[hkarthik]

There's no standard for this yet. We're probably a few years away of remote working becoming more common before that changes.

Compensation at big tech companies is determined by benchmarking compensation across several companies in several geographies to determine what pay scale the company should pay at. The benchmarking usually happens a few times a year. Radford is the gold standard source of data that large companies pay for access to.

This fidelity of this data relies on submissions. So its fairly easy for them to benchmark within a location where a lot of companies submit their data and build effective compensation bands.

The issue with going outside of the Bay Area for comp benchmarking, is that the data fidelity from the usual sources goes down dramatically, so HR and compensation teams usually apply a general heuristic like 50% of Bay Area or 80% of Bay Area just to make the math simple.

Startups can be all over the map on this. The good ones have access to Radford (or a filtered version of it) through their investors and they use it to benchmark. But their data fidelity will also take a hit if a different location is used, and they often benchmark less often than they should, or against the wrong companies based on their size.