years now). Housing is a hard one to compare. Your link mentions city center and out of city center. I'm not sure what that means exactly.

The big issue with London is you have to go _far_ to get affordable housing and commute times are generally terrible. I'm not sure what the picture looks like now with Crossrail.

The thing about New York is yes, Manhattan is expensive (generally) but affordability within 30 minutes of, say, Midtown can be substantially higher. London doesn't really have that. You'll see charts showing commuter towns being X minutes from Liverpool Street, King's Cross, whatever. My experience with London was that those were... unrealistic. Or rather they assumed everything went right. And it almost never does. Particular if a transfer is involved.

My experience of London:

- There's little difference, time-wise, between being located in a town on commuter rail, vs somewhere three connections away on the tube. If you're inside the M25 but outside the North / South Circular, you need to be very close to a station or you're practically worse off than someone living in a town on the railway.

- Motorcycles and scooters, and increasingly, electric bicycles, are the big hack. Free or cheap parking, mostly unaffected by traffic (filtering), not stuck when the trains are cancelled, not constrained by the sparseness of the rail and tube network as you get further from the centre.

Crossrail isn't open yet (due next year, but I wouldn't bet on it); Crossrail 2 is mothballed and probably won't be built for a few decades.

I live in a 120sqm 4 bed house with garden in Enfield, 40 minutes motorcycle commute from Clerkenwell, or 60-80 minutes by tube and train, depending on delays and timing (don't leave enough slack and you miss a connection). We used to live in a very small 60 sqm 3 bed house with garden in Bow, which was about 30 minutes from Clerkenwell. Mortgage now is £1500; rent (for over 10 years, nice landlord) used to be £1300. There's fewer food delivery options, and an Uber home is (or was) the preferred route after a night out, vs a night bus to Bow, but overall it's a higher quality of life.

Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich.

>"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich."

I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?

I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London.

Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substantially better than being a salaried employee in London (although food in particular is MUCH more expensive in Switzerland such that people will drive an hour to Aldi across the border in Germany to go shopping).

Fun fact #1: there are limits to how many groceries you can bring into Switzerland. Meat in particular. You can get checked for this at the border.

Fun fact #2: IIRC years ago the supermarket just across the border in Germany had the highest revenue of any supermarket in Germany.

As for work authorization, it is relatively easy for EU citizens to get and somewhat harder for non-EU citizens. It generally takes 5 years on a B permit (work visa) to get a C permit (permanent residence) if you're EU, 10 if you're not.

I imagine with Brexit, UK citizens are now in the harder category.

Thanks. I think I knew Google had an office there. I'm curious if you or anyone else knows if there are other interesting tech or startup shops there?

I'd say there are 4 main places in Switzerland: around both ETH (the most prestigious universities) in Zürich and Lausanne, with plenty of spinoffs, in Geneva (mostly finance) and in Zug (lots of crypto).

Zürich has all (most?) of the big tech, plus lots of start-ups. Lausanne is mostly just start-ups and small companies.

For money, it's mostly Google. And that's the offer I've taken, turning down an AWS offer in Berlin. I am an EU citizen, so there's no meaningful barrier to living in Switzerland. It was a very hard choice vs Berlin though.

Was it a difficult choice because of lifestyle in Berlin vs Zurich? I would curious to hear your thoughts on that. Does AWS have an engineering office in Berlin now?

It's AWS Redshift in particular, in Berlin. My background in data volume and query optimization, along with compiler development, made me a particular fit. The Google job is actually a worse fit, focusing mostly on data volume, schema management and APIs. But I probably won't be in the same role indefinitely.

Why Berlin vs Zurich decision was hard: in part the cost of living (e.g. childcare) in Zurich, the fact it's outside the EU (e.g. very little consumer protection, less consumer choice, a hard border with customs), and the relative conservatism of society leading to a lot of things which make it harder for women to work: early closing of shops (not that different to Berlin to be sure), apartment living and limitations on running washing machines (if you don't have a housewife to do laundry during the day), school finishing early on Wednesdays and 2 hour lunches where children are expected to go home and eat (housewife again), etc. My partner half-jokes that we should get a housewife or maybe one each.

Oh and recycling religion which I don't buy into - I reckon there are very few things which it makes sense to recycle heavily - primarily metals - but Switzerland promotes it as a virtue. Sorting recycling materials does not make me feel virtuous; it makes me want to pay someone to remove the problem. This isn't that much different to Germany though.

I reckon the AWS salary in Berlin would have put me higher in the income distribution for the city than the Google salary in Zurich, but overall, even accounting for higher costs, I expect to have a lot more disposable income in Zurich. Taxes, for one thing, are lower - though where you live can make a substantial difference.

Lifestyle as in nightlife, restaurants, multiculturalism etc.: not such a big deal to me right now with a 12 month old kid. As a motorcyclist I like the idea of the Alps and less crime. I've had 6 motorcycles taken in London, including one bikejacking at a stop light and not including an attempted bikejacking where I outran my pursuers to help. For younger single people I think Berlin would be a better choice. We already had much of that experience in London before Brexit though.

Zurich is also much closer to western Europe. Munich, Milan and Paris (surprisingly) are 4 hours by train. Berlin is almost in Poland. From my EUrail trip in the 2000s, I recall acutely how pleasant it was to be in Switzerland after having gone through most of the ex Eastern Block countries, to Greece, then ferry to Italy and up over the Alps.

This "can't code a for loop" is a misleading statement given the kind of interviews that are typical at e.g. Facebook.

Even if that candidate could code a for loop and a while loop and knew the syntax of that programming language by heart and knew their algorithms to boot, it's more than likely that they would fail the interview anyway.

Complaining about people that can't code loops emphasizes that the candidates are incompetent while omitting the also very relevant fact that many companies are ridiculously difficult to please.

The most basic weed-out phone screen questions at FAANG still essentially test for undergraduate CS abilities far above for-loops. Tree traversal, data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis are several topics suggested in the very preparation guides provided by recruiters at these companies.

A lack of understanding for-loops would either get caught at the resume screener or suggest some blatant fabrications thereof akin to a pianist not knowing where middle C is. We don't even need to use FizzBuzz, our most basic interview questions we use are considerably more difficult and our candidate pipeline is sufficient to support this to boot.

Umm.. FANMAG pay the same comp for NY and SF. Roughly the same for Seattle too.

The multiples I cited are what I tend to observe in the industry generally. There aren't really any FANMAGs outside of London.

Ah, your comment referred to FANMAG hence my reply.

> There aren't really any FANMAGs outside of London.

There are. For example, AWS has a development center in Cambridge.

To be a little bit picky, Amazon & Microsoft pay about 1/2 in total compensation than the Bay Area companies.

using data from https://www.levels.fyi/

It’s been true since 2014, as I check salaries around the web to see how my hiring goes, and also for my own opportunities. My own records: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BoMvtY_mICEYygy0jXVG...

Point being - Amazon&MS salaries aren’t likely to change, while Bay Area tech companies, the outflux happening, will have to adjust.

Seattle is both as expensive and as competitive of a hiring market as the Bay Area (there used to be a CoL delta but the gap closed after 2013ish, when Amazon and Microsoft stocks both went on a tear and Facebook expanded with multiple new large engineering offices there).

I say that as someone who recently left Seattle to move to the Bay pre-pandemic. Only miss the lower taxes, and certainly not the weather.

Except that employers aren’t going to become less picky when switching to remote; likely, they will become even more picky and will want to improve their employee base since the supply has increased and that will be possible where it wasn’t before.

It doesn't matter. The top 1% of a large pool is still bigger than the top 1% of a small pool, so competition increases for the same number of jobs.

However, a company that was previously land-restricted to only the 98th percentile (top 2% minus top 1%) now has access to the top 1% and will be trying to compete, so there are actually more jobs available at the top.

You are forgetting that for each "land restricted" company that had 0% 99th percentile hires locally available there was x companies having more % somewhere else for it to eventually be an distribution.

There is no way you can filter out top 1/100 candidates anyway.

All that implies is that the number of top 1% candidates remains constant. Of course it does. Some companies had more than they needed, but if you take luxury away from a man, he will seek it out because he is used to it.

This assumes talent is geographically homogeneous. IMHO, Talent in top cities in the US is better than the one in the rest of the countries, and so it goes for other countries.

For top US firms, it may well be that there is a better pool for top talent, but not THAT much better. I believe it would be possible to do inferences from # of non-US citizen in FAANGs.

The thing about London and the UK generally is the real money was historically in contracting. I reckon I was hitting the 6x.

The perm market here has always been silly.

How much were you hitting? I haven’t seen contracts that go that high, I’m on 140K base + car allowance now (8K), in total I make around 220-215K cash w/ bonuses. employer pension is about another 20K or so a year.

IR35 made contracting complicated but even before that I’ve never seen anything that gets you to SV levels of total comp.

I've heard of contracts of 250K-300K GBP for senior architects positions.

That’s around what my role is, but I’ve never seen anything close to 300K p/a contracts for those, at least not actually 300K bailable since you don’t get that many days on those daily rate.

I’ve seen short term contracts with £1500-2000 day rates but you’ll be hard pressed to bill 200-250 days on that rate a year.

For how long?

1500 a day. Depends on the exchange rate at the time and how many days you wanna work, but it was over $500k at the time. Obviously you can earn similar or more as a high level in FANNG and the initital grant in the US is a lot better. 800-1000 is a lot more typical.

Your salary is pretty hot though. I traded in contracting to be a CTO on a lot less than you are, but I got some lottery ticket stocks and will probably see us through an IPO, so feels like that's worth something.

Yeah I’ve seen and even been offered £1500+ contracts but those were relatively short term no where close to being enough to fill out 200+ billable days per year.

You could get probably get to £150K or so over a year focusing on those contracts only 100 days billable is doable but usually you won’t find more than 5-6 months of those contracts per year.

Hopefully the IPO will work out well for you :)

I think you are overestimating suply of talented ppl. On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland. So it's 100 per 40M. Guess in other countries it's similar or less and here programming is quite popular.

This means that India, almost most populus country on earth has around ~3300 per year, correcting for internet/computer access in 20 years ago it's probably 1/3 of that.

> On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland.

How do you figure that?

There's only 2/3 top universities (if you are being generous, 1 if honest) that are match worldwide here (have people doing substantial research, funding valuable companies or just working in FANGs) producing around 100 graduates per year (combined). This gives me some ballpark estimate.

I myself have a CS degree from a Polish university that's regularly in top1-top3 of the rankings. I don't think it means that much. We've had a fair share of people who didn't enjoy the work that much and did bare minimum. On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of people from lower ranked universities who didn't graduate in CS (but, for example in Maths or Physics) who are very strong contributors. The truth is that university pedigree is not a definitive indicator of on the job performance.

