....To help drive the idea home (pun intended), we’ve reimagined our approach to compensation in the US. To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US. It means that our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live. We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live. Internationally, we have had one pay range per country, and now the US will be consistent with this approach.....
I am curious: Why stop at the US? If reddit feels this is a good idea, then why not eliminate geographic compensation zones worldwide?
I suppose the answer is: There's little friction to move inside the US, but a lot of friction (well, a ton right now, but even pre COVID, there was still a lot) to move outside the US and keep working for a US company. Not to mention time zone issues.
I probably answered my own question, though I am curious what their rational is.
That bit about time zones, though, is interesting to me. In my experience working with a team on both coasts, one side's gotta give. Generally, it's the side with fewer people, but one side ends up syncing up their work schedule to either be early or later. Tough to avoid.
As someone with US and non-US teams, I will say that employment law for engineers is relatively uniform within the US and the customs above that are also relatively uniform and “what we’re used to [as US employees]” so it’s just practically easier to continue to comply with all local laws by staying in the US.
You seem to be getting at a fundamental inequity in international law: trade (and, for various historical-fuck-the-Soviets reasons, emigration) is treated as a right while immigration is treated as a privilege. This basically allows unending labor arbitrage. Whenever a country becomes rich enough to have a middle class, labor standards, unions, and/or minimum wage laws, start moving operations over to the next country on the list.
The only governments that have clued into this are the member states of the EU, and even then, some of them are starting to forget this point.
We're talking about whether or not the sofa seller should be allowed to live down the block, not in your house. Right now, if the sofa seller wants to work for peanuts in a third-world country and outsell local manufacturers in, say, the US; they have the right to do that thanks to literal decades of trade negotiations. But if they want to play fair and compete on a level playing field in the US, they have to get visas in restrictive categories and wait in long queues. That's because there's far less international law on liberalizing the market for labor.
Furthermore, the EU doesn't have Free immigration. EU freedom of movement is only extended to member state citizens; and the Schengen area only dissolves "internal" border infrastructure. Both of those schemes are predicated on the existence of "external" borders which are not opened. If you don't already live in the EU, you're subject to the same types of visa categories and quotas you'd get if you were trying to immigrate to the US.
The reason why it seems like the EU has Free immigration is because there was a refugee crisis a few years back. This is, again, not Free immigration - it's just a particular visa category everyone agreed to for various historical fuck-Hitler reasons. You still have to actually prove to an immigration judge that you have a case of being a political refugee, which is far harder than most people think. Meanwhile, economic migrants still have to go through the process of getting work visas for particular approved professions, sitting on quotas, and so on and so forth. So you get none of the benefit of a Free immigration system but all of the downsides of political, economic, and racial ressentiment, etc.
Does Reddit have any non-us staff? I thought they were focused pretty tightly on their SF office.
As a foreigner myself I'd love all companies be open to hiring non-americans, but going from working within the employment laws of one jurisdiction to 150+ countries is not necessarily a good use of resources for a company.
Currency differences would be a big reason. Currencies can shift against each other and if the dollar weakens or strengthens against the Euro or Yen or whatever, it would mean their payroll costs would fluctuate unpredictably.
Yes, but at least there's some ability to be flexible. Pegging international pay to USD (or any other currency) just means that there's one less tool to address the problem when things change.
Even if that happened (which is highly unlikely) then the employees would still earn more money since SF/NY salary - 20% is greater than salaries outside USA.
The IRS is going to come after you for taxes anyway (post first 105k) so you might as well earn it in USD, bank it in the US, and transfer what you need to whereever you are.
The good news is that some countries won't bother taxing you if you're working for a US company remotely - they're just happy to have expats spending in the local economy.
That only applies if you are a US citizen or permanent resident. For others, it is very inconvenient to have their income tied to a foreign country and/or foreign exchange rates.
For me in Turkey: Having my tied to a foreign country is kind of inconvenient (paying fees and having to wait for a swift transfer). Having it tied to an exchange rate has benefits that far outweigh the inconveniences of the transfer (With the way exchange rates have been going for the last few years, it feels more like* you get automatic raises throughout the year tied to inflation in addition to your yearly raise)
* I know it is not that, but it feels like that.
Also thankfully not tied to the officially reported inflation rate in Turkey
You would be surprised how common is is then, especially in areas of Europe surrounding non EU countries where international daily commutes are not uncommon, not to mention remote working.
I work for an engineering company in Switzerland, and half my team are German citizens who (pre-covid) made a daily commute all while enjoying the lower cost of living in Germany.
The USD has been one of the best performing currencies in the world in most people's lifetimes. I'm sure that most people would prefer to be paid in that currency.
For every Swiss Franc that strengthened 15% against the dollar in 10 years there's an Argentine Peso that because 45 times weaker in that time period.
Not sure how the long term exchange rate movements are relevant for most people who take a paycheck, spend a great deal of it, then use the rest to pay down debt or invest. Not many people are choosing to long term hold and deciding between dollars or pesos. And even if paid in pesos you could open a dollar bank account anywhere.
If you get paid in Peso you lose money every payday that you don't get a significant raise in salary. If you get paid in Dollars your salary raises roughly on pace with inflation.
why not eliminate geographic compensation zones worldwide?
It has many cons for employees, but 'at will' employment presents benefits to employers that can be reflected in salary, since if that employee is no longer needed or the salary is no longer viable for the business case, the employee can be let go easily.
If you're employing people in countries where you have to spend months of negotiation, legals, or may even be unable to lay someone off at all, you're not going to be paying as much, since you need to cover contingencies. If US people move to such countries, they can also be covered by such laws, or may also be subjected to double taxation which will affect their pay too.
I know people in Europe who've been "employed" by US companies as contractors to avoid having these local legal obligations, and that would certainly open up the option of global pay levels, but I know there are legal and regulatory issues around this approach too.
Earn a US salary but not have to put up with the US political nonsense while living in essentially the same timezone while living as a king in Costa Rica, or Ecuador, Chile, Argentina or similar?
Uruguay is relatively stable, is close to US timezone and as far as I can tell a pretty good place to live. Would love to hear from people who live there, as I have unironically considered moving to Montevideo.
Uruguay is also containing the coronavirus currently very well, with 40 times less deaths per capita than United States. This is almost Asian level of competence.
You're also held hostage by their infrastructure too. I'm not saying it's bad cause I don't know, but if something went out, do you really trust them to get things back online in a reasonable amount of time?
I know your point stands regardless, but you're replying to a guy who lived in a jeep for more than two years driving through 35 countries in Africa. I think he could cope with Costa Rican infrastructure. :)
Actually it was 2 years from Alaska to Argentina and then 3 years around Africa.
Internet connectivity is MUCH better than you're thinking. 3G and 4G in every town big enough to have a gas station.
The wired internet was so fast in Nairobi and Cape Town I legitimately thought something was wrong. After living in the US, Canada and Australia I've never used internet even half that fast, it was mind bending.
I wonder if that might be because wired is still somewhat of a luxury compared to most that the ISP's aren't held back by the service they offer since there are so few utilizing the bandwidth.
When I went to Cape Town the internet was awful. Super slow (at least for US/EU sites) and with very restrictive data caps (IIRC, 10GB per month). That was circa 2008 so perhaps things are better now
I was mostly joking but 10GB even in 2008 still isn't a lot. 300gb hard drives were pretty common. Although I bet you could've got a lot more out of that 10GB than you can now what with the absurd amount of ads and excessive bloat on websites nowadays.
