Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

nityesh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 624 posts

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#131

Post by yboris »

bserge wrote: post #82
joelbluminator wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny how people expect moral behaviour from other people Do we though? We expect people to not break the rules, e.g murder or steal. We don't expect people to stop eating meat, polluting the earth, or generally to stop being extremely selfish. If we expected everyone to be moral you and I wouldn't be spending money on vacations and buying computer games but on trying to save poor kids in Africa and Bangladesh…

Over the years, I realized that everyone is selfish and will literally throw you under a bus for the right amount of money, or some other acceptable incentive. Laws keep people in line, except for the few who break them and get away with it. Maybe I'm hanging around the wrong people (I often wonder where all the "right" ones are), but that's how it is. And if I don't play the same game, I'll keep getting fucked until…

Once you make claims like "everyone is", it sounds like you've given up on evidence, or have a tautological (always true) definition.

Empirical evidence says otherwise (about altruism): see the work of Daniel Batson - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Batson

As for good people, there are many. There are thousands who give at least 10% of their income to the most cost-effective charity they can find - https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

There are thousands of people working very hard on the most effective solutions to the world's most important problems - https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

There is plenty of hope. Find better people, work to improve yourself, the world, and others.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#132

Post by internet_user »

forest_dweller wrote: post #95
rwmj wrote: post #36

Pay is a power relationship. No one is asking company directors to take a pay cut based on cost of living calculations, because company directors have power over their companies. Similarly cleaners are paid peanuts even if they have to live/commute to high cost of living cities to do the job, because cleaners have no power in the relationship. This is also why workers who unionise can be paid more - the union has pow…

No it isn't about power. Labour is a market and is governed by the laws of supply and demand (typically). A cleaner gets paid less because it is unskilled work and almost any able bodied person can be a cleaner. Same someone that stacks shelves in a super market. The same happens in our industry. VB.NET developers aren't in demand, the contract rates are sometimes £200-300 a day less than a React JS / C# .NET Core de…

What are the rates for React/C#?

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#133

Post by couchand »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #109
bumby wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pervasive misconception that you are paid for how much value you bring. In a market economy, you are paid commensurate to how much you can negotiate. The value you bring (real or imagined) is part of that negotiation, but so are other factors. It pains me to see people get frustrated by this fact.

If a company is going to use the lazy COL argument, they're going to do so no matter what. Take 2 people of equal skill, experience, and negotiating prowess. One lives in SF, another in Kansas City. Both apply to the same remote position for a SF-based company. The company will always take the one in KC. I don't see how negotiation skill has a role in this. Unless there are people out there who have successfully nego…

> Take 2 people of equal skill, experience, and negotiating prowess.

This just doesn't exist, not even in a hand-wavy rhetorical sense.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#134

Post by ghaff »

lgleason wrote: post #89

If you live in the US and are advocating for this be careful what you wish for. It could lead to your 100-200K per year salary being cut to well below 100K to equalize across all engineers including those in low cost areas such as China and India.

Even if you leave other countries out of the equation, equalized salaries across the country is far more likely to everyone being paid medium cost of living salaries (say, Chicago), rather than Bay Area.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#135

Post by kome »

sremani wrote: post #125
lgleason wrote: post #89

If you live in the US and are advocating for this be careful what you wish for. It could lead to your 100-200K per year salary being cut to well below 100K to equalize across all engineers including those in low cost areas such as China and India.

The Software Developers will follow the path of the Autoworkers of the 60s, once a high paid and esteemed profession which becomes a menial job with average pay. It is not that far either, I bet Software Developers do not have beyond 7 years for this to take shape and of course, those massive layoffs are just around the corner when remote works becomes the standard.

> The Software Developers will follow the path of the Autoworkers of the 60s, once a high paid and esteemed profession which becomes a menial job with average pay.

yeah... but the choice here is political, it's not the natural forces of the market (it's rarely the natural forces of the market).

Working in Germany as autoworkers, you still get a more than decent wage. Sure, work is hard. But money is good.

America instead, decided to get cheap till the point to move plants to Mexico or Asia. It was a political choice.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#136

Post by jasonjayr »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #112

> You should expect "equal pay for equal work" at your new remote job So naive. In an ideal, utopian world? Maybe it would work this way. Maybe. In reality, your compensation is a function of your negotiating power. Some people, in fact, manage to get the same pay even when working remote, because they're "highly employable". Others don't. And let me add: I almost agree that remote work shouldn't necessarily command…

Then companies should have no problems whatsoever with Unions? I mean, if a group of employees want to get together to amplify their negotiating power, then they should not stop that?

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#137

Post by internet_user »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #127
cambalache wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I always laugh at the naivete of many people from first world countries : "Wow down there in Mexico the dollar is worth 10X/8X/6X times as more". No, it fucking is not. Or let me rephrase, it does but just for an extremely small subset of things. Cars? No, more expensive in the third world. House? Not at all, for a similar house, same quality of construction, and neigborhood, expect to pay at the very least the…

How can local wages (in a currency other than USD) be "pitiful", but food cost "the same" for the USD? These are incongruent. Locals wouldn't be able to subsist on those food prices. The USD has greater purchasing power, that's just a fact.

lower standard of living. people settle for less.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#138

Post by falcolas »

nicoburns wrote: post #126
falcolas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 'misconception' comes from two big sources, IMO: 1) Leadership is paid for the value they bring. Primarily through huge stock grants as part of their multi-million dollar compensation packages. 2) Companies always discuss employee compensation, especially raises and bonuses, in terms of the value an employee has relative to their peers. So, it's no wonder that people believe that their value has something to do…

> Leadership is paid for the value they bring. Primarily through huge stock grants as part of their multi-million dollar compensation packages. No they're not. They're massively overpaid relative to value they bring. They generally get these multi-million dollar compensation packages regardless of performance. Presumably this is also because of their power to negotiate which is high because they're more or less in ch…

Overpaid or not (I tend to agree that they are overpaid), if a significant portion of their compensation is stock grants, then that portion of their compensation is directly tied to the value of the company.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#139

Post by ma2rten »

klodolph wrote: post #91

Often overlooked in the discussions about privilege and equality is the discussion about how citizens of different countries are given different levels of access to the same jobs. Like, I’m a US citizen and have basic programming skills. Not long after college I landed a software engineering job and I immediately have access to markets like SF or NYC, all I have to do is pack up and move (and it turns out I don’t eve…

This comes down to a philosophical question: what would be the ideal way to give access to opportunities? Should only smart and hard working people people get them? Both of those things are in large part determined by genes. If you take this to the extreme we could give every child a gene and IQ test and determine based on that if they should live in a slum or in luxury.

I don’t think that there is a good answer.

Re: "Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

#140

Post by baron_harkonnen »

This will happen but people will should not be surprised that we all get paid Topeka KS salaries not San Francisco CA salaries.

The long term strategy of location pay differentials may seem like punishing people for leaving SF, but it's the opposite.

I've been paid 80% of SF rate to live in the middle of nowhere and anyone else who has done this will realize it's an amazing deal. When a 3000 sq ft house costs considerably less than your 1 bedroom apartment, you realize that your cost of living didn't just drop by more than 20%, but that standard of living went way up.

The long-term play from tech companies suddenly going remote is that in 1 year or so, once a sizable portion of the workforce has relocated, the "salary reduction" to move out, will become a "salary enhancement" to live in SF. Then the conversation will be "Look Matt, it really doesn't make sense to pay you a premium just because you want to work SF. If you want to stay that's fine, but we'll be downgrading your pay to meet company standards."

Post reply on HN