Tell'em it's fine but you'd like to negotiate based on net pay after taxes. I don't have all these fancy things: kids, deductible mortgage interest, deductible medical costs and I just want to be even with those losing a less percent of their income to tax.
"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
11–20 of 624 posts
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#12How long before an enterprising startup starts selling virtual apartment addresses in the heart of SF?
How long before that startup gets sued by employers and state tax authorities for aiding in the establishment of false residency for personal gain?
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#13This, and similar moans, really misses the point. Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions: * Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. * Employees, and the society made up of employees, want stability, employment rights etc. as salary work is…
> neither is a fundamental human right, and rather a societal contract
This seems like a purely semantic distinction to me. Unless you're religious and believe that humans are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" then everything you're claiming as a 'right' is just some generally-agreed social principle that your ancestors fought hard to establish.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#14This, and similar moans, really misses the point. Employment is a social contract, looking for a compromise between two positions: * Employers want to essentially acquire a good (productive employee) for the best quality / price ratio. If a trained monkey could do the job for peanuts, employers would be happy. * Employees, and the society made up of employees, want stability, employment rights etc. as salary work is…
employment is an actual contract, not just social.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#15If the employer offers terms you don’t like then don’t work for them.
If you feel inclined you can say “I’m taking a job with an employer who doesn’t pay based on location”.
But there’s really no reason to do the employer the service of telling them.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#16How long before an enterprising startup starts selling virtual apartment addresses in the heart of SF?
Virtual addresses are a thing already.
It's used by business to pretend to have an office in city X (expensive) while actually working in city Y (or in a completely different country). It can also be used to provide an address coming from a fashionable/trendy part of the city.
There are similar services that offer re-mailing services. Basically you pay a fee and have a fund for postages/stamps. Whenever mail arrives it gets re-packaged and re-mailed to your real address.
It's basically proxying for real mail.
I used reship.com multiple times to appear to be located in Oregon and overcome "we don't ship to your location" problems.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#17Salaries are based on market rates not "cost of living". If you want your employer to pay a higher salary either move to another city where they would pay more or find another company. There's not much else you can do that would convince your company otherwise.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep this. Let's equalise SF salaries with Europe and India first. What's that? You don't want to? Yeah I didn't think so. I guess this is what Marx was thinking about when he wanted the workers of the world to unite. Without unity it's super easy for capital to flow to the cheapest labour possible. So far software engineers in the U.S didn't really feel it, but things can change.
All the turmoil we are starting to see in the first world countries is due to this. With the rise in productivity in third world countries the wages will keep moving towards a median.
"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#19Right now, we are at an unusual point in time where workforces are going from geographically consolidated to dispersed. Thus, we think of the "standard" salary as what they pay in San Francisco, and ask for everyone to be paid that.
But the advantage of a remote workforce, from the employer's point of view, is 1) getting the brilliant people who can't leave their hometown to work for you, and 2) not having to pay San Francisco salaries. If you're an incredibly gifted talent, you'll fall into category 1 and they will pay you the San Francisco pay regardless of your location (or you can find an employer who will). But if your contribution is shipping high quality, but fundamentally non-novel, Node apps or similar, you'll find that the "standard" salary is that which is paid in Timbuktu, and if you're sitting in San Francisco and want more, you'll have to provide your employer with a compelling reason, or they'll just opt to hire a second person in Timbuktu instead.
Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs
#20It shouldn't be a question of cost of living. Companies pay significantly more (or less) in local markets because of supply and demand in those local markets.
Historically those markets have been localised due to the fact that few companies employed full time remote team members, and relocating countries is intentionally made difficult and expensive.
If we see a sustained transition where a significant percentage of companies (even in just particular industries) support full time remote work, we should expect to see supply and demand for talent in that market to become less localised (time zones are still a thing, and full time remote is different to full time remote _and_ distributed).
If that plays out, you'd expect locations with historically lower compensation to get a bump (regardless of cost of living), and locations with historical higher compensation to get a reduction (again, regardless of cost of living).
Companies don't care what your expenses are per se. The valley is an intensely competitive hiring market which forces up compensation, which in turn forces up cost of living - housing supply is very finite and many people living there have lots of disposable income.