BTW (unrelated) - I think all Polish universities are a joke when it comes to CS. I've never heard of either one of them making you write a compiler or an OS or a database engine from scratch as a part of taking a course, while it seems fairly standard on top US universities. Instead, the workload is superficial and skews towards semester-long BS projects that prepare you for run-of-the-mill jobs in industry (web dev, big data etc.). Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed. The reason for that is because none of the professors, barring maybe a few exceptions, are doing any meaningful research, so they have no understanding of the state of the art.

I also don't think degree means much but anyone with some curiosity gets one here as it's free, so it's still good estimate. Even if you add all outliers, physics and math students then you get max 3x my estimation.

> Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed.

Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.

You are only looking at university graduates. This, by far, doesn't tell you the picture in the job market.

I have worked for the past 17 years with a lot of brilliant engineers, some of them didn't even have a university degree, some had from a crappy uni just because they needed a diploma for a job, and others never touched CS and graduated in Biology or Statistics. You can't measure who is at your level or not just by university graduation stats, it's completely biased to your definition of what's a software engineer at your level: someone who graduated from a university considered at the same level or better than yours for research. That's all your metric tells, not how many people per year in Poland can develop/engineer the same feature set or product as you do, with the same time. And that's nigh impossible to measure or even estimate, there's no data available for that estimation.

If anything this is going to drain talent from other places toward traditional big techs. WFH greatly increased talent pool for top payers.

Folks from the UK should simply vote with their feet instead of whining and move to SV.

It's the only way it will change.

And that's the reason why UK rates are so low. Relatively few people meet the conditions of both wanting to move (for cultural or family reasons, say) and being able to move (visas being the main impediment here - as someone who considered it 15 years ago, moving to the US to work is no walk in the park).

Time to negotiate better visa options for UK engineers!

I'm not optimistic, but if the UK and US ever do a trade deal, an Australian or Canadian style deal that allows more freedom of labor would certainly be interesting.

Good for the engineers, not much incentive for the government to lose their best and brightest to the US.

> A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries

On what grounds? People said the same thing about outsourcing. It didn't really change anything. Engineer salary has already been bimodal for quite some time. Trying to recruit for the upper tier hasn't gotten any easier.

That works both ways though. The 6x places might move to, say, 4x over time, but the 1x and 2x places will salary upwards to compete.

As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.

Indeed. The only folks in trouble are the ones who decide to remain in VHCOL geographies.

I'm not sure sure about that. The 6x places can pay that because of high revenue per employee. It's not like the 1x places will suddenly see a higher revenue per employee to pay higher compensation.

If the company comes to you it might. It’s like how a Cuban can move to Miami and have their “productivity go up”, but with remote work the employee can stay where they are and the company can “move to them”. Of course the flip side of this is offshoring where the company can raise someone else’s productivity more cheaply than someone making US wages already.

There's people scattered all over the country making 2x-3x rates that could have been earning 6x, but moving to San Fran or NYC was never a feasible option. The 6x companies will offer them 4x, settle on 4.5x, and both parties are happy. It will inevitably drive down the 6x pay, but drive up the 1x-3x pay. However, the companies will be the real winners though unless there's some type of coordination between all employees...Not only will they have massive payroll cost savings, buy they will reduce office rent expenses, electricity use, etc.

What happens when that pattern repeats into highly-educated parts of Eastern Europe and Southern Asia?

In a world where employees need to show up to 6X Co HQ everyday to work, the cost of living and the cost of hiring is directly linked (6x). But in a world where people can work anywhere, salaries will be disconnected from housing costs and we may see a lot of 6x companies happily slide lower. It will come down to how many employees meet the 6X Co's hiring bar and how good 6X Co is at turning new hires into productive employees. If there are enough available people above their current headcount, the floor will be closer to 1x. How close to 1x (2x? 4x? 5.5x?) is hard to know. I don't think it's simple to know where the market will fall after a remote work revolution.

Great points and I will add:

It is easy for a thousand engineers to train in Bay Area and move elsewhere.

But could another locale train a thousand engineers to be ready to employed in the Bay Area companies?

In many cases, the value (initial value) comes from assimilating in the culture and while a lot of bigCos could still make people work in Bay Area before sending them home, the challenge is for these locations to evolve to be capable themselves.

I believe most Engineers in the Bay Area did train somewhere else. California has 1/4 immigrants from other countries, and some similar amount moved there from other states.

This forwards an over-inflated notion of the cultural and knowledge value that working at a Bay Area company imparts.

The Bay Area does not have a monopoly on good culture or experts: at times it may even notably lack them. There are many experts there and much good culture to learn from, but there are also many idiots and charlatans, and it is just as likely you'll find one of them first. How does a beginner tell the difference?

There is no locational bound on where people can learn to write great software, on where they can write great software, on where they can teach others to write great software, or on where a strong culture can be grown and shared, i.e. one of good ethics, responsibility, fun, art, innovation, trust, etc.

The Bay Area is not magical; it is just a place where a lot of money and a useful attitude toward spending it (on risky technology ventures) got cyclically concentrated over time.

> "In a world where employees need to show up to 6X Co HQ everyday to work, the cost of living and the cost of hiring is directly linked (6x)."

They are not directly linked, and it is a harmful falsehood to perpetuate (sorry to single your specific comment out here -- I know lots of people are saying it.)

Would they pay you more if you moved to a more expensive area of the city, or less if you chose a bit cheaper? Would they pay you noticeably more in a year of higher than average inflation? Would they change your wage depending upon your marital status, which impacts expenses dramatically? At any point in setting your offer number, did they do calculations of your reasonable expenses, or ever take into account what type of lifestyle you lead? No.

If you are a software developer, you likely make enough to pay an average person's bills in your area, plus some luxuries, and then a bit more beyond. Likely enough to put away some savings over time. Was $YourCo just ... very generous in letting you have that amount of savings, compared to other industries, which pay less?

No. None of these are the case, because cost of living is not relevant to your salary, except to the small degree in which it factors into what the market (i.e. we) expects and will accept. That is where "region" has traditionally played a role, because low mobility between regions has historically made them into homogenous, isolated markets, which is where this falsehood can creep in.

So what really sets that number?

Industry salary reports, people's beliefs in 'the market trends', gossip about what other companies are offering, the acceptance rate they've had on offers in the recent past, your stated salary expectations, your experience level, the degree of specialization your role has, the importance of that role to them, their overall budget for hires, whether you negotiated or not, and whether or not you have competing offers you can play against them. All this boils down to "what they think you will accept, and how badly they want you." -- not your costs.

What happens when American employers starting hiring more and more in Europe/Africa/Asia? I'm not sure. I think fluent English communication skills, timezone affinity, cultural connection, and ease of travel to 'say hi' all form bits of moat, but those will certainly matter less and less with time.

In the near term, as SF+NYC start to allow remote work 'across North America', I think there are just way more jobs and companies looking than there are liquid engineers ready to move. Salaries might drop while we transition, but I really believe they'll go broadly as high as (or higher than) they were in those markets for a time, and this Spotify move is exactly why: the big players will now be competing for the best people everywhere, and the average carrying cost per employee, with no office requirements, is way down.

I definitely agree it's not simple to know where the market will fall in the long run. If European/African/Asian companies start correspondingly hiring here, that'll help North American engineers overall, but I'm not sure if we'll all end up at 1x, 3x, .5x, or what. It's easy to forget that there is room for an awful lot of software jobs in the world, especially, again if companies no longer need to pay for office space proportional to headcount. Some of these companies have a lot of money and were primarily constrained in the past by offices+office-inertia.

Regardless, 'cost of living' is not the root cause driving wages that people keep claiming it is, and when employees join in that lie, it hurts us.

It's all just what the markets of employers and employees are willing to bear, and what we should really be estimating as those isolated markets merge over the next decade is more like #qualified engineers / # potential software jobs, world-wide.

A company that goes fully remote might simply choose to close offices in the 4-6x places.

> As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.

I worked for a large tech company that started going remote before COVID. Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United States at all. Why hire a $100K Midwest US engineer when you can hire two good international engineers for the same salary and not have to pay for their health insurance?

There will always be some demand for US engineers and time zones put some limits on outsourcing, but opening the floodgates to full-remote companies means that even engineers in the cheapest US cities are now competing against increasingly qualified engineers who will happily take half the compensation to do the exact same work.

> Why hire a $100K Midwest US engineer when you can hire two good international engineers for the same salary and not have to pay for their health insurance?

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, engineer salaries are bimodal. I believe this is because labor demand is bimodal. It sounds the company you are describing has this hiring philosophy: we prefer to hire as many mode 1 engineers as we can for the dollar. However, there are also companies that have a counterparty hiring philosophy: we would rather have a smaller, more mode-2 engineer centric organization than a larger more mode-1 engineer centric organization.

What's more, I've noticed that the small, more deliberately leveraged organizations have a strong bias towards the latter hiring philosophy, because it applies not just to their technology divisions, but to the organization as a whole. In finance, it's the boutiques; in technology, it's the startups. Large companies that are able to maintain mode-2 centric culture exist, but generally only when they have high-profit revenue based on R&D.

> Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United States at all.

Facebook, Google, etc. have offices around the world, but that hasn't led them to close any of their US offices. If there were enough equally qualified candidates in these areas that would accept compensation at a fraction of Bay Area salaries, why wouldn't they follow suit?

Companies with huge cash reserves are not optimizing things to save money. Companies dripping with cash will continue to have their offices in prestigious locations and continue to pay absurd amounts of money for acquisitions we roll our eyes at, because money to them is cheap. Same way some people buy absurdly overpriced luxuries, because the price is not an issue.

OP was contending that even the FAANG gravy train is over. My claim is that if increasingly talented engineers exist elsewhere, they would have already been hired and emmigrated to the US Tier 1 city HQs in the first place.

We already have a majority immigrant workforce, and talent is still scarce as it is. I am originally from the American Midwest growing up within driving distance to a top ranked CS university that attracts diverse students from all over the globe with near perfect standardized test scores, literally contending with the likes of Stanford and MIT.

However, our graduates all leave town afterwards for greener pastures at the usual suspects. We just recently got out first homegrown unicorn startup, and there are plenty of satellite offices for brand name companies here. Still, hardly anybody ever stays.

World class engineering talent abroad wants their golden ticket to the US, in particular, to a handful of specific cities only. The vast majority of my FAANG coworkers are immigrants, for example, and our interview bar is more selective than Harvard in terms of raw acceptance rate. Tech companies are essentially in an arms race for brains, even lobbying for more favorable immigration laws. Surprisingly, none of the people we have hired (and cleared our challenging bar for algorithm interview performance) have any desire to return to their home countries. Meanwhile, this global workforce has not dropped total compensation one iota.

