[shmatt]

This is why I dislike the fight against location based pay in the U.S.

People are heated about how they add the same value whether in SF or Kentucky, but forget there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less.

If you are fighting against location based pay, you should be asking your employer to pay all employees on similar teams worldwide the same

[paxys]

This is exactly what has been happening frequently in our company's Slack channels.

Highly paid Bay Area developer moves to elsewhere in the US and complains that they got a pay cut.

Developer in low cost US city agrees and says they should be paid Bay Area salaries as well.

Canadian developer points out that they get paid lower than anyone in the US despite having very high costs of living.

Someone else says think of how much the developers in India are getting paid for doing the exact same work.

Developers in India go - we are very happy with our salaries, leave us out of this please.

[dominotw]

> we are very happy with our salaries,

I don't understand why this could be. Speaking up publicly is definitely a cultural no no in india. so maybe that's why?

[piaste]

Maybe they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the lower cost of labour is their strongest asset in getting hired by a Western company.

If their salary were raised to SV levels, sure, they might go from "well-off" to "fabulously wealthy" - but they might also get replaced with Western or Eastern European engineers. If they're not absolutely confident of their value to the company, it's not a gamble worth taking.

[paxys]

Here's a data point that may help put things into perspective – one of our employees in India lives in what would be considered a mansion when compared to silicon valley housing. His family has the best private medical insurance, and his kids go to the top private school in the city. He employs a driver to take him to work everyday. He has multiple full-time household help. His disposable income puts him in or close to the top 1% in India. And he does all this on a single staff+ level engineer's salary (his wife doesn't work).

Is it too hard to see why he would be satisfied with his work conditions?

[ge96]

If I had that kind of money ratio locally, I would personally blend in eg. "stealth wealth" to avoid being a target. Probably self limiting to feel that way.

[dan-robertson]

I read that in some places there is an expectation that (wealthy compared to the locals) western expats employ lots of staff or pay for services they might carry out themselves in western countries (e.g. laundry, cleaning, but also things like grocery shopping). It’s seen as a necessary amount of ‘giving back to the community’.

[RestlessMind]

Because if you have to pay SV salaries, why bother hiring in India and deal with the hassle of timezone disparities? Companies would just hire in SV...

[dixie_land]

This is the ugly truth people in first world do not understand or willfully ignore: someone in a third world country would kill for what you consider as table scraps. The low cost of labor IS their competitive advantage.

[aantix]

I am hyper aware of my strengths, my accolades, my career accomplishments.

I have no idea what "employees on similar teams" bring to the table. I am not going to negotiate on their behalf.

I am productive. I'll make an immediate impact on your team. I've added millions of dollars in value. I've done international product launches.

We can walk through my body of work from the past two decades in detail if you'd like.

I add the same value, independent of location.

I am not your commodity. Do not represent me. I will not represent you.

I negotiate for myself and my family.

That's it.

[jacquesm]

> I negotiate for myself and my family.

No, you don't. I get where you are coming from but you are not just negotiating for yourself and your family, others have fractionally negotiated on your behalf in the past and have set expectations that you are going to have to meet or exceed to be able to get hired and the same goes for those that come after you.

You do not operate in some kind of idealized vacuum, you are part of a market, whether you like it or not doesn't really matter. Market transparency benefits you too.

[aantix]

>If you are fighting against location based pay, you should be asking your employer to pay all employees on similar teams worldwide the same

My response to the OP is to the above.

I don't have to advocate for others. I don't even know the others capabilities, so I can't make an honest case for/against them.

I know my skills. I know my value.

[bbarn]

Your value is not dictated by you, but by the market. The above poster pointed that out much more eloquently than I, but it is a fact.

[jacquesm]

You know your value relative to the market. Without the market you would not know your value at all. This is different for sales people where it is much easier to benchmark individual contribution but for tech people the reality is that your individual contribution is not something that is known beforehand so it is you versus a bunch of others and unless you are exceptional (which may well be the case, I have no idea) your position is not rational and even then it does not generalize which is what we are aiming for here.

[aantix]

"The market" can be a very broad range.

Especially when you get into 20+ years of software engineering experience. It's not "you versus a bunch of others" - it's me and maybe one other candidate.

Salary ranges are huge. Exceptions are made all the time.

And when you're a contractor, the deal making is even more flexible (as is my case).

[hotpotamus]

Would you consider moving to a lower cost of living area (country perhaps) to compete with someone with comparable qualifications who did not require the same pay since they live in a lower cost of living country?

[benhurmarcel]

Your salary doesn't mainly depends on the value you bring, that's merely an upper limit. It's determined by how much somebody else who brings the same value is willing to accept.

[cjbgkagh]

There will always be someone somewhere who will offer to do your work cheaper than you.

I would much rather be paid based on skill than based on location. I think people should be able to make the case that indeed they are more productive than X people from Y location. If not, by all means higher the cheaper people and see how that turns out.

For those middling developers who are adversely affected it would make sense that they focus on jobs where location is more important.

