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Comment by bedast | Hacker News Reader

I never understand "x times less" valuations. 1.9 times 100k, for example, would be 190k, so is it paying 190k less? How is this intended to be calculated? I never went to college so maybe this is a common way to express something being a percentage of something else, a percentage less than something else, or perhaps an average static value less than something else, that I'm not aware of that is being taught.

I would say the HN title probably needs to have the editorialization removed so that it reflects the actual article title and reduce the confusion (Full remote tech jobs pay better, Global Tech Talent Trends shows), but it appears within the article they do use the 1.9x less pay phrase.

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I went to college, even tutored some math classes there, "1.9x less" is... somewhere between nonsense and poor math communication skills, I think. Skewing toward the former.

If they said "0.3x less" that would make sense. But I agree with you in doubting that the full-office salaries are negative. "1.9x less"… what are they multiplying by 1.9 to figure out how big of a discount from the full-remote salary employers are paying?

Probably it can be defined as "A is X times more than B" if and only if "B is X times less than A", just not to go to negative values.

“X times less” is is not X times Y, it is Y divided by X. That “less” in the statement turned multiplication into division.

In the very least, it is too close to the more familiar phrasing "x% less," which unambiguously means (100 - x)%.

No, you're right. While "1.9x more" is common enough to have an agreed upon meaning, "1.9x less" is not a common expression. It's just a low quality article, don't think too much about it.

Maybe they're trying to say that the full-remote salaries are "1.9x more" than the full-office salaries and they don't understand that it doesn't work that way. That would mean that if full-office salaries were $50,000 then full-remote be $95,000 more, for a total of $145,000.

I think they are trying to say that in-person positions pay 1/1.9 times as much as remote ones. On top of the issues around the phrase "x times less" being a bit confusing, this suffers, I think, from false precision. I mean, come on, how accurate is this survey? How about "In person positions pay roughly half that of full-remote ones."

And it's this thread of responses that makes it clear that this phrasing is far too ambiguous to be useful, and I'm not alone in that confusion.

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