Because they aren't just trying to hire the top talent. They are also trying to lock up top talent so that their competitors can't benefit from it.

> timezones

Wait till they discover all the competent English speaking engineers in South America

What country is your friend's employer based in? I'm America living in Romania soon to apply for developer jobs and I see time zone and residency status as potential obstacles.

You poor soul, American living in Romania? How did this mishap happen? I'm guessing it was because of your (presumably Romanian) partner? :-)

Yes, Romanian partner it is. But it's pretty nice here, why do you call it a mishap and what is a better option? Portugal right?

Well, just out of curiosity, visit some local hospitals or make some appointments with doctors in state owned hospitals or clinics.

For better options, I'd say most of other Eastern European countries in the EU are probably better (except for Bulgaria), and also probably Portugal or Spain.

Just check out where the big Romanian diasporas are :-D

ok, I think we can all agree not to add any more letters to that acronym at this point and just call it big tech.

Although I really would like to get a job at GAFNDMRASDGAMGICZ soon.

I'm not stopping until we reach FANDANGO.

My personal favorite that I've seen is FLAMINGASS (Facebook Lyft Amazon Microsoft Intel Netflix Google Apple Salesforce Square) (at least one of these is definitely a bit of a stretch)

That's awesome! I'm sure the press'll be picking that one up any moment now.

I already only do 10 hours of work per week in this pandemic WFH. No one seems to notice. I’m L6 at google.

Why not double down and get two “full time” jobs. I’ve heard from my friend in BoA that he works less than 1 hour per day.

TC: 800k

Wait until you find out how many people work less than 1 hour per day in the office!

One of the biggest revelations in this pandemic remote work era is you don't 6 layers of management just to forward emails to each other.

Lots of management turns out to be was just for crowd control.

WFH where? Are you paying 400k+ in taxes?

What are you doing with your time? I think I’d go mad if I only worked 1hr a day with these lockdowns.

There is so much stuff to do with your time if you don't have to care about money.

For me, personally, it'd be to invest time in making music, getting good enough in that as my taste is, I just need a lot more free time to practice it. Just like I had when I was a kid learning to program, I've only achieved it due to spending endless hours in experimentation and little projects without usefulness. It's something that is very hard to do, mentally speaking, when you are occupied 8 hours/day with work, I don't have capacity to spend another 4-5 hours/day with music. If I worked 1-2 hours/day I'd definitely have 8-10 hours daily to plunge into it, not only time-wise but my mental capacity would be much more free to put effort in it.

And that can be any hobbies or passions you have that work hours don't allow you to pursue, if money isn't an issue I'm sure you will find ways to fill your time with what you enjoy doing.

If you really enjoy work, well, then you have much more time to work on things you deem worth of.

nice! how do you manage that?

I have a system that tracks how long I use my work machine for, and visualizes it in a bar that is 10 units long.

I got by doing this for about 15 months before they started somewhat catching on. Productivity is still the same, but some things are leaky.

I'm nowhere near your TC though. I feel like you are a smarter, more optimized version of me, but I hope to get there someday and that's the path I'm currently on.

geez lol. I am envious!

How does one get TC 800K ($?) at Google L6? Did you get hired during a stock price collapse?

How people report their TC is all across the board

They could have refresher RSUs, they could have negotiated to stay on and move up, they could just be reporting what they took home after stock price appreciation, they could have offered something special

Do you know not do any scrum or project management?

Is the justification for paying 6x more that those companies presume there's greater than a 6x increase in output due to network effects? I honestly haven't seen anybody try to justify the expenses over just trying to hire for the same qualities, but more dispersed.

theyre actually that much better IMO. the bay area has unbelievable talent.

Isn't that because the companies that attract that talent and pay those salaries are there, though? I don't doubt you, but also there's nothing about the geography of the SF bay that gives people more talent.

The only reason I can think that a company wouldn't start elsewhere, or decide to move to save on costs while hiring the same talent level (who presumably wouldn't mind lower TCO) is the network value of existing bay area talent.

id say yes.

and companies that want to compete with them do have to pay competitive wages. regardless of location. IE snapchat pays more than FANG despite being in LA, where wages are generally lower for tech companies, because they want to compete with FANG. Same with some companies in seattle etc.

FAANG caliber engineers can easily generate millions in profits for companies, and it’s not easy to find them. Downward pressure on salaries is not happening any time soon.

We have been in a global pandemic for one year now. Meanwhile, nothing has really shifted in terms of market value of world-class engineers. If a pandemic isn't enough to cause the "bubble" to burst, any reasonable person would struggle to say that doom and gloom is impending. Software is still eating the world (arguably even moreso as of late).

If companies are fighting for remote talent by showering them with the same kind of compensation packages as they would have gotten in San Francisco and New York, how is that the logical conclusion that can be drawn? Almost all of the remote engineers I know have successfully negotiated keeping their same salary (despite all of this hubbub about lower salaries elsewhere). Where is all of this hidden world-class engineering talent? I'm from the Midwest and could count on fingers how many people from my hometown even knew what C++ was. Out of all of those fortunate people, only one of them still lives there.

Can you imagine any American company contending with the Chinese government for hiring remote workers (let alone risking infosec -- the other top article on HN today is about a Chinese company breeching a US competitor)?

Can you imagine any IIT-caliber engineer wanting to work remote instead of move to the US? My Indian-American colleagues have described the abject starvation and poverty at home to me. I've also seen it myself first hand while traveling.

South Korean engineers have close-knit online communities for moving to the US for work in Silicon Valley (there's even a Korean government agency to facilitate this).

Pockets of talented engineers have also existed in Poland, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine as well (look at the IOI rankings), but timezones make these remote workers hardly manageable. My previous company was almost entirely staffed from Eastern European immigrants who happily packed their bags and booked one way plane tickets to SFO. Those people have been through multiple periods of history aptly described as none other than sheer hell, with the literal climate to boot (I.e. hath frozen over).

Outside of these countries, you're no longer hiring the best of the best. Talent is still scarce, and nations that have the government, culture, population, and resources to foster it are numbered. If I had to guess, every single person I worked with while I was at FAANG had a 150+ IQ (top 0.1%ile). Many had PhDs (we called them "research scientists") or Ivy League caliber degrees.

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs).

US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

> US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

Citation? I think pretty much all salaries discussed in Europe was before tax

(Stock option on the other hand are usually not counted)

This is country specific but in many European countries there are employer's and employee's social deductions. Usually salaries discussed are already without employer's part, but with employee's ones. Taxes should be taken away only once AFAIK.

So salaries discussed/negotiated will still have in them 1) tax; 2) employee social deductions; 3) health insurance. This is deducted, and result goes to employee's account. In many places, its cca 50% or less that gets into account depending on many things (state, family situation, type of employment etc.)

Employer payroll taxes exists in a number (all?) of US states too.

Before tax but after retirement savings (or most of them, e.g. in Italy it's about 4:1 with the employer paying the larger part). Depending on the country after healthcare costs too, since often healthcare is simply financed from taxes (if not, anyway it will be lower and also come with hardly any deductibles).

Does the US have significant employer tax?

A data point from Norway: Employer tax of 14% of pre-tax salary is paid by employer. Employer also has to pay 2-13% (dependent on individual negotiation) of pre-tax salary for retirement savings. These are both part of the cost to the employer, and are rarely considered part of "total compensation". So employers have to pay an extra 16-27% of each person's salary in addition to what the employee gets.

An 8% tax for compulsory retirement savings is then taken from the employee's pre-tax salary, along with other individual taxes, that will usually sum up to around 33%. This is not part of the cost to the employer. The number before these taxes are subtracted is usually quoted as the person's salary.

Although for a US comparison, few employers in Norway have significant expenses for health insurance. And the cost of US health insurance, a considerable percentage, is rarely considered part of your "total compensation".

I've never understood why there's a split between what taxes get paid by your employer and what taxes get paid by the employee - in the end, the employer pays all of them anyway. I'd like to know exactly how much money an employer would have to pay for a given amount of money landing in my bank account in a given time period.

As long as there is a hidden "benefits tax" that varies wildly from company to company, it doesn't matter. It's crazy to try to compare offers in the US.

You can figure it out with a basic Algebra calculation. Not that hard.

But I doubt any employee is comparing your offer on that. They are going on the top line number.

The reason is politics. It's easier to raise taxes that are invisible to voters.

It's also a very strong lever that is not very well understood by the general public and can be used to stimulate growth in a particular area without sounding like the government is subsidizing the industry directly.

For example in Quebec the government waves a sizable chunk of taxes if the employee works on "research". With research being voluntarily defined very loosely so video game development falls into that category. The goal was to draw Ubisoft, EA, Unity, etc... in Montreal.

If you just look at the present state of things, the split doesn't make much sense. Instead, consider the choice of legislators that are about to change taxes on already existing employment agreements. There are two sides to each employment and affecting one is not the same as affecting the other.

No, the United States does not have high employer-paid payroll taxes. The employer is responsible for about 8% for social security (pension) and medicare (old-age health care) taxes, but only income up to $150k/yr is subject to this tax.

States also assess a payroll tax to pay for unemployment benefits; this varies by state and industry. It is also subject to relatively low income caps, especially compared to tech-sector salaries.

OMG I hate this kind of dishonesty by governments (and companies).

There should be no "employer taxes". That's money that otherwise could be going to the employer so all taxes and the like should be reported coming out of the employee's salary.

Example: the US has 6.2% Social Security taxes levied on both the employer and employee. This should be reported as 12.4/106.2 = 11.7% of the employee's income.

BTW companies do this too. Airlines charge fuel surcharges (there's no such thing; the fares are just more expensive). US ISPs are famous for things like "Infrastructure Surcharges" and other charges you can't avoid. The FTC/FCC should step in and make it illegal to underreport true costs with mandatory charges like these.

Another beef with the US government I have in particular is the "standard deduction". This is actually a way of hiding a regressive tax on lower income people. Think about it: you're eroding the value of itemized deductions but lower income people are disproportionately affected.

Agreed. Try to make an argument up here that our tax burden is debilitating, and all you get in return is «our taxes are the same as every other country, 30% on average».

Can be refuted in a debate, but of course the dishonest rhetoric reflects what people actually believe and vote.

Agreed up until the last part. The standard deduction is progressive, it provides a much bigger benefit to lower income earners than it does to mid/high income earners.

Consider a simplified tax system:

- 10% of the first $100,000

- 20% of the remaining

- The standard deduction is $20,000

Now consider three incomes: $40,000, $80,000 and $200,000.

