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

Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 414 posts

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#101

Post by wooger »

nly wrote: post #82
yhoneycomb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to maximize earnings, I almost wonder if it would be cheaper to rent the cheapest possible place in a remote area with a higher COL/salary, and then just live in a cheap area.

Yes, but until remote work is the norm it's a quality of life trade-off. Living in low COL area around London for instance is complicated by the fact that the entire commuter zone, for certain classes of housing, is basically priced at central prices less cost of commuting. If you want a comfortable family life, with a bunch of kids, then you're looking at a long commute. Housing in the UK is severely messed up thoug…

Yeah, at least the US has multiple cities with similar pressure on price, the UK market is so unbalanced by London.

But anecdotally a huge swath of the younger population is moving to Birmingham or Manchester to escape the South East price crunch.

It's essentially insane for anyone not on or approaching 100k GBP to even bother with the South East at all imo.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#102

Post by cabbageoverload »

steverb wrote: post #65
peteretep wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are Spotify’s artists? I thought the artists contracted with record labels

It is pretty straightforward to get your music on Spotify and all the other streaming platforms. No record label needed. There are very inexpensive services that will do all the leg work for you, but it take approximately 230 streaming plays on spotify to earn a dollar.

How many plays should it take to earn a dollar? I don't know anything about the music industry.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#103

Post by cletus »

nly wrote: post #20

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities. My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies: South East England, outside London: 1x London: 2x New York: 3x San Francisco: 6x On making hay: A friend of mine is currently…

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop.

Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC.

I don't believe Big Tech will ever go fully remote. There are inherent advantages in physical colocation. I see this as a means of satisfying the ever-increasing demand. The Bay Area in particular is both largely exhausted in available talent and saturated in how many more people can be supported (given available housing and infrastructure).

Disclaimer: I work for Facebook and have gone remote.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#104

Post by wooger »

Smaug123 wrote: post #22
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #3

This could create a "golden chains" situation for employees, whereby they don't leave their job only because of the money, despite not being happy or as productive as they could be.

Isn't this an age-old story? Choosing whether or not to take a pay cut to get work you prefer? My initial reaction to "oh woe, my employer pays me so much that I don't want to leave!" is "… and this is a problem?"

I think 99% of the population would quit today if they didn't need the money.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#106

Post by odiroot »

AhtiK wrote: post #42
senko wrote: post #29

PSA: When comparing US and EU salaries (or anywhere, really), use total cost to employer (excluding fixed office costs), or total benefit to employee (incl. taxes paid in their name and health/retirement costs). US salaries are mostly discussed before taxes, while often for EU countries it's after taxes and/or after mandatory health insurance and retirement savings.

Which EU countries have net salary in their employment contracts? Employment contracts in Germany have gross salary (Bruttogehalt), all the social security, healthcare and taxes will be deducted from that amount. Estonian employment contracts are a bit of a mix: the amount listed is gross (brutopalk), but the employer pays an additional 33+% on top of that gross salary for social security etc.

I used to have when I worked in Poland. Was really surprised, after moving to Germany, people don't seem to care about their net salaries.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#107

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

tpetry wrote: post #66
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you don't think people doing the same job you do don't deserve the same pay. It comes across as classism to be honest, looking down your nose at people because they don't live in the most expensive areas of the country.

You do understand this wrong! The message is that any startup/company not in the valley will have a hard time finding employees. Until now every company paid a salary fitted for the locale the company is in: You are in an area with a low cost of living you are paid a lower salary than elsewhere. But from now on you can get the inflated valley salaries from everywhere. They are so high because cost of living is very h…

> But from now on you can get the inflated valley salaries from everywhere. They are so high because cost of living is very high and competition with other companies too

You have it backwards. Silicon Valley salaries are not “inflated” nor are they unreasonably high. In fact even at large FAANG companies, engineers are underpaid relative to actual revenue contribution, it’s just that competition drives those companies to pay closer to a fair value wage.

Across the US, engineers are massively underpaid due to specious rent-seeking policies by employers who tether pay to cost of living (treating it like an allowance for employees instead of an earned wage).

This change where remote employees can earn the same high salary based on their value instead of being a paternalistic allowance based on their employer’s opinion of where they live and what they should be allowed to afford, it is a good thing, because all these rent-seeking companies acting like vampires on low-wage suppression due to location are going to have to radically change, get rid of their paternalistic attitudes, and start being fair with employees.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#108

Post by pnutjam »

syshum wrote: post #81
0_____0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny because cities are more efficient from an energy and carbon footprint perspective. The only thing that makes it unsustainable is that some cities haven't figured out how to make it so everyone who should abbe able to live there can afford it

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

Utilities, deliveries, etc... Urban areas are way better in many ways.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#109

Post by sokoloff »

cletus wrote: post #103
nly wrote: post #20

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities. My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies: South East England, outside London: 1x London: 2x New York: 3x San Francisco: 6x On making hay: A friend of mine is currently…

You'd be surprised at how few people can do these jobs. An eye opening exercise is doing interviews and seeing how many people with years of college and/or experience can't code a for loop. Demand exceeds supply and it's market forces not location that is the key driving factor here. Want a data point: London is roughly as expensive as NYC or SF yet the Big Tech total compensation is 30-40% less than SF/NYC. I don't…

Those can’t-loopers are interviewing for many scores of jobs before they wiggle slightly higher on one interview and get hired.

The ones who can code interview at a couple places and pick from among their offers.

I don’t think you can extrapolate from how many terrible coders you see in interview pipelines that the industry is overall terrible.

The interview selection processes working is what you’re seeing.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#110

Post by pnutjam »

eptcyka wrote: post #93
marvin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the US have significant employer tax? A data point from Norway: Employer tax of 14% of pre-tax salary is paid by employer. Employer also has to pay 2-13% (dependent on individual negotiation) of pre-tax salary for retirement savings. These are both part of the cost to the employer, and are rarely considered part of "total compensation". So employers have to pay an extra 16-27% of each person's salary in addition…

I've never understood why there's a split between what taxes get paid by your employer and what taxes get paid by the employee - in the end, the employer pays all of them anyway. I'd like to know exactly how much money an employer would have to pay for a given amount of money landing in my bank account in a given time period.

As long as there is a hidden "benefits tax" that varies wildly from company to company, it doesn't matter. It's crazy to try to compare offers in the US.
Post reply on HN