Tons of companies do. I forget the exact number but I was paying like $3/month for Spotify when I was registered as living in Indonesia and paying with an Indonesian bank card.
NBA also does this for League Pass. A simple work around is to use a VPN to connect from India and buy with rupees. You have to sign in again with VPN each time though when loading a video, disconnect from VPN and then refresh.
That’s irrelevant. It’s up to you to make a choice about what is the best value and suits you best. Rather than paying a high CoL on principal even though you would be better off somewhere else and on a pay cut.
Did you not read the part where the salary dramatically dropped? Why is it justifiable to pay someone less for the same work, just because of where they live? If I find a way to produce the same output but with lower expenses, the difference is my profit. I don't share that with the party purchasing my output so they can fucking steal it.
What does amount of work have to do with anything? Justifiable? What? This isn’t unicef. There’s no moral question here. It’s a bunch of tech assholes divvying up the spoils from further computerising the modern human experience.
Then the notion that anyone is being stolen from is just completely ridiculous.
Thinking that they’re paying you some intrinsically fair rate for a quantifiable unit of work is nice, but not true.
They pay the minimum they feel is required to retain you and prevent you from going to a competitor. And if that amount exceeds the cost to hire someone who can do your job as good as you, they want you gone. That’s it.
They know that working remotely from a place with a lower cost of living is a perk. They know even if you take a pay cut, you’ll come out ahead. They know the minimum they need to pay you to retain you has gone down.
It's hugely idealistic to believe that people get paid the same for the same work.
Look at an international circus contract, for example (I was in one). A group of performers from different countries performing in the same place get paid different amounts for doing the same exact role in the show (up to 2.5X difference, by the way) just because the company can get away with it. It's about the cost of the best alternative (for the worker), not about some intrinsic worth of the work.
Living in a highly sought-after area is a luxury and people who forgo luxuries to save money should not be subsidizing their coworkers who do not. Should your coworker that just bought a Lamborghini get a raise to compensate for their costs too?
My coworker should get whatever raise they can successfully negotiate. Buying an expensive luxury car is probably the kind of lifestyle event that prompts a lot of people to think “I could do with more money” and campaign for a raise. So kind of but not really.
As for whether you should subsidise someone, if it makes you more money overall then of course you should. Regardless of what luxuries they have.
I think ideally we move away from the whole "negotiating for a raise" idea since that advantages people who are low in agreeableness (and exacerbates gender pay ratios).
We should have open pay scales by position with well-defined criteria for bonus / raises. Negotiation should have little to do with it, ideally.
I don’t give a shit about “value delivered” or how much I “deserve”. I care about how nice my life will be. If I can live a nicer life by moving and taking a pay cut and a large CoL cut then I certainly will take it.
I agree that if you're working remote, cost of living should not really matter. But I also disagree that you should be paid an SF salary while working remote - part of the reason for the exorbitant SF salaries was actually the cost of living (and since you had to show up in person it made sense to provide for it). So likely remote workers should have more or less similar compensation, probably indexed to some median city in the U.S. - if you want to live in SF and work remotely - too bad.
Pure value rarely has to do with your salary; it's more about supply/demand. If we doubled the supply of people doing your exact job right now, your ability to negotiate (and your salary) would probably drop, even though you are delivering the same "value" to the company (unless value encompasses supply & demand).
(As I've mentioned above, I've seen pay differences in circus of 2.5X for performers with different passports doing pretty much the same exact job in the same exact show - the value they were delivering was the same, the only difference was country of origin). So pay is also about cost of best alternative.
It's bizarre considering that the company benefits as well when you move to low cost of living areas. Those tend to be low tax states so the state tax burden associated with employing you that the company has to pay goes down. Its absurd that they demand additional savings on top of that.
There are additional state and local tax programs like workers comp and disability insurance, job training, paid family leave, state income taxes if your entity is registered in that state, local taxes, etc. As you might expect, higher cost of living states tend to be more liberal and have more programs that employers are expected to fund. Moving employees out of those states saves money.
