I talked to my startup about moving to Miami and they said they would probably "localize" my pay.
What is the standard? I notice other companies are wresting with this question. What is your experience?
This will fix your situation, one way or another.
I’m get the feeling that developers don’t recognize that these things are negotiations, and just accept whatever they’re told without any pushback. But there are two parties here, and both of you need to agree to any changes to your contract.
As an example, you could live extremely comfortably on $100k in rural Appalachia as compared to some people on here complaining that $200k is low. Why wouldn't the company hire a similar developer from that area for basically half the cost? It's similar to companies outsourcing to lower cost countries.
You’re the guy who is guaranteed to do it well and do it fast. And that costs what it costs.
What you probably need to be aware of is of potential bimodal/trimodal salary distributions. There's a ex-uber guy on youtube[0] that talks about such things existing in Netherlands. Assuming you're in a similar class of companies, that might be something you might want to watch out for, and potentially bring up in salary negotiations.
From talking to friends that work at different companies there's also been a movement to simplify geographic location pay to be around 5% to 15% less than HCOL cities for the rest of the US or simply have no localization factors at all.
Compensation at big tech companies is determined by benchmarking compensation across several companies in several geographies to determine what pay scale the company should pay at. The benchmarking usually happens a few times a year. Radford is the gold standard source of data that large companies pay for access to.
This fidelity of this data relies on submissions. So its fairly easy for them to benchmark within a location where a lot of companies submit their data and build effective compensation bands.
The issue with going outside of the Bay Area for comp benchmarking, is that the data fidelity from the usual sources goes down dramatically, so HR and compensation teams usually apply a general heuristic like 50% of Bay Area or 80% of Bay Area just to make the math simple.
Startups can be all over the map on this. The good ones have access to Radford (or a filtered version of it) through their investors and they use it to benchmark. But their data fidelity will also take a hit if a different location is used, and they often benchmark less often than they should, or against the wrong companies based on their size.
A decrease in pay could potentially be a net gain.
I know a few companies where the location decrease was not in proportion to the cost of living. So people in certain low cost countries were making absolute bank. A much better deal than their counterparts in the US despite making less.
Of course you may want to ask your company for a figure before moving to see what they come up with. After all, that's the number that will matter.