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.
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?"
(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.)
It doesn't have to be yachts, jets, or nose candy causing the pressure.
[0] - FIRE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement
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.
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.
You pay tax when you take your pension of course, but by that point its on your terms.
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.
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.
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.
Another way I'd phrase this is not to not give a shit, but to not give more than a shit.
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.
Mind you, the insane wage difference in SF is partly caused by job hoppers and scalping between the big and highly funded companies.
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.
Fixed for you.