They shouldn't care how much it costs you to live, they should care if your work is worth paying you X to do it.
And if it was good enough to pay you X in city Y then it should be good enough for them to pay you X in city Z.
How does it hurt them if you have a little more left over at the end of the month? And why is it any of their business? If anything I would think it would be a net positive for everyone including the company.
That's silly. By that logic McDonald's should pay Montana minimum wage in Manhattan. Since burger flipping is so simple a country bumpkin could do it, why should you get more just because what buys you huge tracts of land in Bozeman buys you half a broom closet in Brooklyn?
You're not far off. If you could flip burgers in Manhattan from Montana, that's indeed what they should be paying. The only remotely reasonable reason to have geography-based pay is to account for geography-based costs that are a hard requirement for doing the job. When the work doesn't NEED to be done in a Palo Alto office and could be done from a satellite office, that becomes rather silly. And when you're talking about remote workers, it becomes howling madness.
And that is exactly the end game for some companies.
Today it's a voluntary move with a pay cut and small moving bonus. Tomorrow it is an involuntary move, with layoffs in expensive locations and small relocation bonus for those who qualify. And those cheaper locations may be in India, Philippines, South Africa, and other places where enough English speakers can be located.
Many tech companies have not needed expensive big-city offices for decades now. They have done it out of habit and management preference. Some companies and many individuals have figured this out, which helped fuel a housing crisis as people sold their three bedroom Santa Monica home for two million dollars, paid cash for a half million dollar mansion, picked up a few investment properties, and continued working in a cheaper, smaller tech hub.
I know some people who repeated it twice, riding the LA pricing surge, then moving to cities like Seattle, Portland, or Austin to ride it again. Now they're multi-millionaires just from happening to buy homes in the cities at the right time.:-(
And those cheaper locations may be in India, Philippines, South Africa, and other places where enough English speakers can be located.
I've been outsourced twice, and while I definitely was not overjoyed about it, I couldn't really come up with a moral justification why the company should not have replaced me with 2-3 cheaper people outside of "My birthright as part of the nobility of the modern world (i.e. being born a citizen of an industrialized country) is that I am inherently worth more than others who are not".
That said, both outsourcing projects eventually collapsed in tears, but even so, there is no inherent moral reason why I deserve to be paid more based solely on where I live (and thus indirectly on my citizenship).
As a member of the professional class, I've benefited greatly from the huge influx of cheap goods supplied from overseas. It would be rather hypocritical for me to complain as that same process now moves to my industry.
In the end, as I've warned my sons, the great flattening is inevitable and that period when we've been kings of the world for no particular virtue of our own is likely coming to an end. With luck, we raise everybody's boats to a level that is acceptable to us in the Industrialized world. But we're reaching the point where we need to be prepared to compete on an even footing with the entire world, not just our those in our city.
That said, both outsourcing projects eventually collapsed in tears, but even so, there is no inherent moral reason why I deserve to be paid more based solely on where I live (and thus indirectly on my citizenship).
I agree, but I do think there is a huge moral issue with C level executives raising short term profits to enrich themselves by migrating labor over seas that would almost certainly result in long term losses for shareholders and employees. It's far too easy to game the system this way and it results in less productivity and less benefit for society as a whole. It would be one thing if our intellectual property laws were setup to encourage competition, but more and more our laws are setup to protect the interests of entrenched corporations and discourage employees from forming their own competing businesses.
"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers*
from it."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
No (Score:5, Insightful)
They shouldn't care how much it costs you to live, they should care if your work is worth paying you X to do it.
And if it was good enough to pay you X in city Y then it should be good enough for them to pay you X in city Z.
How does it hurt them if you have a little more left over at the end of the month? And why is it any of their business? If anything I would think it would be a net positive for everyone including the company.
Re: No (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You're not far off. If you could flip burgers in Manhattan from Montana, that's indeed what they should be paying. The only remotely reasonable reason to have geography-based pay is to account for geography-based costs that are a hard requirement for doing the job. When the work doesn't NEED to be done in a Palo Alto office and could be done from a satellite office, that becomes rather silly. And when you're talking about remote workers, it becomes howling madness.
Re: No (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is exactly the end game for some companies.
Today it's a voluntary move with a pay cut and small moving bonus. Tomorrow it is an involuntary move, with layoffs in expensive locations and small relocation bonus for those who qualify. And those cheaper locations may be in India, Philippines, South Africa, and other places where enough English speakers can be located.
Many tech companies have not needed expensive big-city offices for decades now. They have done it out of habit and management preference. Some companies and many individuals have figured this out, which helped fuel a housing crisis as people sold their three bedroom Santa Monica home for two million dollars, paid cash for a half million dollar mansion, picked up a few investment properties, and continued working in a cheaper, smaller tech hub.
I know some people who repeated it twice, riding the LA pricing surge, then moving to cities like Seattle, Portland, or Austin to ride it again. Now they're multi-millionaires just from happening to buy homes in the cities at the right time. :-(
Re: No (Score:4, Insightful)
And those cheaper locations may be in India, Philippines, South Africa, and other places where enough English speakers can be located.
I've been outsourced twice, and while I definitely was not overjoyed about it, I couldn't really come up with a moral justification why the company should not have replaced me with 2-3 cheaper people outside of "My birthright as part of the nobility of the modern world (i.e. being born a citizen of an industrialized country) is that I am inherently worth more than others who are not".
That said, both outsourcing projects eventually collapsed in tears, but even so, there is no inherent moral reason why I deserve to be paid more based solely on where I live (and thus indirectly on my citizenship).
As a member of the professional class, I've benefited greatly from the huge influx of cheap goods supplied from overseas. It would be rather hypocritical for me to complain as that same process now moves to my industry.
In the end, as I've warned my sons, the great flattening is inevitable and that period when we've been kings of the world for no particular virtue of our own is likely coming to an end. With luck, we raise everybody's boats to a level that is acceptable to us in the Industrialized world. But we're reaching the point where we need to be prepared to compete on an even footing with the entire world, not just our those in our city.
Re: (Score:2)
That said, both outsourcing projects eventually collapsed in tears, but even so, there is no inherent moral reason why I deserve to be paid more based solely on where I live (and thus indirectly on my citizenship).
I agree, but I do think there is a huge moral issue with C level executives raising short term profits to enrich themselves by migrating labor over seas that would almost certainly result in long term losses for shareholders and employees. It's far too easy to game the system this way and it results in less productivity and less benefit for society as a whole. It would be one thing if our intellectual property laws were setup to encourage competition, but more and more our laws are setup to protect the interests of entrenched corporations and discourage employees from forming their own competing businesses.