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by librish 2225 days ago
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows the general compensation strategy for all the major tech companies.

They don't pay based either on value added or cost of living (which is why compensation is higher in the Bay Area compared to London).

They pay based on market rate where the target is something like 95th-percentile based on market surveys they do. Presumably this hits some sweet spot in acceptance rate vs cost. Employee compensation is a big ticket item for these companies on the balance sheet so they're highly incentivized to put a lot of thought into their setups.

Additionally if we truly go fully remote salaries will almost certainly go down just looking at the supply change alone. Previously these companies only hired

* A) People who met the hiring bar

* B) People who were willing to relocate to one of office location

If you remove B you've massively increased the available talent pool.

2 comments

> If you remove B you've massively increased the available talent pool.

i'm not convinced this is the case. maybe by a bit...but massively? if you look at all of the places that all of the top paying FAANG companies are located--lets keep it within the US for simplicity's sake--you've got basically all of the major cities with the top talent. I'm not really picturing THAT many brilliant developers that fall under the bucket of: a) really smart and able to pass FAANG interviews b) not willing to relocate if they did get a huge offer

sure there are plenty of outliers, but my gut feeling tells me that MOST of the talent that really cares enough and wants to be at FAANG are already living in most of the tech hubs currently. i dont think the surge of competent applications will be that meaningful statistically speaking.

not sure if i communicated myself clearly here, sort of rambled.

I suspect you are right and most of the top talent is in major cities but even then most faang jobs are in the bay area. Anecdotally (and with all the caveats that go with that) I wanted to work for a faang but turned them down several times until an opportunity came up in DC. I have other friends in cities like NYC and Chicago in the same boat. They dont want to leave their current city and even if there is a faang presence it may be small (chicago) or their area of focus doesnt match with the teams in their local faang office (nyc)
>I'm not really picturing THAT many brilliant developers that fall under the bucket of: a) really smart and able to pass FAANG interviews b) not willing to relocate if they did get a huge offer

What about anyone that wants to own a home before they are 40? Even on FAANG salaries its very difficult to buy when millionaires are snatching up fixer uppers for $1M+ all cash.

Every person I work with is under 40 and everyone that wants to own a home, does. SF and NYC are not the only tech hubs in the US.
>SF and NYC are not the only tech hubs in the US.

Also confused. I agree with your point. My comment was responding to a person who couldn't imagine people who wouldn't move to SFBay for a FAANG level salary/job.

You can just move to any of the other big cities that have big offices. It is easier to get a job in SF, but if you are good enough you will have no problem getting a job there.
I don't understand. I agree. What is your point? We're talking about why people may not be interested in moving to the Bay Area...
I'm confused - are you saying you work with people under 40 within SF and/or NYC and they all own homes? I'm pretty surprised...
Even local remote work could get a larger talent pool. Say you live in the outer sunset, or marin, or something. Getting down to facebook's headquarters could be a massively long commute. Hell, imagine commuting from SF to apple HQ. Allowing remote work lets people in one part of the bay area work in the whole bay area. There's a ton of talent in the bay area that's soul-suckingly far from these companies offices.
Except now, employees have a much wider range of companies to work for.

And there is still a shortage of tech. workers...

I foresee tech salaries meeting in the middle