One Job, One Pay – Globally
stellate.co
stellate.co
Obviously, they're less likely to get Bay Area developers, but I don't really see how that's a problem - there are plenty of good devs elsewhere. Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)
Why give up Bay Area salaries, and the large Bay Area job market, to make less money somewhere else for the only company that would pay it?
One of the reasons people stay in the Bay Area is the ease of finding new jobs in tech. If you don't like your job, you don't need to put up with it, because there are plenty of other options.
On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind.
If this was true, there would be few young developers and recent grads, which is not the case. Owning a home is overrated, especially with the current prices.
You know what sucks? Renting in the Bay Area and seeing regular rent increases every single year, such that your rent today is 30% more than it was two years ago.
You know what's awesome? Buying a home several years ago and seeing it go up in value by 30% while your monthly mortgage bill has remained the same -- and also knowing that a significant portion of that monthly payment is going into your home equity and is still your money.
Renters are getting hurt far more by inflation than homeowners.
That might sting. But I don't believe it's ever happened in the bay area. Housing didn't drop 50% in 2001 and it didn't drop 50% in 2008.
I did drop, yes. Sometimes even underwater, as my home did in 2001.
The other factor is that "underwater" doesn't mean anything if you like the house and want to keep living in it.
Wages surely will more or less slowly going to a mean world level, witch means going high for some very poor people who normally live doing non-IT jobs (so they can't even learn fast enough to really profit) and going low for us in the western world. Some countries who happen to be in the middle now, let's say like Vietnam or Russian Fed., probably will not suffer that shift much, we will.
Moving also is not a mere geographical relocation: I can spot for instance a handful of nice areas in the world, in natural terms, where I can live well in natural terms BUT I depend on the physical world, on someone else jobs who can't be remote. Let's say you'll relocate to a natural paradise. Let's say you just want a new pair of shoes. Oh that's easy, just wait for the next delivery, it MIGHT happen in a month or two. Cheese? Oh, well, you might buy something vacuum-packed and frozen but it will be really expensive and of a very bad quality. You need health services? BWHAHAHAHHAHA did you know the meaning of natural selection? Well, if you can survive without them you'll live otherwise you'll die IF you are lucky. If not you might live for years, decades perhaps with very big handicap just because no one fix an issue quickly and how we know it should be done so a broken leg became a twisted and painful limb, a bad tooth a hole that force you to eat just tender foods on the other side of the mouth creating other jaw problems / pains witch in turn, ...
That's is.
Surely we have lived like that for millennia... Happy to came back to such life WITHOUT the real freedom of that past?
My thoughts on this in longer form: http://amurmann.com/posts/remote-labor-market-future/
Oh, sure formally being remote we can relocate. Unfortunately living in the physical real world relocate is not just a matter of physical location on Earth but also physical situations around, for instance if I relocate to northern Urals from here (France Alps) I'll probably able to spot a nearly-similar climate (a bit hotter in summer, a bit colder in winter probably) and appear to be hyper-rich in the Urals BUT if I just need to buy food there is no Drive supermarket nearby there. If I just have a carious tooth I'm almost on my own or I have to fly 500-800 miles at minimum just to sort that out. Not talking about real eventual emergencies. Such services until we have global teleport network (something really fictional from our real current perspective) can be "remote".
Long story short IF I'm a young slave (yes, not Citizen, not worker) with a significant dose of optimism transfused in my body I can be happy and say: "hey, I'll go to some 'tropical-alike' area of the world where with very little I'm still rich! Wonderful! Or maybe I'll even be a digital nomad! Hooray!" and PERHAPS being happy for a little while, than discover it's too late to came back and being a new poor slave. Not much different than modern digital service mass market where some services start free, nice and friendly than they start to offer premium features, quality lower without them (and also with them, often), some fees for all arrive, ... and most customers are so locked-in even only by their peers being communication-centric that they have to remain, suffer and pay.
Now if we enlarge such vision: top talents are very few. Some or even most of them are considered "top" just because they choose to live to work instead of the contrary. All the rest? Try to enlarge the game behind eligible remote jobs: did you think you can get good food and health just paying more? Sorry, you can't. Surely in hoteliers terms just seeing some south Americans clinic you might think that's false. Unfortunately if you really touch the (obscene) quality of their real services you'll discover that scale matter also to form talents. To give them experience. There is no school that can substitute scale. If we do not have OVERALL good services for the society we also can't have good services for a small élite. We can mock them, we can self-convince them they are good seeing the sorry state of others humans, but we do not get nothing really good.