1. $40,000 is $4,000 (10%) tax to $2,000 (5%)

2. $80,000 is $8,000 (10%) tax to $6,000 (7.5%)

3. $200,000 is $30,000 (15%) tax to $26,000 (13%)

So on the face of it it seems progressive and would be if it wasn't for the fact that it offsets itemized deductions. Imagine each person above could deduct 25% of their income:

1. No change.

2. No change.

3. $50,000 deduction, which is an additional $30,000 of $6,000 in savings.

So the highest income earners still get itemized deductions and both the standard and itemized deductions are offsetting a marginal higher tax rate.

The point is that the "standard deduction" is (IMHO) dishonest. You can achieve a progressive tax system by... just having a progressive tax system.

The US does have a progressive tax system. Here's effective federal tax rates. Throw on inheritance tax on top of these and it gets extremely progressive.

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-...

Having worked in many EU countries, I've never once had salary quoted or discussed after tax.

Less experienced, but I've never seen EU salaries quoted after tax, either.

As one data point, people never discus before-tax salaries in my home country (Croatia), it's always after-taxes and all other mandatory deductions. I believe the same holds true for at least several other EU countries from the region.

by "people never discuss" you mean the negotiation between the employee and employer is based on after tax salary, or do you mean casual conversations with friends? I haven't seen discussing after tax salary at all during interviewing process in the 4 countries I applied for jobs and got offers (Slovakia, Czechia, Switzerland, Denmark).

Both.

Officially, on the employment contract, the salary is shown before-tax, but after mandatory pension and healthcare deductions.

However, in the negotiations, in casual conversation, and when you're hearing someone talking about their salary in the media, it's always discussed after taxes. Most people have no idea how much tax (or health insurance) they're actually paying.

In Finland, I usually hear people talk about salaries before taxes and less often after taxes. For example my union has a yearly salary survey and publish results in before taxes salaries. But since it's so confusing, you usually see "brutto" ("gross", before taxes) and "netto" ("net", after taxes) being discussed when talking about salaries.

Croatia, as well as other post Yugoslavia countries is more of an exception here.

It's not alone. In Romania salaries are negotiated based on net salary.

I have; last time when I was looking for a job, some employers (and mostly recruiters) asked me what I'd like to earn per month after taxes.

I'm sure there's some shuffling they would end up doing when it comes to wages, stock options (not really a thing), transportation, and other benefits.

I'd never discuss that with a recruiter, because that would involve a discussion about how I conduct my personal finances well beyond just the salary and other benefits... E.g. additional pension contributions I make, or investments I make would affect it.

“After tax” in the US means after the employee pays their own share of various income taxes. The portion of those taxes paid by the employer are not discussed (in salary discussions).

Either way, the point stands - for cross-border salary discussions, you need to consider the “fully loaded” cost of an employee, not just net salary. You also have to consider non-cash benefits and costs (high US salaries offset by high health care costs, etc).

Once you go fully remote you don't really need employment contracts either - in Europe opening some sort of legal entity and invoicing your salary as an independent contractor will be more profitable and more flexible.

In France there is employee taxes and employer taxes. You discuss before employee taxes, but after employer taxes (which is about 50% of the salary before employee taxes). If you're on a French payroll the amount is written on your payslip, but most people don't even notice it.

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it's an employer tax or an employee tax, the employer spends some amount of money and the employee gets a portion home. But the discussion never includes employer taxes.

Yeah, I wish they'd get rid of that distinction. It's just pointless obfuscation.

I'm sure you have - but not after income taxes. All taxes that are taken before you get your gross (before income tax) pay, is typically what is quoted in Euerope.

E.g. My employer pays X1.25 for my "before tax" salary of X because there is 25% payroll taxes/fees. I pay 35% taxes on that, so my net is 0.65x. Is X "before"or "after" taxes here? It's after payroll taxes and similar deductions, but before income taxes (which I pay myself).

In Romania almost all salary negotiations, ranges, etc. are on net salary ("take home salary").

How do they know what your tax rate is? Especially in the context of "work from anywhere" as in OP, employees can have a wide variety of tax situations.

The tax rate is flat and there are no deductions. There are no local relative taxes (as in a percentage of your income), everything is in absolute values.

And if you're working from another country, then you're a fiscal resident in that country and you have to pay taxes there. But in that case you'd be a contractor or own a company, so that's a totally different story.

Which EU countries have net salary in their employment contracts?

Employment contracts in Germany have gross salary (Bruttogehalt), all the social security, healthcare and taxes will be deducted from that amount.

Estonian employment contracts are a bit of a mix: the amount listed is gross (brutopalk), but the employer pays an additional 33+% on top of that gross salary for social security etc.

That's not completely true, part of the German social security is paid directly by the employer and not deducted from the Bruttogehalt. It's about 15-20% in total.

I used to have when I worked in Poland. Was really surprised, after moving to Germany, people don't seem to care about their net salaries.

Probably because if you maximize the pre-tax salary, except for a few edge cases, the net salary will be maximized too. The difference between the two is largely out of one's control.

What you're saying is impossible. Prospective employers don't know what your exact after-tax income is as it depends on a lot of factors (dependents, marital status, etc)

As an employer in an EU country (Croatia), I know exactly how much each of my employees' after tax income is, including everything you've said (and adding stuff like some debt payments if there are any, etc).

It's all withheld by employer - employee never sees a penny out of it. Although they always get full documentation of exactly what's wihhheld, in my experience almost nobody ever reads it.

Note that there are some adjustments employees can make a return for at the end of the year, which takes into accounts stuff like dividend income, tax deduction on mortgages and similar.

Note the comment you're replying to said "prospective employers". Until you're entered into the payroll system, your employer likely won't know what all the applicable deductions are, so can't give you a net income figure as part of an offer, just a pre-deductions figure.

Good catch, thanks for pointing it out.

The way this works here in practice is the employer assumes "standard" level of taxes based on your location. So for example, you'd negotiate €2k net salary, and you'd get a some € extra if you have a dependant, mortgage, etc.

Yea but you don’t know that before you hire them (or at least that’s the case in America).

Here you might live in a different township or city, taxes will be different depending on school district, etc.

AFTER you hire them, sure, you will probably know what their tax rate is. I think originally the discussion was about before you hire someone.

>I know exactly how much each of my employees' after tax income is

>Note that there are some adjustments employees can make a return for at the end of the year

So you don't know "exactly" how much your employees' after tax income is. You just know how much you are withholding and have some kind of an estimate of what they make after taxes.

In the US, the employer withholds taxes based on filing status. Like if you are single or married, have kids, spouse is also working, second job. There is a short form called W4 that the employee fills out to help determine this.

> dependents, marital status,

Is this common outside the US? I thought this co-taxation thing was becoming less and less common. I have only ever been taxed as an individual.

It depends on the country. In Romania salaries are taxed at the source (employer), the tax rate is flat and there are 0 deductions that I know of.

So the employers knows for sure what the employee makes in 99% of cases. That's why salary negotiation is on net salary.

My wages / wage offers are always listed as wage before tax. On top of that, the employer will pay an X amount for pension contributions and health insurance, but that doesn't show up on my wage slip because it's not coming out of my income.

What country?

In the US, my wage slip shows the portion of my salary that was withheld to pay federal/state income taxes on my behalf, plus my personal pre-tax retirement account contribution, plus health insurance fees. It does NOT show the taxes paid by my employer in my name (workman's comp, employer share of FICA, employer share of health insurance, etc).

I've had paystubs that enumerate what the employer is paying for different benefits, like health insurance or short term disability (US midwest). There is no standard in the US.

When I worked at a university, they made a big deal about how they contributed 10% of your income into a retirement plan. Unfortunately it had a cliff vesting cycle that I never got close to meeting. (another scam that employers use to pay you less)

For many of the sibling comments discussing before/after tax: part of the confusion arises here because many European countries essentially have two steps of taxation. I work for an American organization as a Dutch person and have had to figure some of this out for my own contract situation.

For the Netherlands, your contract will state a wage "before taxes". But the employer will play "employer's taxes" over this wage, making you effectively ~20% more expensive. What gets transferred to your bank account is wage "after taxes", but this is after income taxes.

For example, say that your salary in the Netherlands is E50,000. Your employer pays E60,000 for that, but E10,000 goes straight to the government (doesn't show on your payslip, used to fund primarily social security systems). After that, you pay income taxes, let's say 30%, so you get E35,000.

Of course, effectively you're paying close to 50% taxes and your employer considers you as costing E60,000, but the two-step process hides part of it and makes it somehow more palatable for the employee/tax-payer. This is a really large part of why European wages are lower than American ones.

It's the same in the US, with different percentages. From: https://bench.co/blog/accounting/calculate-payroll-tax/

- FICA tax is 7.65% (6.2% social security, 1.45% medicare)

- FUTA tax is 0.6 to 6.0% (varies, iiuc)

- And then employers (generally) also pay an amount towards health care. But that's not a tax, per se; more of a mandatory "benefit"

Most of all of that comes out of the salary on your payslip in the US.

There is a 7% employer contribution that does not show up on your payslip (as well as the 7% that does). Also the employer contribution to your health insurance does not show up but your part of it does.

None of that comes out of the salary on your payslip. Rather, you also have your own contribution to those things, separate from the one your employer pays.

To give some numbers to play with, here's an official simulator for France: https://mon-entreprise.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-net

Sorry it's in French, but very simple. Choose by month or year, and you have in order: total cost (what the company pays), before tax salary (what's on the contract), "net" salary (ignore that), after tax salary (what they employee actually gets).

You can see that the employee gets about half of the total employer cost.

The US has this as well, albeit to a lesser degree. The employer-side FICA is around 7%, and is paid directly by the employer, rather than deducted from your paycheck.

This works very similar in different parts of the world. You will hear lot of times CTC (Cost to company) being used when discussing salaries.

This is a very good explanation of a major source of confusion.

Indeed "employer's taxes" really does NOT belong to the employer, it is very much a part of the employee's salary. Some left-wing parties in France are starting to call this out and call it "the socialized portion of the employee's salary", which is a good way to put it. A major issue is that this often does not even appear on pay slip, it is an invisible tax that employees do not see (the best kind of tax is you are the one levying it...). This robs people blind, they don't even realize what the things those taxes finance (social security, healthcare, retirement) really cost... if they knew, they would overthrow the government over this..

EU salaries are also given before taxes.

Have you worked in the EU?

Before the employee's taxes, but after the employer's taxes. That adds a good 15-30% depending on the country.

"given before taxes" as in "given before income tax", but by that time a whole lot of other taxes have been substracted...

For software engineers, keep in mind healthcare is typically taken care of via private (high quality) insurance and that pre-tax retirement contributions (401k) are matched as well.

