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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?

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Because not all jobs are remote, so local jobs make up for a considerable amount of the job pool. For this reason, it's easier to get another job at your current location, so that's the competition the employer is faced with. If you live in an expensive area they're not paying you more to help you, they're paying you more to be more competitive with other companies in your area.

This line of argument is ridiculous. Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?

What if you hire a great remote developer who lives in San-Jose, then she moves to Kentucky 6 months later, and their contribution is still the same. Why should their pay be adjusted?

Because a huge factor of pay is cost of living. The only reason people in San Jose are getting paid so much is because they are in San Jose and could not survive otherwise.

> Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?

Yes?

I would like to repeat this comment here:

This is the sentiment I usually see but how are one's expenses or expected living standard is relevant regarding compensation for work? Imo it is very hard to argue against equal work => equal pay. At least from a moral pov.

Btw that is a lot of incorrect assumptions about expenses, including where someone's children might want to go to college, globally fixed costs like work equipment and cloud services, not to mention goods which are actually cheaper in the US.

> Yes?

Since when? I'm pretty sure I've never seen any variation in software prices except international variances, which are most often a case of with/without tax and currency fluctuations.

I think he simply read that as "Do they pay less (for living)?" and not that they pay less for software. No one could seriously think that you pay less for software based on your location, compared to other people in the same region/country.

S/He quoted the whole thing:

> > Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?

> Yes?

Yes, he did, unfortunately. Gasp. The humanity. Now get over it. You understand that he meant paying less for a flat, not for an OS. So stop pretending and go on with replying that you still think it's wrong to base the compensation on the location's living expenses, for whatever other new reason that you now need to come up with.

> You understand that he meant paying less for a flat

No. If I understood that, I wouldn't have replied as I did, would I now?

> go on with replying that you still think it's wrong to base the compensation on the location's living expenses

But why is it a location's living expenses? If a company is paying people to work remotely, location should have zero impact on remuneration: they aren't asking you to live anywhere specific, so there is no business reason to use location as a cost factor.

I'm not hearing a counter-argument. The company needs to get good people to work for them. And this is a way of getting someone from a high-cost location to work for them. If the location's higher living expenses aren't covered for, the person would be unable to take the job. I don't know if you mean that the company should adjust their lowest pay according to the world's most expensive location, but that would probably not sustain the business.

> this is a way of getting someone from a high-cost location to work for them

Why is that a requirement? Do you somehow think the Bay Area has a monopoly on good developers?

If the company finds a person that they want to recruit, and that person happen to live in a high-cost location, they will need to pay up in order for the recruitment to happen. The only alternative would be to offer relocation to a lower-cost region. It doesn't have anything to do with any requirement. It's just a result from the way the world works.

Given that most people aren't hired that way, it's more like:

If a person wants to work for the company but their offered salary isn't high enough to sustain a high cost of living environment, the person will need to either move or find another job.

The company has literally the entire world to find staff - that's the whole point of remote workers.

True. Still, I think most companies will take cost of living in the area where the potential employee lives into account. When thinking about it it seems odd, indeed. I guess it is kind of normal and expected. But entirely rational it is not.

GitLab has made a big deal about working remotely; I thought that's what they did. https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/

> not all jobs are remote

GitLab claims to be "Remote Only": https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

That's correct. We don't have any offices. You're free to work from home, a coworking space (by our expense) or anywhere else, but there's no GitLab office.

We have a 'headquarters', which is also where Sytse (CEO) lives, where there are a number of desks available for special occasions, but no one is ever required to work from a particular place.

So, to quote the original post that prompted the theory about "not all jobs are remote", which I then replied to:

> Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?

It does not matter how big you are on equal opportunities, work and compensation, when you can use your (cherrypicked) metrics to point your fingers at the market regarding salary discrimination, it would be irresponsible not to do so. Put it another way, if it was legal to discriminate against <underprivileged group> companies would be all over it.

PS it is not about GitLab, I like their service (even better than GitHub) and it is great they are transparent about compensations. IMO if they were to eliminate location from their calculator they could get the cream of a very big talent pool.

Especially for remote position when you can live wherever you can imagine.

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