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Comment by sinanata | Hacker News Reader

Short answer: Pay-rate should be decided based on actual skills, not zip code.

Long answer: I'm looking at it from a different perspective, why people have to live in SF? The cloud-wages concept is mostly applicable for knowledge workers, I agree, and it's a limitation. Pay-rates should be decided based on objective test results and skills. I strongly object to the "vanishingly thin" part. For setting the average, I think market dynamics will do its job and find a range that is lower than insane SF rates but still super attractive for people who happened to live outside of the US and capable of getting the job done.

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So what should be the basis for setting that wage? Someone earning $100,000 per annum would be in the top 0.01% of people in, say, Poland. In Vietnam, add a few zeros. In Finland, top 1%, and that's a developed Northern European country.

What does an influx of super-rich tech remotes settling in, I don't know, Thailand do to the local economy?

This is happening as we speak, in the past couple of years, I've visited Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey for meeting with senior software engineers primarily.

In Ukraine for example, knowledge workers working remotely for US and Western European companies are actually one of the highest-earning social groups. Same for Egypt, Brazil, Russia, and Turkey. Local economies are benefiting from the USD flow and more importantly, the knowledge/experience flow.

I genuinely believe that there's no such thing as "engineers/designers/etc from X country is better than Y". There are only skilled individuals and the competition for hiring them will be brutal in the next 5 years.

Five years ago, it was almost impossible to find a great software engineer from emerging markets for a remote position. They were literally asking "are you guys some sort of Nigerian scam?" People started to believe that working remotely is actually possible and paying much better than their shitty local average.

I must say, I really enjoy your smart questions, thanks for the great convo buddy.

Thanks, you too.

My worry comes from the asymmetric nature of the flow of currency on a population level, leading to (further) inequality. That's the gist of my problem. Not to say that we should be paying peanuts for workers in poorer countries, mind. We absolutely should be paying the value of the work done, but the truth is, purchasing power is different in different countries.

Agreed and when you pay them better, in time, more and more highly skilled individuals from these markets are going to join your remote organizations. I think it's a healthy and fair competition.

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