Try to see how innovation after public research era/bit labs era drop. Our actual IT is still way BEHIND old Xerox PARC level. Oh sure, is popularized, more colorful, more performant, far cheaper etc. What we can call "non-talented improvements" but there is NO REAL INNOVATION anymore. That's the result of scale: private markets can't reach the public research scale for the public and as a result they just produce popularized crap. Now imaging the result on social scale outside IT.
Surely as I said that happen more or less slowly witch means that at first we will experience a proximity preference, but just see for call centers: here (France, Italy) there is an epidemic of offshored call-centers operators in the Balkans and north-Africa: they barely speak Italian or French but they get far little wages so for many companies that's good.
This is going to be another decade resembling the outsourcing movement that occurred in the 2000s: and it will have a similar outcome. That outcome being that paying lower wages yields worse results and a huge backlash.
In a lot of cases, the salaries for an SWE2/SWE3 aren’t 2-3x the median but 5-10x the local median income.
And if we are talking about developing areas, the dev pay is already above median and being much higher will afford quite a good living conditions, away from all problems.
If so, this change will reallocate which companies are employing them, but until it attracts people to the field who wouldn’t have otherwise entered it, it doesn’t seem like it will change the aggregate much.
Suppose everyone follows your advise- how will the economy function?
I think our economy would function very well if more people do this. Many already do.
This idea was explained really well back in 1937, in The Nature of the Firm. It explains why we form companies instead of all being individual contractors making trades with each other.
You're missing two key reasons why salaries won't normalize to developing country level pay:
1) Timezones are painful. +3h west to east coast US is usually tolerable if not slightly inconvenient at times, but not too bad. +5h and above starts to strain team dynamics. East US to London/Ireland caused more than a couple great US engineers to seek greener pastures within other teams at the company; a few teams had difficulty staffing majority European teams with US talent. A 50\50 split was usually more tolerable. Any time difference more than that within a team is insanity. Feedback loops become too large, there's no cohesion, and a host of other issues.
2) 10M+ engineers at the senior level don't exist. You want engineers that can autonomously churn through "we have a problem with no identified solution" situations. These engineers earn 2x to 3x their cost through technical leverage. At the senior+ level, talent supply is lower than demand. And if you want to train up an employee from junior to senior, good luck doing that with a timezone difference > +3h.
As long as there are tech companies printing gobs of money while demanding more talent than is available for engineers to produce $$$ for $, then salaries won't normalize to developing country pay.
“This is what this job is worth to me. Are you in?”
That’s true whether it’s a $250K/yr offer or a $36K/yr offer. In the vast majority of cases, the alternative to a company offering $36K/yr is not for them to offer $250K/yr but rather to not offer a job at all.
If anything, I’d argue that a company offering a consistent salary for the job anywhere in the world is acting more ethically than one offering $X in Mumbai and 5*$X in Paris.
If it’s the former, then maybe consider that other people don’t see the issue as the same [obvious problem] as you do, instead of assuming that they do, and then basing further reasoning on that bad faith assumption.
If it’s the latter, then continue doing what you’re doing.
It has apparently become fashionable to voice a concern in response to a solution to that concern to criticize the solution. You're effectively complaining that transparent pricing will result in information asymmetry or exploitation.
Subsiding unprofitable industries doesn’t have a great track record in any case. The Argentine and Indian auto industries disappeared as soon as protective tariffs did, at great cost to the taxpayers who subsidized them for decades.
>> We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA
Not the same. Quite different.
The very talented person in the cheap country who was going to fly to the US to earn more now applies for this job, so this company wins.
The SF resident who hates SF and who is up for living abroad but wants to save for retirement still: same thing.
What do you do about leadership? Do global/permaremote companies have managers, staff eng, and c-level members who never meet more regularly than once a quarter? Does remote-work as a leader in a global/remote-first business mean frequent trips to airports? How does it work when your job is more than “make the CI faster”?
If you do one thing for ICs and another for leaders, are you tacitly saying to all remote ICs that they’ll never progress to a leadership role?
People say that remote IC work is mercenary and very much like contracting. To that extent, if you take a remote salaried position, are you doing yourself a disservice compared to taking the dispassionate, transactional, disposable contractor-style role without the contractor pay?
[1] https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/33bc14f9-4671-4540-8862-7d358...
This wording seems philosophically incompatible with "One Job, One Pay" (OJOP), even if it's not actually logically inconsistent with OJOP "per se".
It works out as long as SF has the highest pay.
We’re rolling it out in the next week 2 weeks. We will begin publishing salary bands on every job posting. Internally, we will publish levels and sub-levels for every job.
This HN post causing 1000 people around the globe to apply is what it means for it to work.
People in SF with high COL probably will not apply. Unless they intend to move as soon as they get the job.
