Ask HN: What a universal remote job salary should be? the salary of remote job depends heavily on the current location of the person
but if we took out rent from the equation what should a person be getting? |
Ask HN: What a universal remote job salary should be? the salary of remote job depends heavily on the current location of the person
but if we took out rent from the equation what should a person be getting? |
Any time you are asking about universals in regards to the lived experiences of human beings you need to take a step back. This principle applies to issues many orders of magnitude less complicated than employee pay which i think goes to show how absurdly far off track this question is.
To illustrate the point,say you conclude some "universal pay" (good luck even defining what that means, who it applies to and when it applies) . Why do I care? I'm still going to go live my life and maximize my pay for my particular situation. So your universal pay is already not universal after the thought experiment of trying to apply it to the first person who you cannot directly control .
You'd be just as good debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Also people face different circumstances, like person with mortgage vs person without mortgage, person with savings vs person without savings, person with family vs person with no family. Different circumstances will translate to different pay that will look good in the one's eyes.
Maybe we have some opportunity at the moment (on both ends) - that opportunity will probably be gone after some time, as more people take advantage of it. Market will even out until "the next thing"..
The only thing they're doing is missing on some talent, but that could be ok for them.
At some point, you're competing with other remote offers though.
I was observing similar situation 15 years ago in one of big corps who outsourced everything to India. For a price of one engineer from developed world they was getting many engineers in India, and those engineers could afford services like personal chauffeur. I could not believe when I heard it first time from friends I have there. Again - situation now is much less in favor of big corp, which is now trying to bring some of those jobs back to the local market.
> if we took out rent from the equation
Then we only need to consider
- employee's age
- employee's education
- employee's experience
- industry
- job requirements
- local, state, federal taxes (income, sales, excise, tariff, etc)
- number of family members supported
- public transportation availability
- local auto insurance premiums
- local school district
- local cost of food
- local cost of health care
- local cost of child care
- union requirements
- hours working
- pay period
- local/national requirements for paid/unpaid vacation / sick days
- inflation
- if employee would rather own a home than rent:
- avg local property taxes
- avg local homeowners insurance (basic, flood, fire, earthquake, tornado)And what if I am a digital nomad and know I want to change nation in which I stay every x months?
The bigger question is whether there should be a universal job salary for remote working jobs.
As someone who has always been on fully remote teams, I've found that ease of communication and time zones are a big deal.
If someone is harder to communicate with (English is a second language) or doesn't overlap with the rest of the team's work day and costs the same as a dev in the US, I may end up going with the dev in the US.
People who says pay should be about value provided are ignoring several things, including: 1) I have no idea how valuable someone is before I hire them, and 2) it's much easier to trust employees who are in the same legal jurisdiction as me (which has a value).
For example, I have two devs in South Asia who cost half of a US dev each, but they're also not very independent and they have very limited skills. They make a lot of money for their country and the price for the value is exactly right for me.
Why should a human being be any different? A good engineer produces certain value, regardless of where they live
At Automattic, that means you would get paid the same if you started in HCOL and then moved to LCOL. But at the same time, you might theoretically start out making a bit more than average in LCOL or a bit less than average in HCOL, depending on your situation and experience.
Some more info: https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/how-automattic-pays-its-re...
Disclaimer: I don’t know the exact specifics of these programs, just sharing some basic info :)
With remote jobs I don't understand why someone living in a cheaper City should get less.
It's just supply and demand. Give 50k in a poor country, and (assuming there are enough qualified people), you will have quite a lot of choice. Give 50k in SF and people will be laughing at you. Why give 200k in the first instance when there's enough supply with 50k?
You're not getting less, the world doesn't have a global currency with fixed price. It's all about earning power. If a company has an office in Alabama, and another office in San Francisco and another in Accra, Ghana. Employees won't expect to be paid the same, so why should they expect the same because they are remote?
I can't interview someone for a few hours and predict how they will be as an employee. No one can.
Sometimes you hire people and are under-paying them, sometimes you're over-paying them.
> assuming you can trust somebody more or less depending on their legal jurisdiction says a lot about your company's culture
So are you saying that all countries have the same laws, and all those laws are equally enforced?
If one of my US employees embezzles money from a client using Stripe credentials, I can easily find and prosecute that person (as long as they're still in the US). Anyone US employee would know this and weigh it against their reasons for wanting to embezzle in the first place (if they have any).
If one of my employees in (let's say) Pakistan did the same thing, there is absolutely nothing I can do. I have no recourse. They would easily get away with it.
It is common and normal to trust people more when they're in the same jurisdiction as you and abide by the same laws.
Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.
They are getting 50% of what a very senior dev would get.
They each make 4x the market rate for their country for this type of work (based on Upwork rates), which is 27x the average salary there.
> Regarding the criminal related comment, you should first and foremost trust and empower your employees independently of where they come from. And then you should also have controls in place to make it really difficult to steal your clients' money.
Thank you for the philosophy lesson. Do you have experience hiring people from many countries, or is this theoretical for you? It isn't theoretical for me.
What you are saying is exactly what I do. I trust all of my employees completely, but literally everyone who is betrayed made a mistake in trusting someone. I am not arrogant enough to say that my trust is 100% correct.
So how do I make it difficult for people to steal money? I rely on my country's law enforcement.
It is impossible to keep devs away from at least some sensitive data, like API keys. The "control" you're talking about is partly to hire people who have more incentive not to steal than to steal.
I haven't hired myself but I have worked with people from all over the world with different backgrounds for many years and have had literally zero close cases of anybody misusing an API key on their benefit for whatever reason. It wouldn't have made any sense for them to do so.
And the control I talked about is security logging, monitoring, alerting systems, etc. I've worked for a banking company and also for a fintech one and all the money movement operations were duly logged and monitored. Literally nobody would risk doing anything malicious in an environment like that plus people are happy with their salaries