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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I always thought geographic zones for remote employees are a bit weird. Living somewhere expensive (within your country) seems like a lifestyle choice like any other. People would think its rediculous if we had different salary bands based on other lifestyle choices like how much you like to go to fancy resturants or something.

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Cost of living is almost a red herring at this point. The real driver of geographic compensation disparities was always just the cost of competing for talent in that area. The only thing that mattered was if a compensation offer was higher than the employee’s other options.

Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.

This assumes there is no elasticity to where people live. For many people there is a cost at which moving to a higher COL area for an adjusted salary makes sense. Or in general someone may be looking to move for the right job at the right price, etc.

>Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.

I tend to agree with this, but I think there is also a dichotomy of destination cities (where people with lots of money move to because it's nice, not necessarily because they will make more money there) vs. non-destination cities which can distort prices absent of wages. See: Vancouver, parts of LA, parts of the NY area, Miami, etc.

> Living somewhere expensive (within your country) seems like a lifestyle choice like any other.

Right. I'm really looking to be able to drive a Tesla and vacation several times a year on remote tropical islands. Should my company pay me more for that choice?

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