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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

> You can move anywhere in the country you work in and your compensation won’t change. Starting in June, we’ll have single pay tiers by country for both salary and equity. If your pay was set using a lower location-based pay tier, you’ll receive an increase in June.

I wonder how this will change things for companies like Figma, which allow full remote, but pay remote workers less.

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Eventually - and it might take a recession - the downside of “work from anywhere” will be that companies can “hire from anywhere”. That means the Bay Area salary you previously enjoyed may be knocked down through greater wage competition.

And then another company will pop up and pay more.

The thing is, we're used to the high pay now. Cut that and you're gonna cut efficiency. It's going to be hard to justify it.

Create bad will with your money makers good luck getting anywhere realistically.

As an engineer I do hope that the global compensation level for good talent rises with all of this remote working. It seems to be already happening. Even in humble Vancouver, I hear of mobile developers being offered $320K. That was absolutely unheard of in 2019.

It happened before, in living memory, it's hardly impossible. It gets easy to justify by employers when enough people lost their job that every job opening is flooded with candidates.

There are basically two schools of thought: the "software is eating the world" one says that requirements will continue to be more and more specialized, for every advance in tooling there will be advances in complexity we can tackle, and the size of the overall dev market will continue to grow in a way that makes it less likely to be as affected by another single thing like the dot-com bubble.

The other is that today's salaries are driven in large part by "fake money" (e.g. VC investment or internal speculative spending more than by revenue from paying customers) and that there will be a nasty correction when that stream dries up.

I don't know which is right.

Both these views are incorrect.

Software is one of the only professions in the US where non executives have managed to enjoy a sliver of the increase in compensation that executives do in most other sectors of the economy. The spectacular rise in productivity has generally been funneled to the top; except in specialized fields like software, which requires highly specialized skills to be effective.

The “crazy VC money” hypothesis is especially easy to prove wrong since the highest compensation is currently offered by Big Tech (public companies). While people that work on startups do luck out sometimes, there aren’t enough of those unicorns to move the market for most; thats almost exclusively being fueled by competition among Big Tech.

Your second paragraph sounds like the same thing I meant, essentially "specialization and skill will continue to be required as software continues to be highly influential all over the place."

For the latter, I think stuff like Facebook's whole "metaverse" money-loser, Google's random-other-non-ads-project stuff, a bunch of Netflix efforts beyond "just show the damn video," would be at risk in a major recession. Couple that with an implosion of a bunch of "growth" companies and it would hardly surprise me to see hiring get a lot easier for the money-making Big Tech projects.

(I don't actually believe that, I lean to the former, but I think it's a much more credible idea than you do. I've had a lot of coworkers the last decade who've never worked at a profitable company but passed FANG-style interviews and were making near-FANG money.)

The engineers in less expensive locales are not used to the high pay. Even without remote, my team is pushed to hire in the offices outside the Bay Area because engineers demand less money and retention is higher.

Don’t take for granted the power of someone to undercut you at every turn. IT thought they weren’t replaceable. But oversea workers on visas and outsourcing to other countries began taking their jobs and pay

The reverse is also true. At the beginning Airbnb employees will be making SF level salaries. As Airbnb continues to hire and churn employees, average salaries will come down since they won't be paying SF salaries for new positions. They might pay better than other companies, but won't keep SF as baseline.

I doubt this will be the case, unless they're willing to substantially shrink their labor pool by not competing with large tech hubs.

I am happy for you if you can play a FAANG salary against another offer, and many on HN can, but for the vast majority of tech employees _and_ employers, those numbers are nothing like a baseline.

This might be a plausible outcome, except for two factors:

- Big Tech has been expanding out of CA for over a decade (e.g. Amazon HQ2, Microsoft Atlanta HQ, etc.)

- Tech compensation is highly weighted toward equity (RSUs/etc.).

Taken together, these mean that more regions have at least one big tech player that's paying significantly in equity. This means that even if the salary portion of compensation is reduced for employees living outside SF, their overall compensation will likely still be very competitive.

At the same time, regional markets are heating up as non-tech companies increasingly are staffing up with the same React & Swift programmers needed in SF. Why leave family & move to SF for $180k base when you can make $150k base in Atlanta or Raleigh, where the cost of living is a fraction of SF?

(Given recent actions in the public markets, it's also worth nothing that equity-based compensation frequently is topped up to some extent when stock values remain depressed. It's been a number of years since this broadly happened, but we can generally expect the $100B+ club (at least) to issue meaningful retention grants if stocks stay down while the labor market remains tight.)

I've said as much on other threads. Employers are playing a longer game, and thinking about the salaries of the person who replaces you. So go ahead, move to Colombia but save up.

When there's zero friction and in fact a couple years successful track record involved in managing W2 staff in any country, the salary for new hires will reflect that.

No company will ignore this, because the potential savings are just monumental and there is no stigma attached.

I wonder how this will change for the calculations of Ligma and the DN ratio.

They will probably be more like fromunda.

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