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

611–620 of 624 posts

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

#611

Post by baron_harkonnen »

ryandrake wrote: post #578
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…

> 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. As a counter-anecdote: I moved from the Florida panhandle to the SF Bay area, and while certai…

> in 2019 the amount I was able to put away into 401k, IRAs, and other tax advantaged savings accounts exceeded my entire Florida gross salary in 2009

Note that I specified 80% of a Bay area salary, not an arbitrary salary difference. You're implying that you got a 25% raise to move to SF and were able to life off of only 20% of your new salary?

I'm not comparing average middle of nowhere salary to SF, I'm saying that for remote workers you typically get something like 80% of an SF salary, typically dramatically higher than most locals get for similar work. Were I lived I was still easily making double what most other tech people in the area were paid.

Getting double or triple your old salary will of course make the move to SF worth it. But if you can work in the FL pan handle for just 20% less than you make know, you'll live amazingly.

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

#612

Post by bumby »

whimsicalism wrote: post #608
bumby wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a mandate in the formal governmental legal sense. It is a mandate in the corporate administrative sense. The problem is many people don't feel they should be forced to pay into an organization that doesn't reflect their values in order to have a job. In some ways, it's similar to the notion that many people don't feel they should pay taxes that go to support something they don't personally support (e.g., abo…

Yes, corporations can require you to join a union and maybe that is a "corporate mandate." I'm unsure of the relevance to "freedom of association" as a negative concept, though. You are still free to associate with who you wish, just as corporations are free to not associate with you if you do not join a union. If we are going to transform a negative right to not join a union into a positive one, there are many other…

>freedom of association" as a negative concept

I don't think it is negative as a concept. I agree that, in theory, it is best to always err on the side of more freedom, not less. In practice, however, it can become negative if you think people don't always act rationally. Which is why I don't know if the right to work is good policy; part of me feels like it takes advantage of humans short-term bias, and leads them to limit their own long-term rational best interests.

It's very much like the social media debate going on right now. Part of me just wants to say it's better to have a completely open marketplace and let the chips fall where they may. But another part of me feels like there is a very real danger this will hijack human psychological shortcomings in a way that is not good long term. Maybe the cliché that "people get the government they deserve" is the closest I can get to reconciling the two.

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

#613

Post by philwelch »

JAlexoid wrote: post #524
philwelch wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farm subsidies generally serve a few purposes in the US: 1. Maintaining the political support of farmers 2. Maintaining surplus food production capacity in case of some contingency (e.g. war). The same is true for many developed countries. The US government actually produced “government cheese” with surplus milk to help support dairy farmers, providing the cheese to schools and welfare recipients. The EU has also exp…

FoodStamps was literally created to give farmers money, indirectly. There's one issue with supporting individual products - government cannot change these rules with the consumption patterns of individuals. As such - it's not the subsidies that are the primary issue, it's the fact that the government decided that milk gets the subsidies... but almond milk gets the full market price.(As in - vegans are actually financ…

There have been counterexamples, such as federal dietary guidelines that promoted margarine as healthier than butter.

In any case, almond farming in particular is just awful.

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

#614

Post by teachrdan »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #572
KittenInABox wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions can be nativist but a tech union shouldn't have to be just because another labor union might've been. Ageism is on the worker's shoulders, but those workers are also managers who choose to do bullshit like lay off workers above a certain age across a company. We need ways to protect ourselves from that.

> " Unions can be nativist but a tech union shouldn't have to be just because another labor union might've been. " There is no "might have been". It's pretty much a matter of historical record that labor unions were fiercely anti-immigrant. Judging by nativist comments even on a heavily moderated forum like HN whenever the topic of H1-Bs comes up, the many, many immigrants in the tech industry would be have to be bon…

Here is one big counter-example: The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, a union with two million members in the US. They call for comprehensive immigration reform tied with labor conditions. Teachers' unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association also call for compassionate immigration reform.

The old stereotype of nativist unions is just that. It's true in some cases--see the Teamsters, who also supported Trump, or police unions--but the actual union movement in the US has long fought for better treatment for immigrants.

https://www.seiu.org/cards/solutions-for-immigration-reform-...

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

#615

Post by ryandrake »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #611
ryandrake wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As a counter-anecdote: I moved from the Florida panhandle to the SF Bay area, and while certai…

> in 2019 the amount I was able to put away into 401k, IRAs, and other tax advantaged savings accounts exceeded my entire Florida gross salary in 2009 Note that I specified 80% of a Bay area salary, not an arbitrary salary difference. You're implying that you got a 25% raise to move to SF and were able to life off of only 20% of your new salary? I'm not comparing average middle of nowhere salary to SF, I'm saying tha…

Ahh you are right. A 20% difference would definitely not be worth it. Also, I’d move back to the middle of nowhere in a heartbeat for 80% of a Bay Area salary.