So these aren't really issues.

> while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

It's not in the UK. I'm not sure which countries you are thinking of.

Please take note that Spotify pays sub-market salaries for these cities. The reason being that they do not offer RSUs but instead public stock options without any discount.

- Typical FAANG compensation: X base pay + Y RSUs + Z signing bonus

- Spotify: X base pay + Y stock options (public, so equivalent to you purchasing stocks really) + no signing bonus

What's the difference, for the laymen

You only earn money if the stock price appreciate

I'm envious of your laymen speak.

Exactly right.

RSU means they gave you the stock at price X. Options mean, they gave you the right to buy the stock at price X sometime in the future.

so its like call options where employer eats the option fee?

Yes, except I think they usually just issue new stock when you exercise and dilute the existing owners instead of actually paying someone else for an option.

Say Spotify's share price is $100, and as part of your compensation you are given an option to buy 100 shares at $100 in 5 years time

If Spotify in 5 years time is $500, you buy 100 shares for $10k, and immediately sell them for $50k, making a $40k profit (or you keep them).

If Spotify in 5 years time is $102, you buy 100 shares for $10k and sell for $10,200, making $200

If Spotify shares in 5 years times is $90, you don't bother buying the shares, but your options are worthless.

Now imagine you were given 100 shares instead, but couldn't sell them for 5 years (an RSU - or restricted stock unit)

In 5 years time, if Spotify is $500/share, your shares are worth $50k

In 5 years time, if Spotify is $102/share, your shares are worth $10,200

In 5 years time, if Spotify is $90/share, your shares are worth $9,000

Yeah this model sucks, unless they give you A LOT more of these options than they would give you RSUs. Then it could work out, if you believe in the company.

The pay isn't particularly attractive compared to other tech companies in those cities, but it's still massively better than 99% of other places in the world.

This is ridiculous. I find well paid devs super arrogant. Some of them made 150k, 200k, 250k - while other people, also qualified, make salaries that are not enough to start a family and have a decent life.

Fully agree, this is why I didn't put numbers and only mentioned pay structure and market rate.

What are you trying to say? Anyone can demand a greater salary if their qualifications are in demand. If they are not - they should consider working on learning new skills which are in demand.

What would you recommend now?

Other than learning skills (getting new qualifications because your current qualifications are not in demand) which are in demand and pay what you wish to be paid?

> Some of them made 150k, 200k, 250k - while other people, also qualified, make salaries that are not enough to start a family and have a decent life.

I don't understand why they are arrogant. Is it because despite making that level (which is objectively nowhere near the ceiling for global SDE salaries), they still want more? I can understand the cognitive dissonance of viewing that number without context, but I think it might be worth taking a look at something like levels.fyi.

Look at engineer salaries at FAANGs at top hubs such as SF, NYC, LDN. The reason they are so high is because the companies need to pay that amount to get access to the talent they need to run their companies. If they could pay less, they'd save billions (maybe trillions), so they would have already tried that. And indeed they did, before they got taken to court for collusion lawsuits.

The truth is, as high as engineer and tech salaries are, they're high for a reason. They get very expensive things done. I don't see anything arrogant about that. On the contrary, what I would find arrogant is expecting them to do that without taking their fair share.

250k is about median, I wouldn't consider it well paid.

Spotify gives you the choice of RSUs or options or straight cash. https://hrblog.spotify.com/2019/06/13/show-me-the-incentive/

Cool, they must have changed their comp structure then as the previous model was an immediate "no-no".

Stock options aren't equivalent to just buying stock.

They are equivalent to letting you travel back in time to the date when the strike price was set to buy stock based on your future knowledge (and using your future money).

That's obviously not worthless. It's much harder to determine the value of than RSUs, but it's potentially very valuable.

This is making finding people for our (large but non tech) company (not in a high tech area) very difficult; we never paid those kind of salaries (cost of living here is much lower) but now you no longer need to be local to work for us, so we have to compete with these high paying companies which our company cannot afford to. It takes the location requirements out of the picture entirely. This is going to kill SF and to a lesser extant, NY, to no longer have these high tax paying employees, but also ruin the work environment elsewhere with now super affluent employees living in low cost but desirable locations.

It sounds like you don't think people doing the same job you do don't deserve the same pay.

It comes across as classism to be honest, looking down your nose at people because they don't live in the most expensive areas of the country.

You do understand this wrong! The message is that any startup/company not in the valley will have a hard time finding employees. Until now every company paid a salary fitted for the locale the company is in: You are in an area with a low cost of living you are paid a lower salary than elsewhere.

But from now on you can get the inflated valley salaries from everywhere. They are so high because cost of living is very high and competition with other companies too.

But from now on your potential new employees can choose to work for your local company or some fang company for a much higher salary. And many companies will not be able to pay these high salaries.

There is a world outside of investor money burning valley startups and the most profitable software companies on the world. And they may have a big problem now.

Some business models would need to adjust if pay outside of tech centers started going up, yes. Possibly some will have to be abandoned entirely.

My instinct is that if a tech problem doesn't have a fairly high upside, though (5-10x), it already has a tenuous business model given how famously risky technology projects are. It's very hard to impossible to consistently complete them as estimated and budgeted. Not to mention actually getting folks to adopt the finished product.

> But from now on you can get the inflated valley salaries from everywhere.

You can't. Spotify are an exception and I doubt that they'll keep this up long term or that many companies will follow.

And I think that that people overestimate these effects in general - the most likely outcome is that the salary distribution gets smoothed over to some extent i.e. big-city salaries go down a bit (or don't rise as high and as fast), remote and lower-cost areas see some increase in salaries but to a limited extent. But at the end of the day SV and big cities will still offer the best compensation, just with a smaller delta between them and the rest of the market.

To the degree that true remote becomes more prevalent (a lot of people will be more in the 1-2 days/week commute camp), you probably see a new equilibrium over time as you say. Even if companies are hesitant to actually cut salaries, given how contentious that is, new hire offers in high CoL areas start coming in a bit lower and raises get skinnier while offers to people living in Little Rock are very generous for the area. You still have disparities but there's more of a nationwide equilibrium.

> But from now on you can get the inflated valley salaries from everywhere. They are so high because cost of living is very high and competition with other companies too

You have it backwards. Silicon Valley salaries are not “inflated” nor are they unreasonably high. In fact even at large FAANG companies, engineers are underpaid relative to actual revenue contribution, it’s just that competition drives those companies to pay closer to a fair value wage.

Across the US, engineers are massively underpaid due to specious rent-seeking policies by employers who tether pay to cost of living (treating it like an allowance for employees instead of an earned wage).

This change where remote employees can earn the same high salary based on their value instead of being a paternalistic allowance based on their employer’s opinion of where they live and what they should be allowed to afford, it is a good thing, because all these rent-seeking companies acting like vampires on low-wage suppression due to location are going to have to radically change, get rid of their paternalistic attitudes, and start being fair with employees.

> Silicon Valley salaries are not “inflated” nor are they unreasonably high.

More people need to understand this. Even here on HN most people appear innumerate. A round number like a $100,000 salary might have seemed like a large amount of money in the year 2000. There has been 55% inflation in the meantime.

What will happen to all the employees at companies who are not able to leverage them to create as much value as FAANG companies can? ie. every other company that isn't a global tech behemoth?

I deny your premise. All those companies can and already do leverage software engineering talent for the same multipliers or orders of magnitude impact on revenue that tech companies get out of it.

They are just using rent seeking opportunities to disingenuously pay uncompetitive salaries and reap surplus for executive pay.

Either those companies will get better management and leaders who successfully rebuild the business model to account for this, or else executive and manager pay will go way down to reflect the reality that competition for high leverage software talent takes away the cushy executive surplus, or else the market in general will deem the company to be unwanted and not useful and it will decay out of business or get acquired.

The company has no right or expectation for things to stay in the current unfair state. The “cost of living wage” free lunch is ending, so adapt or fold.

On what basis can you claim that other companies can leverage engineers to make as much profit as Google/Facebook/Apple? Those are some of the most profitable companies in the world.

It's true that companies might have to adapt or fold, but many business models will not be able to adapt to produce the kind of leverage a global advertising duopoly can.

No, I never said other companies make as much profit. I said other companies experience the same multiples or order of magnitude impact effect from software engineers that tech companies experience.

Ultimately your business’s total revenue is a function of external demand for what you sell. Within that limit, some employees have a big impact on realizing that revenue, some have a small impact. What they are really worth to you is their share of contribution of revenue by that impact.

What I have said is that virtually all companies employing software engineers experience this impact from software engineering in similar ways (meaning the engineers’ value is much closer to their direct impact on revenue than some lower “market rate” wage floor).

It’s frustrating that you are misinterpreting this as me saying other companies earn the same profits, in absolute dollar terms, as tech companies. Because I never said that at all - and more importantly, that does not need to be true for my earlier statements to be correct.

A company doesn’t have to make the same profit as FAANG to justify that the fair value of one of their software engineers according to their revenue contributions within the company’s (much lower than FAANG) profits is already at a FAANG salary level (which they already have the ability to pay).

Remote work just takes away the greedy rent seeking mechanism (local “cost of living wage” excuses) that had been used to artificially suppress what should have been a FAANG-level wage (paid out of the current revenue) all along, based on the way the company leverages software engineers for their contribution to existing, current profits - not any hypothetical ability to generate future FAANG level revenue per employee.

>(which they already have the ability to pay).

I guess I just find it questionable that all or most companies can increase engineer salaries to FAANG levels and remain profitable. I am pretty sure this is not the case for my last employer, for example, looking at their recent earnings report. Remote hiring might push up wages in most places but there could still end up being a bi-modal distribution of wages, between high-leverage companies and low-leverage ones, as long as there aren't enough jobs for every engineer at highly profitable companies. It's already like that in some cities.

That doesn’t seem related to this discussion though. Whether a given business can afford to pay it or not is a reflection of customer demand for that product or service combined with good or bad executive leadership.

If the competitive wage rises but a company can’t afford it, that’s not the worker’s problem to accept a bad wage to help the company. That’s the company’s problem to hire better leadership or cut executive pay in favor of employee pay or get acquired / raise funding or go out of business. None of that changes the reality of competitive wages.

At the root it sounds like your question is more about aggregate market allocation of labor. But why should workers accept inefficient allocation at worse wages? That just seems like an aggregate market expression of “these businesses are unwanted by society” - the same happens to 90% of startups all the time.

>If the competitive wage rises

That's begging the question. The competitive wage will not rise to FAANG levels just because some FAANG jobs are available in every city. It's the worker's problem if they can't get the that FAANG job anyway, because the number of FAANG jobs hasn't changes and instead they've just been diluted over 100x as many cities and a much larger talent pool.

