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by Karrot_Kream
589 days ago
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Internally most larger tech companies index their salary bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over the last couple years has had many companies move reqs from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money. |
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Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")
This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).
London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.