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Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

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Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#201

Post by jlkuester7 »

jondeval wrote: post #169

I think there is a major competitive advantage here for small employers that know what they are doing. If you are running a small US/EU based company and you find someone great in an offshore local, then you can dramatically increase their loyalty, motivation, and potentially output with relatively modest and reasonable raises. I fully understand that larger organizations make the transition to an MBA bean counter mi…

Took a pay cut to go and work for a small nonprofit (~100 people). Best decision ever!

There is no reasonable amount of money I would accept to return to my previous cooperation.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#203

Post by spaetzleesser »

You often get told that you are paid by the value you produce but in reality you are paid by the replacement costs. To some degree they are correlated but companies will always spin this in their favor.

Sometimes there is also a discount based on time zone difference. If somebody is more than 4 time zones way they are harder to deal with.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#204

Post by gumby »

derefr wrote: post #153
closeparen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true companies would never hire in the Bay Area, or even the United States. There’s always a cheaper alternative. The question is, once the company has decided it wants you, what’s that going to take? Making national median offers to Bay Area candidates essentially swears off of ever hiring them. That could be a choice, but for now it remains a bench of talent and experience that companies want to draw f…

Bay Area companies hire in the Bay Area, for the same reason companies are founded in the Bay Area to begin with: because most of the VCs in the US live in the Bay Area. And Bay Area investors care a lot about having a package of colocated staff "human assets" that put an acquihire-based floor on the company's acquisition price. Companies that don't operate from the Bay Area, almost never hire Bay Area remote workers…

> Bay Area companies hire in the Bay Area, for the same reason companies are founded in the Bay Area to begin with: because most of the VCs in the US live in the Bay Area.

You're putting the cart before the horse. Investors live all over the place, and large funds have offices in markets where there is a signifcant number of possible high growth companies to invest in. And they'll invest where they don't have an office and always have.

The reason why so many investors are in silicon valley and san francisco is because of the companies. And the companies are here because of the environment. I've worked around the world but the reason I love working in the valley (specifically the peninsula) and not elsewhere, not even SF, is because of the extreme density of people, resources, markets, and just the sheer intensity of the place. I hire from all over the world, but really, just getting shit done is so much easier around here.

Ignore the bros. Those assholes get the press 'coz they're interesting to write about. I'm talking about nerds in true tech businesses like hardware, software, mechanical systems, pharma.

It's not for everyone, and even people who would like it may choose elsewhere for other reasons. Those decisions are all legit too.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#205

Post by therealdrag0 »

mattdeboard wrote: post #166
therealdrag0 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employee is welcome to work for a local company at local rates. It seems they prefer the colonizer? Is that exploitation any more than the US employee not getting paid 2x or 5 or 100 their current rate?

> It seems they prefer the colonizer? Sure, because the foreign company exercises their access to capital to compete at a wage level that local companies can't compete with, but is still as low as possible to extract maximum value from the investment made by purchasing the worker's labor. Why do you think there's such inequality in economic opportunity, such that exploiting labor in this fashion is possible, in the f…

Actually I agree

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#206

Post by uf00lme »

navjack27 wrote: post #138
pyrodactyl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a crazy conspiracy, I know it's pretty clear why it's being done. And I know I can't do anything about it other than look for new opportunities. But should location based pay be just accepted because that's the norm? There are variables that can't be used to do discriminate like age, gender, race, sexual orientation etc. We've accepted equal pay for equal work in these cases. Is it that far fetched that even…

Imagine paying someone in my town where the median income is $39k and the median property value is $87k the same as someone in San Fran where the median income is $120k and the median property value is $1.15M. that would be unfair to everyone in my town who can't work remotely with a tech company that's in that area.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, and I don’t think it is unfair or bad. Having more money and wealth in smaller towns will in the long term benefit the town, no? If anything in the long term it will be terrible for expensive cities, since people will eventually gravitate towards locations where they can have more for less. Personally for me the most important criteria is finding great schooling for my kids, I don’t want them to have to struggle like I did for the first 30 years of my life.

