[HatchedLake721]

Graduates are not “great developers” as mentioned in the second paragraph. Graduates can’t dictate anything, they don’t have the necessary experience and knowledge.

Once you’re a professional and know your worth, then you know what’s a cheap salary and what’s not.

[dannyw]

Your starting salary is the biggest influencer of your total lifetime earnings. That’s why I mentioned grads: it sets a benchmark and also is relatively commoditised and can be more directly compared.

What I’m saying is that “what you’re worth” is heavily influenced by the area you live, and a $X in SF developer is only worth $X in SF.

They are not worth $X in Thailand; you are welcome to try and get SF salaries for a remote role and see how that works out.

I think you’re speaking from a myopic high-CoL view. High performing FAANG engineers take substantial paycuts to work in lower CoL areas within the US, or overseas, all the time. We get a lot of them here in Australia.

As another example, leading machine learning researchers in China are making a fraction of leading ML researchers in SF.

If you’ve had a look at who’s leading in ML research these days, you’ll realise the disparity.

[true_religion]

People are forced to take pay cuts because high paying companies simply doing hire outside of their high CoL zones unless you are really special. That in effect depresses salaries, because there is less competition from the top.

If Google and Amazon remote only for example, salaries would go up everywhere as they competed to hire the best developers who never want to leave their hometowns.

They wouldn’t hit the SF rates, as the necessity isn’t there, but for most things will improve.

For entry level staff, Keep in mind, there is a floor for developer salaries... and that is the salary of any other job available. For example, in VA you can’t pay developers less than 60k or else the new grads will just walk off into construction work and trade schools. For a company that is remote only, they also have to worry about their targets simply moving to get a better job too. They can’t stiff someone in Mississippi for their salary, or else the person will just move to NYC.