[MartinMcGirk]

I can see why you’d pay a remote staff member differently from an on-prem staff member. As others have said if you’re hiring remote then your talent pool is effectively the whole world, so price competition is fiercer.

But if everyone is remote or everyone is on-prem, then location-dependent pricing is complete nonsense. The employees are all still providing the same value to the company. Claiming that you can’t pay someone as much because they live in some rural town somewhere is just the company finding an excuse to keep a larger share of the value created by that employee.

[lordnacho]

Not obviously one way. There's more staff globally but there's also more places they can work.

This seems like it will turn out in favour of employers with the world being the way it is, with a lot of people in poor places.

But I've been a remote hiring manager before, and it happens that people turn down an offer in favour of another remote firm.

[fakedang]

Isn't Google pushing for a return to on-prem though? So it's the first situation that you mentioned.

[MartinMcGirk]

Yeah my comment is kind of tangential to the post and aimed more at the general idea of location-dependent salaries.

I don’t argue with the concept of saying “we want you back in the office, if you don’t want to come to the office then take a pay cut” like is going on here.

[namdnay]

If you remove location-dependent pricing, which location do you align the new single price on? Mountain View? London? Hyderabad?

[tzs]

You don't align the price for remote work to a location. You set it to whatever it takes to get enough qualified people to do the work you need done.

[namdnay]

Fair enough, but that basically means no more employees in the US