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

#616

Post by jpollock »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #314
jpollock wrote: post #289

If you can move to a cheaper location and perform your job, your job can be exported to a cheaper country and performed there. It is possible to outsource jobs overseas, but the additional friction in communication will frequently overwhelm the benefits. I learned this from watching firms first outsource to New Zealand and then to India, only to pull the work back because the communication and training issues were hu…

Timezones are a harsh, harsh mistress. In general, anything more than 8 hours either way is pretty much impossible (and 3-5 is probably the most workable). Additionally, cultural differences are super super important (and ignored in a lot of these discussions).

Although, a good 12hrs lets you do follow-the-sun support without having to be woken up in the middle of the night! :)

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

#617

Post by kolbe »

bumby wrote: post #574
kolbe wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all depends on what your goal is. Unions take money from R&D and shareholders, and put it in their own pockets. That's totally fine, but it is a tradeoff. The negative side is it creates opportunities for other companies that aren't unionized to innovate with that capital. Or sometimes it just results in returning capital to shareholders. Tesla is a good example of where paying union members instead of investing i…

I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard that R&D angle before. But I wonder is HN would be so positive on TSLA if it were instead “Musk decided to pay his engineers less so he could innovate instead!”

Engineers are R&D

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

#618

Post by joelbluminator »

ironmagma wrote: post #609
joelbluminator wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not eating food that I have a problem with. Its choosing steaks, pork and beef when there is a huge amount of alternatives. The fact we are brought up like that and are hooked does not make it any better or morally sound. The fact that everyone is doing it makes it Ok in your eyes? Please explain. Everyone was a nazi in Germany at a certain point.

It doesn’t make it OK, it just makes it bad and reasonable. If I’m in Nazi Germany and all my friends and family are Nazis, and my neighbor too, I’m going to think less of my neighbor but not exactly hold it against him as much as if there were 100 Nazis in the country and he was one. There’s reasons people have at that point for being Nazi, even though the thing is ultimately terrible. Group dynamics, which are more…

Well you kinda solidify my argument that we don't expect people to be moral, at least not 100% or not even 50%. We expect them not to break society's rules, and whatever capitalism allows - they can do, with no social stigma. We give each other a free pass because we know change is hard (is that the functioning of a society striving to be moral?) Now whatever capitalism allows - meat, unbridled consumerism, extreme selfishness etc, these are things with severe side effects. In the case of buying clothes the suffering is a bit more subtle (I suppose you refer to worker's conditions in poor countries), and since it's paying for someone's job somewhere you could argue it's in the grey area. But the meat industry isn't in the grey area, it couldn't be more black than it is.

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

#619

Post by bumby »

kolbe wrote: post #617
bumby wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard that R&D angle before. But I wonder is HN would be so positive on TSLA if it were instead “Musk decided to pay his engineers less so he could innovate instead!”

Engineers are R&D

Not necessarily and it often depends where you work. Many (most even) are in support roles like maintenance, etc.

E.g., I’ve previously worked for an automotive manufacturer on controls software. I was attached to the maintenance team. The design engineers were a subset of the entire engineers population. In other places I’ve worked, R&D was mainly done by scientists and physicists, not by engineers who served to support the R&D effort

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

#620

Post by ironmagma »

joelbluminator wrote: post #618
ironmagma wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t make it OK, it just makes it bad and reasonable. If I’m in Nazi Germany and all my friends and family are Nazis, and my neighbor too, I’m going to think less of my neighbor but not exactly hold it against him as much as if there were 100 Nazis in the country and he was one. There’s reasons people have at that point for being Nazi, even though the thing is ultimately terrible. Group dynamics, which are more…

Well you kinda solidify my argument that we don't expect people to be moral, at least not 100% or not even 50%. We expect them not to break society's rules, and whatever capitalism allows - they can do, with no social stigma. We give each other a free pass because we know change is hard (is that the functioning of a society striving to be moral?) Now whatever capitalism allows - meat, unbridled consumerism, extreme s…

I wouldn’t say it couldn’t be a grey area. For many, it’s easier to get fresh meat than it is to get fresh vegetables, such as if you’re a farmer in a food desert but you have livestock, or even if you’re just living in a place like Alaska where a lot does not grow. There are also dietary restrictions leading some people to need a higher than average or even entirely carnivorous diet.

Bottom line is that while there may be morality inflation, i.e. when you judge the modern lifestyle on an absolute scale, it looks bad, that there is still a range of acceptability, and if you venture outside of it, that’s no bueno. That doesn’t mean we don’t expect people to be moral (100% would be “perfect”).

Post reply on HN