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Comment by zachmu | Hacker News Reader

All well and good, but consider: if you work for Google in Pittsburgh you make approximately 60% of what you make doing the same job in Mountain View.

We are in a transitionary period where many people are earning Mountain view money while living in Pittsburgh (either literally or metaphorically). In the long run, that won't be the case. It may well be a boon to companies to draw from talent all over the country, but they are certainly not going to pay that nationally or globally distributed talent pool the highest local rate. Why on earth would they?

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What if making Mountain View money was an abnormality all along?

Not sure about this. Many big tech companies are very productive an generate a lot of income.

They collect a lot of income.

I do wonder about this. I struggle to believe that the average FAANG employee creates their salary in value. Companies are so flush with cash they are willing to bid up salaries across the board, but it seems like that is a management decision. You hear people openly speculating that Google could cut staffing by 50% with no impact to revenue, which seems about right to me.

I would like to see remote comp be structured with a flat base rate across geos, and then have bonuses for locality to corporate centers. If you feel that it is worth it, you can choose to live close to the office. A flat base rate across geos compensates folks doing the same work for the same pay.

I get paid according to the value I create, it doesn't matter where I live.

So should those engineers in the UK and India get a pay raise then?

Yes, pay them their worth.

Obviously they should!

Because otherwise why the hell would I work for them?

Maybe you don't want to live in Mountain View?

Google already adjusts a remote employee's comp when they move geographic locations to a lower cost one.

They have smart accountants, after all.

Same thing happens with MSFT. Remote comp is location dependent.

Oh no, workers are making more money.

What a shame!

Why is it so difficult for people to distinguish between "X will happen" and "it's good that X will happen"?

The wonderful flip side to this is that Silicon Valley engineers also get that additional compensation bump when working for out of state companies. SF Bay engineers can demand more than twice what a Pittsburg dev can ask for and the fact they live in SF Bay is part of the resume itself. Lots of very easy work at very competitive rates to take the Silicon Valley skill set out to nowhereville and they love being able to point to their San Francisco 10x talent. Everyone wins?

> In the long run, that won't be the case.

Nice crystal ball you have there. I, for one, have no idea if that will or won't be the case.

Unless you believe that engineers in Paris are a quarter as productive as engineers in San Francisco, you already acknowledge that geographically defined labor markets vary dramatically in compensation. If you remove those borders, why would you believe the rate for labor would settle on the high value instead of the low value.

That's a very superficial analysis. These engineers are not native to Mountain View, usually not even native to California, and sometimes not native to the US.

Several of the highly productive engineers born and raised in Paris moved to Mountain View, because their in-demand skills allowed them to get a high paying job.

Their worth is not set by the Mountain View office - they were moved there because of their worth.

If you remove those borders, you still have the same highly skilled engineers in demand, the only difference is that a company doesn't need to pay for their visa and relocation anymore.

I've paid 4x many times for steaks that were worse than a chain like Longhorn.

I'd go so far as to say price rarely reflects worth. Prices perverted by all manner of different "invisible hands" is more the norm than the exception.

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