Affordability is relevant because it's one aspect affecting how much the competitive wage will rise.

I don’t agree. There are way, way more jobs than qualified candidates for San Francisco & New York level of salaried jobs across a bunch of major cities, and as the candidate pool increases, these companies are likely to just increase demand for more headcount.

My forecast is that prior to the pandemic there were X “FAANG-paying jobs” across ~5 big cities in the US. After wider remote work normalizes in the next two years, there will be 10X that number of jobs and the average wage will likely only go up.

There will be room for all the headcount there currently is across the ~5 largest tech hubs, plus nine times that amount in additional, new headcount. People from all kinds of regions of the US and the world will have much greater chances at these jobs. And it will create spillover effects where lesser tier employers have to raise wages to compete for the remaining candidate pool and so on.

Well I hope you're right. We have FAANG in London already and many tech jobs, and salaries haven't risen to FAANG levels. There still seems to be a bimodal distribution between big tech, high finance and some contractors, and everyone else. Of course it's a different country altogether and there are likely many different reasons for that.

The idea of a company paying based on the cost of the locale is just another way of saying “what’s the lowest we can pay people for these skills compared to what else they can get locally?” and divorced from how much value they bring to the company. Sadly, for these companies, local just got a whole lot broader and they will need to pay more to get the talent they need to stay competitive.

In your life, I’m sure you try to pay as low as you can for things. Have you ever said ‘no, I will pay more for this car because its value to my life is higher than $10k’ ?

Remote work is great, because it’s making a more free-market. It’s almost like we immediately recovered the mobility that the population used to have overnight.

This will also mean that you are competing with 10x more people, so wages may go down because of that fact.

I assume fair amount of these startups service Mexican market and local people. What do you expect them to do, charge locals the US prices? If you don't have that insane SV investor money to burn it makes them struggle.

It is already happening in Mexico (in GDL where I live at least): The city has been a "tech hub" for a good 10 to 15 years with growing presence of technology firms (Oracle, IBM, HP, Tata, HCL, Cognizant, Intel, plus several small startups), paying roughly 1/3rd of the price per talent. In the last year, we have seen an increasing number of employees moving to remote jobs for American companies that decide to pay 1/2 the price per talent. This is a lot of money for locals and still a 50% saving for US companies.

The bad thing is that, the start-up culture that was being formed here is starting to disappear. I know several CTO or CEOs friends who lost developers because they cannot compete with those salaries (paying in USD) when they are charging in MXN.

> This is making finding people for our (large but non tech) company (not in a high tech area) very difficult; we never paid those kind of salaries (cost of living here is much lower) but now you no longer need to be local to work for us, so we have to compete with these high paying companies which our company cannot afford to

It's simple: Pay more.

Maybe it's time for a new funding round.

> This is going to kill SF and to a lesser extant, NY, to no longer have these high tax paying employees.

Sounds like a simple market correction, since those two cities have been extreme outliers for quite some time.

pay for value not area code

Do they pay those salaries in Europe?

Because European salaries are usually 1/3 of the US rate.

They weren't doing that in 2019, at least -- and yes, 1/3 sounds (broadly) accurate.

Very interested in that as well

From what I've gathered when interviewing and the public data you can find on levels.fyi, Spotify doesn't pay their Stockholm employees very well, even by European standards.

"Most of our offices are in large cities like New York, London and Stockholm"

I looked out my window and laugthed abit reading that. They can't compare Stockholm with London amd NY like that ...

Spotify in Stockholm does not pay NY wages today atleast.

Are their glassdoor salaries accurate? 58000 kr/mo for senior developers? You could find similar jobs in Warsaw with half the cost of living.

I don't have first or 2nd hand info but most likely they are.

58 000 SEK/month total compensation (7000USD/month) is approx. the 75th percentile of unionized software engineers (all ages) in Stockholm according to the engineering union.

Are jobs where developers make $7k per month that common in Poland, though?

Not as common as I presume they are in Sweden - nowadays most job contracts for individual contributors without significant seniority or additional duties fall short of that (~6k gross or around 8k cost for employer), although with covid they are seen more frequently. I was mostly surprised to see Spotify in particular not paying more.

Spotify is kinda hype and it is cool saying you work at Spotify in a bar, so they have no problems finding workers (but they sure complain about "engineering shortage").

Music streaming is probably not even a especially hard technical challenge. Quite low bandwidth, open source audio codec and no real time syncing requirements between users. I guess most SWE work is in DB management, cataloguing music or fixing phone vendor bugs in the Android app.

Why would Spotify pay eg. twice what Ericsson, Volvo or Scania pays to reach parity with Apple, Tesla or whatever big truck manufacturer there are in the US.

1/3 is too little

No, a person making 120k$ in NY is not making 40kEUR in a western European city. Maybe half of that, sure. But not 40k (even if you account the EUR-USD diff)

130k$ is probably 60k€ or more in Europe. It's like that in Italy and IT wages are abysmal here.

Are you sure? 130k is fresh out of grad money in SF/Seattle (not sure about on the east coast, but presumably is similar). For reference senior is ~300-350k (this is for big tech companies)

My experience in Germany may not be typical. But with the EU's higher taxes, 80% indeed goes down to 50%. However if you have kids, the numbers climb up again because, at least in Germany, you get "Kindergeld" and "Elterngeld" and state-sponsored day-care (Kita) for your kid(s). Plus, 30-days a year vacation standard, you get walkable cities, very good public transportation (so, no car costs) AND you get to take inexpensive weekend trips to Greece, London, Prague, or wherever you want to go. It's up to you to compute that value.

You really can't just make blanket statements about EU taxation effect on take home salary. There are massive differences in rates, and you also need to consider specific income levels as the profile of taxation by income band and dependents varies greatly.

Germany and (especially) Belgium tends to top the OECD lists over taxation, so for Germany you may well be right, while e.g. Denmark, Ireland and Poland (may be true for others too, but those are the ones I happened to be aware of) has tax rates that in several of the categories the OECD tracks are below US tax levels.

(Source: OECD Taxing Wages 2020)

As someone from Europe, I work in a company with US presence and my counterparts do get 3x salary, according to levels.fyi at least.

> That's an exaggeration. At worst its 50%, but usually its ~80%.

That's too high. In London getting 80% of equivalent pre-tax salaries in a big US city is virtually impossible. And then 1/3 of it goes to taxes and national insurance deductions.

There are many countries in Europe, and many cities, and salaries differ wildy.

You'll get a higher salary in northern Europe (Germany, UK, Netherlands, etc.) than in southern Europe (Spain, Italy, France).

Also you'll get a higher salary in a tech hub like London or Berlin and a lower one in the country side.

There are variations in US too, although probably not as big as between European countries.

I think European salaries are more like 1/2 of the US rate. Mexico/LatAm salaries are 1/3.

Most European salaries may be 1/2 the SF rates. But that is not a fair comparison. A Google engineer in Zurich, Switzerland makes almost as much as one in SF, at an also very high cost of living.

Recruiting is proving insanely difficult right now. We are based just outside of London and have been offering "local remote" (1 day in week office generally) for about 4 years now. Candidates were always hard to attract (salary and office location) but offering remote work 4 days a week really helped. Now, that perk is now a norm so access to even remotely (no pun intended) skilled candidates is next to impossible.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I’d drop the one day a week in office requirement and make sure you’re paying market rates (e.g. £100k+ for mid level devs). Lots of good people looking to go fully remote right now.

Possibly. Although the surveys I've seen show something like 75% of employees want to come into an office at least one day per week. Of course 25% is still a lot of people and opens up options considerably for someone that doesn't want to live near a city or at least near your city. Monthly team off-sites are also an issue if you don't mind paying for some travel/hotel.

This is a definitely a polarising issue. Some devs prefer to come in to be social, some prefer the office environment and others prefer it at home for the flexibility or are just more productive at home (me included).

I expect those who can will seek out workplaces that conform to their preferences. Those who want a bustling office won't have that if none of their teammates comes in on a regular basis. And someone who lives a 2 hour drive from the office, much less someone who wants to move out to the mountains, will deeply resent teammates who constantly bug them to come into the office more often.

> (e.g. £100k+ for mid level devs)

You wish. In London's fintech maybe.

I’m talking about global dev salaries. Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs and the matching salaries.

It’s not that SV salaries are unusually high, it’s that most places artificially depress dev salaries. I think we’ll see the elimination of layers of over paid management with all that money being captured by developers.

In my opinion the artificial bubble is more the SV-type salaries.

Compare developers salaries with similarly educated/skilled engineers in other disciplines (mechanical, electrical, aerospace, civil…), you'll see that SV developers are the outlier.

The reality is that on the global market you can get a good mid-level dev from a first-world country for half that price. And it's not artificial, it's just the market at play.

I think you're underestimating the amount of investment flowing in to tech companies right now. There's massive VC overhang with billions of dollars more to invest than there are opportunities. Devs are going to capture a lot of that money. It's the tech industry that's the future, the rest have just yet to catch up.

You are wrong. The revenue impact of more manufacturing heavy and device heavy industries is lower for those engineers - that’s just how the overhead of other engineering and biotech companies work.

Software is fundamentally different and the revenue impact can be multiples or even orders of magnitude higher, in really any industry or company type.

Software engineers, even in Silicon valley, are underpaid relative to revenue or profit contributions.

Paternalistic and entitled employers in other areas have milked the opportunity for rent seeking by suppressing wages due to disingenuous cost of living policies for a long time. Finally workers have options that let them say, “no, I just won’t take your poor pay job. I don’t care that you think someone in Kansas City or Wyoming should earn X% less for doing the exact same job, and I won’t accept that anti-worker paternalism. Improve your offer or get lost.”

Employees aren't paid based off the value they provide, they're paid the least the company thinks they can pay to get an acceptable worker to fill he position.

That goes without saying and is already accounted for implicitly in anything I already wrote. You’re pointing this out like it’s a surprise or somehow contradicts what I wrote, but it doesn’t at all.

The “least they can pay” floor is just being moved up closer to the fair level indicated by the actual contribution to revenue.

Remote work just strips exploitative regional employers from their many decades of greedy free lunch setting the “least they can pay” floor much lower.

I mean it also opens up the entire Indian subcontinent and anyone who doesn't want to move to the headquarters. Workers compete with each other for jobs, they can't really just demand their marginal value of labor unless they're truly unique. Remote work seems likely to lower the floor even more, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

The entire world has already been a recruiting source for FAANG for more than a decade, both remote & via paid relocation & visa sponsorship.

People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation.

Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it.

You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction.

Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete.

A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates.

I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common.

But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.

> Those London based devs can now easily get SV remote jobs

Is this really the case?

