[lhorie]

> why shouldn't _you_ get to pocket the difference in the cost of living?

I mean, the logic clearly doesn't work because if you instead ask "why shouldn't the employer pay the same low salary in both locations", the argument immediately goes right back to cost of living being different. For the argument of pay correlating to value creation to hold, it must hold in both scenarios, not just the one you happen to like more.

This goes further than tech salaries. By all accounts, the people in a factory that built the device you're using to be on HN right now should also be paid bay area level figures since they clearly are a very important part of the supposed value creation you're partaking in. But if they did, your computer would cost $500,000 instead of $5,000. And your shoes would similarly cost a fortune, and probably your mangos and pretty much everything else too, which is effectively the "low" salary scenario I brought up above, except with more zeros on the right side of the price tags. So something's gotta give, and taking the pay-for-value-creation argument to a logical conclusion frankly doesn't seem all that appealing.

[danaris]

(Disclaimer: No real numbers were harmed in the making of this post.)

If an employee doing Job X in San Francisco is worth $500k/yr to Google, then paying an employee doing the exact same job in NC $250k/yr because the CoL is lower there is padding Google's profits at the expense of the second employee—and, indirectly, all employees in the sector, because that depresses market rates.

As I said in another post, I don't care about what's "efficient", or what makes Google the most money. I care about how they treat people.

Google and its execs would not have their lives change in any meaningful way if they were to pay everyone who does Job X the same that they have to pay to attract people to that job in the Bay Area. But it might change the lives of some of their employees, and of employees of other tech-sector companies, if they were making an extra $100k, $50k, or even $10k/year.

[lhorie]

> at the expense of the second employee—and, indirectly, all employees in the sector, because that depresses market rates.

It feels a bit out of touch to say that when they literally do make top-of-band salaries compared to other local companies even after pay cuts. As others have brought up, $250k in NC is pretty darn good pay.

We're not talking about a company squeezing out their janitors where an extra 1k/mo might mean they can quit a second night shift job or afford insuline or whatever. We're in "I want to be able to afford a Ferrari instead of a Tesla" territory. And I don't think I'd be alone in thinking that the latter is harder to sympathize with.

Your argument boils down to "pay me more", and I already took that to its logical conclusion: yes, of course you want to be paid more, get in line. Everyone wants to be paid more, but if that happens, then through the magic of inflation, everyone loses. What people really want is to be paid more while everyone else doesn't, because that's the only way that they get to keep the purchasing power of their money. And forgive me if this is too brutally blunt, but that's just selfishness masquerading as social justice.