Hard to say, their job listings[1] don't include the salary. Their listings do say "All salaries are transparent within the company and are set above local market rates," so maybe all it takes is one high cost of living hire to raise the rates for all employees with the same title?
We’re rolling it out in the next week 2 weeks. We will begin publishing salary bands on every job posting. Internally, we will publish levels and sub-levels for every job.
It seems to me the way it would work in practice, is that they’ll probably have to give people in SF higher titles? Mostly hire people with senior pay bands in high CoL areas, and if those pay bands are competitive with the other offers they get (which may be less senior) then it works?
I don’t disagree; just, I have seen talent hired at higher levels simply to justify the salary band and not because of the work and it seems like an easy escape hatch from this when recruiters want talent in competitive markets.
It is generally the case that said exceptional talent has already immigrated to HCoL US areas like SF/NYC, or that there are immigration/timezone restrictions preventing them from being hired by companies. It is very rare that someone who is talented can't get hired for a rate that they are worth.
There’s nothing discriminatory about it. The comment isn’t saying non-whites or non-US workers are dumb or untalented; it’s saying that most of the more talented ones have relocated (emigrated) already.
You are assuming that people with exceptional talent want to live in HCoL areas. Migration data over the last two years suggests that your opinion has holes.
No kidding, people seem to pretend supply and demand don't exist and they can just ignore market forces. This sort of populist first order thinking sounds good if you don't think about it very hard, but never actually works. They'll either waste money overpaying people (and go out of business or simply operate a charity if they have deep pockets) or underpaying and fail to attract competitive talent. Presumably it's all just for show anyway, whatever happens will be even less fair than if they just paid market wages for the work they wanted done
For entry-level American SWE pay, you could get the valedictorian from fairly high quality schools across the developing world and work them like dogs and they wouldn't complain.
I think this makes sense given the following:
1) you think you can handle the distributed/async workforce
2) you are OK with having mediocre US talent (made up for by exceptional foreign talent)
3) you think they can make up for not being exposed to modern SWEngineering culture by just being better in {IQ, Work Ethic, etc.}
And I am willing to bet most don't because moving is a huge change in your life, the USA probably won't let you in, and being rich in a poor country isn't all that bad.
IC comp ain’t complicated — you want people who are good at what you need them to do, and you need to make them a more attractive offer than your competition, so that they work for you instead of the other company. Remote work is fine for them. They probably prefer it to being interrupted all day with meetings. They know all about how boring such things can be from reading Dilbert.
What do you do about leadership? Do global/permaremote companies have managers, staff eng, and c-level members who never meet more regularly than once a quarter? Does remote-work as a leader in a global/remote-first business mean frequent trips to airports? How does it work when your job is more than “make the CI faster”?
If you do one thing for ICs and another for leaders, are you tacitly saying to all remote ICs that they’ll never progress to a leadership role?
People say that remote IC work is mercenary and very much like contracting. To that extent, if you take a remote salaried position, are you doing yourself a disservice compared to taking the dispassionate, transactional, disposable contractor-style role without the contractor pay?
There are plenty of high-level remote leaders, even at large conservative companies, who don’t meet in person more than once a quarter. Especially after the last couple of years.
Remote work has led to more meetings than ever was the case in person. Google Calendar's default 30 minute meeting has made things a lot worse so that each interruption is now at least 30 minutes.
Do you commonly use the full meeting time though...? My experience with remote meetings has been that either you just terminate the call when you're done with whatever you started the call for, or you end it after 30 minutes because one or more people have meetings to go to, or you keep going for however long the problem still exists and all participants are available to work on it (or until you give up and shelve it for another time). But in most cases 30 minutes ends up being the upper bound on interruption time, not the lower bound.
I worked at a company that did this, and I left in part because they wouldn't just come out and say, "We don't actually want to hire American employees." Instead they recruited American employees with promises of fast advancement to higher pay, but never actually advanced them.
It's absolutely their prerogative to make a decision like that, only to be competitive in low-wage markets, but they should just own it.
I think being upfront about this like Graph is doing is a much clearer approach.
I don't know what the wage range for these roles is, but at the company where I was, they weren't.
They were fantastic wages for southeast Asia, and competitive wages in parts of Europe and South America, but were solidly 30%+ below our competitors who were also based in the U.S., never mind that the wages were so stagnant retail jobs became competitive with us after awhile.
This is the Infosys model for hiring. I don't know if they publicized it or not, but it's the same thing. Everyone gets paid the same no matter what. You live in Mumbai? $36,000/year. New York? $36,000/year. Paris? $36,000/year. They did this intentionally to facilitate the easy acquisition of visas sponsored by the companies getting these cheap tech workers. It's a total scam and completely destructive to the local tech worker economy/market.
What’s the exploitation? A company offers a job; if the job is appealing to the candidate, they freely take it.
