[lhorie]

Salaries do get affected by WFH policies, since if you move to a cheaper state/country, a company will often do a pay adjustment. So, from a cost savings perspective, it becomes a question of how much a company thinks being in the Bay Area brings in terms of attracting talent, vs how much they can save by having their employees work from Pennsylvania or Canada or India.

I know companies in Canada that are way ahead of the curve on this: they've been consulting for American companies for years, meaning they can afford way more person hours than american counterparts given a US dollar contract size solely because of the salary gap difference.

[whimsicalism]

I am skeptical that the labor market for high quality tech talent is as large in the rest of the country or that it is that tied to COL. The US vs not US gap seems much larger than the HCOL vs LCOL for senior IC jobs.

[kelnos]

Maybe not 10 months ago, but a lot of people have dispersed to various places in the US, and that may continue as companies relax their in-person work requirements. Talent still has its concentration points, but its less concentrated than it was, and I expect that trend to continue.

The US vs. not-US gap is certainly larger, but I expect that US-based companies would much rather hire someone 3 timezones away than 8 or 12. Having to be on conference calls at 7am or 8pm gets old real quick.

[cactus2093]

Do you know of any remote-first tech company that pays Bay Area salaries regardless of location?

I haven’t heard of one, and I would think this would be a huge selling point so anyone doing it would want to advertise it to engineers.

On the other hand there are plenty of companies transparent about their policy to match pay to cost of living, for instance gitlab publishes their conversion percentages for different cities. Many places in the US they pay ~60% of Bay Area.

[whimsicalism]

There's like a $25k difference between Google L4 in the Bay vs in Boulder and with considerably less average years of experience. That's less than the COL difference.

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...