A wired internet connection plus a mobile network with enough bandwidth to tether is sufficiently redundant for the average software engineer. Maybe throw in a diesel generator/Tesla Powerwall if you're worried about power outages that last longer than your laptop's battery. If all three fail simultaneously, you probably have bigger problems than just internet connectivity.
I suppose if you have reliable and reasonably-priced mobile data, then you can deal with any other infrastructure issues that arise. Laptops don't need perfect power uptime, and software engineers don't always need to shower.
But without that, at least the telecoms should probably be reliable.
What about companies that monitor you? Mine at least we have to ping it at a random time during the day and we're not told when we get pinged.
I'm just saying that as work from home becomes more common, it's only a matter of time before corporate starts measuring "output" now that they can't check up on you whenever. For programmers at least it's not so bad. For everybody else lower than management, I can only see people feeling unfairly shackled.
Well yeah, that's the logical conclusion of this policy. Anyone who thinks Bay Area salaries are going to be standard nationwide is delusional. That's not how supply/demand works.
I moved to the Bay Area in mid 2019 from another country. I've had discussions with my American colleagues where I asserted that we were overpayed for what we do. They insist that it's deserved because we're the top engineers of the world working at a top company. But I'm 100% certain the only reason we're paid as much is because of the insane cost of living in the Bay Area. I know many great engineers, or even my former-self, in my home country who are not paid even 1/3rd of what we get paid in the Bay Area. I think this WFH revolution will be a real reckoning for the software industry and the entitlement of many Bay Area engineers.
I'm sure the cost of living is a significant factor, but don't overlook regular old capitalism. The giant FAANG companies need huge quantities of programmers to grow, they are fighting with their competitors to hire those programmers, and they're all convinced (true or not) that they need only the best programmers and that their interviewing systems which can identify such programmers.
Sure, the companies tried the standard approach of just secretly agreeing not to compete with each other for talent, but the DoJ didn't care for that, and so they just do the other thing: pay as much money as is necessary to get the folks they want.
Apple makes about $435,000 in profit (not revenue) per employee, including non-technical employees. If they think that they need to pay staggering salaries to programmers to keep a good thing going, they will absolutely do it. Would they like to pay their programmers a third of what they're paying now? Totally. Would such a salary be fair? Totally. But those programmers would just call a Google or Facebook recruiter and be out the door the next day.
You're right, the real reason is the high density of companies and the talent they attract to the Bay Area. My point with cost of living was that companies need to pay $(CoL + X + Y) for people to be willing to move out here. Where X is whatever they need to pay to entice the employee away from the other companies. And Y is the amount of savings/discretionary spending the employee wants to have.
I always wondered why the FAANG companies don't move their main campuses to somewhere with a lower CoL (call it CoL') so they only need to pay $(CoL' + X' + Y) to keep the employee. Paying X' (where X' probably less than X) because they're no longer in local competition with the other companies. I wonder how long it would take to recoup the cost of moving the company in savings on compensation. There are countless places which have better quality of life than the Bay Area, while also having lower CoL. I chose to move to the Bay Area because Y was greater than what I could get anywhere else.
I agree, otherwise way more jobs would have huge compensation growth in the bay area alone if cost of living was enough to explain the income growth of engineers.
There is a reason why software is %20 of the economy and most economic growth in the USA now and why engineers are paid a lot and I believe they are correlated.
The competition of Bay Area (and California, in general) engineers is definitely a factor. But it doesn't preclude rockstar engineers existing in other areas unwilling to relocate to the region. This policy gives tech companies the best of both worlds (theoretically).
I agree, but this may still result in a happier workforce. I expect that many people live and work in the bay area because of the higher salaries; this may encourage them to prioritize other factors in their lives.
If productivity isn't affected by location why wouldn't the salaries rise accordingly? Companies don't care how much housing costs in an area are, they care about the compensation vs. what they get.
Salaries aren't determined by productivity, they're determined by supply and demand. This comes up every thread where someone expects for-profit corporations to be magically convinced to pay more than they can because "but my productivity" or something.
Cool, what are their alternatives? This is a trend that is sweeping across tech, starting with some of the highest paying employers in FAANG and trickling down to companies like Reddit. When the industry norm becomes permanent WFH, what alternative is there?
Seriously, what are you expecting workers to do exactly?
Their alternatives are the other remote companies! I'm expecting workers to do what they always have done, namely walk to the better paying employers. You earn the highest wages in any field in places where multiple employers are competing for labor, and the lowest in company towns.
Tech hubs like San Francisco are not "company towns", they already had multiple employers competing for labor, and workers already had the choice to go to these other companies that are becoming remote.
The only difference is the benefits of non-remote tech-hub work that have been driving the high wages in tech - concentration of talent, face-to-face communication/team-building, advanced urban infrastructure - are now gone. So tech workers will have the same amount of company choice, but can no longer benefit from tech hubs; tell me why companies are going to continue paying the same high wages again?
Your productivity, as measured by how much value you bring to the employer, does influence your salary, by setting a ceiling for it.
Concretely, if your work adds $300k/year to company revenue, it will at most pay you that much.
Of course, it prefers to pay you less, and to get close to that number it's best to be part of a big enough labor market that you can get job offers from several employers.
Here's the thing: In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.
What I just described is "supply and demand", with a bit of detail.
The bigger the labour pool, the worse deal you are going to get. You're now competing against the guy in Nowhere Town, this guy can do your job and he's willing to do it for less because he's never experienced an expensive reale estate market.
I run a small consulting practice. We are highly skilled and very experienced. We can often charge much less than our competitors because we don't have the overheads our competitors do. A 1 million dollar deal for my practice is worth a lot more than a 1 million dollar deal for Accenture. We can go down to 700,000 and still have over 90% profitability, Accenture will walk away at that price point because it's not worth their time.
This is actually the case in certain industries and areas. You can, for example, make more money as a medical professional in a rural area than you can in cities, for example.
The main thing missing here is that this is the tech industry where there was previously no demand in rural places, which makes the low supply in rural places irrelevant. Before the aggressive lockdowns across the country, tech companies didn't care about rural areas because the increased labor pool wasn't worth the compounding gains you get from a concentration of talent, face-to-face communication, and advanced urban infrastructure. Now they literally can't have that, they will give you a worse deal because they have access to a larger labor pool.
It's kind of absurd to suggest that increasing the labor pool alone will lead to higher wages. It's strictly worse for city dwellers who already benefited from an increasing employer pool, which is now offset by an increasing labor pool.
Theoretically this is true, but most business has little to no idea how much value a given employee adds to the company, with the exception of some very specific roles like sale. Just think of any middle manager - what is their value add to the company? They are clearly needed to make sure workers have clear objectives, but how would you put a number on it?
For starters, it’s not possible to measure how much value an employee generates. When I worked as a consultant, I billed $x per year, is that how much value I generated? No. How much of that value did sales generate? How much did the secretary generate? How much did the cleaner generate? How much of my colleagues value did I generate by referring clients to them when I was at capacity? Or by helping them with their work when they needed it? Or vice versa?...
I think you’ve made a bigger over sight here though:
> In a mainly remote programmer labor market, that we seem to be entering, all employers in the entire US are in your local labor market, so that should work out fine.