That’s true whether it’s a $250K/yr offer or a $36K/yr offer. In the vast majority of cases, the alternative to a company offering $36K/yr is not for them to offer $250K/yr but rather to not offer a job at all.
If anything, I’d argue that a company offering a consistent salary for the job anywhere in the world is acting more ethically than one offering $X in Mumbai and 5*$X in Paris.
When one asks a question in the format, “Are you pretending that [obvious problem] isn’t an ethical problem?”, it makes me wonder if that person is really interested in understanding or is just interested in accusing someone else and picking a fight.
If it’s the former, then maybe consider that other people don’t see the issue as the same [obvious problem] as you do, instead of assuming that they do, and then basing further reasoning on that bad faith assumption.
If it’s the latter, then continue doing what you’re doing.
You sound dishonest. Surely, you are aware that keeping salaries secret and having them differ between employees assigned to the same job is increasing information asymmetry?
It has apparently become fashionable to voice a concern in response to a solution to that concern to criticize the solution. You're effectively complaining that transparent pricing will result in information asymmetry or exploitation.
Right, the local government would have to use subsidies to support college educated workers. The whole system would surely fall apart. It is probably in governments best interest to safeguard against this.
Interesting how the interests of poorer people like the non-college educated or those in poorer countries are ignored.
Subsiding unprofitable industries doesn’t have a great track record in any case. The Argentine and Indian auto industries disappeared as soon as protective tariffs did, at great cost to the taxpayers who subsidized them for decades.
- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living
- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere
- these employees will have motivation to keep their job at all costs, so when they are disengaged doing the absolute minimum to ensure they won’t get managed out
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
- incentive for local teams and managers to hire their friends to extremely cushy jobs and perpetuate
i think this is backwards. remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output. overpaying won’t bring you additional output, but will bring other challenges
- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living
> Agreed. And other factors like taxes and quality of living are all playing a role for what the person will ultimately receive. Interestingly enough, oftentimes these balance each other out. Higher taxes? Usually better infrastructure. Lower taxes? Maybe hospitals less good.
We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point:
"remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"
We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.
> "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"
That wasn’t true in offices and I don’t see it being true while remote. There are integer multiples of difference among employees who used to work in the same office as each other.
- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere
I get the argument, but I think remote work is making that less of a risk. Paying significantly above local market value will let them have high standards. Great engineers should be able to get other great remote offers. Salaries might not keep those engineers from leaving.
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
Is it a huge issue if a senior engineer doesn't want to get promoted if they are doing well in their current job?
That makes no sense. Why would somebody who is extremely motivated to keep the job work less hard? Surely they'd want to do everything they could to keep it by doing their very best work. It's the people who could easily jump to another job who are less motivated to do their best.
Small companies can try lots of interesting things, and they may or may not work out for them. Gravity Payments famously has their $70k minimum salary[0]. Duolingo insisted on gender parity in CS hires[1]. But if Amazon or Microsoft tried the same thing, it might not work. I’m more interested in what geopay is going to look like industry-wide than what one small company is doing, but they might make an interesting data point.
Funny how Amazon or Microsoft are perfectly happy to have mostly the same prices worldwide. Let me know when I can call them both to be priced at my country COL.
There is always a justification or theoretical argument to avoid giving workers more rights.
There's a lot of drama around gravity payments. The CEO has some serious problems and raised the wages as part of a larger political game with cofounders:
It's really recognition that remote roles are essentially competing for people globally, so your competition is every other company hiring globally. The reason a lot of wages were lower for some cities, was a lack of competition for their hires. Now there's competition everywhere. Salaries will rise as a result. These guys are just skipping to the conclusion.
I think these forces, should they become very common, will tend to normalize salaries globally.
That means they’ll rise in some places, but fall in others, because just like the employers’ competition is now every other company hiring globally, the employees’ competition is every other capable employee globally.
This is awesome. Equal pay for equal work is fair and just. An effective interview process and leveling system will be extremely important. If an engineer from SF really is so much better than one from Cleveland or Bangalore, the hiring manager needs to be able to assess them accurately and start them at the right levels for their abilities.
Is it really fair and just, though? Is it fair, for example, for a business financed with Silicon Valley money, leveraging Californian infrastructure, enjoying US legal protections, to offer Americans a wage that only meets the needs of developers in Nigeria or Bosnia? If my money doesn't go as far in the US as it would in India, I'm being penalized for simply being born in the wrong place. Who do you think will take these jobs? In my opinion this is woke-washed outsourcing, and US-based developers should be boycotting any business that does this.
I am all for removing location based pay. But the devil is in the details. There is a reason why location based pay exist. Every country taxes salary differently. Taxes in CA is different from Florida and Taxes in US / EU/ Asia are widely different. So if the pre-tax amount to employee is 100k. In CA you'll probably get around 60k and in florida ~80k. (These are rough numbers, but I hope you get the idea). This might seem like employee in florida is making more than CA. But the net cost to company is the same.
