You make many good points. However, I find that some of them still affect remote work too. For example, people still make efforts to &quot;appear&quot; to be working. They will make spurious commits to version control. They will ration out a series of questions or emails that could be more concisely sent together. And god forbid the company uses Agile&#x2F;Scrum, which is a Pandora&#x27;s Box of ways to appear to be working without working at all.<p>Still, your points are well taken. On the other hand, if a company is really looking at fully-remote work as a way to avoid paying higher wages, that would be a red flag for me. I&#x27;m very good at what I do, and even if I&#x27;m not co-located in Fancyopolis, I expect to be earning a competitive wage based on the value I can add to the business, not how much a gallon of milk costs for me. It comes off as extremely petty and divisive for a company to intentionally play cost of living to their advantage like that. And further, what stops a person from choosing to live in a <i>more</i> expensive place? Your company is in Milwaukee but I want to live in London and work remotely.<p>The kinds of risks that employees face are very asymmetric when compared with what employers face. For a lone employee, the single number that is your annual compensation is a big deal. Other companies might force you to tell them that number if you seek a new job. And whatever that number is, that&#x27;s going to determine your pay. Those other companies won&#x27;t give a shit about cost of living.<p>Let&#x27;s say you used to live in SF and made X-thousand per year. Then you took a new job in Austin, TX, and someone convinced you that you should accept something like 0.7X per year, because Austin is cheaper and 0.7 still leaves you quote unquote above market there.<p>A few years later, you&#x27;re looking to move to New York, well guess what, you&#x27;re salary is going to be pegged to 0.7X, not X, and you might have to negotiate hard even just to get it back up to X in New York, let alone arguing for whatever premium the 0.7X might have been above market in Austin.<p>That&#x27;s just how these things work. Have you negotiated pay when considering a move from a major city to a city with lower cost of living? I have before, and one of the major points of discussion was that salary actually <i>should not</i> decrease in response to cost of living changes. That&#x27;s just an unpleasant side of it that the hiring company has to eat. The risks facing the lone employee are too high that they&#x27;ll never recover the &quot;downward adjustment&quot; amount if they ever find that they need to move on to another area again.<p>When I speak with HR reps about this, I&#x27;ve never had a problem. Sometimes they will say they are not looking to pay in the range I am seeking, but they universally understand and fully expect it when candidates say that their salary should not decrease purely due to cost of living decreases.