What you would expect from this is a new equilibrium prices that is a) lower than the current highest paid region, and b) higher than the current lowest paid region. Which is a situation that doesn’t benefit anybody currently working in the large metros.
A worse (but likely inevitable) outcome would be if wages started trending towards a price somewhere in between San Francisco and Manila.
And this seems like a desirable outcome, at least short term, for reddit. They get to pay (slightly) lower than Bay Area salaries, and get the top candidates across the US.
Top candidates in non Bay Area cities are already getting paid a fair bit lower. They’re not requesting lower pay, there just isn’t the same demand for top software engineers.
This assumes there is an untapped supply of developers across the nation and that all a company has to do is look outside of the traditional tech hubs, but that is not the case. The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
Now that supply is spreading across the country because remote work is easier, but that doesn't change the number of developers that these companies are competing for. I doubt that the supply/demand curves will move much at all.
>The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
This is a wild statement and I would guess it is coming from someone who hasn't spent much time professionally outside of tech hubs. There are tech jobs and competent developers everywhere. They just exist in a higher concentration in tech hubs.
> The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.The tech hubs grew in a self-fulfilling cycle, attracting nearly the entire supply of competent developers.
Even ignoring the silly claim at the end, what you say isn't logical. New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.
> New developers aren't born in SV, they move there because that's where the jobs are. If they no longer need to move there for the good jobs, they won't.
This statement supports my point. A large proportion of devs currently live in a tech hub. They moved there because there was opportunity. Telling all the developers that the opportunity will come to them does not magically change the number of developers. So if demand for developers hasn't changed, and the supply hasn't changed, why would salaries change?
The only way the number of available devs changes is if some new untapped supply exists outside of the tech hubs. My argument is that it does not, the majority of devs that could already moved to a tech hub or figured something out.
As a non-tech hub guy, I think your last point probably isn't true. Where I work, the best devs are not on par with the Stanford/MIT etc. people, but we can hold our own quite well with the next tier down from New York, San Francisco, etc. (A lot of the devs here are from India originally but some are locals and the point stands regardless.) I've worked with a few of those people from big tech hubs on joint projects (one or two even went to prestigious technical colleges), and we had a high level of mutual respect and trust in one another's abilities. Whether my salary will trend towards yours or vice versa I don't know, but I definitely think I could have gotten a pretty big bump had I moved to San Fran. I don't because of many types of friction (laziness, family/friend/other relation ties, age, so on). If that friction goes away I assume we'll become more direct competitors.
Sure, but that would be invalidating someone telling you no developers were born in New England.
SV is a 2m+ area filled with local schools, where many of the parents are developers and highly supportive of the education to be a developer. For someone to say “no developers are born in SV” is bewildering.
You've chosen to interpret a missing qualifier as "all" when the more likely response if you'd asked for a clarification would be "most". It was very clear what the point made was, and it was not that nobody born in SV ever becomes developers.
I live in the Midwest (unfortunately), and despite interviewing quite well it has been difficult to actually get those interviews while living in the Midwest. Previously on HN there were some interesting articles about bias against Midwesterners.
There's many great developers outside of SV but they're typically doing boring Windows-centric finance or engineering support work.
Of course it'll move the curve. Now companies won't be geo locked to US anymore. Yes they have offices in other countries but the salaries are adjusted according to their COL. Think of EMEA where lots of SWE would love US salary but still live there. So the net effect would be that the market will hit an equilibrium where that salary is now way lower for US SWEs than what they used to get but way higher for EMEA SWEs than what they used to get. Get ready for a big time pay cut.
It’s more expensive overhead-wise to employ developers in Europe (higher benefits/social insurance costs, lower hours per year, much higher severance). I don’t find them any less valuable in general once those factors are accounted for.
Maybe this is a hot take for HN, but the quality of engineers is very low on the list of things that makes a company like Reddit a success. The actual infrastructure of the site has been routinely mocked by the Reddit community for years.
“Turn to shit” makes it sound like it hasn’t already. Reddit is no longer trying to innovate, they’re milking their incumbent userbase for the ad money until they can sell.
That’s unfortunately what happens when you’re funded and scale up with VC money. The investors want their returns so this is just a result of that. VC backed companies like Reddit will add unpopular features and intrusive ads to make money — users be damned.
The day the "new" reddit design is enforced without some way to get around it is the day I quit permanently. "Old" reddit and HN, while not perfect, feel vastly more usable.
Reddit is now bigger than twitter and is still growing. Their new platform is constantly pushing advertisements / forcing the app/signups which likely drives their profits up even higher.
Perhaps that will provide incentive for employees to move to lower COL areas, or more importantly allow talented individuals to stay near where they grew up and stem the brain drain from rural communities. Both of these would seem like good outcomes to me.
> Step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave for other jobs.
Alternative step 4 - Employees in expensive markets leave that market for a cheaper market but keep their job.
I have a feeling that a lot of people in their 30's and 40's no longer really care to live in expensive markets, but traditionally felt it was hard to move and accept much lower wages. Decoupling the job from the location frees a lot of people to move that wanted to.
Even if one assumes the engineers in the expensive markets are all better, there's nothing a company like Reddit does which requires a bunch top level engineers. Some of their scaling and site reliability stuff, maybe, but it'll be a small portion of their employees.
They can solve that by paying accordingly more for their top technical positions to make those jobs competitive in expensive markets.
[I'm not arguing in favour of this, btw. - just pointing out it's an easy problem to solve]
The number of companies this would be a problem for is tiny.
According to Step 3, "Slowly allow salaries to stagnate until employees in expensive markets are no longer receiving fair pay", the employees in expensive markets are worth what they cost. Their pay is "fair".
Is the food at an expensive restaurant better? - sometimes but that is not always why it is expensive.
2. Stagnate vs inflation, until salaries track mid-market cities (Denver, Austin) instead of San Francisco / NYC. A bout of high national inflation would make this easier.
3. This works well, but only for a while. To be easily productive remotely you should be a Sr Engineer. Juniors will have a harder time. So will managers. Companies focus (even more!) on only hiring experienced devs. Increased competition drives more work outside of the USA.
4. With lots of remote opportunity, there's even more mobility for individual employees. One company is functionally like any other... all of them take place out of the same room in your house, and only differ by who is on the video chat this week. The "shared culture", both company culture (we're all in this mission together!) and regional culture (east coast / west coast) starts to fade. Fading culture amplifies communication overhead, which slows velocity. A very few companies will overcome this with incredible levels of intentionality, but most will fail to do so.
5. To try to solve the culture problem, companies open smaller landing-zone offices in a couple of hub locations. Remote folks fly in once in a while to get excited and pick up a free tshirt. These smaller hub areas become a good place to onboard Jr employees (making hiring easier), and provide a nice environment for executives to meet with customers.
6. Living physically close to the hub office provides greater executive visibility, and greater promotability for folks who care about that. This reinforces the HCOL compensation premium for leadership only. Jr folks (generally young) are happy to scrape by in the city as always because "dating is the killer app for cities." But they move out as they gain seniority / age / start a family, depressing housing costs for ~10-15 years until population growth catches up again.
7. Startups are primarily founded 2 ways: Senior/stable founders launch distributed companies with their former co-workers around the country. Nobody wants to move. Juniors/new grads launch out of the city of their university, with people they met in school.