I have seen an increase in remote jobs. Most of these remote jobs I've seen have a requirement you are in a similar timezone to the company's offices.

Being in a similar timezone to your team is reasonable. Even though you are remote, sending a message then waiting until you start work the next day for the response, or not being able to schedule calls at convenient hours due to timezone massively impacts delivery. You can live with it, but it's not ideal.

Being stuck on the other side of the world in Australia, this is currently my problem, timezones.

There's an increasing number of remote jobs available which I'd love to do because the work no longer exists in Australia but booming in the Europe/US. However, the timezone means that companies are not interested, they want Europe/US based staff to match with there current team locations.

On the plus side, as it looks like I will leave Australia because my career has stopped and going backwards even if getting paid more, I'll have much more freedom where I can move to if this trend continues, or I hope anyway.

£100k for web dev does not happen outside London in UK. Barely half that.

It's definitely the solution to the problem you're having:

> Recruiting is proving insanely difficult right now.

If you pay a competitive rate, people will work for you. You have to realize that now you're competing with 10X more remote first companies who will hire people who live locally to you.

Mid level devs are more like £70-80k. Although actual quality varies.

That’s the only right way.

Talent is still scarce, even remote. There is not nearly enough good developers out there to fill all the demand. Employers who try to tell you differently in order to cut pay for going remote cheat you out of the salary which a good dev deserves.

I’ve explained it in great detail here:

https://dusted.codes/equal-pay-for-equal-work

FWIW we [0] employ a lot of people in the EU working remotely and a large part of them earns SF/NY salaries.

Probably a strong selection bias to the types of companies that choose to work with us.

[0]: I'm the CEO of remote.com

I couldn't help but remember the classic IRC exchange: http://bash.org/?258908

Too bad that employee's poker face was lacking

Sure because remote.com is so outrageously expensive that only people earning 100k and more can afford it.

We tend to be the most affordable employer of record with quite some margin.

Paying contractors is free through us.

One of my colleagues works remote from another country and you were going to charge him $600/month. That's more than $7k per year, a good 10% of the gross salary of a senior developer in Germany. For that much money our company can contract a tax accountant just for him many times over.

Can you email me with the needs? I'm sure we can work something out. I don't think the tax accountant is able to be a local liable employer, like we are.

I still think that remote in general won't be that prevalent after covid. Remote with SF/NY salaries? I seriously doubt that they will keep this up long term or that many companies will do the same.

Access to world class talent, not paying for office space and greatly improved corporate culture all seem like things that are going to stick. Every new startup I’ve seen in the past year has been 100% remote since day one.

You're right about the reduced cost but I can't agree that remote leads to improved corporate culture (that's largely personal preference though).

> Every new startup I’ve seen in the past year has been 100% remote since day one.

Any reasonable company that had the option to work remotely has done so over the past year, it's hardly a trend that you can project into the future.

I’m saying that new companies that were remote from day one will never be non-remote. They’re not going to go buy a bunch of office space and force their disparate workforce to relocate. All hiring has been remote the past year, that’s not really reversible.

Instead, they'll do like Basecamp and get people together a couple times a year.

If you hired people on the basis of being remote and they're all over the place, if at the end of 2021 you tell them they all have to relocate to San Francisco, expect to hear a whole lot of big "Nope"s.

It shouldn't be some switcharoo that the company pulls off anyway. Every company that I've talked in the past year has clarified whether they are remote indefinitely or remote only while the pandemic lasts.

I find it absurd that wealthy Tech people are making decisions on where to live based on the financial value proposition.

People in Tech are rich enough to comfortably live anywhere. Surely, the lifestyle and character of a town/city/country plays a much larger role in where you choose to stay. Life in cheaper cities in the interior is very different from that in massive cities like SF/NY/London/etc. No amount of money can fix life in the wrong location.

On HN, the Remote vs Local argument often ignores critical advantages of a local setup. Over 1 year of remote work, I haven't been able to replicate the magic of physical work a single time. This is while having an social workplace that has really tried to make people feel included.

This may sound like heresy to some but, if I am going to be spending 50% of my waking time with a dozen people, then I would want to be good friends with them, and remote work certainly doesn't make that easy.

____________

I also don't buy the flexibility argument of remote work. It requires a lot of discipline and deliberate action. All of my acquaintances (all single, wealthy and in tech) have increased their working hours during Covid, due to unclear expectations around remote work. None have used this freedom to travel or fulfill their 'live in a cabin' or 'digital nomad' dreams. (ofc, it is challenging to fulfill these during covid).

Now let be clear. I love the idea of companies letting their employees choose what's best from themselves. But, there is a feeling in the air that remote work will be the norm for effective teams after Covid. I have feeling these people will be in for a rude awakening.

Offices are most effectively leveraged by the 90-99th. Those who are doing productive work that needs focus, but not deliberately effective enough to make in the '1' Percentile. (don't read too strongly into the numbers). The structures lent by the office are most useful to these people. Those who are smart enough to use structures to improve, but not smart enough to not need them at all. The bottom 0-90 percentile are often in jobs that 'require' a physical presence (chefs) or ones that are mundane enough to be done from any location. (excel table filling)

What does it take to work for this kind of company though? I have about ten years experience, been focusing on frontend for the last few years. I have never worked at any of the big names and I have a bachelor degree that’s not in CS or mathematics but I’m a decent developer in my opinion: I write clean, testable code.

And yet the major tech players always reject me before even a screening call. Which makes me think I must be missing something in my CV or experience. But what? What are recruiters screening for at these companies?

I'm was a full stack dev with a similar self-taught background but only 5 years experience and I just started as a Google SRE last year. Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

> Maybe it helped that I attended a lot of meetups and conferences.

How so? Did you meet people there that were part of your recruitment process, or for another reason?

Maybe try different channels, like working with a different recruiter or getting a referral? For the few times I've been approached in the last few years, recruiters differ by miles for how they prepare and present you.

You're missing a referral.

I’m not sure. I was referred by an employee several times at Shopify for instance and it did nothing for me. A referral in a lot of places is just so that the company knows who to give the referral bonus to if you’re hired but it doesn’t give you any kind of edge.

Usually a referral guarantees someone at least looks at the resume.

The nature of the referral matters.

If the referral comes from a respected engineer known to the hiring manager and the candidate is a good fit for the open position, things can move pretty quickly.

If it's just a name thrown into a pot or entered into a form in some internal system, there isn't a whole lot of internal pressure.

A strong referral can get you hired even if you fail the interview.

Try reaching out to recruiters directly on linkedin to enter the system instead of just submitting your resume to be auto-screened. You'll probably have to have a short screen call with them first, during which you can make the case that despite the lack of CS degree you know what you're doing, talk about your passion for that company's work etc, and it should be pretty feasible to get a true coding screen from there.

These recruiters are so used to cold-calling via email/linkedin and getting no reply, I feel they'd be pretty happy to have someone actually interested (and qualified) fall in their lap.

If you're fairly good at coding interviews, last I checked interviewing.io lets you skip the line to onsite at big names like Uber and Lyft.

I just hope the home office trend doesn't lead to an urbanization of the countryside. I'm from a charming village that was overtaken by ugly and expensive developements during the past 20 years because people from the nearest city realised it was within commutable distance.

I die a little inside every time I see someone oneline saying "I can't wait 'till X area has better internet so I can move there", understand "I can't wait 'till X area has better internet so 10k people can have the same idea as me and turn this rural community into a city".

Now in bigger countries (the US, France, Germany, etc.) there will always be cheap rural areas left (though the most desirable areas will probably urbanize and/or become completely unafordable for workers of the primary and secondary sector) but I'm very worried for smaller countries like mine where rural areas are already sought after as of now and it's only going to get worse.

It's tragic, yeah, but the same thing happens to different urban neighborhoods. And the resistance to this kind of transformation just limits residential option and drives up housing costs for everyone.

Please embrace the visitors. You share this planet with them. Your fear of losing your resources is natural, but they weren't yours to begin with.

If you still want your special benefits on Earth, well thats what politics is for.

sounds like visitors aren't the problem it's visitors who come and force an area to change to their liking, being disruptive to existing culture.

That’s just the nature of change at this point. I’d like to think the culture we value today wouldn’t be near what it is without prior generations moving around the planet and blending their beliefs with those of the locals.

Only the best rural locales will see an urbanization. There is likely to always be a hierarchy to human growth since people like to be around other people, in general.

Maybe they should pay their artists more, instead of their employees.

Who are Spotify’s artists? I thought the artists contracted with record labels

The people who make the music. Some don't have record labels, so it would be weird to not just talk about the artists.

I thought Spotify didn’t contract directly with any artists?

They don't

It is pretty straightforward to get your music on Spotify and all the other streaming platforms. No record label needed. There are very inexpensive services that will do all the leg work for you, but it take approximately 230 streaming plays on spotify to earn a dollar.

How many plays should it take to earn a dollar? I don't know anything about the music industry.

A radio play is around 9.5 cents per play. Assuming there are no royalty splits, then that would be 11 plays to earn a dollar.

I think royalties of 1 to 3 cents per stream are completely reasonable. Subcent royalties are just platforms taking advantage of the content creators.

Which is why most artists see all the streaming platforms as merely a way to advertise for live shows and merch. That's the only way to really make money without hitting Taylor Swift levels of streams.

Going from your original numbers (which I didn’t check), a play current pays out just under half a cent (1/230), and you’d like Spotify to pay around 5 times that (avg 2c). Spotify distributes about 70% of revenue to rights holders so you’re asking Spotify to pay out ... 350% of revenue to rights holders?

Spotify could almost certainly be charging more, but it’s already incentivised to maximise revenue, and it has competitors, so it seems like it’s probably found the market value of a play?

From wikipedia: "Spotify pays royalties based on their "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service."

Regardless, Spotify is free to pay whatever they think is fair and artists are free to accept or reject that compensation as they will. But if you're an artist, Spotify (and the other streaming platforms, which mostly pay even less) are not going to be something that you can ever expect to be an income source.

Assuming your number of 1 cent/stream, and considering that 7$ out of the 10$ subscription pays for the music, that gives an average of 23 streams/day for a subscriber.

That's about 80 minutes of music per day, down to 50 minutes or less if you're sharing the subscription.

And somehow terrestrial radio stations, which have no subscription base manage to make it work.

As I said in the comment above, artists are free to NOT put their music on Spotify if they don't think it's a good deal, but regardless streaming services are only commercials for artists. Spotify is far from the worst offender. :-)

But on radio, 1 play is listened to by many people. That's equivalent to many streams.

Fair enough

For Spotify to pay 1/3 of radio stations, wouldn't that imply that only 3 people are listening to the radio station? I don't know what typical numbers are but that sounds... low.