Pay is based on market conditions. Not cost of living or taxes. That's particularly true for location based pay. That's why you end up with certain areas with very high cost of living and very low pay. This myth needs to stop.
This whole, complex strategy does not make much sense economically. Let's asume you want to hire someone with an average skillset: If you are trying to hire where the avarage rates are high, you could not compete with other companies. If you are hiring where the avarage rates are low, you are paying more than your competitors without additional benefits. The same line of thought applies for lower than average or higher than average skillsets, respectively. So on average, you have a choice of hiring someone lower than average from a high income region or someone higher than average from a low income region. The latter is always better economically. In the end, (all else being equal) market forces should drive you towards the traditional off-shoring strategy of just hiring as much as possible in the lowest income regions, but with an additional penalty if you dare to hire from a not so low income region.
It makes sense because it is disruptive and people are not static spreadsheet entries of location and max pay. And most tech workers are savvy to what tech companies can make and that they are fighting for talent.
The very talented person in the cheap country who was going to fly to the US to earn more now applies for this job, so this company wins.
The SF resident who hates SF and who is up for living abroad but wants to save for retirement still: same thing.
You call it complex but what you are suggesting is geographical price discrimination which is obviously far more complex because you need salary information for the location Obtaining that information is difficult so your company will just determine the median salary of the entire country instead of adjusting it based on the city. You leave less money on the table, precisely because the bureaucratic burden has massively increased.
The question is, when such market transaction costs come into play. I don't think that they are so high to justify not taking different salaries into account world-wide. Besides, determining the median salary might also be not very accurate without research. But at least for my country, differences between the salary for software engineering per region are quite transparent. They would not exist in the first place, if they were really so hard to determine, at least roughly.
Nonsense. This is FUD in my estimation. I've work for remote companies who don't pay regionally since 2010. None of them have gone out of business, none of them have been bankrupted by paying people the market rate.
You can exclusively hire the SF and NYC engineers into levels that aren't offered to applicants from Bangalore and Lisbon and still satisfy "One Job, One Pay".
they say they're going to be transparent about equity stake. does this extend to founders and investors, I wonder? If not, I don't think this is transparency.
When it comes to equal pay in all region, I usually find that people tend to think it as Bay Area level (or at least US metro level) pay for everywhere. But a more realistic consequence would be developing country level pay for everywhere. There are tens of millions of developers outside the developed countries which will gladly accept one third of the market rate in developed countries. If you live in Europe or US and speak European languages, you gotta accept the fact that this geographical/linguistic barrier has been a critical factor for your annual salary.
It's probably something in between though. There's probably a point in between Developing Country Pay and Bay Area Pay where the company can get quality work done for the price they're willing to pay.
Obviously, they're less likely to get Bay Area developers, but I don't really see how that's a problem - there are plenty of good devs elsewhere. Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)
> Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)
Why give up Bay Area salaries, and the large Bay Area job market, to make less money somewhere else for the only company that would pay it?
One of the reasons people stay in the Bay Area is the ease of finding new jobs in tech. If you don't like your job, you don't need to put up with it, because there are plenty of other options.
On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind.
> On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind.
If this was true, there would be few young developers and recent grads, which is not the case. Owning a home is overrated, especially with the current prices.
> Owning a home is overrated, especially with the current prices.
You know what sucks? Renting in the Bay Area and seeing regular rent increases every single year, such that your rent today is 30% more than it was two years ago.
You know what's awesome? Buying a home several years ago and seeing it go up in value by 30% while your monthly mortgage bill has remained the same -- and also knowing that a significant portion of that monthly payment is going into your home equity and is still your money.
Renters are getting hurt far more by inflation than homeowners.
You know what’s not awesome? Buying a home in the last year or two of a housing bubble, having your home drop in value 30-50%, owing $150,000+ more on a loan than the house is worth, losing your job, and being unable to sell your home to move to another area for a new job without walking away from the house or coughing up big money at a closing.
Wages surely will more or less slowly going to a mean world level, witch means going high for some very poor people who normally live doing non-IT jobs (so they can't even learn fast enough to really profit) and going low for us in the western world. Some countries who happen to be in the middle now, let's say like Vietnam or Russian Fed., probably will not suffer that shift much, we will.
