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Comment by skeeks | Hacker News Reader

I think it is not fair that everyone earns the same regardless where they live. Cost of living must (and probably already is) included. If everyone would earn the same amount, consequence would be more people moving to areas with lower living cost . Why not even move into a 3th world country and live like a king with your first world salary? Of course, one could argue, that Zuckerberg & co only want to make more money by decreasing salaries for their workforce. Instead of giving this money to shareholders, why not donate it? Especially now, when millions of people lost their jobs..

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You can choose where you live so it is fair. If you want to live at certain area it should be worth it to you. This would optimize the world and make resource usage more optimal. I believe it is unavoidable anyway. As time goes on companies will start to pay based on actual value brought as this is more optimal and competitive. If there truly is a need for there to have at least n persons in each city then they will fill that quota, but rest of the pay will be fair.

No 'fairness' argument visible in that? Why is it OK to discriminate because it's 'voluntary'? (Which is not obviously true). Need some explanation.

> If everyone would earn the same amount, consequence would be more people moving to areas with lower living cost .

What's supposed to be the downside, exactly?

Sooner or later, costs would begin to rise in that area, because the infrastructure, healthcare, etc. must be improved (due to population growth). Meanwhile, in the former high living cost area, prices would drop. Unskilled low wage employees would loose their jobs because of decreasing demand. And somewhere in the future, everyone starts recognizing that the tables have turned and people would start moving back. It's an endless game...

And in the case of gitlab, they state an interesting reason: [1]

> Paying the same wage in different regions would lead to: [...]

> - A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

Why is that a bad thing? Expensive areas over time becoming more accessible and vice versa effectively means that no place is permanently off-limits from the less wealthy.

And what is the downside of that? Seems like the col of world would equalize and in general things would become more optimal.

> Sooner or later, costs would begin to rise in that area, because the infrastructure, healthcare, etc. must be improved (due to population growth).

How many towns were forced to upgrade their infrastructure because you moved in?

It seems to me you are making up extreme slippery slope-type catastrophical scenarios.

Getting back to the real world, I know a few IT workers who had to move to an extremely expensive city when they were hired by FAANGs but since then they were able to move back to their home town while keeping their salary. Could you please explain how your scare story applies to this type of case, which represents most if not practically all cases?

> Sooner or later, costs would begin to rise in that area, because the infrastructure, healthcare, etc. must be improved (due to population growth)

I don't see why that is as the extra infrastructure will come with more tax revenue. For example, Dallas-Forth-Worth and the Houston metro populations are the 4th and 5th largest in the US and have each grown a estimated 19% in the past decade [0] and yet their cost of living still sits right at the national average [1, 2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

[1]: https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator/Texas-Dal...

[2]: https://www.payscale.com/cost-of-living-calculator/Texas-Hou...

Presumably there are some benefits to people coming to the office.

If there truly is then pay extra for coming to office, but not because of their col choices which everyone can choose best themselves.

The downsides are not clear to me as well. The only argument I could think of is a nationalistic sentiment that nations should live & work together but I find it poorly motivated in a global world. I see, however, a lot of benefits of easing out the wealth distribution geographically. And you rarely want to live in the cheapest 3rd world country far away from your family. It's a CoL-vs-comfort balance you need to figure out for yourself - no calculator will be 100% accurate here.

I've been riding this ride through most of my career, working remotely for western startups mostly from Poland. In the end, I don't care how "fair" your compensation policy is - it all comes down to the best alternative offer.

Continued overcrowding of cities. Continued discrimination between nationalities.

> Continued overcrowding of cities. Continued discrimination between nationalities.

Where do you see your "continued overcrowding of cities" if anyone is free to live wherever they want, provided there is a reliable high-speed internet connection?

And exactly where do you see any discrimination if anyone is free to worke everywhere?

Did I miss a left turn somewhere? The thread is about better pay in cities, vs the pay cut if one leaves the city. Better pay for locals (read Americans) vs pay for remote workers which includes all people living in other countries.

But this is obvious. What is the question?

>Why not even move into a 3th world country and live like a king with your first world salary?

And that's a bad thing why exactly?

Well, it would not be a bad thing per se. But if everyone would start doing that, costs will rise again and in the end, situation (high living cost, rents, etc.) will be the same. It is just not sustainable. You may also think, that people in 3rd world countries do not have good access to education, so basically you take advantage of them, only because you were born in a first world country and they were not... Of course, you could be a really generous king and even help the people there to have better access to education. That would be sustainable.

> You may also think, that people in 3rd world countries do not have good access to education, so basically you take advantage of them, only because you were born in a first world country and they were not

How are people born in developed countries not already doing this via importing from countries with little or no labor laws and environmental protections?

If anything, an educated person going to an undeveloped place and sharing their resources that would have gone to an already developed place is a huge benefit for the undeveloped place.

It seems like it would help out low cost areas and the poor and all in all help equalize the world. With proper regulations, taxes, that is.

I don't know that it is, but there is a lot of anguish over gentrification in areas in the US which seems to me to be exactly this, just on a smaller scale. The assumption that "rich" moving into "poor areas" lifts all boats in the area is not necessarily true.

> If everyone would earn the same amount, consequence would be more people moving to areas with lower living cost .

And this is bad because?..

One reason is that wealthy tech outsiders move to poorer areas and drive up real estate values to the point that only wealthy tech outsiders can afford to buy houses (shutting out many/most of the local residents).

I just found an interesting article about the topic, where GitLab explains why they do not pay everyone the same salary [1]

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...

In principle, it is fair to get paid same regardless of where you live because you should be getting paid for your contributions, not where you happen to connect your laptop. However, in current form of capitalism, you don’t get paid in proportion to your yield but rather in proportion to what your employer thinks you will need to maintain living standards they deem you are worthy of. This, in fact, is the cause of inequality where chain of command can decide to keep vast majority of value generated for themselves regardless of true value of their own yield. We often try to justify this inverted economics under the disguise of risk taking or leadership or making big decisions but if you look closely this singular aspect is the cause of why 1%ers exist at all in current system.

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