Maybe they don’t already own a home in the Bay Area?
The article mentions a 10% cut at a company where the average senior engineer makes $450k a year according to levels.fyi.
In most of the country, you’re living very, very well on $405k a year. In the Bay Area, you’ll make a 11% more and be house poor or spend your life in traffic. For most people, that’s a bad deal.
I’d put it this way: if a recruiter called me and suggested I quit my job and move back to the Bay Area for an 11% pay increase, I would be laughing as I hung up the phone.
Uh, what? I’m in Sydney and as I write this it looks like we’re going in to full on metro outbreak and lockdown this weekend. For the third time, IIRC. The country’s vaccinated approximately no one, there’s been near zero entry or exits of the country for anyone who’s not rich/famous/a politician, it seems like half of the past year has had internal travel restrictions between states and metro areas. There appears to be no plan to systemically improve our situation before next year.
Yes, we haven’t had mass deaths and hospitalizations. I’m very thankful I’ve been here instead of the US, or many other places. But dont pretend it’s some utopia that’s escaped the troubles of the last year.
I'm Australian and eagerly looking for a second nationality. Australians aren't allowed to leave Australia, it's literally a prison island again. I can't imagine why anyone would willingly subject themselves to that.
They allowed unmasked vaccinated people indoors. Then all the unvaccinated people took their masks off, in effect lying about their status to everyone else.
Yes, that is what I'd meant. I edited my comment to clarify. It's not just that unvaccinated people are lying, it's also that stores, and other places, are either not allowed to verify or don't want to verify - thereby putting all at risk.
The endpoints for vaccines are “does the person end up in the hospital and does the person die of COVID” not “does the person get infected”. To that end, the vaccines are still effective.
From the original WSJ source [1]: “Analysis by England’s public-health agency suggests vaccines provide significant protection against Delta after two doses, reducing the risk of symptomatic illness by about 80% and the risk of hospitalization by around 96%. That is only slightly weaker than the protection vaccines confer against Alpha, also known as B.1.1.7.“
In that case the virus can further evolve to get around vaccine indiced immunity, as Delta already has. Letting a virus spread among a vaccinated population is not exactly wise.
Most of the workforce is young enough that they weren't going to die anyway. The endpoint they're interested in is "does the person end up with long-term lung scarring/cognitive impairment/erectile dysfunction/dry mouth" and all the other scary long covid effects. I've seen at least one study showing increased risk of all sorts of neurological issues after even mild covid cases, FWIW.
The early research emerging on possible brain changes from COVID is pretty alarming. Obviously further information is needed, but it's fairly shocking this can happen under any circumstances. https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/14056549901280460...
The rare, fully-vaccinated, delta / delta plus breakthrough cases tend to be very mild. Anti-vaxxers are an existential threat to sane people because that's where variants are going to evolve that could defeat current vaccines.
If we're going to "optimize" life for as "little risk as possible," then optimizing for the wrong things is inevitable. I can see WfH if commute times, costs-of-living, and 99% of coworkers are assholes, but then there's social interaction, facetime, and how are people going to get promoted if their effort goes unnoticed.
In fairness to the anti-vaxxers (I have no sympathy for them), COVID-19 has crossed over to many mammal populations, and the scariest variants will almost certainly come from animals, not from anti-vaxxers.
I say this because it leads me to view the situation less as a threat to my personal safety, and more like a mass Darwin Award candidate, or nature’s version of a voter registration purge.
I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we can vaccinate young children against COVID.
> Now we are "saving the climate" not doing commute. It works both ways /s
I’m not sure why the /s as this is a legitimate argument in favor of WFH.
It is objectively better for the environment and reduces climate-impact so governments and corporations who have been green-washing should be embracing the new reality.
Instead we get unsubstantiated claims of better water-cooler conversations driving innovation and other baseless claims.