8. Weirdly, this means that it becomes somewhat efficient for super-tiny startups to locate just outside of major cities, because if you only have a few people it's probably cheaper to live there than buying tons of plane tickets to visit VCs in those areas. Have to raise that next round! But as soon as the company hits mid-size they are quick to move out to cheaper areas.
9. Given all the above, we'll see an averaging of salaries for all areas, with the exception of executive leadership. Vibrant HCOL downtowns will fade and hollow out, suburban hub offices will be more common. Cities with strong tech universities will do best, as always, since they provide the flow of new-grad startups and academic partnerships.
This is great, glad to see reddit leading on this front. I do wonder what effect this would have on metro areas with high COL if more companies adopted this policy. Mass exodus? Probably not. But I imagine the effect will at least be measurable.
I'm more interested in the effect on metro areas with a lower COL. Imagine an influx of young professionals with Bay Area salaries in cities like Denver, Austin, Huntsville, Madison, San Diego, Nashville, Charlotte, Salt Lake City. I can't imagine current residents would be too happy.
The only case where residents would be unhappy is when said residents flood the market causing meaningful inflation across local markets. It takes the entirety of the bay area young professionals to keep the bay area as expensive as it is.
1. Would the dispersion of the same talent (assuming talent isn't suddenly growing in size) + local tech talent being paid higher cause the same inflation even when split over a large number of cities?
2. If said inflation happens, would they not move again?
I believe incentives here are to distribute this talent across the US, not concentrate in new cheaper centers
Idaho is experiencing what California had in the 1970s and 1980s, with the influx of people from other states. I remember the bumper stickers, "Welcome to California, now go back home" and "Welcome to California, now get the fuck out."
You’d need critical mass for that. San Diego (I wouldn’t put it into LCOL either) is close enough to LA that many “creatives” with high Hollywood comp already could (and do) move there and commute. There’s also a decent tech scene.
It has increased some costs, but nothing like Bay Area peninsula for example. You just don’t get the critical mass and no building like that in SD or any other place I’ve seen, save for Manhattan.
Think even smaller for where people might go. There are a lot of small towns (50-100k pop) with great quality of living where some remote workers will thrive. I’m talking places not part of larger metropolitan areas.
That’s an excellent start, so hats off to Reddit for that.
The next item on the list would be other things that vary within the US, such as the enforceability of non-compete clauses. Reddit can’t change the law for each state, but they can agree to not add those clauses for any US employee. How they would be held accountable is not a question I know how to answer beyond the realm of public opinion/memory.
Again, I congratulate Reddit for the steps they took so far.
In a remote-working world, the best talent should always command top-dollar, regardless of where they live. If they are absolutely rockstar talent and can be just as good remotely, then why wouldn't they command the highest salary? In fact, they should be able to command even more money now as all the remote-OK companies bid for them without any friction over moving / commute issues.
Honestly it's a win-win-win - a win for the company that has far larger talent pool, win for the employee who gets paid more and can move to a more desirable, low cost-of-living location, and win for the "left-behind" areas of the country where many rich techies will move to.
This will reduce class divisions and equalize our communities without any coercion and continue to allow highly-skilled labor to extract maximum income from capital. I very much like this shift towards remote work - it is the silver lining to come out of the pandemic.
I think there's an even simpler reason than this... some companies that hire remote employees use the same payscale everywhere, and that gives remote workers substantial negotiation leverage. An offer for remote work from one employer that was NYC-based and offered me an NYC-competitive salary in a much cheaper city was enough to talk a different company which leveled by city substantially upwards. Having watched this effect happen, if I were considering moving while working for a company that would relevel salary based on CoL, I would almost certainly be considering offers from other employers - and if I were a manager with an employee who was moving to go remote I would really push back on adjusting their salary, knowing that there are competing employers who won't, and the employee will probably find out one way or another.
I wouldn't call myself a source of advice on remote work necessarily because I kind of fell into remote work by accident pre-COVID, and COVID has really solidified the situation. But it also seems like remote work is going to be on the rise outside of the context of COVID. I live in a city with very little tech industry and so I only rarely here from recruiters, and those that do contact me are usually talking about relo to a different city. Just over the last two months or so I've started hearing from recruiters at nearly the level I did when I lived in San Francisco - and they're mostly not talking relo.
>if they are absolutely rockstar talent and can be just as good remotely, then why wouldn't they command the highest salary?
because this isn't how market economics work. You're not payed for being a rockstar, you're payed for the least amount of money you're willing to work for. Indian rockstar coders may be as productive as American ones, the difference is their cost of living is lower, so they're willing to do the same work for less money. Same reason your barista in SF makes more money than the same barista in Podunk Idaho despite serving just as much coffee.
For example, when many people have children, it locks them in to their current job, at least for a while. They have to depend on the parental leave, they need stability and insurance coverage while dealing with a newborn, and their time is taken up with new responsibilities so severely that there’s no way to study, practice and prepare for intense interviews.
If market compensation was truly based on some notion of all the external factors that make a person willing to accept a certain amount of pay, then you should see people getting pay cuts when they have children. But you don’t. In fact, having children is historically correlated with raises, one theory being that it communicates fealty to your employer that you are accepting a life responsibility that yokes you to that employer more strongly - but this affect varies across different cultures and different types of companies.
The same is true for working remotely. There is no “market rate” for a person already working for you aside from what you already pay them. There is no comparable substitute person in the new geographic market that you can swap in for them. They already work for you.
Any salary arbitrage by location would already have to have been priced in when you hired that person in the first place. Them moving to a new location doesn’t suddenly mean they are fungible with a new local substitute - and in fact it’s quite the opposite.
The end result will be a huge equalization in pay. People in low cost of living areas will become a lot richer and those in high cost of living places will become a lot poorer.
Likely those high cost of living places will quickly drop in cost as most people spread out.
It's interesting because that equalization would only affect people in certain industries which are already fairly well compensated. If people making tech salaries move to overlooked parts of the country, I wonder to what extent their wealth would trickle down to benefit their new communities?
It would be interesting if a bunch of people leaving the Bay Area ended up congregating in certain low-COL communities. I wouldn't be surprised if a sort of rural gentrification occurs in the handful of Midwestern towns that have gigabit fiber. Would those areas remain low COL? Would the existing inhabitants become a sort of underclass?
> I wouldn't be surprised if a sort of rural gentrification occurs in the handful of Midwestern towns that have gigabit fiber. Would those areas remain low COL? Would the existing inhabitants become a sort of underclass?
You'd see something like that, but keep in mind that outside of dense urban cores, you mostly don't have the same constraints on available real estate that drive existing residents out by rising prices (and the SF Bay Area's lack of housing inventory is largely self-inflicted, unlike, say, Manhattan).
So, yes, some competition from well-heeled newcomers will drive prices up a bit (encouraging new construction), but without a constraint on housing inventory that drives the newcomers to compete with each other, what you get is just a bit of urbanization, rather than gentrification per-se.
The other way around, they are being paid as little as companies can get away with because remote is not a protected class. Profits come from unpaid wages. Imagine a hypothetical(?) scenario where market economics say you can get away with paying less for marginalized individuals. Disability, gender, religion, age, race etc. Would it be OK?
Considering all the middle managers I know of are desperately trying to get the workforce back into offices because they seemingly have bugger-all to do now, I'd say you can cut out a fair few of them if you need to balance out a new cost.
