51–60 of 233 posts
Of course that depends upon proper judgement and valuation of employees and prospective employees.
People should be warned that working remotely has been career suicide for as long as I've been in tech. Being "out of sight, out of mind" from management generally means you're passed over for promotions, and often the first to get cut during layoffs. It's just human nature. It's easier to layoff the person that's been working from across the country (or another country) than it is to layoff the person at the desk ne…
Facebook and Palantir both used to pay people up to $10k/year to live within a mile or so of the office, since the cost of living in SF & Palo Alto & Menlo Park was so much higher than the rest of SFbay. I don't know if they still offer that perk, but I can attest that the increased costs of rent within a mile of those offices would, at that time, burn up that entire $10k and then some, relative to the rest of SFbay.…
(Source: I worked for fb)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is how thing should be. Let say I shop for a gadget. I pay for that gadget not because the value it deliver but the least amount required to get the value it deliver.
Sure, if you think human beings should be treated like disposable gadgets.
And human beings are not being treated as disposable gadgets. Their labour is behaving like any other good in the market. There are some specifics but for the most part it is true.
There's no should to this. It's merely observational truth.
This is one of the things that's always bothered me. Let's say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K. You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. In other words, the company will (eventually) make more than $150K per year off my contributions to the company. But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, O…
They know that not only does the company have a wider choice of employees - the employee has a wider choice of employers.
They also know SV companies pay more then $90K, and if they already have a decent gig they will not 'settle' for what they could get at a small company. They may not ask for the full $150K - but they are going to ask for say $120-125k. End result is salaries will start to homogenize around the country.
P.S. We've seen this in AZ as more tech comes in, salaries have been getting closer and closer to SF.
This is one of the things that's always bothered me. Let's say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K. You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. In other words, the company will (eventually) make more than $150K per year off my contributions to the company. But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, O…
The $150k is not what your work is directly valued at, but rather an agreement of what it'll take for you to drag your ass to San Francisco, which is objectively a bad place to live if you're a human that has to make budgets, and come to work at Facebook. Also yes, if Facebook starts to hire remote workers, then your value will drop because they now have the access to a pool of workers who don't want to drag their as…
They don't pay based either on value added or cost of living (which is why compensation is higher in the Bay Area compared to London).
They pay based on market rate where the target is something like 95th-percentile based on market surveys they do. Presumably this hits some sweet spot in acceptance rate vs cost. Employee compensation is a big ticket item for these companies on the balance sheet so they're highly incentivized to put a lot of thought into their setups.
Additionally if we truly go fully remote salaries will almost certainly go down just looking at the supply change alone. Previously these companies only hired
* A) People who met the hiring bar
* B) People who were willing to relocate to one of office location
If you remove B you've massively increased the available talent pool.
This is one of the things that's always bothered me. Let's say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K. You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. In other words, the company will (eventually) make more than $150K per year off my contributions to the company. But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, O…
As someone who's run two remote companies now, I have struggled with this dilemma as an employer. Because I agree with you, if a person is worth $x to the company, their location doesn't change that.
The flip side, though, is that I also want people to be on relatively equal footing. Not everyone can move to optimize their relative adjusted income, and the problem with a salary number is that it doesn't reflect status. An entry level SF salary will get you a house + a lake house in Oklahoma. A person who owns a vacation home is living an entirely different life than someone with a roommate in Oakland.
If you _don't_ adjust salaries for cost of living it makes that even worse, because suddenly you're probably paying less than someone in SF or NYC needs, more than what most people need in other states, and paying a crazy high localized salary to someone in Vietnam.
All that said, we're doing the same salaries regardless of location. And I'm still not sure that's the right choice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You've made a calculation: my value to the company is greater than $150K, and $150K is a price you're willing to pay to leverage that value. You are in for some surprises then. Companies don't pay you just in relation to the value you deliver. Most companies pay the least amount required to get the value you deliver. Now if you are competing against engineers who are willing to accept lower salary due to low CoL in…
How can it be otherwise when it "should be"? I get that it is vexxing to the workers in the high COL area but why would it be done otherwise? How could it even work otherwise within the constraints. The only reason to pay more for higher COL jobs is if they get more utility.