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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 385 posts

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

#371

Post by mattdeboard »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #191
mattdeboard wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you it's horseshit. What you're saying sincerely makes total sense to me. Has to feel terrible. I would feel detached from my work as well, I think. You're experiencing alienation from the fruits of your labor. Your labor being exploited to maximize profit. Unfortunately, the comments here are right. It "makes sense" in the sense these experiences are characteristic of life within capitalism as a laborer…

You don't know the worst of it. In my country, it is almost always better to be "exploited" by US companies than to be "treated well" by local employers. Sad but true. The USD exchange rate is just too good for exporation of goods and services. They simply offer more, despite the wage arbitrage. More money, more benefits. The typical US software developer salary is a truly ridiculous amount of money here due to the 5…

Yep that uneven competition for labor prices is also exploitation.

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

#372

Post by Spooky23 »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #247
darth_avocado wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your pay is based on the cost to hire replacement What is being described here is supply/demand economics. If you think you’re being underpaid, quit, find something else that pays you more. The reason why you won’t quit is the reason why the company doesn’t pay you more. You don’t have other options, and if you quit, they know there will be 10 other people ready to take you place for those wages. Part of the reason…

> You don’t have other options, and if you quit, they know there will be 10 other people ready to take you place for those wages. I'm just imagining this dude quitting and his manager suddenly realizing that no one else knows anything about the parts he worked on and how fucked they are now. Just because a bunch of people could take your job doesn't mean they'll give a shit about the job. Good, well motivated, employ…

Ultimately, we muddle through. Nobody is irreplaceable.

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

#373

Post by Spooky23 »

swatcoder wrote: post #85
kleinsch wrote: post #22

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…

> Your pay is based on the cost to hire your replacement. That’s it. Only in an imaginary world of perfect information and labor liquidity, which is about as far from what we have (and could have) as can be. Location-adjusted pay for remote US workers is indeed a social norm, proposed by some firms and accepted by enough of labor for it to work for them. It persists mostly because it exists and because there’s no org…

In the US, sure. There are a very small number of employers paying employees in say Eastern Europe, Africa or South Asia the same as an American equivalent.

Hell, I worked for a Canadian company that paid Canadian employees 30% less.

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

#374

Post by Twisol »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #350
redditor98654 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. I recently quit a job (FAANG) after 13 years and I thought I have so much institutional knowledge that mu departure would be impactful for at least a little while. And while I was under no illusion of my importance and did not expect any breakdown of the team or anything like that, I did think I would get at least ONE question after I left from my previous teammates about some obscure thing that I thought only…

Your knowledge is now arcane black magic. The reorg probably shuffled away the people who knew that you knew what you knew, you should be proud.

Having left and (briefly) returned to the same team, absolutely this, 100%. People typically avoid touching functionality they don't understand, for (legitimate) fear of breaking it in unknown ways. New features and changes are built up on top of the existing edifice, rather than trying to change the edifice itself. You end up with an unstable tower of layers in which it's more and more difficult to get anything done -- but not impossible, and not suddenly more difficult all at once. It's a slow boil.

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

#376

Post by Hakashiro »

It appears you are located in an Asian, South American, African, or perhaps another region. I find it curious that you talk about US/EU compensation, when in fact Poland (which is part of the EU) has Google offices that quite literally pay a half of what Google Dublin pays for the same job, and Dublin in turn is a half or a third of what California pays, if not less.

I too have migrated away from my EU country to another EU country because USA is incredibly racist and getting a job there nowadays is practically impossible.

And I do agree. I've said for quite a while that Cost of Living is a scam to appease poor people. It is very simple: after paying housing, and bills, you are left with more disposable income in a place like Seattle than in a place like Warsaw, Poland. Notice that stuff like iPhone or EC2 instances have more or less the same price globally, so it is funny that these same companies adjust pay regionally, isn't it?

Anyway like someone else mentioned, there's no conspiracy. Companies adjust pay regionally because they can. That's it. I don't understand how more people aren't rioting and burning the streets demanding pay according to value produced... but that's almost communism I suppose?

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

#377

Post by abcd_f »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #32
abcd_f wrote: post #27

It's in part the cost of living (which is a very valid argument) and in part basic supply/demand. If there is an oversupply of qualified people in your country willing to work for lower wages, that is what you are competing with, not people in the EU/US.

nothing valid about it except that it's an established coordinated behavior of employers to reduce pay based on region instead of anything to do with value produced

Well, it is almost universal, because wages have always been based on the cost of living as it helps increasing profit, which is the raison d’être of for-profit businesses. This “behavior” however is more of a natural phenomenon rather than something coordinated.

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

#378

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

derefr wrote: post #366
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Source: we are a Canadian company, and hire from everywhere but the US. I don't follow. This isn't true at all in my experience, plenty of companies in Canada and the US hire across Canada and the US. It's practically the norm. If you work for a Canadian company that doesn't hire in the US then you're comically underpaid. Wages are converging very fast. Many companies are paying parity and frankly folks are selling…

(Context clarification: I'm not an employee of a Canadian tech company; I'm a cofounder + major shareholder of one. I'm looking at this from the hiring side, not the being-hired side.) Wages might be "converging" to the same numeric value — CAD$N in Canada vs USD$N in the US — but those are, and have always been, very different amounts of money. The two countries are still nowhere near the sort of economic equilibriu…

> The two countries are still nowhere near the sort of economic equilibrium-state where Canadian companies are paying the prevailing US salary exchanged into Canadian dollars.

You may be surprised to learn that this is quickly changing.

> Take-home pay may be converging, but the cost to the company of hiring a salaried US employee — or even a US contractor, as long as you care about being equitable / not building resentment when your employees talk amongst themselves about relative total compensation — is still higher than the cost to the company of hiring elsewhere.

This is not true in my experience. It's slightly cheaper to hire in the US than other markets, if you do not yet have any presence in those markets. It's a wash long term. Some firms offset the extra costs for US workers benefits by simply paying others more.

> To hire these people, you can't just offer "the going rate"; you have to offer FAANG money.

In the ballpark, but yes. The gap is rapidly closing. Plenty of seed or series As are paying near FAANG rates.

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

#379

Post by wahnfrieden »

abcd_f wrote: post #377
wahnfrieden wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nothing valid about it except that it's an established coordinated behavior of employers to reduce pay based on region instead of anything to do with value produced

Well, it is almost universal, because wages have always been based on the cost of living as it helps increasing profit, which is the raison d’être of for-profit businesses. This “behavior” however is more of a natural phenomenon rather than something coordinated.

Wages are in fact highly coordinated in industries and within hiring organizations (in contrast to among workers where any wage data sharing is shamed and many are uncomfortable to coordinate)

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

#380

Post by paulcole »

soneca wrote: post #33

It is a negotiation not a fairness discussion (even though fairness is part of the negotiation arguments). I asked about it in my current job before accepting the offer and was able to successfully negotiate it. In your situation, it seems that the only way is to look for a new job. Anyway, the way I negotiated was very simple. Basically a version of ”I understand that this is a good salary relative to my local marke…

> I am comparing your offer to offers from other US-based companies that I received for remote work

If you go this route and you don’t have any other offers, are you willing to walk away or will you settle? Or if you do have those other offers, are you willing to take one of them instead of the one you’re currently negotiating?

Post reply on HN