Without being overworked, can a remote manager manage more people than an on-site manager? I don't know any remote managers
> Considering all the middle managers I know of are desperately trying to get the workforce back into offices because they seemingly have bugger-all to do now, I'd say you can cut out a fair few of them if you need to balance out a new cost.
Are you sure you've diagnosed this correctly? The managers I know are ready to get back to the office for the exact opposite reason - managing remotely is much harder and more time-consuming.
This is such a bad idea, why would someone earning 150k in sf should earn the same in Deroit? It will just increase the price of living in cheaper area which will create the same problem as in SF, you work in IT you're ok otherwise life gets too expensive.
Typical shortsighted viewpoint... cost of living increases along with the economy. Those higher paid workers will then spend their dollars in the economy thus bolstering local businesses. So many places in the US would kill for an influx of high paid individuals to kickstart their economy.
Assuming a competitive labor market where employees have multiple offers, why should a company not offer as much for someone who works remotely and adds the same amount of value?
If the same person relocates to Bermuda why is Reddit not giving them the same money they would give in the top tier US cities? Even better, Reddit will save even more money on them because they wont have to pay payroll taxes.
Or if an employee moves to Mexico City, or even Canada, why would their pay be adjusted down?
It shouldn't, but international borders are a lot harder to cross (for both people and goods) and so this prevents prices from normalizing across countries.
I don't know a single compagny that pay the same wage worldwide.
Basecamp.
According to the current status quo it is OK to discriminate remote workers, but that is not an inherent property of the system, just an implementation detail. People are pro/con whether they think they are benefiting from the current state of things.
Everything you mentioned is directly related to your physical location. Your state taxes you a certain amount, and (hopefully) spends it on services. Different states have different laws/politics/philosophies, so they tax you differently.
Whether you work for Google from SF or Chicago makes no difference to the company as long as you are doing the same work. I'd argue that someone working for Google in the UK should also be paid the same.
> I'd argue that someone working for Google in the UK should also be paid the same.
Tax rates are very different in the UK and SF or Chicago.
Level of social services provided to people is very different, nearly everything is different. I am not saying whether person should or should not be paid the same, but rather pointing out the fact that things are different between UK and SF/Chicago. Most of Google Engineers in the UK pay 40-45% income tax https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
That's not the case. Scotland is the only constituent country of the UK where powers to set income tax have been devolved. Income tax in Wales and Northern Ireland is still controlled by Westminster.
You're only thinking about it from one side. Assuming two excellent employees are on offer and both are remote so location is no issue, the employer will typically choose the cheaper option. Someone with a lower cost of living will generally not need to demand as much money.
> It will just increase the price of living in cheaper area
Also seen by some as the value of their houses rising, which they might welcome; and this only happens if there's some demand from other workers to work remotely from their area, which brings money into the area's service sectors. This could breathe new life into many parts of the country that are currently without any particular reason to go on existing.
I could see smaller townships deliberately incentivizing remote workers and designing things around them as a primary source of monetary influx.
You can already live in a cheap place and work in an expensive one.. it's called a commute. Companies don't pay less just cause you live 1.5 hours away. Why should they pay less for you to live 6 hours away?
If tech was actually paying enough to raise the cost of living significantly over the entire country than people would flood to it lowering the pay enough that this was not an issue.
Posting from a throwaway since I use my real name (and reference my employer) on my primary account...
Is nobody else worried that policies like this are going to end up penalizing workers who genuinely prefer living in an urban, high-COL area? I'm not sitting here in Brooklyn eagerly awaiting a chance to move to a cheap giant home in the suburbs - I genuinely like walkable communities, and moved to one, and found a job there which paid me enough to justify the high COL.
This feels like a regression-to-the-mean sort of move, where the net effect over time will be all tech salaries becoming reduced as the labor pool spreads to cheaper areas and the national average market rates become depressed. It'll be great for those who genuinely like living in small towns in the midwest, they'll probably still be doing well relative to the local average. It'll be horrible for those who genuinely like living in expensive coastal areas - the pressure to move to a cheaper place will be enormous.
(And thats not to say anything about my belief that a lot of low-COL areas afford to be cheap by providing poor social services, which feels like we're diminishing the ability of high-COL areas to apply social pressure to elevate the standard of living of other states and regions...)
Am I thinking about this the wrong way, or are high-COL urban workers going to take a hit here?
It could always end up having the opposite effect (over a period of time, anyway): the reason NY and SF became high cost of living was because everybody wanted to move there because that's where all the jobs were, in a vicious cycle. If, say, Manhattan loses its primary advantage of proximity to jobs and has nothing to offer besides walkability and population density, I can imagine it becoming a lot more affordable.
It's hard to see how New York becomes more affordable without a bunch of serious knock-on effects that would make it a bad place to live.
During "White Flight" New York lost a substantial, but not enormous number of people, but still the effects on the city budget caused quality of life to plummet, as crime spiraled and infrastructure crumbled.
I was reminded of this after reading this recent New York Times article about the current massive budget shortfall as the tax base flees the city:
In addition, high CoL areas have (mostly) self-inflicted their high CoL; nothing prevents them from building more housing and dramatically lowering their CoL! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501
I don't know anything about this but I am incredibly skeptical that there's a magic silver-bullet solution with no side effects. I would imagine that there are a lot of factors that lead to this working in Tokyo.
I'll be happy if those changes that you're worried about will happen.
If you're working remotely, why should your employer pay you more just because you prefer more expensive cities? Should you also get a pay raise for preferring more expensive cars, or having expensive hobbies?
It would be great to have more good salaries and good jobs available nationally.
Sometimes living in a high cost of living area isn’t optional. For example, I have to do a lot of elder care for family members who live in a major urban center. They’ve lived there for all their lives, and the doctor suggests it would be pretty mentally harmful to forcibly uproot them at this point. I need to be super physically close to them, so I have to live in an urban center. I would not consider working for an employer that acted like this was my “choice” and expected me to take lower net pay as a result.
The same could be true if someone has a family member incarcerated at a certain prison and needs to live close by for visits or to help with legal procedures.
Yeah, I completely agree. I am all for companies abandoning the dumb idea that pay should be tied to geographic market rates, and especially for workers to turn down those employers and just say no to job offers that aren’t competitive on a global basis.
Couldn't you argue the opposite: that current policies penalize workers who don't want to live in an urban high cost of living area? Is there a solution that doesn't penalize one or the other?
That’s penalizing those living in a lower CoL area. “Here’s a giant paycheck for those of you who want to live in the Bay Area where you can eventually buy a $2 million house.”
Subsidizing high-CoL people who get the advantages of being in a city is not fair at all. It’s only tolerated because high-CoL cities tend to be where the talent is most concentrated so you have to compete for them.
For example, Google will not pay Zurich engineers Bay Area equivalent salaries despite there being similar CoLs.
I’m a programmer living in a low CoL area. My salary (for 25 years now) has reflected that. I think it’s fair. I don’t make the same money as I would in an urban center, but, then, my longest commute during that time was 20 minutes. Usually about 5.
Why do you think that’s fair? Why should you be expected to subsidize a co-worker who does the same thing as you but demands to live in a super expensive city?
Would you think it’s fair if you lived in the same city but your company paid more money to people with more expensive houses?
Google actually pays Zurich engineers more than Bay Area, something like +15% IIRC. I was close to moving out there at one point and know a few people who did.
