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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

First off, $125k is the entry level wage in NYC and SF. That's what you pay fresh grads out of college. The author massively understates the wage gap between the core job areas and peripheral cities. Any recruiter offering a senior hire $125k to relocate is working on the behalf of complete idiots.

Secondly, distributed teams are nonsense, from an economic point of view.

Why on earth would I pay someone in a "flyover state" $80k when I can get very similar talent for half as much in Argentina? If I'm willing to compromise on time zones, I can pay even less in Eastern Europe or South Asia.

The only reason that your bloated American wage is justified is communication. Good English skills can be purchased in any market in the world, for much less than what Americans demand. Being on site, in the damn office, is how you earn that money.

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> Good English skills can be purchased in any market in the world, for much less than what Americans demand.

Is this true? My experience differs; even hiring semi-technical roles where the most important factor was "high-level English competency" I've had really disappointing results. It gets better if you're willing to deal with less than that, but that's a pretty rough compromise for a lot of highly collaborative roles.

Strong technical skills are easier to source, but strong technical skills without good communication is tough to square.

Are you allowed to require a TOEFL score? I work in academia and find it’s pretty indicative of good English comprehension, and universally done by international students.

I'm not sure, to be honest. I've always had to go through on-site intermediaries, after whose filtering pass I would pretty much downcheck everybody else.

AFAIK that's legal grey area. Aptitude tests in the US are generally illegal because they act as stand-ins for IQ tests, with the specific exception of ability tests proven to be relevant to the job at hand. That's why programming tests get a pass for programming jobs.

So I think it would depend on if you could convince a judge that the TOEFL score is relevant to the job at hand, and not just being used as a discriminatory stand-in for an IQ test.

It is legal (at least based on the guidelines provided by the US Department of Labor: http://www.onetcenter.org/dl_files/empTestAsse.pdf) to give people all kinds of tests as long as (a) they do not select against certain protected traditionally disadvantaged classes more than it does for the average applicant or (b) if it does, there is a demonstrable link between the test and ability to perform job functions (so, for instance, a test of strength in a job that involves lots of lifting may select against women, but if strength is highly correlated with job performance, that is OK).

> First off, $125k is the entry level wage in NYC and SF.

It's the entry-level wage at top-tier tech companies, and a few second-tier who can compete with them at the junior levels (like Bloomberg). It is not what the average new grad should be expecting.

The numbers really are crazy wrong. My total comp as a new grad in SF tech industry was $170k, in 1998. A “senior software engineer” at Google, which is the median grade of engineers at that company, makes around $500k/yr in total comp.

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