Sadly some careers pay more then others but that’s life. It’s why I worry about the education system eventually crumbling, since teaching and in some countries even healthcare professionals are woefully underpaid. I wish it wasn’t the case but some people get lucky and others successfully follow the money, whilst society allows governments and or private industries to milk human kindness for as much as it can get away with.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#207

Post by hiyer »

Tbh, I don't see a problem with this. Throughout my 10+ year career in India I've been paid less than my counterparts in the US, and probably less than a few juniors as well. However the difference has reduced significantly from 10x to 2-3x now.

Just because we all work remote now, I don't feel that there should be parity in our pays. I'd probably be pissed if a counterpart in, say, Bangladesh was being paid much more than me though :-).

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#208

Post by gumby »

Friday0722 wrote: post #148
mattdeboard wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Alienation from the fruits of your labor. It's disgusting we expect people to tolerate it, and act like it's not a totally optional choice by management to exploit labor resources to get a better return on investment for the already wealthy. A modern take on colonization.

On the other hand, the only reason the company hired someone overseas was to save money. They would not have even considered these candidates if they weren't hugely cheaper. Instead, the company would have hired from the local labor market instead. What the submitter should be asking themselves, is whether they can pull a higher wage working from their current location with any other company. If they can do that, the…

> On the other hand, the only reason the company hired someone overseas was to save money. They would not have even considered these candidates if they weren't hugely cheaper.

Not the only reason: I have plenty of times hired people who had skills we needed and couldn't find locally. Sometimes brought those people over on H-1B, sometimes just hired them remote. And then if we had a few in the same area, opened an engineering office (though these days I am less likely to do that unless the folks really wanted it).

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#209

Post by quickthrower2 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #190
quickthrower2 wrote: post #95

Kind of depends what you are getting paid, but if it is less then $100k say, you can easily find remote jobs that pay more, play them off against each other. The companies are using sharp business practice to get you as cheap as possible, you can do the same to get as much as possible. Apply for 100 remote jobs, interview, smash the interviews, ask for top $ from all of them. See https://remoteok.com/ , etc. If on he…

But 100k or, actually, 50k is very high for outsourcing countries. There are many talented and senior programmers working for less than 20k; the thing is, they wouldn’t pass the ‘modern’ interview practices of western companies. Language or culture or both prevents them from getting passed even the first step, and many companies have nonsense processes in place that require many steps over many weeks. It is a competi…

Possibly: 100k is probably high(er) than it used to be because of exchange rate changes too. That is 87000GBP or 100000EUR roughly! I am in Sydney Australia, pay is higher than Europe, maybe on par with London, and lower than US tech cities or those "crypto" fully remote type jobs.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#210

Post by closeparen »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #154
closeparen wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true companies would never hire in the Bay Area, or even the United States. There’s always a cheaper alternative. The question is, once the company has decided it wants you, what’s that going to take? Making national median offers to Bay Area candidates essentially swears off of ever hiring them. That could be a choice, but for now it remains a bench of talent and experience that companies want to draw f…

> Making Bay Area offers to rural candidates is giving them 4-5x their next best option, which is characteristic of either a) the devil, or b) rich people making expressive displays rather than business transactions. No? If you budget to hire two employees at Bay Area salaries and don't care where they work, you should pay them Bay Area salaries regardless of where they work. Plenty of companies do this. It's fine. I…

If employers stop getting the candidates they want with location-based offers, they will go away. Right now people may grumble, but they sign. Like OP did.

Making a Bay Area offer when you could just as well have closed the candidate with a locally competitive offer doesn't make business sense. It is exactly an expression of the company's values: that it thinks paying people the same is inherently, morally good. Which is not an uncommon set of values in tech! If you can find a company like that, more power to you. But whether it's sustainable to be paying more than necessary for some of the staff depends on the company's economic conditions. If the company ever needs to trim its sails, then reverting to location-based pay would be a natural step.

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