Moving also is not a mere geographical relocation: I can spot for instance a handful of nice areas in the world, in natural terms, where I can live well in natural terms BUT I depend on the physical world, on someone else jobs who can't be remote. Let's say you'll relocate to a natural paradise. Let's say you just want a new pair of shoes. Oh that's easy, just wait for the next delivery, it MIGHT happen in a month or two. Cheese? Oh, well, you might buy something vacuum-packed and frozen but it will be really expensive and of a very bad quality. You need health services? BWHAHAHAHHAHA did you know the meaning of natural selection? Well, if you can survive without them you'll live otherwise you'll die IF you are lucky. If not you might live for years, decades perhaps with very big handicap just because no one fix an issue quickly and how we know it should be done so a broken leg became a twisted and painful limb, a bad tooth a hole that force you to eat just tender foods on the other side of the mouth creating other jaw problems / pains witch in turn, ...
That's is.
Surely we have lived like that for millennia... Happy to came back to such life WITHOUT the real freedom of that past?
I think it will be more differentiated than that. If you are top talent at FAANG you'll probably continue to be able to demand top comp. If the you are a mediocre dev and you're salary is only high because you are in SF, your comp will likely go down. Comp in developing countries is already going up as well as part of the remote boom. Comp in Colombia for example seems to have practician doubled in the last year.
Your articles is still not really "optimistic" although it appear to be with a certain neutrality... As OP said most salaries will tend to slowly align to low income countries, like in nature, the communicating vessels principles, where liquids tend to align to a common mean level. That's means some Tajikistan or Paraguayan or Samoans workers will be happy, while other, like us in the western worlds with our actual cost of living will no be happy at all.
Oh, sure formally being remote we can relocate. Unfortunately living in the physical real world relocate is not just a matter of physical location on Earth but also physical situations around, for instance if I relocate to northern Urals from here (France Alps) I'll probably able to spot a nearly-similar climate (a bit hotter in summer, a bit colder in winter probably) and appear to be hyper-rich in the Urals BUT if I just need to buy food there is no Drive supermarket nearby there. If I just have a carious tooth I'm almost on my own or I have to fly 500-800 miles at minimum just to sort that out. Not talking about real eventual emergencies. Such services until we have global teleport network (something really fictional from our real current perspective) can be "remote".
Long story short IF I'm a young slave (yes, not Citizen, not worker) with a significant dose of optimism transfused in my body I can be happy and say: "hey, I'll go to some 'tropical-alike' area of the world where with very little I'm still rich! Wonderful! Or maybe I'll even be a digital nomad! Hooray!" and PERHAPS being happy for a little while, than discover it's too late to came back and being a new poor slave. Not much different than modern digital service mass market where some services start free, nice and friendly than they start to offer premium features, quality lower without them (and also with them, often), some fees for all arrive, ... and most customers are so locked-in even only by their peers being communication-centric that they have to remain, suffer and pay.
Now if we enlarge such vision: top talents are very few. Some or even most of them are considered "top" just because they choose to live to work instead of the contrary. All the rest? Try to enlarge the game behind eligible remote jobs: did you think you can get good food and health just paying more? Sorry, you can't. Surely in hoteliers terms just seeing some south Americans clinic you might think that's false. Unfortunately if you really touch the (obscene) quality of their real services you'll discover that scale matter also to form talents. To give them experience. There is no school that can substitute scale. If we do not have OVERALL good services for the society we also can't have good services for a small élite. We can mock them, we can self-convince them they are good seeing the sorry state of others humans, but we do not get nothing really good.
Try to see how innovation after public research era/bit labs era drop. Our actual IT is still way BEHIND old Xerox PARC level. Oh sure, is popularized, more colorful, more performant, far cheaper etc. What we can call "non-talented improvements" but there is NO REAL INNOVATION anymore. That's the result of scale: private markets can't reach the public research scale for the public and as a result they just produce popularized crap. Now imaging the result on social scale outside IT.
IMHO there will always be a language and culture barrier, and timezones. A Spanish company would prefer to hire Spanish speakers ( so Spain or Latin America) over Tajiks. What good are developers, for instance, if you can't really communicate with them due to limited timezone overlap and language issues?
Learning a language enough is not that hard, especially with languages like English... Spanish is a little bit harder, but still easy. It's not Chinese or Japanese with more alphabets etc...
Surely as I said that happen more or less slowly witch means that at first we will experience a proximity preference, but just see for call centers: here (France, Italy) there is an epidemic of offshored call-centers operators in the Balkans and north-Africa: they barely speak Italian or French but they get far little wages so for many companies that's good.
No offense and not trying to be racist or anything but I’ve never really worked with someone from South Asia or Eastern Europe who didn’t have some sort of insane crippling communication problem that made working with them nearly impossible. Yes I realize it’s a two way street but usually it’s US companies driving the car.
I work with several Ukrainians working in Ukraine. They all speak pretty good English. The only thing they struggle with is the dumb ass slang I spontaneously create, and even then they tend to understand from the tone.
That’s a temporary state of affairs. If you’re talent constrained but not capital restrained the returns to talent will increase and those to capital decrease over time. See long run increases in returns to Labour in every country that has managed to successfully industrialize, e.g. China or South Korea. For a software developer example see the run up over the last two decades in salaries for Indian, Chinese or E European developers.
