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"Equal pay for equal work" in remote jobs

nityesh.com

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

#511

Post by erik_seaberg »

cambalache wrote: post #117
sokoloff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fine starting point to set the initial conditions. Now, if a company can find a way to harness developers to create $100K of enterprise value per year, they will be happy to bid $50K for qualified developers. Another company that can create $150K/dev/yr will be willing to bid $60K, etc. I doubt you'll see qualified developers seeing a salary cut anywhere near as deep as you project, because the process I des…

> I doubt you'll see qualified developers seeing a salary cut anywhere near as deep as you project, because the process I describe will play out faster than needed to inject the needed stability. In the long term, yes I agree. In the short term? No way, there should be around 5x-10x as many people in the world who would be great competition for FAANG spots who cannot do it now because of VISA and location restriction…

How many people have handled FAANG-scale problems (especially oncall) without ever having worked for a FAANG-scale company? I've learned things from Bay Area colleagues that I never did in Seattle.

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

#512

Post by NationalPark »

inglor_cz wrote: post #482
NationalPark wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself, but you'd have to pay me even more to live in the middle of nowhere than in a city, and this doesn't seem to be an uncommon preference. Especially if you're young, single, have disposable income, and lean left politically, which is probably most of the remote tech workers who have these options.

Fun story. A former chairman of the Czech Green Party, a young and progressive gay guy moved to a rural area, bought an older ruin of some former baron's chatelet and started putting it into order. With his husband. In a year or so, his Tweets started shifting noticeably to the center and sometimes to the right, to a great consternation of his former Green co-partisans. There is something about life out there that ch…

Ha, just goes to show you really can't bucket everyone. Likewise, I know a few younger progressive folks who decided to move to rural, conservative areas (in the US) and got quite a lot more than they bargained for. It's certainly a different lifestyle.

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

#513

Post by dwaltrip »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #468
dwaltrip wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company is found to be discriminating by protected class, they are in big trouble. Sure, it can be difficult to catch. But what is your point exactly? Markets currently play a massive role in determining prices across our entire society. A wage is a price paid for an individual's labor. Labor markets are not perfect. No market is (despite the wailings of the ideologues). We try to fix these issues with specific…

The point is that “the markets don’t work that way” isn’t an argument that “society shouldn’t work that way.” We intercede in the case of protected classes because “economics therefore morality” isn’t a sound argument.

Ok fair enough. Do you grant that some interventions are more practical and cleanly implementable than others?

Perhaps the assumption in the original comment is that legally restricting market discrimination for wages by region may not be practical and / or would have significant harmful side effects.

I would need to give the idea more thought. It certainly seems a far more complex and less clear-cut matter than the existing protected classes.

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

#514

Post by nybble41 »

bumby wrote: post #406
nybble41 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's also potentially a failure at a national long-term level as it has reduced our manufacturing capacity. That isn't a market failure. It's just a recognition that the economy is global, not national. The market doesn't optimize for the benefit of one nation against others. As for "short-term bias", the market just reflects the biases of the people making the decisions—the same as any other system. If people…

> It's just a recognition that the economy is global, not national. True, and good point. > just reflects the biases of the people making the decisions...The market's only real "failure" is that it's too democratic This is a failure if you can agree that people are less than optimal at making decisions, i.e. that humans have biases that work against their own rational self-interest at times. Meaning the market can ex…

> there are times when a completely free market doesn't serve the best interest of society

In my opinion the best interests of society are best served by letting people make their own decisions regarding themselves and their own property, and not by aggression or deliberate attempts at social engineering. I tend to be pro-market on average but really it's not the market I'm interested in so much as liberty. I also take a very expansive view of what the market entails; not just materialistic concerns but the full spectrum of human preferences. Does it always lead to a perfect outcome? Of course not. No system comprised of fallible and incompletely-informed human beings could possibly do that. It's just better than all the alternatives.

All the human failings which prevent markets from achieving optimal results are also problems for the various political schemes that aim to regulate them, magnified by the introduction of force as a "legitimate" means of achieving the desired end state. (It's ironic, for example, that people turn to governments to save them from monopolies—mostly government-created monopolies—when the government itself is the biggest monopoly of them all.)