- We offered one person $27K more than their asking salary because the data showed that they were underestimating their market value.
- We offered someone 30K below what they were currently making
- We’ve made a comparable market offers
As long as the pay moves UP. Not down. Then I will support removing location-based pay.
There are many great engineers in 3rd world countries. I wonder what the long term implication of this will be, both for USA and the 3rd world countries.
On the other hand, I am hearing the drum of de-globalization being sounded from afar...
That’s why I’m planning my exit.
But the policy is One Job, One Pay.
If you get an exceptional dev and you want to pay them as such, simply label their job as "Exceptional Dev". Is this easy? No. But it does define the role more, what the company wants/needs the role to be.
And now if you find an equivalent in ANY country, they get the same pay. But they'd better live up to the terms of the job because everyone in the company knows your job and what you are being paid.
If you act like "average dev" then be sure that people will argue for your pay to match.
For entry-level American SWE pay, you could get the valedictorian from fairly high quality schools across the developing world and work them like dogs and they wouldn't complain.
I think this makes sense given the following:
1) you think you can handle the distributed/async workforce
2) you are OK with having mediocre US talent (made up for by exceptional foreign talent)
3) you think they can make up for not being exposed to modern SWEngineering culture by just being better in {IQ, Work Ethic, etc.}
If you get paid more purely because you were born in the US and not India you’re being unfairly enriched for being born in the right place.
Should landlords also be paid the same no matter where they are supplying housing for renters?
[0]: https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/
[1]: https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
There is always a justification or theoretical argument to avoid giving workers more rights.
https://www.hundredeightydegrees.com/dan-price-business-frau...
[0] "Price, his brother Lucas and their father Ron worked as sales agents for a another credit card processor named Axia Payments"
That means they’ll rise in some places, but fall in others, because just like the employers’ competition is now every other company hiring globally, the employees’ competition is every other capable employee globally.
Can someone provide a link to these publicly available bands?
I do believe, that if the world were to add free movement of people to the first lot, within a generation you'd get normalisation of incomes and lots more besides (laws relating to workplace rights, OHS, environmnental etc).
Of course that pain that would be suffered in that generation would be pretty huge as entire populations started moving. It's a pretty big perturbation to settle into a new stable state.
1) bankrupt any startup hiring in SF and NYC
2) prevent startups from hiring in SF and NYC
You can't have both.
I think most are willing to make this tremendous sacrifice.
a) any startup hiring in SF and NYC will go bankrupt
b) the devs you hire outside of SF and NYC for the same HCoL salaries are not worth the pay, and over time will cause business failure
or is there another option?
- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living
- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere
- these employees will have motivation to keep their job at all costs, so when they are disengaged doing the absolute minimum to ensure they won’t get managed out
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
- incentive for local teams and managers to hire their friends to extremely cushy jobs and perpetuate
i think this is backwards. remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output. overpaying won’t bring you additional output, but will bring other challenges
We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point: "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"
We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.
That wasn’t true in offices and I don’t see it being true while remote. There are integer multiples of difference among employees who used to work in the same office as each other.
I get the argument, but I think remote work is making that less of a risk. Paying significantly above local market value will let them have high standards. Great engineers should be able to get other great remote offers. Salaries might not keep those engineers from leaving.
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
Is it a huge issue if a senior engineer doesn't want to get promoted if they are doing well in their current job?
It IS, however, about what language you speak.
I do think that as productivity and tools improve around remote and async work salaries in remote friendly jobs will equalize.
It's absolutely their prerogative to make a decision like that, only to be competitive in low-wage markets, but they should just own it.
I think being upfront about this like Graph is doing is a much clearer approach.
They were fantastic wages for southeast Asia, and competitive wages in parts of Europe and South America, but were solidly 30%+ below our competitors who were also based in the U.S., never mind that the wages were so stagnant retail jobs became competitive with us after awhile.
> We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA
Why would paying higher in other regions necessitate lower than market rates in high-salary regions?
(If there is only one job, any company automatically has a One Job, One Pay philosophy.)
I will say that for anyone else thinking about doing this, there is a lot less market data available for those positions. We had to combine market data from multiple providers to get to a good baseline.
Companies doing this are letting the market dictate pay: the global market. If there is no particular need to have people working in a particular place, there is no reason to pay a premium to get labor in HCOL locations (which, the fewer employers are paying a premium to get labor there, will cease to be as much HCOL areas, too.)
> They either will waste a ton of money by giving everyone Bay Area-level pay, or will just be unable to hire in high cost of labor locations without compromising talent quality.
If employers stop paying a location premium when the premium location provides them no added benefit, people won't be able to command premium pay to live in premium locations.