Zuckerberg says employees moving out of Silicon Valley may face pay cuts

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, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of "cost of living".

Why? My value to the company hasn't changed! I am still worth the same amount as I was before! The only thing that changed is where I choose to reside. What difference is that to the company?

As remote working becomes more and more acceptable, we're going to start to see companies like Twitter and Facebook competing nationwide, not just in Silicon Valley. An engineer in Oklahoma will now be in a market that includes all of the big giants, and not just the local banks or whatever. Likewise, Twitter and Facebook will be competing against each other in the lower COL areas like Oklahoma! And not just SF startups, but competing against NYC and London startups as well.

This whole area is really fascinating to me, but the "you get paid differently depending on where you live" thing has always struck me as bizarre and one-sided in favor of the businesses and not the people in high demand, like good software engineers.

thats not how the free market works. im not sure where people got the strange concept they are paid what they are worth to the company. or that they are paid based on how hard they work.

its literally just supply and demand like everything else.

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 Farmer is happy.

A few years later I decide that purchasing organic peaches online for $15/lb fits the bill, and utility dropped slightly to $19/lb but still better in comparison. The farmer is no longer happy.

I've been mostly reading the WFH debates here on HN and this seems to have come as a shock to many advocates. You know, companies already had offices in different places you could already move out of SF to elsewhere and this was part of the deal. This isn't anything new, there was never the option of taking your Bay Area salary and living it up in Laos.