Living in Pleasanton is cheaper than living in Mountain View, but still commutable. Living in Tracy is cheaper still and people still commute to the Bay Area from there. Living in Fresno or Sacramento is even cheaper and farther but still some people will do that commute daily.
If you're in Sacramento, you're definitely not in the same MSA as either San Jose or SF. Pleasanton on the other hand is part of Alameda County, which is part of SF's MSA.
Meanwhile, if you opted to be in Santa Cruz, "just" 32 miles south of San Jose, you'd be SOL.
Interestingly, Seattle is only in the premium price tier, not the premium price tier. This is because there's no state income tax in Washington, so a lower salary goes a longer way. So it ends up being a wash even factoring in NY/CA state taxes. Because CA taxes are higher than NY (but not NYC taxes), your best bet is living in upstate NY (Long Island is outside of NYC too but it's eliminated because CoL is higher there).
If the employees move away rent goes down, so does demand for their properties.. so yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
5 -> 0 is a pay cut based on where you live.
5 -> 3 is not a pay cut as you're still working out of the same office.
If I were to go fully remote, I would take a pay cut ... but it would be almost identical to my commuting costs, once you account for rail fair, parking, vehicle mileage, taxes, snacks, etc.
I don't know how representative my case is, but the pay cut ends up being a non-factor in my decision whether or not to apply for full remote.
If this were indeed the reason for the salary adjustment, it wouldn't matter whether an employee was moving to Santa Cruz, San Mateo, or San Salvador. Either way they're remote, and unless one city has markedly different internet bandwidth, the value that a given employee delivers from any remote location should be the same.
Next time I hear someone making this argument, I'm calling BS. It's a bald-faced attempt for the company to capture value which rightfully belongs to the employee.
Only the horribly uninformed would ever make such a bad faith argument. You've never been paid based on your "value" but rather what it takes to keep you as an employee. The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
I think that depends what your other options are. It might work if everyone in the industry offers you less based on where you live, which is almost collusion in my opinion.
Nevertheless, it's one that I've heard repeated quite often.
It's slightly more true that it's based on the local cost of labor, but even more so that it's just based on the state, with carveouts for MSAs (which are defined based on county) surrounding certain offices commanding higher salaries.
You'd make just as much working remotely in Matamoras, PA as you would working out of the NYC office in Manhattan.
E.g. I live in a low-CoL area, but I pay you, someone living a high-CoL area, $100 to nominally be your "flatmate".
If company can pick arbitrary locations around the world to be their HQ, or Trump can use Mar-a-Lago as his residence, then so too can every other citizen following the law and paying their taxes.
> every other citizen following the law
For criminal fraud to happen, there has to be a defrauded party. If I follow my local tax laws and negotiate a better salary with a corporation based on Location A, while potentially living elsewhere at Location B/C/D for prolong periods of time with lower costs of living, that is not fraud.
Two parties entered a contract with the understand you would live in location A if you don't that's fraud objectively.
https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-contr...
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/business-laws-and-regu...
https://www.upcounsel.com/intent-to-deceive-contract-law#:~:....
If you follow whatever local and state laws apply to your situation, you're perfectly in your right.
The topic is whether a global corporation with access to a global workforce should be allowed arbitrary salary negation privileges because of the circumstances of a candidates geographical circumstances, while robbing the candidate of the same privilege.
Just sounds like another way to exploit labor at a time of record profit windfalls for corporations.
Someday if most employers switch to remote-first, this won’t matter and salaries will be equal everywhere (a lot lower than we’ve seen in tight labor markets, and probably the first world in general).
A company telling me my worth is based on where I live at that exact moment definitely feels like wrongful deception intended for financial gain.
A company can be registered in a tax haven but have its main office in the US.
I used to drink with a bunch of fireman who lived about 300 miles away - they had to live in the city or adjacent county. They’d have a flophouse in the hood shared by like 20 guys and crash there once in awhile when they pulled overtime as well as get mail.
Travel scams are similar too. If a company will reimburse travel if you’re 50 miles from home, people will “move” so they can bill the mileage tolls.
It works great until it doesn’t. If you want to give up your cushy Google gig for a few thousand bucks, good luck.
That ship has sailed, and it’s got a nice tail wind as well.
Yes. I know somebody working remotely about 10m driving from the office.
To keep your salary you'd need to stay in the SF bay area, which is defined according to country lines.
This has some failure cases, with some weird places being included in regions like NYC while some other places where people really do commute to NYC (though it is extremely far) are excluded. I don't actually know anybody who has been impacted by this, but clever Googlers made a pretty compete map of all of counties in the US and their pay region once the tool for getting salary information for proposed moves was available.