“If you want NYC salary, work in NYC” – Morgan Stanley CEO

do they give a discount on their pricing page based on your location or do they charge the value of the product ?

cost of living seems to only apply to employees and not customers

This succinctly illustrates the problem. The worker is in a position to eliminate costs for themselves and their organization, and the organization has the gall to suggest that they are owed something in EXCESS of the cost saving they just received from the employee.

They should be giving everyone raises to leave, putting the office savings toward payroll. Instead they are trying to claw back.

Push back against this - it is a desperate attempt by the organization to retain outsized bargaining capability.

The bill for your office space at home? Now that is an interesting idea.

As usual, there are two sides of the story.

For me, personally, I pay a lot more on:

- food/drinks (Coffee)

- heating of my home office

- Internet (had to upgrade my speed)

I always walked to the office, so I have no saving on gas while the commute was a very pleasant 20m walk.

But then, there are others who save a ton of money on gas and hours on not being stuck in traffic, so the company feels entitled to demand more from you for allowing you to work from home.

The company also of course must maintain at least some rent because a number of people will want to return to the office (I'd think the split is like 50-50).

AND utilities … my electricity and water bill has shot up.

Alabama resident here. You can make a decent chunk more than 100 as a software engineer without too much trouble if you are anywhere near a senior level.

But it could also limit your future opportunities as it's still unclear which employers will offer attractive remote options.

That is not going to happen because unlike a lot of the comments in this thread making various sorts of fairness arguments, prices are never determined by fairness but by supply and demand. Morgan Stanley pays high salaries in New York because it must, but if it can open those jobs to be done anywhere in the world where there is an internet connection, then the supply of workers for Morgan Stanley just increased massively.

Arguing that a massive increase in supply should not result in a price drop because of some fairness idea is like arguing that a ball should not drop to the ground because of some ethical concern (e.g. it may drop on someone's head). Look, that ball is gonna drop whether you like it or not, there is no amount of tweets and open letters and hunger strikes that will prevent that ball from dropping.

The only way to prevent the ball from dropping would be to try to make working from home illegal, thus forcing Morgan Stanley to hire from a much smaller labor pool.

Now there is a flipside to this, because the above argument was just for the highest paying employers. Lower paying employers will need to pay more, because their workers can now be poached by Morgan Stanley. E.g. Expanding the market increases supply for the highest paying firms but decreases supply by the same amount for the lowest paying firms. They are going to feel a big labor crunch, particularly those firms that opened up shops away from SF/NYC in order to pay low wages.

But the end game -- e.g. competing with global labor -- is going to be a big threat to Silicon Valley wages, especially for individual contributors.

There are no labor shortages in Capitalism. If something is off-balance, it's not Capitalism's fault.

In large numbers, employees are commodities for their employers and are treated as such. The larger the company, the worse HR is treating people as cattle. It sucks, but it is what it is.