So the key is get hired by Google in the bay area and "work from home" in Minneapolis! :-)
At both Sun and NetApp where I was familiar with the compensation practices there was a 'modifier' applied to bay area jobs which increased their compensation, but even with the modifier the 'net' take home pay was less than it was elsewhere.
That said, when I was at Google they had a really interesting pay practice for engineers which consists of a base salary and a 'bonus', the bonus was affected by a personal multiplier and a company multiplier. The system was designed to make it impossible to figure out what the multipliers were so basically is simplified to the old fashion 'tweak the folks we like' non-accountability that you got elsewhere but it certainly gave the impression to people that they were going to earn more money than they actually did. (And yes, it annoyed me, but Lazlo Bock the VP of HR didn't really care that it did :-) Perhaps when they did that whole 10% across the board thing they normalized things a bit (which would have been a good thing, the old system was causing good people to quit when it should have been rewarding them)
At both Sun and NetApp where I was familiar with the compensation practices there was a 'modifier' applied to bay area jobs which increased their compensation, but even with the modifier the 'net' take home pay was less than it was elsewhere.
That said, when I was at Google they had a really interesting pay practice for engineers which consists of a base salary and a 'bonus', the bonus was affected by a personal multiplier and a company multiplier. The system was designed to make it impossible to figure out what the multipliers were so basically is simplified to the old fashion 'tweak the folks we like' non-accountability that you got elsewhere but it certainly gave the impression to people that they were going to earn more money than they actually did. (And yes, it annoyed me, but Lazlo Bock the VP of HR didn't really care that it did :-) Perhaps when they did that whole 10% across the board thing they normalized things a bit (which would have been a good thing, the old system was causing good people to quit when it should have been rewarding them)