No, not when it comes to TC. L5 TC when I left Google was just under $500k once stock and target bonus were counted (for new stock grants not counting appreciation). Zurich TC was like $250-300k USD for L5s in my same group.
Wouldn't the neutral solution be to pick a target standard of living (roughly approximated by something like a 75th percentile market rate salary, or whatever metric you chose) and pay that for any given location?
I'm aware of several teams that have done this with success in the past. Everybody, no matter their region of choice, gets compensation enough to enable an appropriately comfortable standard of living desired based on the actual costs of living where they choose. This is what we're talking about when we advocate for adjusting salaries for COL. It creates incentive for your employees to live where they actually want to live, work, and be happy - rather than wherever they feel like they can extract the most cash value from the company.
Those measures tend to be pretty dumb though because “comfortable standard of living” is very subjective. I know people who think a 2BR apartment in Manhattan is awful compared to an acre on the edge of a town with a manufactured 3 bed/2ba home, 2 car garage, and a workshop.
So the equivalent “comfortable standard of living” they’re used to in Manhattan would require a $5 million annual salary.
It could happen, and you will need to adapt to it. Change happens all the time, and only those that resist change will suffer from it, while those that bend with it will benefit from it.
That said, I really don't think remote work will be permanent. Once the Pandemic is over, people will relish going into the office. Most people WANT to work at an office, regardless of the commute. It runs between 60-75% of all people want to work from an office, and it is more efficient.
Some will but the percentage remains to be seen. I hope we get to a place where people can choose what they want and aren't forced to adopt someone else's preference.
It also all depends on the office setup and where people reside. If someone has a casual bike ride to an office they probably don't mind the commute, v.s. if someone has to take an hour + BART ride without seating, packed like sardines and some homeless junkie smoking crack, they probably feel differently.
> prefer living in an urban, high-COL area? I'm not sitting here in Brooklyn eagerly awaiting a chance to move to a cheap giant home in the suburbs - I genuinely like walkable communities
There is nothing physical that makes it more expensive to build dense, walkable communities. On the contrary: Shorter distances mean less roads, less pipes, and apartment buildings (and smaller apartments) mean less heating costs. It should be cheaper, from the material point of view.
The problem is political: People already living in walkable communities tend to vote for keeping newcomers out of moving into their walkable communities, vote against building more homes in their communities or expanding the walkable communities at their edges. This shortsighted selfishness, pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you-attitude of people already living and voting in walkable communities is doing the penalizing. And potential newcomers don't have the right to vote in the local elections of the walkable communities they are only aspiring to move in to.
I feel like you're kinda right. at least I expect that in the medium term, the average SWE salary will be what it is now (plus inflation), but the regional spread will be much lower. in the long term (and regardless of WFH), I expect software engineers will become more like accountants: valued professionals, but not superstars pulling $200k+.
I also don't think this is unreasonable. we're not entitled to live in the most expensive corners of the world just because we want to. currently engineers in high-COL areas get paid a premium because the company sees value in having offices there and having most people work in the office. once that perceived value-add no longer exists, what entitles you to get paid much more to enable your lifestyle than joe schmoe in iowa who does the same work? if this feels unfair, it sorta calls into question whether it's fair for SWEs to get paid so much more than other professions in the first place.
I totally agree, and am trying to balance my desire to preserve my career and standard of living with what - logically - makes so much sense.
I previously worked for an all-remote team that, over time, shifted from mostly within the US to HQ'd within the US on paper, but with just a few employees left in the country. When I left to take a local job, the guy who replaced me in Latin America was every bit as talented an engineer and tech leader, but for less than a third of the cost to the company compared to what I was making in NYC.
I get the feeling a lot of people are looking at this as their first step towards more tech jobs in cheap parts of the US, but the reality will probably end up as more tech jobs offered to people from much cheaper parts of the developing world - also a great thing... but with potential impact to those of us in the country if wages move faster than COL does.
My justification for finding my walkable community in one of the only places it exists in the US was always high wages, but if that changes, there's little reason to not pursue parts of western europe with a much better social climate and lower wages - but also lower wages. Who knows what will happen post-pandemic though, and how much of this will stick outside of a few SV companies.
Software engineers are more like creative staff (being a "creative" accountant is a negative!), one discovers value, the other transmutes it into cashflow, the incentive structure for both shouldn't be the same.
maybe accountant was a poor comparison. I chose it because (AFAIK) the barrier to entry for a career as an accountant is similar to that of a SWE. there aren't many fields these days where completing a four-year degree gives you a good chance at a steady job with good pay. SWE is definitely an outlier when it comes to pay vs credentials. when I got my cs bachelors and starting working, I instantly hit the 90th percentile income for a person my age. a CS major is relatively difficult, sure, but it's not that difficult. I have to assume that over time pay and opportunities for people with CS degrees (at least at entry level) will converge with pay for other similarly difficult STEM degrees.
> Is nobody else worried that policies like this are going to end up penalizing workers
But what is your solution to this? If companies can make this work, why should they ignore the huge talent pools that exist in the middle of the country? That said, I think there will always be employers who prefer to have most everyone sitting in the office.
To be clear, I'm not opposed at all to remote work - but it feels weird to me to ignore cost of living where your people are when setting their compensation if you aren't deliberately trying to incentivize people from (or relocating to) low-COL areas.
But from the company's perspective, why should they care? If they are hiring remotely, shouldn't they optimize for the best employees at a given price?
I think people focus too much on money. Yes, someone could take a HCOL salary and move to a LCOL area but they might not actually like living there. Quality of life does matter and I don't see a meaningful number of people moving to a place they hate just to save some dough.
Companies that pay more based on a worker's unnecessary location are subsidizing the worker's lifestyle at the expense of their customers and/or shareholders.
I think you're probably right in terms of the trend. But at the end of the day, the decision of where to live is ours (as workers living in high-COL areas), and companies don't owe us any special treatment so that we can live in cities. We benefit from the fact that we can do our jobs completely remotely, but of course from a job security perspective there are some tradeoffs (ones that I am very glad to have made, given global current circumstances).
My suggestion: join your local YIMBY group and work toward making cost of living more affordable in your area.
A relatively small number of cities in the US and Europe have been the big winners over the past few decades while smaller communities have struggled, it's no bad thing if an increase in remote working allows that trend to be slowed down, or even reversed a little.
Cities like New York (and SF, London, Berlin, etc, etc) still have a bright future and are still going to attract large companies - and most of those companies are likely to remain predominantly office based for the foreseeable future.
I always like to view this stuff through a supply and demand lens.
As it is, you could already work full time remote and get much higher salary than those companies that adjusted for COL and publicly advertised their pay scales(Gitlab, Stack Overflow, etc). If you were interested in money, and willing to get after it, those salaries were laughably low for someone with the talent and history to back it up.
So now what? The same as always, get paid what you can get paid? If you want X money go get X money. If you can't, maybe you don't have what it takes to live in a high COL city(is that so different from now)? Perhaps the COL will come down to reflect a reduced demand for those particular urban centers. Or to reflect ability to pay high rents and prices?
IMHO the potential downsides are more social; risk of increased social/economical stratification. Maybe the cities end up even more packed with a certain "type" that can pull the big money while everyone else is servicing them on scraps. IDK.
I don't agree with the premise of your argument. I think you currently get a very nice luxury benefit, and stoping that isn't "penalizing" you.
