Why Remote Work Should Change Startup Culture

With startups it's quite difficult - remote law, pay and equity. Law for contracts and equity in different countries vary. Buying power is inconsistent. Stock options in particular are strongly biased against holders with lower pay, since they will have to take greater risk to buy their stake at cost of many more years worth of salary. You got to make sure so many things add up in multiple places, otherwise it's just a matter of common sense for remote workers to eventually see themselves at disadvantage and act on it.

If more startups allowed remote workers, would the salaries of developers fall in the bay area?

This may be the case, but I'd guess the vast majority of software work is salary only. Having remote workers working as self-employed contractors should actually make the paperwork a lot easier for the company.

Several months ago I interviewed for a remote position with a startup based in NYC. The technical screening consisted of a project and of course a couple of phone interviews.

After I did well on all of that, I was flown up to NYC for a 'culture-fit' interview. Which I failed, apparently. As a mid-30s guy who was raised in the mid-west, I felt like I had very little in common with the 20-something urbanites with whom I was interviewing.

They didn't seem like bad people at all, and I didn't foresee any issues working with them (esp. remotely), but apparently I gave off a strong enough 'not-like-us' vibe to cause them to pass on a demonstrated technically-solid candidate (because if there truly is a shortage of good developers, this would be an incredibly silly thing to do).

Possibly, if it were large enough scale to truly impact the supply of labor at a sufficiently lower price point to matter.

There are a variety of remote work arrangements: 1) local employees who have employers with liberal work-from-home policies (they're "remote" when they don't commute in), 2) employees who are always remote, but still in-state (located in the same state as the employer), 3) employees who are always remote but still domestic (located in the US), 4) employees who are always remote and located internationally.

The first two kinds of remote employee don't incur (much) additional cost to the employer. The third kind can incur non-trivial additional costs in the management of payroll (state income taxes, labor/unemployment fund requirements, etc.), especially if done at any scale. Larger companies can do this because they are already established in multiple states, but smaller ones tend to impose restrictions on where remote workers can live and even whether they're permitted to move to a new state and still remain employed. The last kind is a whole other ball of wax--it has the same tax and payroll management problems of the third kind, but additional complexity I'm sure.

Then there is the additional overhead of managing remote teams. Having experienced being an "individual contributor" and coordinating with project management to manage remote teams I can assure you this is not a trivial thing and involves its own costs.

So all these factors influence how much lower the salaries have to dip before they are worth it. Personally, I doubt remote work will impact salaries in this area much anytime soon.