[PragmaticPulp]

The reality is that geographic pay modifiers are part of the negotiation process whether it’s explicit or not. They only time it’s not is if a company goes out of their way to pay everyone the same, which is currently rare and only limited to small companies that haven’t tried to hire at scale yet.

At an individual scale, you have to pay enough to convince the person to join your company over their other options. Their set of other options is still heavily influenced by geography, so geography is a always factor in the negotiation.

On a global scale, developer compensation in the US is an outlier, and not just in expensive cities like SF. If you truly want pay equality, you have two options: Either raise everyone’s pay to That of the most expensive market you want to hire in, or simply exclude the expensive markets from your hiring plans so you can bring the number down.

Ignoring geography in compensation discussions sounds great, until you realize that they end game is reversion to the global mean, which means most US salaries would have to come down. Way down.