“Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain?
<p><pre><code>    &gt; Let’s say you hire me for your company in San Francisco and pay me $150K … [blah blah blah, I provide that much value ...] But now if I decide to move to Tulsa, OK, you want to cut my pay and reduce it to 90K, because of “cost of living”.
</code></pre>
There&#x27;s that really big missing piece in the middle: When you took that job, your bargaining position was &quot;I am willing to accept $150,000 at my talent level and my competition is other folks who are willing to arrive at this office in San Francisco every day.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve turned down a job very similar to that, twice, for much less money to work remotely.  I like Sushi, but my wife makes good Italian and I get to eat with my family.<p>But now <i>that</i> $150,000 job <i>is</i> all-remote!  And even if I was at 80% &quot;San Francisco&quot; pay, I&#x27;d be doing incredibly well where I live, so if I started negotiating salary for that job, my &#x27;20% above ADP-reported&#x27; is going to be a whole lot more palatable to the hiring manager, and he doesn&#x27;t care that the next town over&#x27;s name ends in &quot;tucky&quot;.  Worst part of it is that last time I checked, I live in an area that lands around the 5th highest cost of living.<p>I would accept a salary adjustment due to a move, personally, with research&#x2F;negotiation to ensure that my new salary truly takes into account real costs that I will experience.  And if I cannot accept my employers terms, there are now a whole lot of other companies who are hiring remotely.  Like, almost <i>all</i> the companies.  So I&#x27;ll find one that does.<p>These kinds of programs will exist for a while, I bet -- some great employers will probably attract employees by <i>offering</i> a program like this (along with non-discriminatory policies around ... allowing you to move from a really cheap place to a really expensive place while compensating you accordingly).<p>But the <i>vast majority</i> who go &quot;all remote&quot; are simply going to start hiring wherever the cheapest talent to fill the need exists.  If a 30-something mom&#x2F;dad in North Dakota is just as capable of joining Teams calls&#x2F;performing a mid-level QA job (you know, for the cloud-based web&#x2F;mobile app...), but will do it at $36,000.  Well, ...<p>Think &quot;Off-shoring&quot; at closer geographies&#x2F;more common cultures (ok, maybe; some of ya&#x27;ll city-folk ... need sunlight or something).  Companies are good at not learning from past mistakes, so expect whole technology teams at some shops to be brought into a (virtual conference) room with HR reps while they sort out the details of their transition and training of their replacements.<p>Your &quot;available talent pool&quot; is ... <i>big</i>.  And it now includes <i>my wife</i>.  She left the workforce when she had children.  She didn&#x27;t return when they went to school -- it didn&#x27;t make sense.  Factor in child-care&#x2F;extra car&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;fuel&#x2F;non-optimal meals, 40 hr&#x2F;wk equating to 7:00A-6:00P with commute and the &quot;extra money left over&quot; wasn&#x27;t worth losing what <i>we</i> felt was basically the reason we work in the first place.  And forget about landing one of those coveted remote jobs when you&#x27;ve been out of the work-force since before the iPhone came out.<p>Welp, that ended last month.<p>So dispensing with the doom and gloom, humanity has always figured it out in the past, we will again:<p>In my mind, this is &quot;the first sign of what&#x27;s to come&quot;.  The whole equation on hiring&#x2F;employment has been undergoing a lot of change, but I think the explosion in remote work stands to be the biggest disruption of my lifetime.  If companies steadfastly <i>refuse</i> to adjust for cost of living, and <i>only hire</i> where it&#x27;s cheap, expect people to move from cities.  And <i>it might be as simple as</i> &quot;rent goes down, people move back in&quot;.  While many&#x2F;most jobs cannot be performed remotely (manufacturing-related in particular), by moving all that can to remote-only the impact of &quot;a large employer leaving a city&quot; on a city -- in theory -- is far less.<p>You are <i>prevented from living in certain places if you like certain kinds of work</i>, today.  Suddenly, for a lot of jobs, that&#x27;s no longer the case.  Staffing is the #1 cost for companies -- for a reason, it <i>is</i> a company ... it&#x27;s entire value -- optimizing that cost (by reducing what you are paying people to do work -- I&#x27;m not trying to spin here).  Maybe an extra hire can be made for the next project?  Maybe, over time, the cost savings are so much (real-estate, etc) that it might make sense to take some of these other jobs that aren&#x27;t very easy to do remotely and figure out how we can do <i>them</i> remotely, too?  Maybe everyone stays home in their pajamas and rots away, we all die and fall into the dark ages, again?<p>It&#x27;s been ... interesting? seems wrong ... being a part of all of this.  The place I work handled things superbly; we continue to work remotely and ... everyone, as far as I can tell, is <i>actually working</i>.  I hear about employers installing weird monitoring apps and such on their employees phones&#x2F;work PCs and I think: sell the stock; clearly a lot of staff with nothing to do.  My deadlines&#x2F;expectations didn&#x27;t disappear simply because the office did.  I <i>feel</i> like I&#x27;m working a lot less some days -- I&#x27;m working <i>more</i>, I&#x27;m just spending no time on the road.  Prior to my current job I had been remote for over a decade; I&#x27;d forgotten how much I enjoyed the benefits.<p>[0] I&#x27;m assuming that my area and the vast majority of the US, like Tulsa, would have paid $90,000 for said job.<p>[1] If I were paid San Francisco-equivalent salary for my work where I live, which isn&#x27;t terribly low cost of living to begin with.  ... I&#x27;d have my <i>own</i> lake house up north.  Certainly wouldn&#x27;t get out of time-share presentations so quickly and easily.<p>[2] We enrolled our kids in a charter all-virtual school when it appeared our district was going to go virtual.  We figured a school with employees that had been doing this for the last ten years would fare better than our district&#x27;s thrown together-in-a-week plans.  Very few decisions ever end up in the &quot;100%-the-right-choice&quot; category, but that one sure did!