[RestlessMind]

> I would much rather be paid based on skill than based on location.

And that is how societies, especially middle class, gets decimated. Look at what happened to midwest when The Capital discovered that chinese workers are equally skilled at manufacturing stuff at a fraction of the cost.

Sometimes, you don't need skillset beyond a certain level to do a job. And I would rather have that job stay in my community to ensure its stability, rather than outsourcing it so that a few in my community get fabulously wealthy while a big chunk suffers unemployment and all that it entails.

[cjbgkagh]

With sufficient competition cost savings on labor turn into consumer surplus. It’s incumbent on those who wish to remain in the middle class move up the value chain. This is supposed to be done by using the wealth gained by being early to the middle class to reinvest in additional productivity and specialization. Unfortunately a lot of that wealth has been squandered so those same people are now falling out of the middle class.

A case could be made for maintaining an inefficient and underproductive middle class as a more efficient tax on the productive middle class (as opposed to a less efficient direct redistribution). I am of the view that the US is a net beneficiary of globalization and Americans would have to be prepared to be a lot poorer on average in order to wind it back. I’m also of the view that subsidies for unproductively is long term counter productive.

I think management often overestimates the savings of cheap labor, but instead of legislating nationalistic hiring practices, I would prefer those companies to fail and new ones with new management who can more accurately assess costs and value to replace them.

[RestlessMind]

> With sufficient competition cost savings on labor turn into consumer surplus.

Nice theory. Though consumer surplus is not evenly distributed which creates problems.

> This is supposed to be done by using the wealth gained by being early to the middle class to reinvest in additional productivity and specialization.

Again, wealth gained goes to a different set of people than the ones who need to reinvest in additional training. Also, if you are worked until the age of 45 in a certain field, retraining and becoming expert in another field is near impossible given how much time you have to spare with other commitments in life. So again, a cute theory but fails in practice.

> I am of the view that the US is a net beneficiary of globalization

Citation needed. Maybe there are benefits in the short term but I am afraid we have destabilized our society for the long run.

> I would prefer those companies to fail and new ones with new management who can more accurately assess costs and value to replace them.

Sounds good in theory. Haven't seen it working in practice over the last 2-3 decades across the Western world.

[cjbgkagh]

A lack of consumer surplus creates far more problems.

Again, lack of wealth causes more problems across the board.

I cite myself for my opinion.

I’ve seen a lot of failed outsourcing over the last 20 years. It’s not like companies haven’t been trying and it’s not like they won’t keep trying. In any case, I’m not sure how effective spreading the wealth through labor restrictions will be if developer salaries normalize after the next recession. I think it is probably a moot point.

[zozbot234]

> And that is how societies, especially middle class, gets decimated. Look at what happened to midwest when The Capital discovered that chinese workers are equally skilled at manufacturing stuff at a fraction of the cost.

Look at what happened w/ workers in China and elsewhere in that same timeframe. It takes two to tango. Why don't mfg towns in China and Southeast Asia count as "strong communities" too? There are plenty of locally-bound jobs in any First-World country - most of those have well-developed service economies after all. But other stuff will just get done wherever it's most convenient.

[dragonwriter]

> Look at what happened w/ workers in China and elsewhere in that same timeframe.

The “cool” thing about neoliberal trade is that it drives internal inequality (usually on pre-existing race, ethnic, tribal, and other distinct subgroup lines of advantage/dusadvantage) in both the more and less developed partners in trade.

[mbg721]

What do you tell your Kentucky-based employees at that point? "Look, 30 cents a week is our business model. You don't see Harbaglarb in Racetothebottomland complaining,"??

[pydry]

Thats pretty much what happened to most US based labor-intensive industry.

It all seemed to work fine for US business leaders until it slowly started dawning on politicians that their "free trade" schtick created a colossal national security risk in the form of enormously fragile multicontinent supply chains.

[akmarinov]

Well yeah, if Harbaglarb does the same job as the Kentucky person why shouldn’t they be paid the same?

[RestlessMind]

Burden of proof is on you to demonstrate why they should be paid the same. Employers (aka Shareholders/owners) are always going to maximize money going to their own pockets. Why should they give more of it to Harbaglarb?

[mbg721]

From a rational economic standpoint, they should, but that isn't the fight that the anti-Harbaglarbers wanted; there's an assumption that there's culture in common between SF and KY that gets lost somewhere overseas to the cheapest bidder.

[ChuckNorris89]

It wouldn't get lost if you didn't go for the cheapest bidder. And you don't have to go as far as paying US salaries to get that talent as well.

Eastern Europe is full of top devs who who work remotely for SV companies and understand US culture (New Yorkers couldn't believe I was a foreigner) and deliver value, while being paid half of what their US team members are getting and are (mostly) happy with that since 80k-150k is still way more than what local companies pay there.

[pydry]

There are larger legal differences across countries that mostly dont apply between SF and kentucky.

& timezone and language/cultural differences too that are not immaterial.

