As the employer, it often works differently. You interview a number of people as final candidates you find good fits for different reasons. Each person presents some extra benefits and some shortcomings. You then balance it off against the costs of hiring each person, and you make a final decision on that basis. At that stage, someone who'd be an appropriate "right next step" for the company at $80K may not be the right next step if they were at $100K, so you may pass if the person isn't willing to accept $80K.

If you truly run into cases where the hiring decision has already been made, so you're sure you're hiring the person independent of where they live, and then decide you'll pay them less if they live elsewhere - then one of 2 things is happening. Reality #1 - you're being subjected to some kind of corporate level accommodation where the business has decided that "we'll just take the hit and up-adjust salaries based on cost of living". If they don't apply this approach universally, the only alternative would be to either pay everyone $100k and therefore not have the ability to hire as many people, or simply not hire from $100K markets and only hire from $80k. Reality #2 - there's some real corporate corruption happening at the company where they're doing this for the sake of some central policy, but it's not a real constraint. That'd be unfortunate.

It might be helpful to give an example. Buffer is a company that is open about its salary formula. Their formula has exactly the problems I'm talking about. See here:

https://buffer.com/salary/customer-engagement-strategist/ave...

> At that stage, someone who'd be an appropriate "right next step" for the company at $80K may not be the right next step if they were at $100K

This is the right way to look at things. You look at the price / performance tradeoff of each employee, and make an offer based on that.

All the SF people get at least $100k because they all turn down the $70k offers, for the good and simple reason they can't live the lifestyle they want on $70k in SF.

Some Rust Belt folks might take a $70k offer because it's interesting work, and a fairly good salary in an economically depressed area.

> you're being subjected to some kind of corporate level accommodation where the business has decided that "we'll just take the hit and up-adjust salaries based on cost of living"

This is the kind of policy I was expressing my distaste for.

If I don't qualify for the CoL based on my location, it sure feels like the SF-level salary is the baseline and I'm being down-adjusted.

> corruption happening at the company where they're doing this for the sake of some central policy

I don't really think this is a thing. I think it's more a misguided attempt to equalize the lifestyle of employees who happen to live in different places. An ideal of "All of our employees should be able to afford a middle class lifestyle" means you pay your Bay Area people $100k and your Appalachian Mountainfolk $60k.

If you look at it from that perspective, it makes sense.

I'm trying to point out that from the view of someone who, at an earlier point in his career, was looking for remote employment while living in a low CoL area, this perspective isn't the one that comes naturally.

Instead it felt more like my skills are worth $100k, and there are a bunch of tech companies out there who will pay me $100k, but they all have this really strange rule that they'll only pay me what I'm worth if I agree to spend 40% of it on incredibly overpriced housing in a city I don't want to live in.

And I got really angry because it felt like they're screwing me. And screwing me in a way that's completely insane and economically irrational for them. Either pay me $100k for remote work, or don't. Whether I'll spend $15k or $50k of that $100k on food and shelter is, quite frankly, none of my employer's business.

That was many years ago. I'm at a much better place in my career now. But at any given point in time, there are probably thousands of people at the point where I was. It helps to be aware of prospective hires' perspectives when considering compensation policies.

I should address the whole conspiracy theory aspect of this.

I don't seriously think there's some cackling cabal of coastal elites having secret meetings about how to keep flyover country poor.

I think it's various companies using lifestyle-based reasoning. That is, instead of numerical salary offers, the company thinks it's better to offer a specific lifestyle level in a geographically neutral way, which translates into different salaries for different locations.

Unfortunately the policy such reasoning leads to is exactly the same one that the conspiracy of coastal elites would implement (if it actually existed): Based solely on their location, pay people who live in Middle America less than you pay BigTechCity residents for the same work.

I'm trying to explain that you have to look at lifestyle-based reasoning from one particular perspective for it to make sense. There are other reasonable perspectives which reveal it to be a stupid, absurd policy.

I am 100% behind you on this.

Also consider that so many expenses in life are the same wherever you live. For instance, Apple charges the same for a MacBook Pro delivered to Iowa as San Francisco, so if your Iowa rate is half that of San Francisco's, that new laptop takes you twice as many hours to buy. And for what? Also, someone's student loans don't change when they move from a more expensive place to a cheaper one, so in absolute terms anyone making fixed payment stands to take a massive pay cut if they move to a place with COL-based salary changes.

My company is remote-only for now. Without asking them, I have no idea whether my coworkers are in Berkeley or Des Moines. Why should the one living in a cheaper please make less than the one next door? Yes, I completely understand why an employer would like to pay less salary to the latter, but I can't think of any defensible reason that would make the person in Iowa OK with this.

> It's completely ridiculous that you say "Okay I'll give you $100k if you live in NYC, but only $60k for the same work if you live in the Rust Belt."

