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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

They absolutely have. It's much easier to switch jobs without moving than to get a job that requires a move. Their leverage isn't totally gone -- especially since full remote jobs are becoming more common -- but it's definitely reduced.

When you move, it's not just the hassle and expense, but also the life changes. Especially if you have kids, those are big.

Experienced software engineers in general are capable of moving to practically any major metro if they really want to. By your reasoning, all of them should possess the same pay scale, the same cost of labor.

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> Experienced software engineers in general are capable of moving to practically any major metro if they really want to. By your reasoning, all of them should possess the same pay scale, the same cost of labor.

By Jove, I think you've got it!

But they don't, because they don't need to, and it's not how the market works.

Worked. Past tense.

It may well change in the future, but it hasn't just yet.

Yes, and the cost of labor in that case is not everyone getting an SF salary, it's everyone getting a much lower (but equal) salary. Part of the reason that SF salaries still exist is that the US has a very tough immigration system and artificially restricts the number of people who can claim one of those SF salaries (H1B quotas etc). Same thing for doctors (foreign doctors mostly can't practice medicine in U.S.), lawyers, etc.

Believe me, there are Russian programmers earning 1/3 of a U.S. engineering salary that are much more technically competent - the only thing stopping them from capturing the true "value of their work" is that damn market (and U.S. immigration system...)

I never said the cost of labor was "everybody getting an SF salary." It's "everyone who could otherwise get an SF salary getting an SF salary."

The SF salary is high because of high demand and low supply (of competent engineers). If you move remote, you increase the supply of competent engineers (there are likely people in middle-of-nowhere that are just as good as SF engineers but don't want to move because of other reasons - hence market inefficiency). Since you're increasing supply with the same demand, now the SF salary is going to drop (and establish a new market clearing price with the new supply & demand dynamics).

I think in the long run the SF salary (for the average developer) will be a historical anomaly in a place and time - kind of like the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.

(If your argument boils down to SF having more strictly more competent engineers than other places and that being the cause of the pay discrepancy, I strongly disagree)

Google has problems money can't solve as a company. I personally won't, and I coach juniors to stay away from many of the big names purely because of their toxic influence in the tech sector. They are of course free to do as they like, but I have an alright success rate with getting people to pass on those jobs to do something somewhat more constructive elsewhere.

It's like Fintech; a black hole of talent away from actually important work that needs to be done. You get that much capital condensed under one company, and it starts to channel itself against overall societal interests as it seeks to ensure it's own survival distributed across jurisdictions, fueled more by ignoramt adherence to past performance predicts future results amongst the capital management class implicitly picking winners through retarded capital overvaluations through overly aggressive M&A's and purging of the competitive landscape.

> Google has problems money can't solve as a company.

Right. Such as their entire business model being "hire smart people to get other people to click on ads."

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