[x0x0]

You're aware you don't have to accept the salary offered, right? You can take less, and I even bet few employers will complain. I gonna let you start the trend and I'll hold back though.

I think you misread the complaints: to my ears, they are more about "how on earth is that useful" or "another company solving the problems of young upper middle class urbanites" (viz Breather [1], or the 5 (and growing!) laundry startups respectively) [2].

Finally, businesses need to reach a mutual agreement with their employees. Startups and small companies are amazingly stupid; the standard playbook for creating a business is do things big companies can't that you can because you're small, ie make your smallness a positive instead of a hindrance. Somehow, none of them are willing to do that with employees. So, for example, I'd love to work remotely. Virtually no companies are interested. I've also repeatedly offered to trade 10% of my salary for the ability to 4 weeks of vacation in a row, but no-one accepts the offer. If you choose to compete directly with {goog, fb, etc} then you're competing on their terms and will probably lose.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/04/breather-series-a/

[2] I submit, w/o proof, laundry startups are a symptom of how shitty a city sf is. In a real city (ny) there are wash & folds near your apartment; you hand them a hamper and either pick up clean clothes or they drop them off at your apartment. No need for smartphones and deliveries and other bs.

[potatolicious]

> "You can take less, and I even bet few employers will complain. I gonna let you start the trend and I'll hold back though."

Which is why I won't do it. It might be a symbolic gesture, but it'll also be useless.

Expecting people to take voluntary pay cuts is unrealistic, it also overlooks a fundamentally better solution: increasing supply.

Growing the labor pool is good - it means more wealth and more employment all around. It means better lives for more people (as opposed to reducing the quality of your own life for no apparent purpose). It means more people in our community, it means more technologists will exist, and a larger portion of the population will understand what we do.

I will gladly take a pay cut if it means more people have joined the fold and enjoy the upper-middle class income that was previously out of reach.

> "I submit, w/o proof, laundry startups are a symptom of how shitty a city sf is. In a real city (ny) there are wash & folds near your apartment"

Hehe, agreed on all counts. I too am of the opinion that a large number of startups exist solely to paper over what is a civic planning failure of gigantic proportions. SF is not a functioning city, it is an embalmed tribute to the 1940s, kept "alive" solely by the massive and unending injection of cash.

[x0x0]

It would be far from useless for your employer for you to take less money, but fair enough.

Growing the labor pool is far from good when the goal is what passes for leadership in the valley -- pmarca, zuckerberg, larry page, et all -- are really advocating: avoid investing in education, or growing the workforce domestically, in favor of importing cheap foreign-educated labor which can then be exploited via our pseudo-indentured servitude h1b system. Most of these folks already let their ethics show w/ their engineering wage cram-down, along with their tax avoidance schemes which reduce funds to the government which heavily subsidizes their industries via, for example, public support of education of the skilled employees.

There are plenty of good engineers available in the US. You can do any of:

hire remote employees

pay better so that people can afford to live in the valley without making huge financial sacrifices, or use your leadership role to attack any of the things (transport, nimby, lack of housing, lack of dense housing) that make living in the valley so expensive

foster an engineering pipeline and work culture that doesn't systematically exclude women (double your potential employee base alone), plus other minorities

But since they make none of these changes, I oppose any increase in visa allotments.