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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't make sense to go the zip code route, of course. It's too granular, to the point that even if "COL" changes zip code to zip code there's too much variance to make that meaningful unless your only view of "COL" is what it costs to rent a 2BR1BA apartment. If you pay everyone the same wages, you're immediately excluding people who live in VHCOL areas unless you pay VH wages, and spoiler alert, you almost certainly don't. If you're not competing with FAANGMULA-etc. on cash comp, you're not in the right ballpark.

But guess what, you can still pay the person in Vietnam or India or Belarus or Oman a very strong regional wage and free up cash allowing you to offer a competitive VHCOL salary. There's no realistic reason to pay someone in eastern Europe $400k TC.

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> But guess what, you can still pay the person in Vietnam or India or Belarus or Oman a very strong regional wage and free up cash allowing you to offer a competitive VHCOL salary. There's no realistic reason to pay someone in eastern Europe $400k TC.

In my experience with working with foreign developers, specifically those in eastern Europe, real talent can easily command SF-level compensation from companies that pay SF-level compensation in the US. Employers often get what they pay for when they think that outsourcing means that they'll get equivalent quality work, just with lower costs.

FAANGMULA – what ULA stand for?

Uber Lyft AirBnB

IMO these acronyms have reached the point where they don't really serve a purpose.

I've never seen FAANGMULA used anywhere except ironically, my earlier comment included :)

Labor should be compensated for the value created, not the least they will accept.

It's a nice thought but it doesn't have any bearing on reality. No other market in the world works that way. A company wants to charge as much as it possibly can. A person in need of a service wants to pay a company as little as possible. There's sometimes a range where those two values overlap and that person can become a customer. It's all about perceived (not actual) value, which is heavily influenced by marketing and sales.

If you can't tie your actions directly to cost savings or revenue increases you're just blowing smoke up your manager's ass about value created anyway. It's all hand-wavey negotiation and negotiation is almost entirely based around leverage.

Oh I thought it was a marketplace.

Salaries aren’t high in the bay because houses are expensive. Houses are expensive because salaries are high. There happens to be a concentration of talented and highly compensated people there. That doesn’t mean they will settle for less elsewhere.

So early startups should get money from their workers?

I’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. If you go to the very beginning I’m sure many startups get money from employee #1, AKA the founder. But even in an early stage startup why hire someone that isn’t delivering value?

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