How many people on average hear a single radio play? Without that number this isn’t a reasonable comparison point.

A radio play is also tens of thousands of listeners. Compared to that, Spotify pays many orders of magnitude more than radio.

Fair enough.

Many people here are against copyright and thus by fault, royalties (of other peoples work, not their own), but as a hypothetical, I wonder the same.

It appears the major labels sold their catalogues for a pittance and streaming platforms are 'making hay'. We could have been streaming The Beatles on an app called EMIMusic had they not been so slow on the uptake of the internet.

As soon as all music is finally only made by people who have no monetary concerns, the end of revolutions will also be nigh.

This will just end very quickly. Soon every company will do what Gitlab did: pay average salary based on your geographical location and call it fair. Markets will always try to find a way for cheap labors, and this is no exception.

I actually know a very talented guy that turned down a gitlab offer for this reason- their loss.

I wonder if this will make non-techies' life even harder. Right now, thanks to the relatively higher pay, techies are concentated in cities/urban areas. With rermote work possible on a permanent basis, all these relatively well-off techies moving to rural areas; and with their spending power, wouldn't they drive up prices?

Maybe the firefighters, nurses and restaurant staff who work in cities will be able to afford a shorter commute if city housing prices fall?

Rent will fall, I doubt home prices will fall that much though.

It will in desirable places that techies frequent. Think this is a rising problem in the Tahoe region right now.

Probably good for the businesses in the area which can raise prices though. Someone's profiting.

Really depends on the location. I spent a bunch of time with family in suburban/rural Ohio as a kid, and the area where I used to live has rapidly been emptying out over the last 10-20 years. IMO, techies moving to rural areas is good as those areas have been experiencing depopulation for quite some time.

I can't see a reference if this is for current employees only or will be applied to future hires as well.

Does anyone have more details?

Let's see how long this lasts. This used to be the pathos for many US manufacturers 30 years ago, but it did not last.

They were already paying what they were paying. You can either get same talent at lower salaries or higher salaries and better talent.

I wonder what the mood was like when homo sapiens was transitioning - unbeknownst to many - from a hunter gathering nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary agricultural one.

I know the scales are different but sapiens is in another transition, again unbeknownst to many.

that's nice - it would be even better if they paid artists remotely equitably.

This could create a "golden chains" situation for employees, whereby they don't leave their job only because of the money, despite not being happy or as productive as they could be.

Doesn't that already exist working remote or not?

The effect is much more muted living somewhere like SF or NYC, because there's a bunch of companies around those areas that pay similarly that you could switch to.

If other high-paying companies started also paying major tech hub wages to anywhere in the US for remote work, then this problem would be similarly alleviated.

Since I've been feeling like this for most of my working life, I don't see why this would be a new thing.

It could also be a fast track to the financial freedom. Work for 10 years receiving an SF salary living in a low COL area, save agressively and invest in low-cost broad-market ETFs. One should be pretty well financially doing this.

w.r.t investing: If you're on a good income you are actually incentivized to do so in some countries. In the UK every pound you earn between $140K and $170K USD is effectively taxed at 65%. Investing via contributions in to a pension is tax free. 100% gross salary. Even if the market goes nowhere for 30 years that's 3.5% annualized return.

You pay tax when you take your pension of course, but by that point its on your terms.

That's an amazing problem to have for most people.

Even in that situation, you could save enough of your cash to eventually leave and strike out on your own / take a lower paying job with better satisfaction.

It's a classic #firstworldproblem that many wish they had. I certainly wouldn't blame the employer for that.

It could be a problem for the employer as well, if it results in having a bunch of employees doing minimum effort.

My experience has told me that as an employee with no direct stake in the company, you should do little more than the minimum it takes to do what you're hired to do, and put all extra energy into literally anything else, like reducing your responsibility per dollar earned and total allotment of work hours. Anything else is a bad deal for you, but a great deal for real stakeholders.

I say this, because most of the time your employer wouldn't give two shits about you, beyond what they're required to, and your widgets being produced is the only thing they really care about. There are exceptions of course, like companies that obviously will give you that raise as you work to improve your skills etc.. which you should be doing. But usually it's just a Jason Bateman movie waiting to happen.

Way I see it, is that 'just doing the minimum' is utterly soul-destroying. And if you're doing that, then just you need to focus on everything else to stay sane. Work is never going to feel better.

However, if you can find at least a bit of interest in something that you do, then it's rewarding to focus on it. You take pride in that 5%, you polish it, read up on it, stay a bit late to add that shiny new feature, you tell others about it etc. If others agree with you, it grows and then becomes 10, 20% etc of your time.

Basically you're still stuck at work, when you'd rather be asleep under a duvet - but you've made that time more tolerable.

This is just pride in your work and a personal choice right? Which is great, but then sometimes you do this and it's so unreciprocated that you just burnout because you thought what you did mattered, and then your company fires you for whatever trite reason. That fucks with your head and it's probably not worth that much unless you know it can be.

Not disagreeing with anything you say.. But you can make things that satisfies you, and doesn't require external validation/utility.

Have an example: About 8 years ago I was told two oracle dbs were behaving differently, despite "containing the same data and code"

I'm a biochemist, I can't code for shit, but fuelled by the logic that "there must be a difference" and google, I knocked out a block of PL/SQL that would generate hashes on schema, data, and packages.

At the time I just ran it against the two schemas, it showed me two tables were different and boom problem solved.

Over the subsequent years I've bumped into people with a problem that maybe my script could help debug - but the pride I felt each time was incredible. It's maybe fixed three issues, but something I did right so many years ago still being useful today, feels great.

I get what you are saying, but the fact that your company doesn't give a shit, shouldn't mean that you automatically don't give a shit about a company. Giving a shit is a great trait IMO. If your country doesn't give a shit about you, should you not give a shit about your country? Or your relatives? Or parents? Or children. I am perfectly fine not giving a shit about many things, but I do care about other things passionately, even if they don't reciprocate. Work is one of those things that I really would rather care about than not. When I don't - it usually makes me unhappy.

Yes, unless giving shit makes you happy you shouldn't give any.

I agree, but also wasn't advocating for not giving any shit, more so not going "above and beyond" in what is ultimately a relationship that's transactional in nature, or maybe just beyond. Everyone loves someone who takes pride in their work and does a great job, but investing yourself in the company in a way they they won't reciprocate doesn't seem wise. Investing in that way in your actually family, your own business, or your community seems different.

Another way I'd phrase this is not to not give a shit, but to not give more than a shit.

Or you could work hard and advance your career.

Maybe, but only if you have control over that, and it's only a great deal if you can control it. Usually you control that if you're either a stakeholder, or you make smart choices in terms of what you work on and who you do it for, rather than to what degree you suffer. If you have no agency, and no way of getting that agency, then it's not worth displacing yourself past a certain point. If advancing your career because you suffered x amount only means you suffer more for the chance at a bit more money, bad deal.

I don't know why people assume that you have to "suffer" to advance your career. In my experience, hard work pays off.

Isn't this an age-old story? Choosing whether or not to take a pay cut to get work you prefer?

My initial reaction to "oh woe, my employer pays me so much that I don't want to leave!" is "… and this is a problem?"

If you find the work tedious or unethical and have arranged your finances such that you’re trapped into the bi-weekly drip of cash, I’d find that to be a problem.

I can't help thinking that in that case this really is your fault. Remember, we're talking about SF tech salaries being given to employees who aren't in SF here; many people get by comfortably on far less.

(Obviously there are orders of magnitude more people who get paid much less than the sums we're talking about, and don't have enough to get by comfortably. But the question is specifically about people who have been golden-chained to a job in the top 5%-ish of income.)

There is a type of chain that is "I'm seeking to FIRE in 10 years and if I quit this job, I can't do that."

It doesn't have to be yachts, jets, or nose candy causing the pressure.

[0] - FIRE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement

I still don't see how your position is any worse when Spotify is paying you more.

In one case, Spotify is paying me a locally-relevant market wage and I quit Spotify when I find working there mentally exhausting, easily matching my income from my choice of other local employers. Because that market wage is lower than SF, I experience lesser lifestyle inflation and still FIRE in 10 years or I choose to have a more luxe retirement and retire in 16 years.

In the other case, Spotify is dumping cash on me by the bucketload, we drive new cars, live in an amazing house, I regularly take amazing vacations with my family, kids go to private schools, and I still plan to FIRE in 10 years and be able to maintain that lifestyle. 3 years in, I realize that I'm miserable and the thought of grinding out 7 more years of this is difficult to bear, but I can't bear asking my family to curtail their standard of living to accommodate my unwillingness to keep bearing the burden of the daily grind.

Am I as a person happier in scenario 1 or scenario 2? There's no question that you're richer in scenario 2, but life isn't all about money.

I think 99% of the population would quit today if they didn't need the money.

Certainly. But the alternative action that anybody can unilaterally take is…?

My comment was in response to someone noting that Spotify could be constructing golden chains by paying people far above the market rates for where they live. The people involved are given the means to retire strictly faster in the world where Spotify does that, vs the world in which they don't.

For you definitely no. But for employer they would rather have new excited person working for a bowl of rice than old and tired "just doing my work".

You've just described how employment feels for most people. Y'think people who work two jobs do it so they can maximize their hapiness and productivity?

Or to rephrase, the employer gets long term commitment and loyalty from their employees because they get the best reward. The alternative is job hoppers, and I don't think you can create a business out of people who skip town whenever they get a better offer.

Mind you, the insane wage difference in SF is partly caused by job hoppers and scalping between the big and highly funded companies.

You speak here as if it's somehow not fair for the companies that employers get paid more? As if the competition only works in one direction, to reduce the salaries, because employees are interchangeable.

Instead, let's enjoy the interchangeability of employers for a while and use the competition of companies for the best talent in our advantage. At least while it lasts.

> Mind you, the insane wage difference in SF is partly caused by companies that value their employees and are willing to pay proper salary

Fixed for you.

That's cool. They should pay artists fairly, too.

Will they start paying SF salaries when you started working in London?

Probably just means they will pay it to those that leave and not retain the amount afterwards because its unsustainable.

This is the right move. All FAANG companies will have to fall in line quick.

All the nonsense about location based COL salary adjustments are based on pure HR fantasy.

High performance engineers are valuable and rare.

All this talk about more talent being available remote to companies and companies can demand salaries lower miss out on the other aspect.

More companies are now available to high performance engineers. High performers can now negotiate higher salary with multiple companies for remote positions.

It will be upward feedback loop, pushing higher salary offers for higher performers.

It will be both. The higher performers will have higher employer pool availability driving demand up, the entry-level performers will have higher competition barriers to entry from peers.

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