The (unfortunate) reality is that the quality of software engineers outside the major tech hubs even in the US is relatively poor—-and it gets worse abroad. Other countries’ talents tend to migrate to these tech hubs, leaving their home countries with even more relatively poor talent.
This is going to be another decade resembling the outsourcing movement that occurred in the 2000s: and it will have a similar outcome. That outcome being that paying lower wages yields worse results and a huge backlash.
Outsourcing in the 2000s was difficult, technologically. Zoom meetings didn't exist. Github didn't exist. Continuous integration and automated testing was not really a thing. There was nothing like Slack. Screen sharing was difficult if not effectively impossible. Remote work is much more practical today, and the pandemic gave it a huge turbo-boost. I don't think we'll see a replay of oursourcing from 20 years ago (which was generally a debacle, no argument).
No talented engineer is going to look at a wage that is 2-3x locally in relatively poor conditions (crowding, sanitary, etc.) and think it’s a better deal than what they can get by emigrating. It might not be as bad as the outsourcing debacle, but it’s not going to be much different.
Yes, but you’re still living in conditions that are relatively poor compared to what you can get in developed countries (not just western/white ones). And these people aren’t ignorant or stupid: there’s a reason they emigrate in the numbers they do.
2-3x isn't actually bad level when the prices are also lower. Also the place with highest compensation sounds from discussion here have both crowding as in having room mates and sanitary issues with all of the issues of homelessness around...
And if we are talking about developing areas, the dev pay is already above median and being much higher will afford quite a good living conditions, away from all problems.
Is this “relatively poor talent” already working as software engineers?
If so, this change will reallocate which companies are employing them, but until it attracts people to the field who wouldn’t have otherwise entered it, it doesn’t seem like it will change the aggregate much.
That's why u never become an employee in the modern age. The only way to become wealthy nowadays is to own things: own companies, securities, certificates that allow you to perform certain useful jobs. The actual work is dirt cheap; access to the results of the work is pure gold.
People would decide to form companies, so we would never get what the commenter wants.
This idea was explained really well back in 1937, in The Nature of the Firm. It explains why we form companies instead of all being individual contractors making trades with each other.
Worse unless someone has figured out how to do the internal coordination that companies do. That’s a huge part of why first world countries are richer. They have large companies that embody social technologies and make long term and large scale coordination easier. Most people want security more than you be an entrepreneur and perhaps get rich, with much higher chances of losing everything and higher stress because the buck stops with you.
What about winner takes all markets? For instance there's only a few major ridesharing companies. It would be hard to start a small, profitable ridesharing business. And they couldn't pay staff engineers 500k+.
We already have a whole bunch of top developers who move to the Bay Area because it's the only place to get paid what they're worth. Pay will probably drop by whatever the all-in cost of relocating is, but not by two thirds; people who can make 3x as much by moving to the Bay Area already do, on the whole.
I'd say they're worth the same in a value sense (if we're talking remote then they're doing the same work, after all), it's just that their price is higher.
We are anchoring our pay to the 60th percentile of San Francisco. According to the most recent market data, this is higher than the average European pay.
Speaking from the perspective of working remotely for over 5 years with multiple teams (all of differing compositions): salaried + contractors, US (all three timezones) + South America + Europe (Eastern and Western) + Asia, junior + senior + staff engineers, etc.; and being involved in plenty of interview loops for remote engineering positions.
You're missing two key reasons why salaries won't normalize to developing country level pay:
1) Timezones are painful. +3h west to east coast US is usually tolerable if not slightly inconvenient at times, but not too bad. +5h and above starts to strain team dynamics. East US to London/Ireland caused more than a couple great US engineers to seek greener pastures within other teams at the company; a few teams had difficulty staffing majority European teams with US talent. A 50\50 split was usually more tolerable. Any time difference more than that within a team is insanity. Feedback loops become too large, there's no cohesion, and a host of other issues.
2) 10M+ engineers at the senior level don't exist. You want engineers that can autonomously churn through "we have a problem with no identified solution" situations. These engineers earn 2x to 3x their cost through technical leverage. At the senior+ level, talent supply is lower than demand. And if you want to train up an employee from junior to senior, good luck doing that with a timezone difference > +3h.
As long as there are tech companies printing gobs of money while demanding more talent than is available for engineers to produce $$$ for $, then salaries won't normalize to developing country pay.
Eh... I've worked with remote teams and found that you largely get what you pay for. Even if the devs technical chops were good, that language/cultural/distance barrier meant a lot of misunderstandings, and time spent breaking down tasks to avoid misunderstandings, that commensurately lowered their productivity. Also the overhead for their offices, HR, tax compliance, etc... it really didn't pay in the long run until a lot of them were hired.
