[eanzenberg]

Why is it a surprise? The moment the employee is willing to hire remotely the employer is competing against people willing to make half or less, since they don’t care to live where you decide to live. Hilarious right? Same happens when minimum wage goes up. Imagine it goes up to a livable $40/hr. Now these high school kids are competing with people with college degrees for the same job.

[godelski]

I'm not sure this makes sense. Did I not include these people? Wage as a function of distance, right? I didn't say that everyone gets paid the same. And is it not more advantageous for the employer to be able to select from a larger pool of candidates?

> Imagine it goes up to a livable $40/hr. Now these high school kids are competing with people with college degrees for the same job.

Do they? This doesn't mean that every job that pays under $40/hr (which is pretty high! You must be living in the Bay) becomes $40/hr and jobs higher do not go up as well. But rather now those companies have to compete (you can compete in ways more than wage, especially if it is $40/hr!). High school kids may have to compete with people with college degrees for things like McDonalds, but now an engineering firm like Boeing (who pays less than $40/hr for starting salaries in most locations) has to compete with McDonalds. The competition doesn't work only in one direction.

Of course, I'm sure that there's a upperbound to how well this works though, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was under $80k/yr

[taneq]

> Imagine it goes up to a livable $40/hr. Now these high school kids are competing with people with college degrees for the same job.

A lot of these predictions seem based on assuming nothing else changes when the minimum wage changes. Realistically you're not going to have college grads applying for highschool-kid jobs, you're going to see college grad jobs paying more.

[jsjohnst]

> Imagine it goes up to a livable $40/hr.

$40/hr is a high salary for many parts of the US, so I assume your “livable” comment is relative to the Bay Area?

[iso947]

Ok so it $40 an hour flipping burgers, or $40 an hour writing code. Which would you rather do?

[m0zg]

TBH if those were the only available choices, burgers would win. A much easier job.

[james-skemp]

How long did you flip burgers for? Depending upon the location/business, it means standing on your feet in a hot environment for hours. They've hopefully gotten better, but plastic gloves are also murder on the hands.

Maybe less challenging mentally, but physically way more demanding.

[iso947]

It sounds horrendous. In a reasonable world horrendous jobs like flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets would be far more rewarded than fulfilling jobs like writing code.

My own history of jobs involved delivering f pizzas for a small firm (great, very little pressure, just listen to radio all night), and stacking shelves in a corner shop (I lasted 3 hours)

You literally couldn’t pay me to stack shelves, and I in turn rarely go to shops, I won’t support such a terrible environment.

[andiamo]

Flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets can be done by literally anyone. On the other hand, the demand for people who can code like you remains high.

This is the reason why investment bankers make bank. Granted, many of the "signals" are dubious, but the people who can _actually_ do the work of a MD are extremely low.

[iso947]

Is far rather write code for $40 than flip burgers for $100