[flog]

Remote is such an overloaded term. Is it US/North America only? Is it equal work for equal pay globally?

I was someone who took the opportunity to relocate back to my home country when Covid struck, but had to take a near 50% pay cut to do so, despite doing the same work. I'm surprised this hasn't become more of a hot button issue within the community.

[r00fus]

Timezone and management capabilities of your organization could have been an issue in why the pay was so different.

Especially for startups, managing payroll in another country could be challenging. Also the latency on communications for daylight working hours could be bad - back and forth discussions leading to swift actions are hamper by a 9+hr timezone difference.

[vultour]

They don't need to manage payroll in another country. Everybody working overseas does so as a contractor which means it's just another expense for the employer.

[sanderjd]

I don't think it is an overloaded term... It just means that there is no office you are expected to go into. Those things you identified are just other dimensions that are also important.

[flog]

I guess what I was hinting at was the difficulty in filtering "remote" roles

[sanderjd]

Yeah it would be good to include all those dimensions in listings, I agree.

[chrischen]

Equal pay globally would mean less pay for Silicon Valley tech workers and more pay for Chinese/Indian/Eastern European devs.

[kortilla]

Unlikely for Chinese devs, most of them don’t speak English. Definitely more common in India/Eastern Europe.

[Salgat]

It's so much easier to just hire someone in the same country. No visa/sponsorship, no timezone worries, no language/culture barriers. It's just so much easier.

[xtracto]

I work (from Mexico) with people in the US, which has 4 time zones for mainland. My time zone lands in CT, Which is convenient both for ET and PT. I didn't require a sponsorship and I am able to communicate pretty well with my American peers.

And I'm between 50% and 70% cheaper than hiring someone in the US at the same level (PhD, 10+ years of industry experience, Executive level experience, startup experience, highly technical , etc etc).

And I know several people with a profile similar to mine.

Companies that discover this are getting an "unfair advantage "

[Salgat]

Outsourcing has been attempted and is still occurring for the past 30 years. Yes, sometimes you get great employees like yourself, but it's a mixed bag and for some companies they just don't want to deal with the additional risks and headache.