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

businessinsider.com

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

#311

Post by andrewstuart2 »

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…

Is the justification for paying 6x more that those companies presume there's greater than a 6x increase in output due to network effects? I honestly haven't seen anybody try to justify the expenses over just trying to hire for the same qualities, but more dispersed.

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

#312

Post by chillacy »

ornornor wrote: post #146

What does it take to work for this kind of company though? I have about ten years experience, been focusing on frontend for the last few years. I have never worked at any of the big names and I have a bachelor degree that’s not in CS or mathematics but I’m a decent developer in my opinion: I write clean, testable code. And yet the major tech players always reject me before even a screening call. Which makes me think…

If you're fairly good at coding interviews, last I checked interviewing.io lets you skip the line to onsite at big names like Uber and Lyft.

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

#313

Post by yowlingcat »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #272
headcanon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works both ways though. The 6x places might move to, say, 4x over time, but the 1x and 2x places will salary upwards to compete. As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.

A company that goes fully remote might simply choose to close offices in the 4-6x places. > As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself. I worked for a large tech company that started going remote before COVID. Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United S…

> Why hire a $100K Midwest US engineer when you can hire two good international engineers for the same salary and not have to pay for their health insurance?

As I mentioned in another comment on this thread, engineer salaries are bimodal. I believe this is because labor demand is bimodal. It sounds the company you are describing has this hiring philosophy: we prefer to hire as many mode 1 engineers as we can for the dollar. However, there are also companies that have a counterparty hiring philosophy: we would rather have a smaller, more mode-2 engineer centric organization than a larger more mode-1 engineer centric organization.

What's more, I've noticed that the small, more deliberately leveraged organizations have a strong bias towards the latter hiring philosophy, because it applies not just to their technology divisions, but to the organization as a whole. In finance, it's the boutiques; in technology, it's the startups. Large companies that are able to maintain mode-2 centric culture exist, but generally only when they have high-profit revenue based on R&D.

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

#314

Post by ffggvv »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #311
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…

Is the justification for paying 6x more that those companies presume there's greater than a 6x increase in output due to network effects? I honestly haven't seen anybody try to justify the expenses over just trying to hire for the same qualities, but more dispersed.

theyre actually that much better IMO. the bay area has unbelievable talent.

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

#315

Post by chillacy »

penguin_booze wrote: post #207

I wonder if this will make non-techies' life even harder. Right now, thanks to the relatively higher pay, techies are concentated in cities/urban areas. With rermote work possible on a permanent basis, all these relatively well-off techies moving to rural areas; and with their spending power, wouldn't they drive up prices?

Probably good for the businesses in the area which can raise prices though. Someone's profiting.

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

#316

Post by mc10 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #272
headcanon wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works both ways though. The 6x places might move to, say, 4x over time, but the 1x and 2x places will salary upwards to compete. As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself.

A company that goes fully remote might simply choose to close offices in the 4-6x places. > As someone who works in the Midwest USA, I don't see anything but upside for people like myself. I worked for a large tech company that started going remote before COVID. Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United S…

> Once they started pulling out of expensive cities and opening offices in cheaper foreign countries, it became an uphill battle to hire anyone in the United States at all.

Facebook, Google, etc. have offices around the world, but that hasn't led them to close any of their US offices. If there were enough equally qualified candidates in these areas that would accept compensation at a fraction of Bay Area salaries, why wouldn't they follow suit?

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

#317

Post by andrewstuart2 »

ffggvv wrote: post #314
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the justification for paying 6x more that those companies presume there's greater than a 6x increase in output due to network effects? I honestly haven't seen anybody try to justify the expenses over just trying to hire for the same qualities, but more dispersed.

theyre actually that much better IMO. the bay area has unbelievable talent.

Isn't that because the companies that attract that talent and pay those salaries are there, though? I don't doubt you, but also there's nothing about the geography of the SF bay that gives people more talent.

The only reason I can think that a company wouldn't start elsewhere, or decide to move to save on costs while hiring the same talent level (who presumably wouldn't mind lower TCO) is the network value of existing bay area talent.

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

#318

Post by yowlingcat »

88840-8855 wrote: post #244
nassycheezy wrote: post #231

Please take note that Spotify pays sub-market salaries for these cities. The reason being that they do not offer RSUs but instead public stock options without any discount. - Typical FAANG compensation: X base pay + Y RSUs + Z signing bonus - Spotify: X base pay + Y stock options (public, so equivalent to you purchasing stocks really) + no signing bonus

This is ridiculous. I find well paid devs super arrogant. Some of them made 150k, 200k, 250k - while other people, also qualified, make salaries that are not enough to start a family and have a decent life.

> Some of them made 150k, 200k, 250k - while other people, also qualified, make salaries that are not enough to start a family and have a decent life.

I don't understand why they are arrogant. Is it because despite making that level (which is objectively nowhere near the ceiling for global SDE salaries), they still want more? I can understand the cognitive dissonance of viewing that number without context, but I think it might be worth taking a look at something like levels.fyi.

Look at engineer salaries at FAANGs at top hubs such as SF, NYC, LDN. The reason they are so high is because the companies need to pay that amount to get access to the talent they need to run their companies. If they could pay less, they'd save billions (maybe trillions), so they would have already tried that. And indeed they did, before they got taken to court for collusion lawsuits.

The truth is, as high as engineer and tech salaries are, they're high for a reason. They get very expensive things done. I don't see anything arrogant about that. On the contrary, what I would find arrogant is expecting them to do that without taking their fair share.

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

#319

Post by WWLink »

2W2 wrote: post #290
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…

I already only do 10 hours of work per week in this pandemic WFH. No one seems to notice. I’m L6 at google. Why not double down and get two “full time” jobs. I’ve heard from my friend in BoA that he works less than 1 hour per day. TC: 800k

geez lol. I am envious!
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