I think it is a little silly that companies pay someone more just because they like living in a city. I admit that I have a strong preference for rural areas, but I don't expect an employer to pay me more (or less) because of that. I am constantly surprised that more companies don't setup in lower COL areas, but I guess that much of the in-person talent desires that enough to make it work.
Most people agree that it is good to treat people equally regardless of their background, and this policy seems to promote that.
Reddit has another benefit to this-- by having employees around the country, they'd also be more representative of the country as a whole in terms of "viewpoint diversity", instead of being in a liberal bubble.
There’s a feedback loop here. When many companies scale up compensation for areas they are contributing to higher expenses in the area. I think in the long run this will certainly have the effect of making desirability a key factor in how expensive an area is, but without the feedback mechanisms causing costs to get out of control as companies increase pay more and more to keep up with rising costs resulting from increased pay (mostly realized as increased rents, driving up the costs of all local services, employee rents, and office rent).
High-COL areas will take the hit as the Professional Class moves out. Ultra-high -COL areas will be fine... they are mostly full of executives anyway, who will continue to need an office location from which to operate. No CEO wants to spend the rest of their life planning strategy and entertaining clients in generic hotel ballrooms.
COL adjustments don't make a lot of sense when you dive a little deeper. Just because you reside in a HCOL area doesn't mean you actually encounter high costs. If you happen to have family in the area and you live for free, you still get paid a high salary without the expenses. Similarly, if you choose to have 5 roommates you also don't encounter the high costs. Why should someone be penalized if they simply choose to live somewhere else geographically? If you work remotely, where you work shouldn't affect your compensation, compensation should be based on value added to the company.
Well said. My lifestyle choices have incurred a high cost — I’ve always lived alone when possible.
The idea of an employer daring to adjust my pay because they think I should get a roomie (or make any other decisions about my cost of living) is crazy.
Over the years various employers have entered into negotiations, mid employment, to change the terms of my contract. More often than not it’s been a good opportunity for both parties to seize the opportunity for some fresh air — new job for me somewhere else, new chump for them!
I'm basically operating with the assumption that with the expansion of programs like this, enough tech workers would be willing to leave high-COL tech labor markets to reduce the average tech worker pay nationally as NYC/SF are no longer hyper-competitive, but not so many as to meaningfully reduce the cost of living in those areas, especially in NY where the COL is driven by many other industries.
The end result (as I'm imagining it) would be that these new national-average tech salaries can still provide a very comfortable living in low-COL areas, but are no longer comfortable in high-COL areas.
The salaries are already not comfortable in high-COL areas, at least for a lot of developers. That's why HN has had these discussions about remote work compensation.
Realize with areas like SV you're also competing because of desirability not related to job market. If you want to live in certain parts of CA it's going to cost more.
If what you are worried about does happen I suspect it would take on the order of a decade to show up. But regardless of timespan, I must say I don't care. Your post is just crocodile tears.
It's possible that there are walkable communities outside of NY and SF. I don't know if anyone has ever thought to check, though.
It might even be that if a bunch of people who value things like walkable communities move to a place and get involved, they could even make one. It's just crazy enough to work.
Keep in mind that even cities that have lower scores overall often have some very walkable neighborhoods. For example, Los Angeles has an overall walk score of 68, but has several neighborhoods that score 90 and above.
Nobody wants to say it, but the only real distinction is the investors and the composition of those investor's portfolios.
When Tencent, Sequoia and Andreesen Horowitz are in the same room, its a startup, specifically a tech startup.
They could be selling hairgel with only a landing page for you to put your email address and it would be a tech startup. They'll make sure it is considered as much.
I have worked at Google and Amazon. I never required PMs to be in the loop for a feature launch at either of the two.
Having said that, both Google and Amazon has excellent PMs and there are teams that require PMs to be in the loop for a feature launch but it is not universal.
A good PM saves work for the team by shifting work away from from valueless investments. If a team is "slowing down to appease a PM" then that PM is worthless.
> A good PM saves work for the team by shifting work away from from valueless investments.
Knowing what’s valuable and what’s not is a function of being an employee. Designers and engineers should know where value exists.
If they need a PM to shift them away from valueless work, then I highly question their efficacy as an engineer. I also highly question that organization’s management structure and communication.
We actually had an instance of Reddit that someone at my company hacked together an integration with our ActiveDirectory and we used it like an internal wiki and discussion board. It was better than anything else I've used.
Reddit was never a remote company. We had a few remote employees at some point, and then in 2014 that was stopped, and now it looks like remote is back. But for at least the first five years, no one worked remotely (except the last two weeks of December, when we all worked remotely).
> Imagine: casual and coffee shop-style seating, private space for heads-down focusing, larger bookable resources and collaboration spaces for teams to strategically meet IRL, and no more fixed desks—we’ll have neighborhoods for teams to gather and bookable desks for employees working in the office.
As much as I'm supportive of having flexible working and with that flexible office space, I really don't like the idea of non-fixed desks/hotdesking. Ergonomics and having a correct desk setup up for your needs is incredibly important and something we don't value as much as we should.
I'm 50/50 on whether I'd like to go to back to the office in the future (not having to take the tube in London is massive plus) but if I do I'd want my own desk setup, monitors set up at my required height and a comfortable chair. Hopefully that's not much too much to ask?
The way I've seen this work out in reality is people who care about ergonomics and their setup end up going in every day and hoteling at the same desk every day, which basically just becomes their desk.
Everyone else just uses what's available. It's kinda like when you were in college. Even though there were no assigned seats, most everyone sat in the same seat each class, after the first few.
>I really don't like the idea of non-fixed desks/hotdesking. Ergonomics and having a correct desk setup up for your needs is incredibly important and something we don't value as much as we should.
Someone who gets me! Hotdesks sounds like a good idea in theory, but in practice definitely are not. What happens if you show up late and somebody has your seat, do you boot them out? I'd just rather have a fixed desk, thank you very much.
More power to them, but I would weigh giving anyone a raise until their web page stops being so user-hostile as to be worse than useless. The web site is so bad that I will go back and add "-reddit -site:reddit.com" to my searches if they've SEO'd the terms I'm looking for, and it comes up on the first page of results. The only reason the site exists now is as the world's largest porn aggregator. I'm sure there's enough money in that to continue to prosper, but I have no use for it any more.
old.reddit.com still works, and if you make an account, you can set old as your default so //reddit.com uses that layout instead
You can only change "Opt out of the redesign" setting on the new site though, which is super annoying, and a pretty big signal https://new.reddit.com/settings/
Call me old fashioned, but the old version of reddit on mobile without mobile styling or any media queries is a far better experience than any Reddit app.
Yeah, website no longer works for me. Clicking load more comments often just me somewhere random. Comment threads have been decapitated by suggestions to other threads.
Using Reddit as a source of information via Google search either:
1. Has half the screen blocked or you have to dismiss modals to use the app
2. Breaks your search flow by switching to the Reddit app
I honestly don't know what they are working on at reddit. The new version still goes down at least once a week and the new site is still lacking basic features like editing multireddits.
And yet they keep adding things like streaming videos and creating cartoon avatars.
They seem heavily involved in taming the darker corners of the site, to make it friendlier to advertisers.
I also found the global moderation surprisingly efficient. I got a few official replies about actions on content I reported. They seem interested in banning really bad users.
