I'm not sure I agree with some of these figures. Vancouver and Nashville are somehow considered to have similar cost of living.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
31–40 of 169 posts
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#32I strongly disagree with cost-of-living-adjustments when employees have the choice of where to live. People shouldn’t be punished for living in less expensive places. If your company is willing to pay you more for living somewhere else even if they don’t gain anything from it, it means they’re underpaying you right now.
That's not really realistic though. How could I convince someone to pay me $250k in Minneapolis when the market is supporting 115-150k?
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#33Why do companies continue to pay out higher salaries to devs in high cost of living areas? In this case, their payscale pays out 30-50K more in high cost living areas vs low cost areas. Rather than blow revenue rewarding bad life choices, offer to move them to an area with lower costs of living. Do that for only 10 employees and you have 300-500K EVERY SINGLE YEAR to re-invest into your company. In practically any ot…
Because if you do that, they'll find another employer that doesn't force them to move. Living in a high cost area is not a "bad life choice".
I moved out of a high CoL area to somewhere I actually enjoy living. And brought the salary band with me.
No chance I'd work at Buffer, given they'd halve my salary because of my zip code. Other remote jobs don't. No brainier.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#34Open salaries are only great if you’re some introverted, beta developer that can’t speak up for themselves. “Everyone’s the same. Hooray Marxism!” If you’re good and you have any sort of gumption, negotiate hard and take the money the feeble leave on the table.
Their salaries are not the same though, if you look at the table. I do agree it is a silly idea though because I'd rather keep my salary secret, for privacy reasons.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes quite a good dev to generate 50K more valuable than another dev in another area. There are cases where that is true, but it's not universally true. In this particular case, there's a baked-in assumption that a beginner dev in SF is worth more than a senior dev in a low-cost area.
I feel like you are using salary to measure worth. A junior dev in SF isn't significantly better than junior devs elsewhere; but the salaries are higher in SF, so if you don't match the salaries, you can't hire any junior devs. > so, just hire in low-cost areas! The company execs might be based in a high-cost area (because of family ties, property ownership, etc.), and also might not be ready to eat the cost of runni…
I think this is the answer, if management is based in high-cost area, then the formula will include a bias for them.
I don't think it's bad, it would be bad if they didn't have a better salary because of their location.
Does that mean they will hire people from the bay? No it doesn't mean that either. The formula could actually force them to hire people from cheaper places.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely, they have found that some really good developers want to live in specific places with really high standards of living and since they are good, they could easily get a job somewhere else and stay in the city they want to. Not everyone is willing to just move for a job if not necessary.
It takes quite a good dev to generate 50K more valuable than another dev in another area. There are cases where that is true, but it's not universally true. In this particular case, there's a baked-in assumption that a beginner dev in SF is worth more than a senior dev in a low-cost area.
I don't agree with this sentiment. There's something to be said for competition, closeness to hustle and bustle of an industry, and the sheer learning-by-osmosis that happens in an area densely populated by a certain industry. As much as I think that senior devs are needed in the industry (I've been in startups without the proper amount of them and it's terrible), there is a lot to be said for the benefits of being a young developer embedded in an industry hotspot.
I've never lived in SV, nor do I want to -- there are areas of the US that pay SV prices with lower cost of living and progressive citizenship/policies, which I'd rather not name since then whoever's reading this would move there -- but the assumption that a "senior" dev in a low cost area is more valuable than a "beginner" dev in a high-cost area like the valley rests on a bunch of things that often are untrue/shaky at best.
- How do you even determine senior vs. beginner? Years of experience? Successful projects? Breadth of technology knowledge? depth of technology knowledge? interaction/propensity to share knowledge with team members?
- What has this senior dev in low-cost area been exposed to? What about the junior developer? If I asked them to solve a problem, which can imagine the widest breadth of possibilities? which can imagine the most stable/future-proof possibilities? This can come down to the person almost as much as the years of experience.
- What frameworks/tools/language are you talking about? (this seems like it may not matter, but if you're measuring contributions to a codebase, a developer with 1-2 years of experience in purely golang is going to be better/likely faster at grunt work maintaining an API in golang where the design choices have mostly already been made). Higher level refactorings and architectural work will likely be out of their reach for months/years to come as they mature, but if what you really needed was someone to put out fires with code that isn't terrible, 1-2 years will often suffice. It wouldn't take the senior engineer very long at all to learn the new language but they'll also have to spend some time unlearning old habits -- of course they'll also be bringing good habits that you may not already have as well, but happily dealing with grunt work and over-working yourself because you're "super psyched" is usually not something senior engineers will do -- newcomers/greenhorn often do this, however.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#37Wow, this is really terrible. This looks like a PR explanation for why they're slashing everyone's salaries. A cursory glance shows everyone either staying the same or dropping. > One of the toughest decisions we made with the new formula was to remove the annual 3% loyalty increase given to teammates for each anniversary from their start date. > We looked at a lot of options and in the end decided to remove it as it…
Yes, but I assume the SF scale is indexed to that annually (ie: the bay SF pay will go up itself probably more than 3% anyway).
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#38I strongly disagree with cost-of-living-adjustments when employees have the choice of where to live. People shouldn’t be punished for living in less expensive places. If your company is willing to pay you more for living somewhere else even if they don’t gain anything from it, it means they’re underpaying you right now.
Salaries don't reflect the worth you're providing to the company (unless you're part of a worker-owned collective that disperses annual profit). Salaries are the lowest amount the company thinks it can pay you. If they had a higher budget and you failed to negotiate effectively for a higher salary, then I feel it is not the company's fault if you think they should have offered more.
Vote with your feet. If you think you would be paid more in SF, what is stopping you from packing up and moving? That's what's lowering your salary.
Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#39Why do companies continue to pay out higher salaries to devs in high cost of living areas? In this case, their payscale pays out 30-50K more in high cost living areas vs low cost areas. Rather than blow revenue rewarding bad life choices, offer to move them to an area with lower costs of living. Do that for only 10 employees and you have 300-500K EVERY SINGLE YEAR to re-invest into your company. In practically any ot…
Because if you do that, they'll find another employer that doesn't force them to move. Living in a high cost area is not a "bad life choice".
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Re: New Remote-First Formula and Updated Salary Calculator
#40Whoa $121k in Spain that's a superstar salary for a programmer there.
Average for programmer according to glassdoor is 35,000 euro = ~42,000 usd.