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

551–560 of 624 posts

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

#551

Post by bumby »

JAlexoid wrote: post #529
nybble41 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ta…

There's too much of "we know better" attitude. Where people fail to realize that what they want to force other people to do - is not necessarily the best option.(the typical issue of healthcare and freedoms) In the end getting back to the OG topic - it ends up being forced social engineering, instead of freedom and social fluidity. People who can only et paid 6 figures by virtue of geography are going to shout and sc…

>There's too much of "we know better" attitude.

I think this is the cynical view that paints it in an arrogant light. The alternate is there is an acknowledgement that the system is less than ideal and could be improved.

>People who are awesome get shafted

I mean, isn't this par for the course in any group environment? If you're healthy, you get shafted by paying more into insurance than you use. If you're wealthy and subjected to a progressive tax structure, you get shafted by paying a disproportionate amount of taxes. Sometimes I wonder if getting shafted is part of the cost of living in a stable society. You agree to carry a load so that in the event you need it, somebody can carry the load for you. Game theory shows that this leads to more optimal solutions as long as you can keep free-loading within certain bounds.

I used to be a staunch libertarian but came to realize society doesn't work so well when it's structured to only let the top percentile be successful. At a certain threshold, the top percent will always be successful. The utilitarian in me is concerned with finding a way to may the most people successful, which means gearing some policies to the mean rather than the high performers. To that utilitarian perspective, I think it's a more optimal use of resources if you consider human capital one of the more useful resources.

I've noticed libertarians tend to be those high performers who would tend to benefit (or perceive themselves to benefit) from not being held back. I personally moved away from it because most of the discussions seemed to lack nuance. Even Ayn Rand collected social security when her health started failing...

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

#552

Post by geodel »

NationalPark wrote: post #366
baron_harkonnen wrote: post #140

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 conside…

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.

Well if you can negotiate extra pay for living in cheaper area mainly due to inhospitable conditions, more power to you.

I have seen this happening only for CEOs and such.

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

#553

Post by bumby »

JAlexoid wrote: post #525
bumby wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is literally the opposite -- providing benefits to private interests. While true in many cases, I don't think it's always initiated this way. Many subsidies start as a social good and then perpetuate based on lobbied interests. My favorite example is the subsidy for alpaca wool. This was started as a social good to ensure there was enough cold-weather gear to fight the Korean War. However, this subsidy continu…

The problem with subsidies is - no one is going to willingly relinquish them.

This is true; nobody wants to give up free money or a competitive advantage.

But this isn't to say subsidies are bad in and of themselves; rather it means you need strong leadership willing to make tough or even unpopular decisions. The recipient's opinion should have very little bearing on whether the subsidy is an overall good.

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

#554

Post by bumby »

nybble41 wrote: post #550
bumby wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the impression from your previous posts that you take the libertarian mindset to markets. That's not a bad thing per se, but I think it diverges from what most of society implicitly wants. You stance optimizes for liberty as you rightly point out. People, however, generally want a society that balances liberty and stability. Laws and policies are enacted to try and find that right balance. It's similar to the c…

> People, however, generally want a society that balances liberty and stability. Stability is certainly a worthwhile goal, to a point—in the end nothing alive can be completely stable—but there is no reason why it must come at the expense of liberty. The main issue is negative externalities, which are already addressed by the Non-Aggression Principle; i.e. your liberty applies to yourself and your own property, not o…

>but there is no reason why it must come at the expense of liberty.

I do think there are times when they are juxtaposed. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is the cliché. Ideally they can coexist, but for the libertarian ideal to work, humans have to be rationale. I think we are anything but rational although we like to pretend we are most times.

>unless they consent.

That consent, to a certain extent, is implicit on being a willing participant in a free democratic society. It's part of the social contract.

>"the people are the government" in approximately the same way that individuals cells are a human being

I don't think I agree with this analogy. A collection of human cells cannot volitionally decide for the human being to become something wholly different. A government, by the people, can change it's entire makeup to serve it's changing values. When I say the people are the government, I mean the people in a functioning democracy have the power to make the government reflect their value system. I feel like you are misinterpreting my statement by reading it through a individualist/collectivist lens.

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

#555

Post by superfrank »

arrosenberg wrote: post #541
superfrank wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have a positive or negative take on the situation. It's the workers' rights to try and fight for a higher salary and it's the companies' rights to either pay them or tell them no. The majority of the workers affected by this are making well above the poverty line, so I'm happy to let the free market handle this. What I do have a very negative view on is articles like this that try and frame it as some…

I don't think the author is pretending it isn't about money - that seems to be the central thesis of the entire article. The point they are making is that if the author wants to live in India, if the work is entirely remote anyways, they shouldn't have to provide additional value. If his work was worth $100K when he lived in SF, why isn't the equivalent work worth $100K in Wichita? To me it seems like a recognition o…

> The point they are making is that if the author wants to live in India, if the work is entirely remote anyways, they shouldn't have to provide additional value

They should because there is nothing stoping their company from hiring someone else in India for the Indian market rate.

