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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

> But cutting pay for existing employees who opt to work from home is a terrible idea and it shows a complete lack of emotional intelligence.

What in the world does this mean?

Cutting pay for temporary telework is stupid, but cutting it for long term agreements that are willfully made by the employee makes total sense.

It seems ludicrous to me to pay Silicon Valley rates to someone living in Montana. The pay is based on cost of living and labor supply constraints. And both of those are eased by people working remotely in low cost of living areas.

If they don’t do this then they’ll end up paying the high water mark everywhere in the world for fairness purposes and that will make it harder to compete. Imagine living in Lagos or somewhere and because you’re locally employed and always lived in Lagos you get Lagos wages. But someone who was hired in San Francisco and moved to Lagos gets San Francisco wages. How emotionally intelligent is that?

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At the risk of this discussion devolving into a flamewar, I would just encourage you to do your own research about this situation.

Regardless of all other arguments about location-based pay, Google et al have been paying their temporarily-remote employees 100% of their salary up until now.

These companies would need to spend lots of resources to legally navigate pay cuts to already-agreed-upon contracts.

And they would also have to weigh the risk of those employees leaving for better pay elsewhere.

Advising someone do their own research is a cheap way to circumvent providing any sources.

It’s also confusing. Does that mean they think I didn’t do research? My basic operating model is that we’re all doing our own research all the time and using it to form opinions.

I wasn’t sure if GP was saying they disagree with me, think I didn’t research, think I was relying on someone else’s research, didn’t feel like doing their research, or something else.

I’m not sure your intent, but yes, I’ve done my own research on this. And I did it before my comment and I think my comment stands given my research.

Im not sure what contracts Google has. My contacts there don’t have any contracts guaranteeing pay or term, just stock awards. So it’s not a contract issue to raise (or lower) pay. I think it’s more an issue of whether employees will quit and whether they can continue attracting new employees.

> These companies would need to spend lots of resources to legally navigate pay cuts to already-agreed-upon contracts.

My pay went down by like 40,000 when I moved to fully remote. Whatever cost was involved in setting up a new contract for me is surely quite a bit lower than that.

> And they would also have to weigh the risk of those employees leaving for better pay elsewhere.

The industry hasn't settled on a standard, but the number of companies that offer permanent remote work at SF pay scales and also pay the same as Google is pretty low. Attrition for pay is real, but it isn't like Facebook doesn't do the same cuts.

It means people can feel unappreciated and offended and that could cost Google much more than 10% in the long run. Basically, you sometimes need to stop counting beans and start considering people's emotions. It's not always logical but you must still consider it.

I know a top engineer & manager who left a major company because someone decided his nice parking space that he had for 10 years should be given to someone more important.

True, but I assume they are counting the beans and thinks the costs are greater than the benefits.

Lots of anecdotes about people who quit over reasons. But there’s many more examples of people who didn’t quit despite all sorts of weird stuff.

> The pay is based on cost of living and labor supply constraints.

why?

I think because labor is a market and markets are driven by supply. If there’s millions of programmers, wages will be lower.

Just basic, hundreds of years old thinking from Smith’s Law of Supply and Demand [0].

There’s likely lots of specific reasons but they all boil down to some form of supply and demand.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/law-of-supply-demand.as...

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