In the end the real goal isn't to make people "happy"—we could do that much more easily with drugs. Rather, it's to ensure that people can live their lives the way that they choose, so that they can seek happiness, or purpose, or whatever else means the most to them. The fact that people make choices that (in someone else's opinion) probably won't make them happier is not sufficient justification for taking away their freedom to choose for themselves. I happen to think the moral, principled position also happens in this case to be the one that leads to the best outcomes for the most people from a purely materialistic point of view, but this is merely a happy coincidence; it would still be the right thing to do even if it resulted in abject poverty.

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

#515

Post by thinkharderdev »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #174
thinkharderdev wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those two seem equivalent to me. A software engineer in Toledo has a competitive advantage over an equally skilled software engineer the Bay Area because they are able to work at a lower wage without materially sacrificing their quality of life. So by looking to reduce labor costs by hiring more remote engineers in Toledo, Bay Area companies are effectively working to reduce income polarization and spreading the…

Don't follow. How does income get less polarized? Toledo Engineers working remotely but at Toledo pay, are not ahead. I guess they have a larger market for their skills? But that could lower rates thru competition.

Since more companies are hiring engineers in Toledo, competition is higher and pay should rise as well. More importantly I think, good engineers in Toledo don't have to leave Toledo to find gainful employment so they stay and the general economy in Toledo should be stronger.

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

#516

Post by UncleMeat »

csense wrote: post #333

Say you have a startup in California and are thinking about hiring me remotely. It's completely ridiculous that you say "Okay I'll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt." If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move. As someone who actually does live in the Rust Belt, it feels like these tech c…

> If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.

Google has like 100,000 employees. They had a net profit of $34B in 2019. That is 340,000 per employee. From a "we could pay people more" perspective, they are wildly underpaying their employees. That is precisely as much of a jerk move as anything else.

The only solution to this is collective action. I do hope that recognition of "wow, we really do get screwed by the bosses" among remote tech workers will allow the entire industry to see how capitalism seeks to minimize their pay.

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

#517

Post by JAlexoid »

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…

Your whole comment is literally addressed in the article - and the author, without using the same terms, agrees with you.

I don't understand why you think that you are in opposition to the author.

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

#518

Post by JAlexoid »

aeternum wrote: post #312
claudiulodro wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to pay $2 dollars for milk, instead of $20? That's thanks to competition between companies. It's not though. "The support granted to U.S dairy producers represented approximately [...] 73% of the farmers' marketplace revenue. USDA data also reveals that US dairy farmers operate at a loss, and have a cost of production that is higher than what they earn from the marketplace."[1] We're subsidizing the low co…

> the marketplace failed to provide both affordable milk and the ability for dairy farmers to make a living. So the price is both two low and too high? This is not a failure of the marketplace (aka price discovery), this is the U.S. deciding that cheap milk and overproduction is in the nation's best interest and we should socialize some of the production costs. There are logical (milk as a staple product and avoidanc…

Milk has become a staple, because of overproduction.

We used to consume much less milk pre-WWII. And we are consuming less and less cow's milk.

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

#519

Post by lotsofpulp »

FooHentai wrote: post #496
lotsofpulp wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand where people get the idea that prices are based on anything but supply and demand.

Consider the offshoring of manufacturing to undeveloped/developing nations. It reduced manufacturing costs, increased profits to businesses, and/or lowered the price to consumers giving the products a competitive advantage over those made in developed nations. The ability to outsource to places where cost of living and wages were low allowed this to occur. I don't see that the office-based/remote-based working situat…

I agree with what you write, but I don't see what this has to do with price being the intersection of supply and demand curves.

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

#520

Post by JAlexoid »

whimsicalism wrote: post #431
aeternum wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is excess milk production really a social need though? According to the market people would generally rather spend that money elsewhere. Via the subsidy the U.S. is forcing everyone to spend a small portion of their income on milk production.

> According to the market people would generally rather spend that money elsewhere Or some people don't have the money to spend on it at all. This is the fundamental issue with using "willingness to pay" as proxy for "utility consumer gains."

Just because SAD has had a lot of milk in it for the last 70 years, doesn't mean that we actually need it.

Milk consumption dropped and we need to drop financial incentives for it.

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