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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

paying people out of market rates is a bad idea

- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living

- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere

- these employees will have motivation to keep their job at all costs, so when they are disengaged doing the absolute minimum to ensure they won’t get managed out

- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?

- incentive for local teams and managers to hire their friends to extremely cushy jobs and perpetuate

i think this is backwards. remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output. overpaying won’t bring you additional output, but will bring other challenges

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- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living > Agreed. And other factors like taxes and quality of living are all playing a role for what the person will ultimately receive. Interestingly enough, oftentimes these balance each other out. Higher taxes? Usually better infrastructure. Lower taxes? Maybe hospitals less good.

We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point: "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"

We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.

> "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"

That wasn’t true in offices and I don’t see it being true while remote. There are integer multiples of difference among employees who used to work in the same office as each other.

- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere

I get the argument, but I think remote work is making that less of a risk. Paying significantly above local market value will let them have high standards. Great engineers should be able to get other great remote offers. Salaries might not keep those engineers from leaving.

- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?

Is it a huge issue if a senior engineer doesn't want to get promoted if they are doing well in their current job?

That makes no sense. Why would somebody who is extremely motivated to keep the job work less hard? Surely they'd want to do everything they could to keep it by doing their very best work. It's the people who could easily jump to another job who are less motivated to do their best.

3x -> 3.15x is a 5% raise. That's hardly a promotion.

that’s a healthy faang base increase for a promotion

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