I see now. That makes sense. It is similar to how the anti-Bitcoin crowd in HN constantly smear Bitcoin as an environmental disaster while ignoring facts like:
- 100% of gold is strip mined literally raping the planet and leaving the mined earth completely unusable, while polluting water supplies.
- The primary alternative to Bitcoin is the US Petrodollar system which relies on proof of violence backed by the most powerful military industrial complex in the history of the world to ‘liberate’ oil-rich nations who dare trade oil for anything other than USD. (See Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc.)
- Gladly ignore things like Blood diamonds, the environmental and social costs of mining Lithium and other rare earth elements used to build the so-called green economy.
- Bitcoin uses mostly clean energy and increasingly so over time thanks to incentives while Gold, Platinum, Copper, etc are never held to the same ESG standards.
- Bitcoin gets demonized for its energy consumption while using half the energy of YouTube, an ad-infested spyware-ridden cat video site and less energy than the world’s hair-dryers /s
Don't be sad for being downvoted. Just buy and HODL.
As Peter Thiel asks: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Bitcoin's adoption is about 0.5% right now. By the time most people will agree with you it will have to be over 50% (about 7 doublings, which is 7 years), and Bitcoin won't be as great investment anymore as it is now.
> I’m not sure why the /s as this is a legitimate argument in favor of WFH.
I suspect that there's significant variation here: widespread WFH means fewer people driving ~1.5 hours a day to their office park jobs, but it also means fewer people taking public transit to urban centers. The former is an ecological disaster; the latter is probably slightly better than the same number of people air conditioning, etc. their independent houses and apartments.
Honestly the reduction in carbon emissions is a huge one, imo. I'm surprised more companies aren't championing that as a reason, by itself, to downsize office space and let people work from home.
I laughed at espresso, I’m glad that has been a shared experience. I spent around $2k on coffee equipment since the start of the pandemic. No way I’m going to go back and drink sad office coffee or deal with poorly maintained espresso machines in micro kitchens now.
I spent $700 on the breville machine and it makes far better coffee than the $2000 fully automatic machine at work that has to be disassembled almost daily to avoid mould build up which no one does. When back at the office I’m drinking tea only.
I spent about $750 on a Rancilio Silvia, about $550 on a DF64 espresso grinder and some several hundred here and there for other small equipment at $20-30 apiece. I then paid about $750 or so to a coffee roasting machine, and I started to regularly roast my own coffee. Put in about $200 for books on roasting, and I’m now fully vertically integrated, ready to forcibly take over a small Caribbean nation to plant my flag and start my first coffee plantation under the auspices of the West India Company.
There's definitely amenities at home that seem simple but seriously factor into my preference to WFH.
For example, a Toto washlet. I visited Japan in Feb 2020 and purchased a bidet promptly afterwards, along with starting WFH at the onset of the lockdowns. After more than a year, it's hard to imagine going back. :-)
I’ve bought a clone of Toto Washlet for a few hundred bucks on Amazon when I saw the writing on the wall for toilet paper shortages. It worked great for reducing my toilet paper use to 1/10 of what it was, and it’s objectively more hygienic to boot.
Surely enough, one of the first few things to become scarce after the toilet paper was the washlets.
Most of young & single are going mad in home isolation. They want to come back for social connect, better worksrations, free convenient food and many such..
Why do the extroverts want to go back? Why would they rather spend time harassing introverts instead of spending more time at a coffeeshop or a gym or wherever other extroverts go?
if facetime matters those who go back will get raises. those who stay wont. over time in non-remote first companies the facers will out compete the WFH crowd.
queue articles on nytimes on pay discrimination for those who WFH.
No offense to the writer, but it's a relatively light piece given the amount of ads. 7 of the 9 "paragraphs" are only one sentence. If this was a newspaper, the entire thing would take up maybe 3 inches of a single column.
A lot of people probably won't be able to go back in office full time until the fall. Remember that the whole child care situation is still not great. Summer camps may be operating at partial capacity, or not open at all. Parents didn't have time to line up child care this summer due to the uncertain nature of the pandemic.