“We don't just release publicly available bands. The transparency continues internally; every employee knows how much everyone is getting paid, including equity.”
Can someone provide a link to these publicly available bands?
If this goes through, and more and more companies do this, I think a lot of immigrants would want to go back to their cheaper home country instead of staying in the USA. I know I want to.
There are many great engineers in 3rd world countries. I wonder what the long term implication of this will be, both for USA and the 3rd world countries.
On the other hand, I am hearing the drum of de-globalization being sounded from afar...
I think compensations outside the US will continue to increase. The current decade is going to be a good time to be a SWE in a Low CoL country. Top talents in the US will continue to be well compensated. The one who will see their salaries decrease or stagnate and opportunities leak outside the country will be the average US developer who can't justify being paid > 50% more.
> The one who will see their salaries decrease or stagnate and opportunities leak outside the country will be the average US developer who can't justify being paid > 50% more.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] thread[1] https://jobs.lever.co/GraphCDN/33bc14f9-4671-4540-8862-7d358...
This wording seems philosophically incompatible with "One Job, One Pay" (OJOP), even if it's not actually logically inconsistent with OJOP "per se".
It works out as long as SF has the highest pay.
We’re rolling it out in the next week 2 weeks. We will begin publishing salary bands on every job posting. Internally, we will publish levels and sub-levels for every job.
This HN post causing 1000 people around the globe to apply is what it means for it to work.
People in SF with high COL probably will not apply. Unless they intend to move as soon as they get the job.
- We offered one person $27K more than their asking salary because the data showed that they were underestimating their market value.
- We offered someone 30K below what they were currently making
- We’ve made a comparable market offers
For entry-level American SWE pay, you could get the valedictorian from fairly high quality schools across the developing world and work them like dogs and they wouldn't complain.
I think this makes sense given the following:
1) you think you can handle the distributed/async workforce
2) you are OK with having mediocre US talent (made up for by exceptional foreign talent)
3) you think they can make up for not being exposed to modern SWEngineering culture by just being better in {IQ, Work Ethic, etc.}
What do you do about leadership? Do global/permaremote companies have managers, staff eng, and c-level members who never meet more regularly than once a quarter? Does remote-work as a leader in a global/remote-first business mean frequent trips to airports? How does it work when your job is more than “make the CI faster”?
If you do one thing for ICs and another for leaders, are you tacitly saying to all remote ICs that they’ll never progress to a leadership role?
People say that remote IC work is mercenary and very much like contracting. To that extent, if you take a remote salaried position, are you doing yourself a disservice compared to taking the dispassionate, transactional, disposable contractor-style role without the contractor pay?
I do think that as productivity and tools improve around remote and async work salaries in remote friendly jobs will equalize.
It's absolutely their prerogative to make a decision like that, only to be competitive in low-wage markets, but they should just own it.
I think being upfront about this like Graph is doing is a much clearer approach.
They were fantastic wages for southeast Asia, and competitive wages in parts of Europe and South America, but were solidly 30%+ below our competitors who were also based in the U.S., never mind that the wages were so stagnant retail jobs became competitive with us after awhile.
> We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA
Why would paying higher in other regions necessitate lower than market rates in high-salary regions?
“This is what this job is worth to me. Are you in?”
That’s true whether it’s a $250K/yr offer or a $36K/yr offer. In the vast majority of cases, the alternative to a company offering $36K/yr is not for them to offer $250K/yr but rather to not offer a job at all.
If anything, I’d argue that a company offering a consistent salary for the job anywhere in the world is acting more ethically than one offering $X in Mumbai and 5*$X in Paris.
If it’s the former, then maybe consider that other people don’t see the issue as the same [obvious problem] as you do, instead of assuming that they do, and then basing further reasoning on that bad faith assumption.
If it’s the latter, then continue doing what you’re doing.
It has apparently become fashionable to voice a concern in response to a solution to that concern to criticize the solution. You're effectively complaining that transparent pricing will result in information asymmetry or exploitation.
Subsiding unprofitable industries doesn’t have a great track record in any case. The Argentine and Indian auto industries disappeared as soon as protective tariffs did, at great cost to the taxpayers who subsidized them for decades.
>> We are anchoring our salary to the 60th percentile of San Francisco, CA
Not the same. Quite different.
- some people will be vastly better compensated than others in terms of cost of living
- attrition for these employees drops to near zero because it’s better pay than they can get anywhere
- these employees will have motivation to keep their job at all costs, so when they are disengaged doing the absolute minimum to ensure they won’t get managed out
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
- incentive for local teams and managers to hire their friends to extremely cushy jobs and perpetuate
i think this is backwards. remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output. overpaying won’t bring you additional output, but will bring other challenges
We might not agree in all points, but where we apparently strongly agree is on this point: "remote work has shown us most people are generally equal in output"
We agree with that. The only next step we do from there, is that for us, it matters, that for the same output, the company pays the same compensation. Why not go further? Why not think a step further from paying the same and adjusting it based on factors like cost of living, quality of living? Because that's very hard to quantify. We say, that the boundary of this decision is, how much we as a company pay to the human on the others side. We can't control what exactly will arrive, there are different taxes, health insurances etc, which all have an impact on what you ultimately earn.
