The thing about remote work is.. it could become a global marketplace now for talent.
The big companies could get to off-shore again in a global remote-first re-jigging.
Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
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Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#72This 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…
> "you get paid differently depending on where you live"
If I'm relocating to SF from middle of nowhere where I got paid 80k, without a cost of adjustment increas I can't afford SF.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#73This 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…
And the dev in Eastern Europe is wondering why is the dev in San Francisco getting 10x as them.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#74Funny how no one was complaining when they got a 50 to 200% raise by moving there. It just makes sense - why would you pay more than necessary?
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#75This 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…
I kind of understand where you’re coming from and as an employee I agree... but on the other hand when you relocate from TUL to SFO you expect a COLA, right? Why would COLA only apply one way?
If the company honestly didn't care where you lived and you took it upon yourself to move to SF, you wouldn't get an adjustment.
But if the company needs you in SF, then they'll need to pay what it takes to hire someone in SF, regardless of where you lived before.
It's only a cost of living adjustment to you. To the company, it's what they have to pay to get an SF worker. It just happens to be higher than what you were making before.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#76This 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…
> The $150k is not what your work is directly valued at
Indeed, presumably you are worth more than that to them. It's a pretty naked cash grab to cut salary in response to a location move, and somewhat illogical considering they moved their HQ to the bay area in the first place. If it's objectively bad and expensive, why not move your HQ to Austin or San Antonio or Portland?
> 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 asses to San Francisco and can pretty easily settle for less since their rent doesn't require them to bleed money.
For now. It remains to be seen if bay area rents are high because of tech salaries, or if tech salaries are high because of rents. Likely they feed back into each other. And as a worker in SF, you have access to all the same remote opportunities.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#77This 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…
I always see comments like this from individual contributors. I'll give you the managers perspective. You may be worth $150k, any one individual engineer could be worth multiples of that! Look at your entire engineering team, from best to worst. Is not there some inflation of salaries in the SF Bay area? The bootcamper that is making $110k out of bootcamp? Are they really 73% as effective as you? The marketing person…
You’re acting like the company is assigning value to people and paying them accordingly. That’s not how it works.
Pay is determined by the labor market.
Substitute wizzle for “senior engineer”, and wozzle for “bootcampers” or “marketing”.
Facebook pays $150k for wizzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones. It pays $110k for wozzles because that’s what it costs to get good ones.
People (reasonably) want a specific combination of wizzles and wozzles, for growth, different roles, etc.
At no point does Facebook assign a price for wizzles based on their expected individual contribution. Maybe there are some “market makers” in some industries, but I don’t think it applies in tech.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about where you live. It's supply and demand. Those companies artificially limited their supply and provided a ton of demand within their narrow market. They are now opening up to new markets and spreading out the demand accordingly. Forced analogy time: It's like if I decide I'll only buy peaches from the organic farm down the road. They charge $20/lb. I calculate that I get $21/lb worth of utility. The Far…
The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF. Tech companies typically do increase your salary if you move to a higher CoL area.
>The part that doesn't make sense though is keeping the employees that live in SF, or paying an employee more if they choose to relocate to SF.
The buyer (Facebook) may not be playing all their cards. They may very well intend to reduce SF employee headcount, but want to experiment, and so saying otherwise will allow them to do it in a slow, controlled manner.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#79This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows the general compensation strategy for all the major tech companies. 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 acceptanc…
> If you remove B you've massively increased the available talent pool.
i'm not convinced this is the case. maybe by a bit...but massively? if you look at all of the places that all of the top paying FAANG companies are located--lets keep it within the US for simplicity's sake--you've got basically all of the major cities with the top talent. I'm not really picturing THAT many brilliant developers that fall under the bucket of: a) really smart and able to pass FAANG interviews b) not willing to relocate if they did get a huge offer
sure there are plenty of outliers, but my gut feeling tells me that MOST of the talent that really cares enough and wants to be at FAANG are already living in most of the tech hubs currently. i dont think the surge of competent applications will be that meaningful statistically speaking.
not sure if i communicated myself clearly here, sort of rambled.
Re: Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts
#80How do new hires get trained remotely, and will it be as effective? It's a problem I just thought about.
At my company, they fly you out to train with your boss/senior dev for a week-long intensive. After that, it's easier to get the rest of the knowledge transferred remotely. But I have no doubt you could train someone remotely if you put a little more planning into it (automate environment setup, good written documentation, good video chat software).