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

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

#361

Post by stubish »

mc10 wrote: post #316
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, wh…

Companies with huge cash reserves are not optimizing things to save money. Companies dripping with cash will continue to have their offices in prestigious locations and continue to pay absurd amounts of money for acquisitions we roll our eyes at, because money to them is cheap. Same way some people buy absurdly overpriced luxuries, because the price is not an issue.

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

#362

Post by bogomipz »

cletus wrote: post #354
bogomipz wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Of course, with Brexit, I'm headed for Zurich." I would be curious what the tech job market is like like in Zurich. Can you elaborate on that are you EU resident or have taken a job offer with a company based there?

I worked for a time in Zurich years ago so this may not be current but there are some tech jobs in Switzerland (eg Google has a decently sized office there). It's less than in, say, London. Switzerland is actually a dream for car-free living. You only need a car if you live in a rural area. Taxes are pretty low. There a bunch of mandatory insurances you need but my experience was your net income position was substant…

Thanks. I think I knew Google had an office there. I'm curious if you or anyone else knows if there are other interesting tech or startup shops there?

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

#363

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #357
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That goes without saying and is already accounted for implicitly in anything I already wrote. You’re pointing this out like it’s a surprise or somehow contradicts what I wrote, but it doesn’t at all. The “least they can pay” floor is just being moved up closer to the fair level indicated by the actual contribution to revenue. Remote work just strips exploitative regional employers from their many decades of greedy fr…

I mean it also opens up the entire Indian subcontinent and anyone who doesn't want to move to the headquarters. Workers compete with each other for jobs, they can't really just demand their marginal value of labor unless they're truly unique. Remote work seems likely to lower the floor even more, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

The entire world has already been a recruiting source for FAANG for more than a decade, both remote & via paid relocation & visa sponsorship.

People seem to think that opening up India as another source will drastically lower wages, but I don’t see any reason at all that this will be true - and if the reasoning is just “more supply generally means lower prices” then you’re totally wrong and supply & demand 101ism should just get straight ignored in this conversation.

Hiring a competent and trustworthy software engineer, even at entry level, is extremely hard and expensive. For every 100 computer science applicants, maybe 15 are hirable, 4 are good, and 1 is sincerely worth it.

You can increase the candidate pool but that rate doesn’t change. And if the sources of education and training are substandard in other markets (only a fraction of Indian students can get education or training on par with mid-grade or higher Western universities), the rate of acceptable candidates is even lower. Factoring in the overhead of visas, it is just super unlikely to result in widespread wage reduction.

Besides that, there is still employer competition. Employees don’t typically bid on jobs by quoting lower prices to undercut peers, especially not in a collaboration-based industry like software. Rather, employers compete.

A lot of companies would gladly double their engineering headcount even at San Francisco wages, if only they could actually find that many acceptable candidates.

I admit these dynamics could change. For example if the fraction of computer science job seekers who are actually capable of doing the job at a minimally acceptable level grows much higher than ~20% then perhaps replacements will be cheap and common.

But right now the industry is not at all like that. I welcome remote workers from all over the world. If they are good enough to get hired, then they deserve a wage close to their impact on revenue just like their SF or NY counterparts. I don’t fear this will cause wage depression for me one bit. It will give them access to better quality of life they have earned, and will make our teams more culturally diverse and globally minded. I think all around it’s only a good thing.

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

#364

Post by anm89 »

kibibyte wrote: post #301
jrochkind1 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not stopping until we reach FANDANGO.

My personal favorite that I've seen is FLAMINGASS (Facebook Lyft Amazon Microsoft Intel Netflix Google Apple Salesforce Square) (at least one of these is definitely a bit of a stretch)

That's awesome! I'm sure the press'll be picking that one up any moment now.

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

#365

Post by vinger »

dt3ft wrote: post #293
88840-8855 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you trying to say? Anyone can demand a greater salary if their qualifications are in demand. If they are not - they should consider working on learning new skills which are in demand.

What would you recommend now?

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

#366

Post by PhoenixReborn »

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?

Really depends on the location. I spent a bunch of time with family in suburban/rural Ohio as a kid, and the area where I used to live has rapidly been emptying out over the last 10-20 years. IMO, techies moving to rural areas is good as those areas have been experiencing depopulation for quite some time.

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

#367

Post by [deleted] »

purplecats wrote: post #305
2W2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

nice! how do you manage that? I have a system that tracks how long I use my work machine for, and visualizes it in a bar that is 10 units long. I got by doing this for about 15 months before they started somewhat catching on. Productivity is still the same, but some things are leaky. I'm nowhere near your TC though. I feel like you are a smarter, more optimized version of me, but I hope to get there someday and that'…

[deleted]

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

#368

Post by RHSeeger »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #203
RHSeeger wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same in the US, with different percentages. From: https://bench.co/blog/accounting/calculate-payroll-tax/ - FICA tax is 7.65% (6.2% social security, 1.45% medicare) - FUTA tax is 0.6 to 6.0% (varies, iiuc) - And then employers (generally) also pay an amount towards health care. But that's not a tax, per se; more of a mandatory "benefit"

Most of all of that comes out of the salary on your payslip in the US.

None of that comes out of the salary on your payslip. Rather, you also have your own contribution to those things, separate from the one your employer pays.

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

#369

Post by jhpriestley »

adamcstephens wrote: post #355
jhpriestley wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

What are these numbers comparing? Property taxes? Don’t discount the many sources of funding in America. The state and federal governments can and do pay for infrastructure, along with long term bonds paid using sales and other taxes. The suburbs benefit from the highways to the suburbs, but the suburbs don’t fund them.

Can you point out for me then where the order of magnitude suburban inefficiencies are accounted for?

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

#370

Post by brewdad »

odiroot wrote: post #106
AhtiK wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Probably because if you maximize the pre-tax salary, except for a few edge cases, the net salary will be maximized too. The difference between the two is largely out of one's control.
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