| > Why are salaries so far apart, even with all the tech we have today? Doing remote work over the Internet is so easy. I've struggled with the answer to this myself as well. For some reason people leading companies decided that they want their employees to sit in an office. Even when there's 0 reason for it. The best explanation I can come up with is plain old stubbornness with a hint of craving for human connection. The madness of crowds: everybody does it this way, so it must be the only way. As a contractor I offer clients a 30 % discount on my hourly rate if they let me work remotely. Which is always possible. None of them care about the discount. In the case of my clients most decision makers are around pension-age. The CEO at the last company I worked at didn't know what the possibilities of a VPN where until the pandemic hit. They didn't have the bandwidth capacity to let people work from home, because they had refused to pay a few thousand bucks for a company to lay fiber to the office a few years prior while the road was opened up. "Our internet connection is fine." This was a tech company building equipment for physics experiments. Business leaders literally have a hard time imagining the possibilities of the internet in 2020. It's still 1970 for a lot of people. |