We've been talking about this for the last 150 years. Workers are paid for their labor power, not the value they produce.

> If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.

Like laws of motion, the economic system we have naturally leads to exploiting this disparity.

> In practice I wouldn't do this. I'd simply walk away from a company that uses this offensive hiring practice on me.

Extend this to the labor pool at large. Some people have the ability to walk away from these practices while others don't. Ask yourself who has this ability and who doesn't and if this is the outcome we want.

What about the same thought experiment with different items:

If $100k is what you're willing to pay for a Tesla Model S but it only costs $60k, it's completely ridiculous for you to walk into the store and say "Ok I would give you $100k if you charged me that much, but I'll pay you $60k instead because that's all you charge". If it makes economic sense for you to pay $100k for that car, then paying the lower amount of $60k that the store charges is just a jerk move.

Doesn't really make sense in this context. At the end of the day, salary is a lot more fuzzy than an item in a store with a set price, but it's still dictated by market forces like everything else.

> In practice I wouldn't do this. I'd simply walk away from a company that uses this offensive hiring practice on me.

That's great and that's exactly the thing that would change how the market works. If this does end up happening and enough people are in demand enough even living in low COL places, the market for tech workers will adapt and become more national. It feels like we're at a bit of a discontinuity point right now where nobody knows if labor markets for knowledge work will continue to be locally defined as they always have been, or are becoming more national. What will dictate this is people like you and me comparing our best offers, doing what's best for us, and seeing where we end up.

> it feels like these tech companies are saying "Yeah we're going to actively try to keep the wealth created by our business models concentrated in the coastal cities we like, and keep the rest of the country poor."

I guess can see that perspective, but it's really beside the point. This is the collective behavior of everyone driving the market like it always is, it won't ultimately just be up to a couple of executives to decide.

Trust me, us folks living in the coastal cities have our own pet peeves from our perspective that we can complain about all day too. We pay a lot more in federal taxes relative to the benefits we get than any other part of the country. We are nearly an order of magnitude less represented in congress and by our electoral college votes, because empty land is worth as much as people in the US. But again none of these things are really relevant to the topic at hand.

If those living in region A have less employment options than those living in region B, then workers from region A will receive lower offers for their labor. This is a fundamental aspect of market dynamics. There is less demand for labor from region A, so the price of that labor (e.g. the wage) is lower.

If society deems this undesirable, the government can create polices to try to achieve a different outcome. This would be a complex undertaking. But I imagine there are beneficial options that exist, especially if the goal is to merely reduce or mitigate the harshest aspects of the labor markets. We already do this in many cases. Employment law is a big area of law.

> If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.

If you can buy a product for $50 from one site and that's worth it to you but you can buy it for $35 from another site...

What was written is literally an argument for not trying to minimize expenditures. But it makes economic sense to minimize expenditures, that's business 101.

"Objective value" doesn't exist. Not only is it hard to determine because information is generally far from perfect, but the only thing that matters to actual people in the actual world is relative value (aka, incremental value).

That is to say: All decisions in life are about choosing your best option. Hiring is no different.

For one thing, if you give your employer a wildly wrong address (i.e. different state), your taxes will end up pretty screwed up.

Your example could possibly work for NYC vs. upstate, middle-of-nowhere NY, though.

The withholding will be screwed up, but if you claim to be in NY and are actually in Wyoming, you'll probably get a big refund.

But you'll file in your real state of residence, and the other state will then insist you owe them taxes because your employer reported you were working there.

That could be an awkward conversation since a W-4 has this above your signature: "Under penalties of perjury, I declare that this certificate, to the best of my knowledge and belief, is true, correct, and complete."

Definitely consult a tax attorney before you try anything like this.

Fraud is what you're talking about doing and it is illegal. Also most states require payroll taxes so the company would be on the hook for the lie too. You'd be lucky if you only got fired.

Salary has very little to do with the value you create for the company. It's about how much they're willing to pay and how little you're willing to be paid. Now that everything is going remote, chances are higher that there's someone else living next door to you in the Rust Belt who was previously making $60k for a local company, who would be ecstatic to add Facebook to their resume at the same pay they've been making.

> I live in high-CoL area, $FriendsAddress is my NYC address.

Using PHP presumably... there's your salary rate problem.

> If it makes economic sense for you to pay me $100k, making that conditional on where I live is just a jerk move.

Google has like 100,000 employees. They had a net profit of $34B in 2019. That is 340,000 per employee. From a "we could pay people more" perspective, they are wildly underpaying their employees. That is precisely as much of a jerk move as anything else.

The only solution to this is collective action. I do hope that recognition of "wow, we really do get screwed by the bosses" among remote tech workers will allow the entire industry to see how capitalism seeks to minimize their pay.