"what do you mean i can't collect silicon valley salary while working from Montana?"
The employer has been paying a premium for having employees local. Now employees are getting upset because they're losing the premium. As if they are some dirty European or Indian. It's actually quite offensive to hear these complaints from US employees.
Where I always ran into trouble was child care.
I had one boss who moved his parents to the US from China to raise his son, often commented that he never raised a finger to raise his child, expected everyone else to do the same. He had no sympathy for child care needs.
My next boss raised two kids in NYC, knew all the hoops you had to jump through, was very accommodating of child care needs and schooling.
Completely different experiences.
I can‘t deny their expertise and quality of work, and they‘re starting to constantly outbid anyone on work for hire platforms
Edit: you can downvote me all you want, doesn’t make it less true.
They'll get someone to do the same thing from Islamabad like Digital Ocean.
Seeing SV people whine about this is quite offensive, and a little bit racist.
Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?
> Take off your company-man hat, does it make sense to you as a worker?
I don't tend to analyze things along "class struggle" lines. Obviously, as a worker, I would prefer to make as much money and have as good of work conditions as possible, but I don't necessarily think any deviation from that is "unfair".
You’re providing X value, and the company needs to make >X, often by some multiple mX profit so to speak.
My costs are my business, and I shouldn’t be punished for making different life choices.
If remote employees tend to produce a lower multiple, that’s fine. Just provide a salary at the reduced rate. Should be the same everywhere though, imo this is unfair hiring practices
I should add, it’s up to the employee what they’d accept. I had a few awesome job offers from Europe, but they couldn’t even come close on salary. That’s fine, didn’t work out, still respect them as it was the same salary everywhere
I always approach each conversation the same. I won’t interview until we discuss potential salary range. If it’s within a range I’d accept for the work, we interview. The argument I’ve made in negotiations is always similar - if you’re willing to pay X (regardless of location), it should matter more about what I can offer in return. If you’re penny pinching to try and cut that employee cost 10-20% have at it. I know my worth and can provide significant multiples over that. I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.
It can be in certain cases but not in all. I may have to hire someone with a certain clearance for example. Or, we don't have a business subsidy setup globally. Or we have TZ preferences because of communication issues. As a manager I wouldn't want to hire someone half way across the world because my 1-on-1 time with them would always be awful for one of us. So I don't.
You are of course free to set your own market rate. I think it's great you want to discuss salary expectations up front because there's no point in everyone wasting their time. At a smaller company you'll have a better chance of getting sway with it, but keep in mind they tend to pay below market rate anyways.
At a medium to large company they source data which describes for certain roles what market rate is. We know this because companies participate in giving this anonymized data so we can slice it up by region as well. From this we can calculate a "comp ratio" and your salary will gravitate towards 1.0, which is perfect market price for your role in your region. This is how budgets are set. Every region is put into a bucket (premium, average, bargain for example) and priced by that bucket. We can then open a role in "average or below" regions, for example if we don't want to pay extra. We tend to want to offer below 1.0 so we have room for negotiation and also for merit increases.
> I guarantee I can provide the same level or more productivity as a remote engineer in New York as I do in the rural south.
I don't doubt that but it's not really a surplus value theory thing here. If I could get the same person close to me VS far away for the same money then I'd hire the person close to me, which is almost always in a big city and not the rural south.
If they truly don't care then why not hire two equally good people in Warsaw? It's because they do care.
SV employees do not want all remote to be equal. They would very much be on the losing side of that bargain.
And look I'm all for extracting maximum pay from employers, but it's a bit delusional to not realize that it was mostly because they were in silicon valley/the west coast that the pay was so high. Not because they were literally leagues ahead of everyone else. I'm sure there is a much higher concentration of top talent in SV, but the pay was, at least in part still, inherently due to the location.
The weird part is that it is usually highly paid techies that push so hard for fully (out of state, or even international) remote work. A position which to me is completely against our own self-interests, because it takes for granted salaries that surely won't adjust to international competition because they just...won't?
