Lead Developer, business owner, US Army veteran. I build things for the web. My website is a bunch of HTML pages that didn't need a framework. Yours can be too!
Oh, don't get me wrong: I absolutely believe all companies SHOULD pay the same rate for the same work. Full stop.
Edit: I forgot to address the primary issue: What does FB have to lose?
It's purely economics. They consider it an overpayment for payroll. See below for the reasoning, I just wanted to make sure I was talking TO you and not past you by not addressing the specific point... Sorry about that!
I'm simply describing what I see as an economically viable alternative system to "Your pay is going to get cut arbitrarily if you don't come back to the Bay Area"
The key here is that the Bay Area cost of living is so astronomically above the average that someone making 300k is making 300k not because that is the value of their labor on the open market, but because companies cannot recruit employees without either an incentive to drive an hour+ from affordable housing (I don't know where the affordable housing is in that area) or enough that they can live nearby.
Without the enormous cost of living, none of those workers would be making as much as they do.
Zuck is (shudder) correct that if a worker isn't in the Bay Area, then they shouldn't get paid the recruitment premium necessary to get the best and the brightest to come work for FB in the Bay Area.
The thing that most people fail to realize is that if we truly had a globalized average of pay for Senior Software engineers, the average would probably be (off the top of my head, zero research) somewhere in the 60 to 80k/year range.
But COLA is already baked into the salary. This is just making it explicit.
Now that I feel icky, I do think there are a lot of important conversations to be had around worker treatment, profit sharing and general compensation packages, but when it comes to a company trying to optimize pay based on localized cost of living, we can say things like "They should get the same pay regardless" (which would make them targets for the next round of layoffs), "They should pay overseas engineers the same as domestic US engineers for the same work" (decimating the offshore engineering market by removing it's primary value proposition, which is labor in markets with much lower cost of living thresholds than the US), or we can approach it from a position of how to get the most good and best transparency in the process so workers can be informed and know what to expect rather than what Zuck did, which is just say "we'll cut your pay if you don't come back"...
Jeez... I feel like I'm defending giant companies (I'm not, I just don't think this is a good target)... I need a shower now 🤣
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Oh, don't get me wrong: I absolutely believe all companies SHOULD pay the same rate for the same work. Full stop.
Edit: I forgot to address the primary issue: What does FB have to lose?
It's purely economics. They consider it an overpayment for payroll. See below for the reasoning, I just wanted to make sure I was talking TO you and not past you by not addressing the specific point... Sorry about that!
I'm simply describing what I see as an economically viable alternative system to "Your pay is going to get cut arbitrarily if you don't come back to the Bay Area"
The key here is that the Bay Area cost of living is so astronomically above the average that someone making 300k is making 300k not because that is the value of their labor on the open market, but because companies cannot recruit employees without either an incentive to drive an hour+ from affordable housing (I don't know where the affordable housing is in that area) or enough that they can live nearby.
Without the enormous cost of living, none of those workers would be making as much as they do.
Zuck is (shudder) correct that if a worker isn't in the Bay Area, then they shouldn't get paid the recruitment premium necessary to get the best and the brightest to come work for FB in the Bay Area.
The thing that most people fail to realize is that if we truly had a globalized average of pay for Senior Software engineers, the average would probably be (off the top of my head, zero research) somewhere in the 60 to 80k/year range.
But COLA is already baked into the salary. This is just making it explicit.
Now that I feel icky, I do think there are a lot of important conversations to be had around worker treatment, profit sharing and general compensation packages, but when it comes to a company trying to optimize pay based on localized cost of living, we can say things like "They should get the same pay regardless" (which would make them targets for the next round of layoffs), "They should pay overseas engineers the same as domestic US engineers for the same work" (decimating the offshore engineering market by removing it's primary value proposition, which is labor in markets with much lower cost of living thresholds than the US), or we can approach it from a position of how to get the most good and best transparency in the process so workers can be informed and know what to expect rather than what Zuck did, which is just say "we'll cut your pay if you don't come back"...
Jeez... I feel like I'm defending giant companies (I'm not, I just don't think this is a good target)... I need a shower now 🤣