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Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

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Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#61
> What do others think about this and how do you deal with this?

One word: counter-offer

Welcome to the world (plane?) of zero-sum games and adversarial strategies! Appealing to fairness doesn't help in this world - because the values and corresponding strategies of your management and yourself are fundamentally adversarial to each other - that is, your delta of profit is their delta of loss. People like to argue sophisticated game theoretical takes that serve to obfuscate this simple truth.

For a more esoteric take: You could as well model our life as a trajectory unfolding across a stack of "planes" - most common people manage to constrain their limited & valuable attention to "narrative plane" or "social plane" where the main "control points" (as in Bézier curves) are mainly various narratives floating around and signals of social (dis)approval applied to you. Compared to the harsher plane of adversarial game theory I mentioned earlier this social plane is much more fuzzy and forgiving (main message - be a nice person, get an average nice life). Yet for all its self-evident harshness, keeping one's attention away from the adversarial plane (where the main control points are hard decisions, often legally-powered, decisions bearing heavy financial and business implications) leads one to sub-optimal outcomes.

If you play this game by its true rules, your score will increase. That being said, I agree with the increasingly common sentiment that this is long-term unsustainable (sobering statistic: https://florentcrivello.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/image... ). Some solution is increasingly becoming necessary, and this solution is likely some form of UBI.

Why our politics is dominated by various local and global non-sequitur causes and not this sobering issue of rising necessity of UBI is an exercise left to the reader.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#62

> What do others think about this and how do you deal with this? One word: counter-offer Welcome to the world ( plane? ) of zero-sum games and adversarial strategies! Appealing to fairness doesn't help in this world - because the values and corresponding strategies of your management and yourself are fundamentally adversarial to each other - that is, your delta of profit is their delta of loss. People like to argue s…

Haha, this seems important but I don't fully understand what you're saying. Will need sometime to process this.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#63

Your pay is based on the cost to hire your replacement. That’s it. There’s no crazy conspiracies, there’s no moral failing, they’re not running a calculator of how much value you generate. Would it sap your motivation to learn there are people doing your same job at FAANGs making double what you make? Or that some other job makes more money than you? Location based pay is just another variable. As with everything in…

Its not a crazy conspiracy, I know it's pretty clear why it's being done. And I know I can't do anything about it other than look for new opportunities. But should location based pay be just accepted because that's the norm? There are variables that can't be used to do discriminate like age, gender, race, sexual orientation etc. We've accepted equal pay for equal work in these cases. Is it that far fetched that even…

If looking at it from a company perspective, I'm not sure I would see much benefit for them in doing so. If a company is based in the US/EU and pays the same wage to workers in someplace like Asia, they would not gain much(financially) by hiring in Asia in the first place (companies that have no need to hire in Asia). Why bother dealing with the grumbling at home about exporting jobs to outside locations if they are just going to pay the same anyway. Might as well be the hero providing jobs to local workers at home and keep the money circulating there. As for the other, age, gender, race etc. All of that is also at home, so not discriminating against it is beneficial. What is not at home are foreign located workers.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#64

Does this same logic also apply to the price of goods and services you consume? For example, when you go to a restaurant in your location, do you pay them the same as an equivalent meal would cost in US/UK? The chef there is just as talented as one in the US, and the value of satisfying a human's hunger should be the same irrespective of location.

Difference here is that we live in the digital world where location isn't a constraint to providing services.

OP said: > I've raised this issue with my manager and they've told me that I can transfer if i want those pay scales but that's not a possibility for me.

Looks like location is a constraint to them.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#65
post #54

The cost of living point is very valid. A great salary in Hanoi is most likely to be a very low wage in San Francisco. You can't expect an employer to pay way above the local market rate for a position. Bottom line, they will always find someone to work if they offer a bit above the local market rates. The salary, whatever miles away makes no difference. As far as how to deal with it, look a round you I bet your sala…

> You can't expect an employer to pay way above the local market rate for a position. This would certainly be true for a business where all the employees and clients are local, but doesn't have to true for a global company with fully remote jobs. If I'm providing as much value as an SF-based employee and demand a raise to 80% of SF pay, the company would be foolish to let me leave.

"the company would be foolish to let me leave"

Fundamentally, if they can find a replacement at a lower cost, they will. Businesses are about the bottom line. No matter what their size is. Fighting that truism will only lead you to frustration.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#66

> What do others think about this and how do you deal with this? One word: counter-offer Welcome to the world ( plane? ) of zero-sum games and adversarial strategies! Appealing to fairness doesn't help in this world - because the values and corresponding strategies of your management and yourself are fundamentally adversarial to each other - that is, your delta of profit is their delta of loss. People like to argue s…

Haha, this seems important but I don't fully understand what you're saying. Will need sometime to process this.

It's ultimately simple: many people, especially people from professional–managerial class (PMC) which keeps rising in its aggregate wealth & prominence during the recent past, will tell you (maybe in a comment section on HN or some other media) that using "counter-offers" as a career strategy is unethical, akin to blackmail. This is a (often performative) niceness narrative common to the social plane.

Be aware that it very well could be the same PMC people who consistently use various tricks to lowball (google it) offers for productive people like you and me in their day to day hiring practice, simply because they can - this is the logic of harsh business plane.

There is no contradiction here.

Counter-offer is something you can use as well.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#67

Does this same logic also apply to the price of goods and services you consume? For example, when you go to a restaurant in your location, do you pay them the same as an equivalent meal would cost in US/UK? The chef there is just as talented as one in the US, and the value of satisfying a human's hunger should be the same irrespective of location.

Well the product this company makes is uniformly priced across all locations. So if i wanted to consume the product my company makes I would be paying the same price as US/UK.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#68
Easy solution, get a p.o. box in a higher cost of living location, and use that as your 'business' location, base your pay off that rate. Make sure it's somewhere the company doesn't have physical locations.

Deceptive you say? Well, why do you even need to disclose where you live in the first place? Everything you need can be done remotely, again you can get a forwarding postal mail address from anywhere if they need to drop you snail mail.

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#69

"If the company is willing to pay me that amount in a different location, why can't it pay me the same here?" Because capitalism. Or more specifically because your company has very little incentive to pay you more than the market rate in your locale, unless you give them one. You can either try to do that as an individual by basically saying "I'll quit if you don't pay me more" or you can try to do it collectively wi…

"Having a presence and hence a team in another location with a pyrodactyl-like employee doing pyrodactyl-like things. Probably quite a lot."

Though this is absolutely true for traditional companies, this company is actually a fully remote one so they don't have a presence as such? I would just be wfh but in a foreign country? I still don't see the point in my perticular case

Re: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

#70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't expect an employer to pay way above the local market rate for a position. This would certainly be true for a business where all the employees and clients are local, but doesn't have to true for a global company with fully remote jobs. If I'm providing as much value as an SF-based employee and demand a raise to 80% of SF pay, the company would be foolish to let me leave.

"the company would be foolish to let me leave" Fundamentally, if they can find a replacement at a lower cost, they will. Businesses are about the bottom line. No matter what their size is. Fighting that truism will only lead you to frustration.

> if they can find a replacement at a lower cost, they will

If that was easy for them, they wouldn't have SF-based employees in that role.

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