Good to have this pointed out again!
If you relocate to Zurich or Vancouver from SF, highly likely most companies that re-adjust salaries will decrease your salary even though cost of living is pretty high in both of those places.
My friends at Google say Zurich is a better deal that it might seem. Between lower taxes and moderately lower cost of living, your google salary goes a lot further in Zurich than it does in Mountain View.
Either that or get VC funding on par with what's happening in the valley.
The cost of living is not crazily different, yet the entry level comp in SF is high senior level for most technical jobs. However, my experience is that the Bay Area has a lot of British immigrants (I encounter a new (to me) at least weekly at the large company I work at), so perhaps people are indeed voting that way.
Maybe it's time to negotiate a better deal.
H1 is completely clogged with not so legal bodyshops, but what about simply getting an O-1?
Currently however, for a Canadian to move from Canada under a TN series visa than any of the visas available to Europeans, other than some limited cases such as diplomatic missions.
No, the primary driver of those differences is cost of living.
Vancouver is not actually a 'high cost of living' place - it's just the real estate.
It's supply and demand as well and since most people work 'local' and Van doesn't have huge and powerful software companies HQ'd there, pay will be less.
But cost of living is a primary factor.
The 'my wife is pregnant' thing isn't a fair comparison because it's an individual artifact, not general for a location.
The fact maybe a spouse is pregnant will 100% affect pay because it will affect the demand curve i.e. change the nature of someone's willingness to work at what salary.
If a company is going to pay for you to have a good/happy living conditions, and disposable income, then adjusting some of the pay by location makes sense.
The best scenario is when they split the difference and it becomes a win win scenario.
At the end of the day a company will pay as much as the market bears for their long term retention strategy (e.g. 94% voluntary retention).
Sure rent is pricy in Manhattan relative to other places in America, but I just don't get how that type of life is depicted as such a struggle online.
1. $1800 isn't that far off for studio rent, multiple listings on apartment.com show that right now
2. Most New Yorkers don't live in Manhattan anyway. I purposely overstated New Yorker's rent costs to prove my point.
I moved to Jersey City last year to have cheaper rent but I did that because I don't care for NYC much and am migrating out in general but it wasn't like I was struggling as an individual engineer before hand.