The only way you can make this work is if the people "there" are mostly self directed. that means the management needs to be able to make the right decisions when faced with a question, without calling back to "the main office". If any of the words or similar phrases are uttered it cannot work.
I don't agree with the "most talented". For sure a lot of talented people move to the US as they can make more money but that's a subset of the talented people, a subset that intersects with the ones that are willing to work harder/longer, or with less social benefits, etc. I've worked with a lot of talented individuals that were unwilling to relocate to the US even though they could get much better pay, simply because they were happy enough in their societies and weren't all in chasing only money.
Different people value different things, reducing that to a simple transactional value is rather inhumane.
Because good software engineering is 20% good programming and 80% good communication.
We, as an industry, already tried the offshoring strategy in the mid-2000s and quickly realized the cost savings of salaries were offset by the communication barriers. At least for projects where the quality of the output actually matters. You still see a ton of offshoring for projects where the result doesn't matter so much, like government IT contracts.
If Amazon/Google/etc had any data supporting that you could successfully get devs in Bangalore to code stuff up at $2/hour, they'd be doing it.
Most of the average in Germany being better than India is in Germany there are many opportunities for bad engineers to self select into something not engineering. However the nature of India is bad engineers will persist as engineers because there is nothing else they can move to that is better than being a bad engineer.
If you leave, then of course you should no longer be bribed to work there.
SV employees are overpaid. They are being paid to work in SV. Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View.
And the people doing the exact same work in Warsaw, with the exact same skills and performance, are being underpaid.
I have no sympathy for the people on the SV side of this equation.
Ask for more and if you think you are being undervalued look elsewhere.
> Because no sane person would want to live in San Francisco, Menlo Park, Cupertino, or Mountain View.
This sort of (extreme) caricature strikes me as a form of coping, to be honest, and doesn't really reflect well on your mindset. "no sane person", seriously?
I have a hard time following your logic here.
The only way to get a SV salary has been to move to SV, because that's the only place the companies are willing to pay it. They'll want you there so much that they will pay the cost of moving, pay for a relocation consultant, pay for three months of hotel while you look, pay for immigration, visas (visas are not cheap), give an extra lump sum just for "extra costs you'll incur moving".
Yet you think that it's possible for someone in Poland and India to just go "yeah, can I get the cash equivalent of all that, and also the SV salary?".
I agree that remote work logically is remote work. But it's not that SV employees used to be paid "just right" and everyone else was a sucker. SV employees were and are overpaid.
> "no sane person", seriously?
It's hyperbole, sure. But survey after survey shows that even internal transfers within a company (say moving from the Poland office to Bay Area) makes for people who hate where they live, but they do it for the money.
So the company is paying (bribing) people to move to SV against their will. Just like they're paying salary at all for you to do other things you wouldn't otherwise do.
Compare this to finance. People who leave my company generally go to finance, because it pays 50-100% more. But then you work in finance. And if you already make $300k then (empirically) another 50% won't make you think finance is worth it. Some do leave. Just like some do move to SV. But they don't like it.
Clearly the company wants people to live there. Clearly people don't want to. So if you don't do it, why should you be paid to live there?
You are having a hard time because you already have your little thesis in hand regarding “SV salary” and are not listening to what I am saying.
I am saying that you as an engineer are providing quite a lot of value in today’s world and if the collective you are unable to take the necessary measures to negotiate value for value employment agreements with international corporations, it does not invalidate the fact that a competent SWE working in location X (given that X is effectively and practically accessible to employer) is creating a given measure of units of labor and intellectual value that is independent of location X.
I do not agree that SV salaries were excessive. Have you seen lawyer rates? All they do is jaw bone. We are creating the very fabric of tomorrow’s societies. We are creators and builders. What is excessive is the greed of the C Suites. They should be spreading those corporate profits wider, and yes, pay equivalent pay to whoever is pulling their weight.