[akmarinov]

Is your argument that people in different timezones and cultures doing the same job with the same results should be paid less because of it?

[reflexco]

If a part of the job is coordinating with people in a specific timezone who are ready to pay for availability during their own timezone then yes. We don't consider it abnormal that a waiter in Manhattan gets paid more than a waiter doing the same job in Prague. A more interesting question would be to ask how can we overcome these coordination hurdles between people in different regions and cultures in tech companies? It's a challenge for sure.

[ksdnjweusdnkl21]

I think his argument is that in general their results would be worse because of the timezone and culture difference, thus earning less on average. I think there might be an element of truth there, but probably not enough to explain the entire difference, only a small part of it.

[akmarinov]

You know, there are a lot of cultures in the US itself - should we pay them differently based on that?

[hiptobecubic]

It's not that Indian culture somehow isn't as good. It's that there's sufficient supply there to fill all the positions at lower pay. If the exact same people manage to get a visa and transfer to SF, they will instantly start getting paid $100,000s more. Likewise, If Google moves an entire org, doing all the exact same work, from NYC to Raleigh, NC, it will cut everyone's pay by 25%.

I personally am moving from completely remote to completely remote but from somewhere else, specifically because my company pays more than the difference in CoL so it's "free" for me. From the company's point of view, I just became more expensive for no reason and at no gain to them, but that's their policy so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[randyrand]

for most companies, time zones and the added 200-400ms of audio delay are a big deal.

[ghaff]

Time zones past a certain point perhaps. I routinely deal with a 5-6 hour spread (eastern US to Europe) and it works pretty well. No particular audio issues either--at least any more than video calls generally. I would agree that more than about 6 hours starts getting harder unless the people in one of the zones really shift their workday.

[solardev]

Not the OP, but I think you bring up a great point and just wanted to chime in...

IMO cultural compatibility is valuable and worth paying a premium for, both within an employer's team, between an employer and their customers or their marketers, etc.

The support culture can be vastly different between cultures, as can design sense, time prioritization, team dynamics, etc. It's hard to work effectively with someone who barely speaks your language, doesn't get your jokes, doesn't like the same food, isn't used to communicating the same way -- whether in body language or slang or powerpoints, etc. (And it goes both ways -- I'm not just talking about American companies offshoring, but also Americans trying to work overseas, or people moving to/from China for opportunities, etc.)

But in an actually free market, where capital, labor, and customers are all free to pick and choose as they please, I doubt the difference would be as large as it is now, like 5x-10x difference for the same work just based on cultural compatibility. I've met plenty of foreign (to me) people who work harder and are just plain better at my job than I am, but get paid less because of the circumstances of their birth.

In a hypothetical world where people were free to work and live where they please, I don't know what an appropriate value of that "cultural fit premium" should be, maybe 20-30%? Certainly not orders of magnitude. But we don't have that hypothetical world, and our protectionist borders seem to be getting more defined by the day, not more blurred, as the West goes through a cultural backlash against globalization.

The dark side of "equal pay for equal work" is that Americans often enjoy higher pay and a higher quality of life for less work, sometimes MUCH less work, compared to their counterparts in international tech sweat-shops. We have hard-won labor protections that took decades of organizing to achieve, and even then there are horror stories of abuse and burnout.

Ideally we'd be paying all workers the highest wages and letting them move where they please, but doing so would also cause hyperinflation across the world and in turn drive down purchasing power. And cause a horrifying housing crunch in all the desirable areas of the world. The whole system is rigged such that there can ever only be a small % of comfortable people, or else it all falls apart =/

Other options are to pay the lowest common denominator (and lose all your highest paid staff), just don't outsource, or apply a cost of living adjustment, etc. None are perfect or easy solutions.

But salary transparency is a great start, especially while there are still people doing the same job in the same OFFICE, sometimes on the same team, who get paid differently. It at least gets the conversation going so we can start thinking about solutions...

[baron816]

Companies don’t exist for the sole benefit of their employees, unless they’re a coop. Capitalism doesn’t allocate resources based on “hard work” or some sort of social notion who “deserves” to be paid what. You get paid what the market determines you should be paid.

A company that pays everyone the same thing is overpaying a lot of people. That’s great for those employees, but it probably means the company wasn’t able to hire as many people as it otherwise would have. Either that, or the company has become less competitive and runs the risk of failing.

It’s perfectly fair to argue that you should be paid the same as all the other employees at company X, and it might work as a negotiating tactic. But if your options are $150k at global company X where SF employees at the company are making $300k, or $75k at local company Y, what would you choose? Company X probably knows what your options are.

[mmmpop]

> there are people even more valuable than them getting paid significantly less.

Is this some reference to how SWEs are overpaid on the whole? OR something else..?

[shmatt]

Just that U.S Based usually means highest paid. It doesn't usually mean highest performer. Because pay depended more on COL (or more accurately cost of hiring). Which then causes a COL-adjustment, which then causes the employee to go against said adjustment

But COL-adjustments are ingrained in every international company. It's just US based employees always benefited and liked it