[penultimatebro]

Called this last year. This will become more prevalent in the industry as time goes on. Tell your boss you’re moving to San Francisco and if your employer bases your salary on your zip code then your pay should be going UP

[dec0dedab0de]

I wonder if people will start renting mailboxes in high income areas.

[mint2]

It’s just like how businesses love to incorporate in Delaware or tax havens. All Employees can be based out of sf regardless of where they actually do their business. Just make an app to let people rent out their mailbox and forward it. When 500 people use the same address it will be just like the companies do!

[NtochkaNzvanova]

As the sibling commenter suggested, it's not as simple as renting a mailbox -- HR departments and tax collection agencies are not that dumb.

However, I suspect that one reason the housing market has gotten so crazy (California perspective here) is that many Silicon Valley tech folks bought houses in Sacramento/Tahoe/$CHEAP_PLACE while also keeping their houses in SV but renting them out. As long as the rent payment covers most of the mortgage, they build equity and eventually own the house, while also having a nice big house to work remote from. And perhaps they quietly keep using the SV house as their official residence for HR/tax purposes.

[YZF]

There are some tax and work permit/visa consequences so it's not as simple. E.g. someone who can not legally work in the US may have a problem presenting a US bank account and an SF mailbox. The requirements may vary in different countries/states.

But I agree we may be headed towards a future where pay is no longer a function of location. If you can't tell where an employee is physically it's a lot more difficult to have location based payments. A remote employee can be anywhere. When I worked remotely (way before the pandemic) I spent some time working from Hawaii and my employer did not even know.

[mister_tee]

possibly, but it's against the rules, they'd be living a constant lie and there would probably be repercussions if they were found out and didn't have political cover. Might not stop some employees from trying.

Facebook will also scale salary by location; I have never and almost certainly will never work there but they said they will check VPN logs, and in the past have used IP and geo data from their app to determine locations of employees and users who were potential security risks. Regarding VPN and remote work:

https://fortune.com/2020/05/21/facebook-permanent-work-from-...

<quote> Facebook said it would enforce the new work-at-home policy mostly by the honor code, but that it plans random checks of employee VPN addresses—the tool used to securely access the company’s network remotely—to confirm their locations. Any employee that is caught lying will face “severe ramifications” as it could affect some of the company’s tax filings, Zuckerberg said, adding, “You may be breaking the law.” </quote>

I don't want to second guess them but random spot checks seem like more work than an automated job that looks at all vpn connections and matches to primary employee location.

[destitude]

My all remote company specifically states that if you move to a higher cost of living area they will not adjust your salary but if you started out in that higher cost of living and moved to a lower cost of living area they will not cut your pay.