I suspect it'll be a bit different when schools resume in the fall, but even then I doubt people will want to go back full time.
If you don’t want to go to the office and you’re being forced to, quit. There’s WAY too many jobs out there being offered fully remote and at the same salaries for you to accept that shit.
There was a "Office Reopening" lunch a few weeks ago. You could come in if you wanted or you could join over zoom while the CEO did their spiel. Since I was hired remote I went hoping to meet in-person the others on the engineering team. Only one other team member showed up of about 15. Got to meet a lot of the product and marketing people instead if that's any indication of who is going back to the office (Non-coastal, East of Missisippi but not Chicago).
I don't like WFH. Maybe it's because this is the 1st time I did it during the pandemic. So here are my questions to those loving it
1. How do you form connections if you do 10p% WFH? many of my friends and casual acquaintance are from meeting people in pantry area. Or meeting someone who is with someone I know. That's not possible now. I am an introvert so pre pandemic itself it was difficult for me.
2. Company doesn't pay for buying furniture or electricity used at my house. I am depreciating my house without any benefit. Company ain't paying enough to offset internet charges
3. I miss going out. But that's a pandemic thing
4. Do you think office politics will reduce if we WFH? I mean it's difficult to be managers pet when everyone is wfh
As an environmentalist I like that my travel has reduced and carbon footprint has decreased. So that's a plus. I've also planted around 20 plants this year. Benefit of WFH
Ask your work for a stipend so you can purchase a co-working space membership. (Assuming you have one or more nearby.) Remote work most certainly doesn't have to mean only work from home. I also highly recommend finding local meetups (perhaps still online-only at present) centered on technologies or industries you care about. In short, I think it's important to seek out ways to get what you need out of life without expecting your immediate job description to somehow meet those needs.
> And company doesn't pay for anything depreciating at my house except laptop
I can only see incremental wear and tear on, say, furniture mattering if you are jumping on the couch while you code. Maybe a 33% wear on your kitchen from eating lunch at home too. The house falls down from the weather at the same rate if you are there or not.
What is depreciating about your house from WFH at an marginal and alarming speed?
Whatever it is. I'm using my personal stuff for business.
Companies do dodgy shit to evade income tax, one of which is spend unnecessary amounts internally to make it an expense
And they are liable for less tax.
I had to buy new furniture or use existing furniture.
Indian celebrities buy Ferrarris and mark it as depreciating asset by doing some tax magic to save taxes.
And here I am using all my personal shit for work and getting nothing in return
Not to mention company saves tons on rent, electricity and internet. And yet few firms have policies to reimburse employees.
When I work from office, I'm sitting on my dinner table and chair for less than 1hr per day. Now I sit on it for 8-9hrs. And I already had to refit that chair once. Maybe the fitting guy hadn't fit it well.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadFor me at least the added COL is more than offset by the higher pay.
Edit: This is more a pre-Covid comment. No idea the math for remote post-Covid.
Food, gas, plumbing, etc are also cheaper.
If you take a pay cut for relocating to a lower CoL area, you are being stolen from.
Then the notion that anyone is being stolen from is just completely ridiculous.
They pay the minimum they feel is required to retain you and prevent you from going to a competitor. And if that amount exceeds the cost to hire someone who can do your job as good as you, they want you gone. That’s it.
They know that working remotely from a place with a lower cost of living is a perk. They know even if you take a pay cut, you’ll come out ahead. They know the minimum they need to pay you to retain you has gone down.
Look at an international circus contract, for example (I was in one). A group of performers from different countries performing in the same place get paid different amounts for doing the same exact role in the show (up to 2.5X difference, by the way) just because the company can get away with it. It's about the cost of the best alternative (for the worker), not about some intrinsic worth of the work.
As for whether you should subsidise someone, if it makes you more money overall then of course you should. Regardless of what luxuries they have.
