Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

People want to have their cake and eat it too. Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area and they _need_ to pay well to attract talent in that area. If remote work becomes the norm, pay will start to even out across the country. If you live in a place that didn't pay well before, you'll be better off, but if you live in a high cost of work area, you'll probably be worse off. It's just an inevitable truth of how the market functions.... maybe your company says they'll keep salaries the same no matter where you work, but let's see how that plays out in ten years from now.

To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.

Silicon Valley companies pay very well because _other_ Silicon Valley companies pay very well. Fast food companies don't pay anywhere near as well even though the cost of living is the same for those employees.

The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?

They pay well because demand for engineers is high. Cost of living is high because engineers have bought all the stock in the area.

You've got the order backwards.

Its a cycle. It’s undeniable that Bay Area salaries are higher than elsewhere. They pay what they need to pay to get good engineers _in that location_. I’d venture to guess that Apple employees in other countries (or even other parts of the US) make less.

You are completely missing out on the market impact of large corporate (Blackrock) and overseas investors.

If they find that it's hard to attract talent, they'll also pay well for remote. But if they don't, angrily worded letters are not going to be the thing that makes the difference. People are going to have to start voting with their feet before Apple will see the supposed error of their compensation formula.

Many companies are. Traditional, old school companies like Google and Apple are slow to move here, but many tech companies are moving to a "we pay you your value, not your cost of living".

I've only seen one (Airbnb) but perhaps there are others I've missed. I don't think we will be able to know how it is going to play out for a couple of years. They may validly intend to do what they say today, but market forces may ultimately force them to change their approach. I'm happy to wait and see personally.

Hasn't Gitlab successfully been a remote-first company for years before the pandemic? https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/resource...

There's no forward or backward. It's a feedback loop.

"They pay well because demand for engineers is high"

Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.

Lower barriers to communication and the building of shared conceptual models of the domain will make a team much more effective.

An engineering team in the same timezone whose members have a similar general context for how they approach work will be able to do all of that more easily.

In my mind, that explains much of the difference.

Of course, there are fully-remote teams and companies that work hard to overcome some of those obstacles, but it seems to be non-trivial to do so successfully.

They are already starting adjust salaries for cost of living in the zip codes where remote workers live. They still pay more because the field is competitive, but companies (including Facebook and Google) aren’t paying Palo Alto salaries to remote workers in low cost of living areas.

>Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area

Isnt this backwards? Isnt the cost of living high because the companies pay so much?

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