That wasn’t true in offices and I don’t see it being true while remote. There are integer multiples of difference among employees who used to work in the same office as each other.
I get the argument, but I think remote work is making that less of a risk. Paying significantly above local market value will let them have high standards. Great engineers should be able to get other great remote offers. Salaries might not keep those engineers from leaving.
- when you’re making 3x the salary comparatively what additional motivation would a promotion get you to make 3.15x?
Is it a huge issue if a senior engineer doesn't want to get promoted if they are doing well in their current job?
[0]: https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/
[1]: https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
There is always a justification or theoretical argument to avoid giving workers more rights.
https://www.hundredeightydegrees.com/dan-price-business-frau...
[0] "Price, his brother Lucas and their father Ron worked as sales agents for a another credit card processor named Axia Payments"
That means they’ll rise in some places, but fall in others, because just like the employers’ competition is now every other company hiring globally, the employees’ competition is every other capable employee globally.
If you get paid more purely because you were born in the US and not India you’re being unfairly enriched for being born in the right place.
Should landlords also be paid the same no matter where they are supplying housing for renters?
As long as the pay moves UP. Not down. Then I will support removing location-based pay.
The very talented person in the cheap country who was going to fly to the US to earn more now applies for this job, so this company wins.
The SF resident who hates SF and who is up for living abroad but wants to save for retirement still: same thing.
1) bankrupt any startup hiring in SF and NYC
2) prevent startups from hiring in SF and NYC
You can't have both.
I think most are willing to make this tremendous sacrifice.
a) any startup hiring in SF and NYC will go bankrupt
b) the devs you hire outside of SF and NYC for the same HCoL salaries are not worth the pay, and over time will cause business failure
or is there another option?
Obviously, they're less likely to get Bay Area developers, but I don't really see how that's a problem - there are plenty of good devs elsewhere. Maybe this is a good incentive for Bay Area devs to move somewhere cheaper :)
Why give up Bay Area salaries, and the large Bay Area job market, to make less money somewhere else for the only company that would pay it?
One of the reasons people stay in the Bay Area is the ease of finding new jobs in tech. If you don't like your job, you don't need to put up with it, because there are plenty of other options.
On the other hand, if you move out of the area and there are only a few employers who will hire you where you live at a salary you can live with, you do not have that ability. And good luck moving back -- if you spend a few years out of the Bay Area housing market, the cost of moving back would blow your mind.
If this was true, there would be few young developers and recent grads, which is not the case. Owning a home is overrated, especially with the current prices.
You know what sucks? Renting in the Bay Area and seeing regular rent increases every single year, such that your rent today is 30% more than it was two years ago.
You know what's awesome? Buying a home several years ago and seeing it go up in value by 30% while your monthly mortgage bill has remained the same -- and also knowing that a significant portion of that monthly payment is going into your home equity and is still your money.
Renters are getting hurt far more by inflation than homeowners.
That might sting. But I don't believe it's ever happened in the bay area. Housing didn't drop 50% in 2001 and it didn't drop 50% in 2008.
I did drop, yes. Sometimes even underwater, as my home did in 2001.
The other factor is that "underwater" doesn't mean anything if you like the house and want to keep living in it.
Wages surely will more or less slowly going to a mean world level, witch means going high for some very poor people who normally live doing non-IT jobs (so they can't even learn fast enough to really profit) and going low for us in the western world. Some countries who happen to be in the middle now, let's say like Vietnam or Russian Fed., probably will not suffer that shift much, we will.
Moving also is not a mere geographical relocation: I can spot for instance a handful of nice areas in the world, in natural terms, where I can live well in natural terms BUT I depend on the physical world, on someone else jobs who can't be remote. Let's say you'll relocate to a natural paradise. Let's say you just want a new pair of shoes. Oh that's easy, just wait for the next delivery, it MIGHT happen in a month or two. Cheese? Oh, well, you might buy something vacuum-packed and frozen but it will be really expensive and of a very bad quality. You need health services? BWHAHAHAHHAHA did you know the meaning of natural selection? Well, if you can survive without them you'll live otherwise you'll die IF you are lucky. If not you might live for years, decades perhaps with very big handicap just because no one fix an issue quickly and how we know it should be done so a broken leg became a twisted and painful limb, a bad tooth a hole that force you to eat just tender foods on the other side of the mouth creating other jaw problems / pains witch in turn, ...
That's is.