We should have open pay scales by position with well-defined criteria for bonus / raises. Negotiation should have little to do with it, ideally.
Pure value rarely has to do with your salary; it's more about supply/demand. If we doubled the supply of people doing your exact job right now, your ability to negotiate (and your salary) would probably drop, even though you are delivering the same "value" to the company (unless value encompasses supply & demand).
(As I've mentioned above, I've seen pay differences in circus of 2.5X for performers with different passports doing pretty much the same exact job in the same exact show - the value they were delivering was the same, the only difference was country of origin). So pay is also about cost of best alternative.
The difference in income taxes is paid (or saved) by the employee.
Maybe they don’t already own a home in the Bay Area?
The article mentions a 10% cut at a company where the average senior engineer makes $450k a year according to levels.fyi.
In most of the country, you’re living very, very well on $405k a year. In the Bay Area, you’ll make a 11% more and be house poor or spend your life in traffic. For most people, that’s a bad deal.
I’d put it this way: if a recruiter called me and suggested I quit my job and move back to the Bay Area for an 11% pay increase, I would be laughing as I hung up the phone.
I guess we’re just waiting for a 2nd wave in the US.
Yes, we haven’t had mass deaths and hospitalizations. I’m very thankful I’ve been here instead of the US, or many other places. But dont pretend it’s some utopia that’s escaped the troubles of the last year.
I wouldn’t expect so. You have 2/3 the population of California and almost the size of the USA (although populated all along the coasts).
I also don’t agree with dude it’s some Covid utopia. But, just density-wise it was never going to be very bad there.
In December when you you had a handful of deaths, we had one every three seconds. Every hour. Every day. For over a month.
People go shopping with cough and fever. People gather with family and friends without any consideration whatsoever about the consequences.
I had someone come to my house one day after two of his co-workers tested positive for covid. Zero considerations.
It's an epidemic of stupidity here. You have absolutely no idea what it's like here.
From the original WSJ source [1]: “Analysis by England’s public-health agency suggests vaccines provide significant protection against Delta after two doses, reducing the risk of symptomatic illness by about 80% and the risk of hospitalization by around 96%. That is only slightly weaker than the protection vaccines confer against Alpha, also known as B.1.1.7.“
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-warns-of-new-versions-of-...
Fully vaccinated Delta-variant carriers are infecting other fully vaccinated persons.
Wasn't this the whole point of vaccination: to allow virus circulation among vaccinated population without negative effects?
If we're going to "optimize" life for as "little risk as possible," then optimizing for the wrong things is inevitable. I can see WfH if commute times, costs-of-living, and 99% of coworkers are assholes, but then there's social interaction, facetime, and how are people going to get promoted if their effort goes unnoticed.
I say this because it leads me to view the situation less as a threat to my personal safety, and more like a mass Darwin Award candidate, or nature’s version of a voter registration purge.
I’m eagerly awaiting the day when we can vaccinate young children against COVID.
I see what you did here. Lockdown psychosis is not a joke.
There is a huge demand for IT people.
And we all learn and know we can do it remotely as we are doing for almost 2 years.
I do get some people Want to go to the Office.
But the majority of tech scene is Introvert.
We are not going back.
We have better machines, espresso, coffee food and gym at our own house.
Now we are "saving the climate" not doing commute. It works both ways /s
I’m not sure why the /s as this is a legitimate argument in favor of WFH.
It is objectively better for the environment and reduces climate-impact so governments and corporations who have been green-washing should be embracing the new reality.
Instead we get unsubstantiated claims of better water-cooler conversations driving innovation and other baseless claims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
- 100% of gold is strip mined literally raping the planet and leaving the mined earth completely unusable, while polluting water supplies.
- The primary alternative to Bitcoin is the US Petrodollar system which relies on proof of violence backed by the most powerful military industrial complex in the history of the world to ‘liberate’ oil-rich nations who dare trade oil for anything other than USD. (See Iraq, Iran, Libya, etc.)