> If his work was worth $100K when he lived in SF, why isn't the equivalent work worth $100K in Wichita?

His work wasn't worth $100k. It cost $100k to hire someone who was willing/able to do his work and come into the office.

> but software companies should expect to pay a national rate for those types of jobs going forward if remote work is going to be more of a standard

I couldn't agree with you more, but I think a lot of people have things backwards. People in the Bay Area (etc) were being payed wages far, far above the national rate. These companies aren't cutting wages below the national rate, they're attempting to remove the premium they were paying to local employees.

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

#556

Post by forest_dweller »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #258
forest_dweller wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying it’s a power relationship is another way of saying the same thing that you are saying here. The amount of power that employer and employee have is based in large part on supply/demand. However, power includes a little bit more: an employer who has a better knowledge of the market may be able to extract lower pay from an employee who doesn’t know their market rate, and an employee who is exceptionally well suit…

> Saying it’s a power relationship is another way of saying the same thing that you are saying here.

The way you frame the power imbalance is framed suggests that there is always something coercive and manipulative going on. A market rate suggests that a the hourly or daily rate for labour has settled naturally around a particular point through market forces in that particular area. Developers are more in demand in London so the day rate offered reflects that (typically £100-200 more).

You seem to be conflating two concepts into one.

> The amount of power that employer and employee have is based in large part on supply/demand.

What do you mean by power? I don't want to sound rude but the way you are talking about it is akin to how people talk about the force in star wars.

> However, power includes a little bit more: an employer who has a better knowledge of the market may be able to extract lower pay from an employee who doesn’t know their market rate, and an employee who is exceptionally well suited for a given job has more power to negotiate a better rate.

What you are arguing there is being informed about the market means that you won't get ripped off. Generally though there will be an approximate wage for a particular type of work based on how valuable the employee is and whether they can be replaced or not.

There are job boards these days online for almost anything you can work out what you are going to get paid for a particular type of role.

> Of course, this can also be reframed as a supply/demand scenario taking into account imperfect information for a given scenario, but that’s largely my point. They aren’t equivalent concepts, but they are closely related.

Again don't want to sound rude. This all read likes double speak to me. If you want to talk about a coercive power imbalance then talk about that. If you want to talk about market rates talk about market rates. Simply call things what they are.

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

#557

Post by jacobolus »

aeternum wrote: post #509
jacobolus wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The appropriate way to fix that problem would be to directly give the money to the people who have trouble paying for food, instead of giving it to dairy farmers.

This (some kind of UBI) does seem like the best solution to give those that don't have money a say what we produce. But this still doesn't address tail risk like war or disasters. Importing 100% of the nation's food might make sense from a market POV but is a significant risk from a strategic POV. Markets do not seem to handle low probability events very well.

Subsidizing the heck out of corn and soybean production while keeping average income low has resulted in an unbelievably unhealthy diet, and incredible external costs to the environment, while centralizing and corporatizing agriculture and making a small number of people extraordinarily wealthy.

There are many better ways of accomplishing the geopolitical goal of maintaining enough food supply and production capacity to keep people going in a crisis.

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

#558

Post by kgin »

Wages are set by the minimum amount it would take to replace you with a different sufficiently qualified worker. That's it.

It has nothing to do with any other abstraction. If someone else can do the work for less (including the cost of finding and hiring that person) then you're going to get paid less.

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

#559

Post by kgin »

ukoki wrote: post #347
satyrnein wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value you bring is the ceiling on your compensation; employers are not going to pay more than that. Your cost of living is the floor; you're not going to take less than that. The spread between the two is what you're negotiating over.

Your cost of living is not the floor -- just ask Uber drivers. An income of less than the cost of living is still better than nothing. The floor is the next best thing you have available, or the minimum wage if applicable.

The unfortunate thing is that "cost of living" in this floor definition is literally the cost to stay alive. The floor in a pressurized market will not be the cost of a comfortable life, just a life at all.

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

#560

Post by IggleSniggle »

forest_dweller wrote: post #556
IggleSniggle wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it’s a power relationship is another way of saying the same thing that you are saying here. The amount of power that employer and employee have is based in large part on supply/demand. However, power includes a little bit more: an employer who has a better knowledge of the market may be able to extract lower pay from an employee who doesn’t know their market rate, and an employee who is exceptionally well suit…

> Saying it’s a power relationship is another way of saying the same thing that you are saying here. The way you frame the power imbalance is framed suggests that there is always something coercive and manipulative going on. A market rate suggests that a the hourly or daily rate for labour has settled naturally around a particular point through market forces in that particular area. Developers are more in demand in L…

I’m not talking about a power imbalance, I’m talking about pay being a function of power equilibrium, of which market forces are one significant (perhaps most significant) component in a market society.
Post reply on HN