Surely we have lived like that for millennia... Happy to came back to such life WITHOUT the real freedom of that past?
My thoughts on this in longer form: http://amurmann.com/posts/remote-labor-market-future/
Oh, sure formally being remote we can relocate. Unfortunately living in the physical real world relocate is not just a matter of physical location on Earth but also physical situations around, for instance if I relocate to northern Urals from here (France Alps) I'll probably able to spot a nearly-similar climate (a bit hotter in summer, a bit colder in winter probably) and appear to be hyper-rich in the Urals BUT if I just need to buy food there is no Drive supermarket nearby there. If I just have a carious tooth I'm almost on my own or I have to fly 500-800 miles at minimum just to sort that out. Not talking about real eventual emergencies. Such services until we have global teleport network (something really fictional from our real current perspective) can be "remote".
Long story short IF I'm a young slave (yes, not Citizen, not worker) with a significant dose of optimism transfused in my body I can be happy and say: "hey, I'll go to some 'tropical-alike' area of the world where with very little I'm still rich! Wonderful! Or maybe I'll even be a digital nomad! Hooray!" and PERHAPS being happy for a little while, than discover it's too late to came back and being a new poor slave. Not much different than modern digital service mass market where some services start free, nice and friendly than they start to offer premium features, quality lower without them (and also with them, often), some fees for all arrive, ... and most customers are so locked-in even only by their peers being communication-centric that they have to remain, suffer and pay.
Now if we enlarge such vision: top talents are very few. Some or even most of them are considered "top" just because they choose to live to work instead of the contrary. All the rest? Try to enlarge the game behind eligible remote jobs: did you think you can get good food and health just paying more? Sorry, you can't. Surely in hoteliers terms just seeing some south Americans clinic you might think that's false. Unfortunately if you really touch the (obscene) quality of their real services you'll discover that scale matter also to form talents. To give them experience. There is no school that can substitute scale. If we do not have OVERALL good services for the society we also can't have good services for a small élite. We can mock them, we can self-convince them they are good seeing the sorry state of others humans, but we do not get nothing really good.
Try to see how innovation after public research era/bit labs era drop. Our actual IT is still way BEHIND old Xerox PARC level. Oh sure, is popularized, more colorful, more performant, far cheaper etc. What we can call "non-talented improvements" but there is NO REAL INNOVATION anymore. That's the result of scale: private markets can't reach the public research scale for the public and as a result they just produce popularized crap. Now imaging the result on social scale outside IT.
Surely as I said that happen more or less slowly witch means that at first we will experience a proximity preference, but just see for call centers: here (France, Italy) there is an epidemic of offshored call-centers operators in the Balkans and north-Africa: they barely speak Italian or French but they get far little wages so for many companies that's good.
This is going to be another decade resembling the outsourcing movement that occurred in the 2000s: and it will have a similar outcome. That outcome being that paying lower wages yields worse results and a huge backlash.
In a lot of cases, the salaries for an SWE2/SWE3 aren’t 2-3x the median but 5-10x the local median income.
And if we are talking about developing areas, the dev pay is already above median and being much higher will afford quite a good living conditions, away from all problems.
If so, this change will reallocate which companies are employing them, but until it attracts people to the field who wouldn’t have otherwise entered it, it doesn’t seem like it will change the aggregate much.
Suppose everyone follows your advise- how will the economy function?
I think our economy would function very well if more people do this. Many already do.
This idea was explained really well back in 1937, in The Nature of the Firm. It explains why we form companies instead of all being individual contractors making trades with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
You're missing two key reasons why salaries won't normalize to developing country level pay:
1) Timezones are painful. +3h west to east coast US is usually tolerable if not slightly inconvenient at times, but not too bad. +5h and above starts to strain team dynamics. East US to London/Ireland caused more than a couple great US engineers to seek greener pastures within other teams at the company; a few teams had difficulty staffing majority European teams with US talent. A 50\50 split was usually more tolerable. Any time difference more than that within a team is insanity. Feedback loops become too large, there's no cohesion, and a host of other issues.
2) 10M+ engineers at the senior level don't exist. You want engineers that can autonomously churn through "we have a problem with no identified solution" situations. These engineers earn 2x to 3x their cost through technical leverage. At the senior+ level, talent supply is lower than demand. And if you want to train up an employee from junior to senior, good luck doing that with a timezone difference > +3h.
As long as there are tech companies printing gobs of money while demanding more talent than is available for engineers to produce $$$ for $, then salaries won't normalize to developing country pay.
Can someone provide a link to these publicly available bands?
There are many great engineers in 3rd world countries. I wonder what the long term implication of this will be, both for USA and the 3rd world countries.
On the other hand, I am hearing the drum of de-globalization being sounded from afar...
That’s why I’m planning my exit.
It IS, however, about what language you speak.