They also try really hard to replace private messages with the chat box, which seemingly doesn't work in third party apps. They added badges, friends and other game elements.
Reddit is trying to become a product for advertisers. It's pretty obvious to me.
Perhaps I'm a little late to the game; I've now read enough of these articles that I sense a genuine seismic shift in the way that knowledge work is done in the US.
Especially now, it is looking like we're in this situation for at least another year; it makes sense for companies to make longer-term changes.
I was fortunate to start working for a 100% remote company 2.5 years ago; it is nice to see that I'll have more options for future employment if I ever need to seek it.
I'd imagine its similar to the whole 'hotdesk' topic. I read about hotdesks and how people hate them, but nobody I know in real life even knows what that is, much less works at a company with them.
Reddit used to have a high signal to noise ratio. After acquisition and several leadership changes, they decided to ramp up user acquisition and engagement.
Essentially, the website is an ad funnel.
They've added bells and whistles that attract the type of audience that watch videos, buy add ons, and click on ads.
Reddit is turning into exactly the vehicle they want. It's going to be worth so much more money now.
Come on. HN gives YCombinator some measure of "street cred" in the tech community, it gives visibility to startups (especially YC's.) It's the water cooler where people gather trying to appear innovative and thought-leaderish just in case sama or pg wander by.
Obviously it's a moneymaker. The goodwill and the brand make money. The low-tech anti-modern anti-business aesthetic makes money. There's a reason this forum is a subdomain of a venture capital firm. I agree that they shouldn't (and probably won't) change in Reddit's direction but only because they don't need to. Why bother with ads when your entire culture is in essence an ad funnel?
> Our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live
This is exactly how it should be, kudos to Reddit. Major tech companies taking advantage of employees relocating to lower-CoL areas completely ignores that the value they bring to the company doesn't change at all.
Right but you better believe they have already started planning what they are going to say for the next phase where they reduce the pay and recommend that people don't live in SF or NY etc.
We at Pex went through this kind of transitions few years back, although we are basing our compensation on LA for USA and CA and on Vienna for Europe.
We made this decision with the understanding that we can't compete for talent in the most expensive places of either continent but we are still left with great amount of people.
It worked well for us. Not only while hiring candidates, but more importantly allowing our employees to move closer to their families or finding places to live that better match their lifestyle. We generally notices overall increase in happiness across the company while people are not restricted to single area. Also the financial pressure dropped significantly which means people stay with us longer even if they are offered better paid jobs (at least in the cash portion).
Didn't reddit and a lot of other companies (I think Yahoo?) at some point mandate that all remote employees move to their HQ cities so they could work at the office, leading to a lot of folks quitting?
I seem to remember a lot of blog posts lamenting this at the time
We have to applaud Reddit for their compensation strategy.
Every company that does this puts upward pressure on wages throughout the company.
The scenario where every company goes remote simultaneously is what we are witnessing play out. That means workers in every major city will have a 1000 different businesses to offer their skills to. The businesses that offer ‘local salary’ cuts will be on the lower end of people’s interest.
This still might be very bad for innovation (missing a critical mass of a range of experts accidentally trying new things in SV), but it may be very good for increasing wages in non costal cities (and the knock on effects that positively has on the communities there).
It all starts with celebrating people getting paid the same. Then you realise that when Reddit starts doing pay cuts, everybody across the board will get them and SF/NYC become even more unaffordable.
In a major city like SF? Will never happen. That's the price for a 2-bed in a mid-west city with excess supply, super cheap labor and materials costs, limited permitting, etc.
I could never see a $1200 2-bed in SF ever coving the costs of construction.
Yes, that’s the price in cities that haven’t fucking failed to address housing issues. The building materials are not meaningfully different in costs and labor isn’t that much worse (not nearly enough to justify 100% difference).
There is nothing magical about the bay compared to Indianapolis that means I can’t find a 2 br apartment anywhere on the outskirts of even San Jose for a similar price. The only difference is the overbearing NIMBY crowd protecting their own investments in their homes.
This is great news. I wish worker pay was more based on the value they provide versus where they decide to live. If you're making $200k in the valley and you decide to move to Ohio, why are you suddenly worth less to the company? If everyone goes remote you no longer have to live in a high cost of living area. If you choose to that's on you.
I think The answer might be that there were good developers in Ohio that for various reasons (family) didn’t want to move to the valley.
They already accepted a lower salary. They were comfortable passing up valuable networking opportunities in HCOL.
Now the $200k in valley, doesn’t provide as much value as $125k in OHio.
That’s one example. I’m sure there is some examples that support both ideas, but there are some that support Paying the same developer less In LCOL areas
I've never though it made much sense to tie compensation so tightly to geography. If I'm providing enough value for you to pay me $X, and I move somewhere cheaper but provide the same value, you'll either pay me $X or I'll find someone else that will. If you think you can find a suitable replacement for cheaper, you should be doing that anyway.
I always thought geographic zones for remote employees are a bit weird. Living somewhere expensive (within your country) seems like a lifestyle choice like any other. People would think its rediculous if we had different salary bands based on other lifestyle choices like how much you like to go to fancy resturants or something.
Cost of living is almost a red herring at this point. The real driver of geographic compensation disparities was always just the cost of competing for talent in that area. The only thing that mattered was if a compensation offer was higher than the employee’s other options.
Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.
This assumes there is no elasticity to where people live. For many people there is a cost at which moving to a higher COL area for an adjusted salary makes sense. Or in general someone may be looking to move for the right job at the right price, etc.
>Cost of living tends to follow from the prevailing wages in the area, not the other way around.
I tend to agree with this, but I think there is also a dichotomy of destination cities (where people with lots of money move to because it's nice, not necessarily because they will make more money there) vs. non-destination cities which can distort prices absent of wages. See: Vancouver, parts of LA, parts of the NY area, Miami, etc.
> Living somewhere expensive (within your country) seems like a lifestyle choice like any other.
Right. I'm really looking to be able to drive a Tesla and vacation several times a year on remote tropical islands. Should my company pay me more for that choice?
The only way they should reimagine their workforce is to fire them all. The website has become embarrassing, with videos loading ridiculously slow or without audio. They’re basically helping me off of the addiction to Reddit, which actually isn’t such a bad thing.
I don't think you're being hyperbolic, the ruinously bad updates broke my addiction to reddit too. The charitable take is that they made it deliberately shit to drive adoption of their official app. If it's not that, then they must be hilariously incompetent.
I cannot view new messages on mobile without putting Chrome in Desktop Mode. In mobile view it always shows me the same old moderator message instead of new ones.
Since it's been like that for so long, I have to assume it's deliberate. Some executive at Reddit decided they were going to try to break things to force people into the app.
The mobile website has deliberate unnecessary delays in order to force you onto the mobile app. Are reddit frontend engineers actually proud of this behavior?
Using an article entirely as an excuse to soapbox about something that's barely related should always be downvoted. Even if you agree with it, that doesn't make it a relevant (or good) comment.
> The website has become embarrassing, with videos loading ridiculously slow or without audio.
Considering how Orwellian they are with content curation and moderation, particularly with anything that has even a whiff of politics, I see that as a good thing.
....To help drive the idea home (pun intended), we’ve reimagined our approach to compensation in the US. To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US. It means that our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live. We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live. Internationally, we have had one pay range per country, and now the US will be consistent with this approach.....