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Comment by throw_away | Hacker News Reader

> paying a single rate would create a very lopsided team in terms of geography

> the incentives would lead these places to be dramatically over-represented relative to higher cost of living places.

vs. the not-at-all-lopsided and equally-represented status quo, where everyone lived in the same high-cost-of-living city?

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So much this. I'm still hoping for the work-from-home revolution's best possible side effect: the leveling of the political playing field as safe districts get flooded with politically urban expats.

Unless a company limits its hiring to the US, the entire country can be described as “high cost of living” in terms of the incentive I’m describing.

Imagine a company offering a simple 100k geography-agnostic salary for an engineer. They’ll get some junior-to-mid-level candidates applying from lower cost of living places in the US, sure, and they’ll also get a lot of excellent senior applicants from India, Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. If they hire based only on merit, they likely won’t be hiring from the US at all.

Imagine a company paying people what they are worth rather than what they can get away with.

Still waiting for a real argument that addresses this issue instead of substance-free snark.

Because as an employee I charge whatever I can get away with completely regardless of my worth or how much actual value I produce.

Companies can already do this; there are plenty of opportunities for outsourcing - and yet, somehow that "exodus of employment" hasn't yet happened - I get the sense that while going full remote may cause some jobs to get outsourced that weren't before, there won't be a total exodus, as has been repeatedly predicted in the past every time we've moved towards being more remote-capable.

Afaik, most companies that outsource are paying local market rates, not the same rate regardless of geography.

That’s not even close to the status quo for most distributed companies—-it definitely isn’t for Gitlab.

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