Tech companies that are paying workers the same rates across US
foxbusiness.com
foxbusiness.com
Even Zillow is only committed to doing it until the end of 2021, according to the article. It is pretty hard to justify paying Silicon Valley or Seattle salaries to people who move away, when other remote workers will accept less. It is likely a bad business decision to do that, given how big the pay differences are.
I think remote work has been subject to a massive hype cycle lately and won't pan out the way the optimists seem to expect. Flexible working arrangements, e.g. spending a few days a week at the office and a few at home, is the most likely outcome for most workers. Living near the office will still be important.
100% agreed. Work from home is likely to see an uptick in companies that permanently allow it (or are open to it), but I very, very much doubt it will be the norm.
> Flexible working arrangements, e.g. spending a few days a week at the office and a few at home, is the most likely outcome for most workers
This is exactly what I want once I'm allowed to go back into the office. The isolation of working from home sucks, and the communication barriers even more so. I'd be fine going in all the time too, but living withing walking/bus distance of my office would be far more important to me then. I do not enjoy being fully remote, and short of long-term travelling, would never willingly do it again.
Strictly speaking, this could also imply that in places where the cost of living is excessively high (coughSiliconValleycough) people are getting paid too much. The implications for where people chose to live if they get paid approximately the same no matter what could rock the residential real estate world the way COVID-19 blew up the commercial real estate world.
Admittedly that could lead to the more toxic gentrification form that you mention, but it could make it more possible for local people in an area like that to start businesses due to the larger local economy. Really depends on so many factors it's hard to be confident.
Very rich hub cities seem to draw so much money away from less wealthy cities. Certainly in UK London has much greater spending and better public transport than basically the entire rest of the UK.
It might be a first step to more equal competition for labour (and naturally for jobs) around a country.
If everyone goes fully remote permanently, this isn’t an issue, but I don’t think a temporary pandemic will lead to that.
Now it looks like this move towards remote will mean that I won't have to sacrifice all the interesting jobs for the sake of lifestyle choices.
Seems like a win to me, at least.
How do you translate value to a $$ amount?
The question is better backwards I think. Should your personal cost of living be factored into your wage for the same work?
And the truth is there is a market rate for labour (usually regionally) and that affects the viability of businesses where they fail if market wages are too high for them to make a profit.
So likely if you work for an established business, you're getting paid less than the value you're creating, and if you work for a startup that question has not yet been answered.
Debatable, do you see cost of living and food as a personal expense? To me they’re basic human rights that every person deserves, if you hire a worker in an expensive city, then the basic cost goes up. Likewise if you hire someone in a place where the cost of living is cheaper, then that basic cost goes down.
But now the question is, what happens when you hire a worker in an expensive city, but then allow them to work remotely from a cheaper city, should that affect his/her salary?
Yes, YOU should factor your cost of living into your desired wage.
I get it that often companies are specifically trying to encourage people to live near their office in expensive cities, but from a standpoint of value created for the company it seems irrelevant what an employees outgoings are.
Presumably greater competition from more places around the world would eventually drive down developer wages in major cities. I do hear a lot of justification in terms of market costs for labour varying by region, but it frequently comes from people who benefit from stock market prices that are not priced depending differently on region.
Maybe it's naive and unrealistic but I'd actually like to see it cause cities to get too expensive and actually create benefit for bringing economic activity to places with lower market wages.
I know the UK most intimately, and I can only imagine how areas like the North East might look if money had flown out of London and allowed more people who can work remotely to live there at higher wages. Would it have caused rifts and gentrification? Would the additional money have made it into the local economy and created more local businesses and a better economy?
There are a lot of open questions and I'm certainly in the camp that supports non-regionalised pay - to the extent I'd sooner work for someone else than accept a pay cut for doing exactly the same work.
Obviously. An employer performing pay cuts is betting that the employee doesn’t have a better option, and/or they are betting the can replace them if they did leave at a cheaper price and still derive the same utility.
Whether or not this pans out is never certain, but it’s no different than the risks of a business changing to a new supplier offering better prices or putting out contracts for a bid.
So when I need to hire an attorney or a plumber, should I shop around, or pay as much as possible, so that i'm not paying one less for the same amount of work.
They won’t pay you more in the long term. In the short term, they may be trying out candidates willing to work for cheaper. If they notice cheaper employees are available and providing the same utility, then I would bet the more expensive employees are on the chopping block.
I disagree. I believe continued personal interaction with team mates to produce better outcomes. Not everyone can function at their best, remotely.
It doesn't mean all tech jobs have to be 100% remote.
The fact the videoconference and online collaboration is still a dumpster fire of crap is both a cause and a symptom of companies insisting on an in-person workforce. Look at how the videoconferencing market has been juiced into improving their products by the necessities of the pandemic and imagine what they'd do if there was consistent global demand.
I don't really see why I should be expected to do otherwise. The value a person brings to the company cannot be separated from the company's capital and the person's employment of that capital. An ML engineer would be of little use without the company's cluster of GPUs on which to train models. So what brings the value? The cluster or the engineer? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Try operating a business otherwise, and you’ll get steamrolled by others allocating resources more productively.
Obviously this is subject to government regulations, but the context is outcomes between competing entities in the same framework, who aren’t making life or death decisions like in the emergency room of a hospital.
Some people are paid a lot for where they are (like truck drivers in the North Dakota oil fields) and other people are paid a lot for their skills (like professional athletes), and most are paid for bits of both. Some skill sets are rare and in high demand globally, concentrating in places like Silicon Valley and Seattle because that was where you could get the best compensation if you happen to have those skills. There is no implication that a large pool of cheaper but similarly skilled people exists elsewhere — professional sports would look very different otherwise.
Ironically, I’ve lived in Seattle but worked remotely for European companies for years. It has always been highly competitive with the best that FAANG/unicorns have to offer in terms of compensation, which surprises people but I’m not compensated for where I live — that is incidental.
I will make an observation based on experience I’ve seen few people make: there are many companies not located in SF/Seattle/NYC that would pay almost anything for a rare-skill engineer but they are located a long way from a major tech hub and they would never be able to convince a rare-skill engineer to move there. If you have these skills and the world goes remote, that suddenly becomes part of your buyer market. It works both ways and this isn’t theoretical. There are a lot of opportunities in places few engineers look because they don’t want to move there.
As an engineer, positioning yourself to operate in the global market does not imply a race to the bottom. For the highly skilled, it can often imply the opposite.
Disagree. In most teams 1+1 = 11 happens only with f2f interactions and physically next to each other. AFAIK there is no substitute for human interactions. Managing remote teams is hard. Maybe some day we will get there, but thus far our preference is to have a blend of home + office work.
When we used to think being in an office in the heart of the Valley was important, $200,000 was the cost of getting someone into the office. But now that we've decided the office wasn't all that important after all, the rest of the country (and world) are ready to moderate things.