- Gladly ignore things like Blood diamonds, the environmental and social costs of mining Lithium and other rare earth elements used to build the so-called green economy.
- Bitcoin uses mostly clean energy and increasingly so over time thanks to incentives while Gold, Platinum, Copper, etc are never held to the same ESG standards.
- Bitcoin gets demonized for its energy consumption while using half the energy of YouTube, an ad-infested spyware-ridden cat video site and less energy than the world’s hair-dryers /s
Edit: downvotes but no comments, sad.
Totally agree with it 100% btw.
ESG is just corporate/banker control disguised as rainbows and sunshine.
Gotta love the doublespeak Orwellian world we're in.
While your rant was a bit off topic, it would still be fun to see the arguments. But no, you'll just be down voted.
As Peter Thiel asks: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
Bitcoin's adoption is about 0.5% right now. By the time most people will agree with you it will have to be over 50% (about 7 doublings, which is 7 years), and Bitcoin won't be as great investment anymore as it is now.
I suspect that there's significant variation here: widespread WFH means fewer people driving ~1.5 hours a day to their office park jobs, but it also means fewer people taking public transit to urban centers. The former is an ecological disaster; the latter is probably slightly better than the same number of people air conditioning, etc. their independent houses and apartments.
Strange that our "carbon free" companies are getting crazy about coming back and even more crazy now because nobody wants to go back to the cage.
Sorry but no.
I want to live where I want to live and I will work same or more efficient than I did before WFH.
No that cold free sandwich will not do it
For example, a Toto washlet. I visited Japan in Feb 2020 and purchased a bidet promptly afterwards, along with starting WFH at the onset of the lockdowns. After more than a year, it's hard to imagine going back. :-)
Surely enough, one of the first few things to become scarce after the toilet paper was the washlets.
queue articles on nytimes on pay discrimination for those who WFH.
We all know the best way to get raises is to switch companies.
No switching means you will get maybe 5-8%
My workplace did that and everyone agreed they would rather work at home than wear a mask all day.
Once that’s gone? Plenty of people want to come back - part time at least.
I suspect it'll be a bit different when schools resume in the fall, but even then I doubt people will want to go back full time.
1. How do you form connections if you do 10p% WFH? many of my friends and casual acquaintance are from meeting people in pantry area. Or meeting someone who is with someone I know. That's not possible now. I am an introvert so pre pandemic itself it was difficult for me.
2. Company doesn't pay for buying furniture or electricity used at my house. I am depreciating my house without any benefit. Company ain't paying enough to offset internet charges
3. I miss going out. But that's a pandemic thing
4. Do you think office politics will reduce if we WFH? I mean it's difficult to be managers pet when everyone is wfh
As an environmentalist I like that my travel has reduced and carbon footprint has decreased. So that's a plus. I've also planted around 20 plants this year. Benefit of WFH
And company doesn't pay for anything depreciating at my house except laptop
How does that even out?
On the contrary it 'odds out'. Everything odds out.
I can only see incremental wear and tear on, say, furniture mattering if you are jumping on the couch while you code. Maybe a 33% wear on your kitchen from eating lunch at home too. The house falls down from the weather at the same rate if you are there or not.
What is depreciating about your house from WFH at an marginal and alarming speed?
Companies do dodgy shit to evade income tax, one of which is spend unnecessary amounts internally to make it an expense
And they are liable for less tax.
I had to buy new furniture or use existing furniture.
Indian celebrities buy Ferrarris and mark it as depreciating asset by doing some tax magic to save taxes.
And here I am using all my personal shit for work and getting nothing in return
Not to mention company saves tons on rent, electricity and internet. And yet few firms have policies to reimburse employees.
When I work from office, I'm sitting on my dinner table and chair for less than 1hr per day. Now I sit on it for 8-9hrs. And I already had to refit that chair once. Maybe the fitting guy hadn't fit it well.