Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should get fair wages. But that's just not how it works in different societies. "Fair wages" means different things in different places.
in particular, if i want to keep my european lifestyle, malaysia ends up being more expensive than europe. same goes for most other asian countries. it gets worse with kids. education is very expensive in asia if you want to get the same quality as europe. and i also need to factor in expensive travel to visit family back home.
average cost of living is meaningless.
life is only cheaper if you accept the local living standards and if you don't have any family on another continent. so you are telling me that me having to accept a worse standard of living than you is fair?
Up front, I believe everyone should be paid the same. I want that. But I do accept local living standards. I must - and therefore I am paid less. It's just a reality of our world today.
I think this conversation is about how global our economies are. Which I think are more local than people believe. Also keep in mind that cheaper living isn't always worse living, just cheaper.
and i decidedly disagree that cheaper living isn't always worse. it is. that was the whole point of my post. traveling to visit family, sending my kids to a school with european standards, getting insurance for european quality medical care, all are expensive no matter where i go.
i have lived on 4 continents in dozens of countries. i have yet to find a place where a high standard of living was cheaper.
cheaper living always required trade-offs.
Why not?
I understand why GitLab does it, it increases profits, but why can’t you pay someone in Malaysia Silicon Valley wages? If there was an individual contributor they wanted badly enough they’d break policy and I’d be surprised if there aren’t some people for whom exceptions have been made.
Well, yes, but $1 in Malaysia goes a lot further than $1 in SV. So "equal pay" isn't really equal at all.
COL-adjusted salaries are perfectly reasonable in my opinion.
Would I be happy to be paid the regular rate of a Malaysian developer while I live in Silicon Valley? Or would I demand a higher pay? Does that mean everyone in the Malaysian office gets paid more? Does the company go under?
GitLab is in a weird position because they have workers in both. We don't chastise a local Malaysian company for paying the local rates, but we do for GitLab?
It's an unfair reality, but not an unlivable one. A cheaper lifestyle isn't necessarily a degraded one.
That still doesn't make it fair. I personally believe these global companies could step up and try to change that. But that's if it weren't about profits - which is is.
Who budges? Do the global companies lower their prices or do local economies step up and pay more? Or even are they able to pay more?