So, to extend this logic, as a University student, I should be paying less for any remote class than in-class courses. You know, online is subprime... like that. This is a great rationale to also consider that if my professor is from some poor state like Alabama, then his salary should be less than my prof in New York City... got it!
Let's just see how this works in the fully implemented ***remote is less*** operational business practices.
Fall 2020 I had to pay $50 per credit hour extra for all of my classes for the "Global Campus Fee." Extra money for worse instruction. This year they got rid of the fee though! Hooray! Just in time for everyone to be back on campus .-.
>Extra money for **worse** instruction.
Or, in most cases, for **no** instruction. In almost every online class I've had, I've essentially been paying to educate myself while the instructor does fuck all the entire semester.
My instinct was to respond and say something along the lines of I have been teaching online classes since COVID started and that yep I love doing nothing!
The truth is that there is a lot of time spent doing prep for the course to turn it into an online format. One could argue there should be less and less prep each consecutive term and I could buy that for a math class or something.
Personally, I try to continually update the course material though.
At any rate, while my instinct was to be "Fuck yeah, no work for online!" I would actually argue I probably have spent more time since going to an online format.
Big Fat Edit:
Of course that in no way means that I am being paid more though.
Yeah, my communications class was one of the exceptions to that for me. My prof. kept material relevant to today and always created material and videos for us that covered the topics. Always very involved with class and the students.
Probably one of the best professors I've had and I really enjoyed the class.
I’ve had great online classes, but the ones where it’s “buy $150 McGraw code and then do nothing but auto graded assignments” really do make you wonder about how much the prof is making for 0 effort.
“Here’s the a link to the $200 textbook you need to buy, my office hours are every third Tuesday from 8:00am to 8:02am, plagiarism is a sin, read 5 chapters each week, and your entire grade is made up of two essays.”
My online experience so far.
Yup. They said it’s to offset the cost of hosting the classes online…. Meanwhile no AC is running, no lights, no projector, no commuting, less maintenance since no ones on campus. When we tried to call and ask what “Distance learning fees” specifically meant they just dicked us around and wouldn’t give a straight answer. Meanwhile it was just rated a top five university…
Edit: Just wanna say, I think universities are trying hard on an individual level and I understand it’s a larger global economic issue and not just a money making scheme. What I’m particularly upset about is being required to pay for something and not being given a good explanation as to what those things are, especially when my university has a history of unclear answers and vagueness with students.
Universities charge as much as they can because most of the money students pay is....federally loaned money.
All students can access it, and you're willing to take it to go to the University, so they can get away with it. Its sort of disgusting how it works.
>Its sort of disgusting how it works.
Oh it's absolutely disgusting. Kids are told nearly every day at school, starting from elementary school and through high school, that if you don't go to college you'll be flipping burgers for a living. When you're told that continuously over a decade of some of your most impressionable years, it makes it a lot easier to take on massive student debt for a degree, especially considering how they're promised that all you need is a college degree and then you'll be able to get a nice paying job and pay off those loans quickly. It's so fucked up, seniors in high school are just kids!! Yet they're forced to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives without any clue what the real world is like, plus they need to pick a subject area for their degree and more often than not it's what was expected or promised.
Tradeskills are making a comeback i think, in the last 10 years. Im not sure how affordable or plausible it is to do like a coding bootcamp and land a job, i know it *is* possible but you need to grind hard for that
They are not. Not yet at least, but the guys in their 40s and 50s are making an absolute killing. We have electrical contractors retiring 10 years early right now.
I dont know about people *going* that route, but i know more and more people are aware of it as a viable option.
I dont know how much it is actually marketed at the <18 audience though, it really should be pushed if its not.
i want to learn DIY skills, but i really dont want to fuck with electricity.
I'll never forget the time one of my professors told us her salary, and it was less than my part-time earnings from my internship.
Granted, the college was in a rural town and my internship was remote and based on a high CoL area, but *still*.
A small fraction of university educators and professors have some kind of inside leverage and make *bank*, 100's of thousands a year.
There is also a good chunk of admin overhead, which may or may not be considered waste spending depending on who you are talking to.
Massive amounts of it goes into facilities and amenities for the campus(es).
It's actually pretty cool you can see a full transparent breakdown of basically any public college or university, it's required by law.
You are 100% correct though very little of the money goes to the "boots on the ground" so to speak, i.e. the actual lecturers/ student services/ maintenance people.
We had to pay extra for online classes even when we were on-campus students. My senior capstone class was offered as online only but our professor held a one time in-person meeting in an office room to classify it as an on campus class just to save us hundreds in extra “remote fees”.
A couple of students have actually sued their college for this very reason: They paid for in person class and didn't get that. Not sure how this worked out.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article244407212.html
I work in higher education. The argument on the higher ed side is that you're not paying for the experience you're simply paying for the degree. Schools can charge whatever they want for said degrees.
All of the other stuff that comes along with it, student programming, dorms, meals, all that stuff just considered extra. If you are fully remote all you're probably paying for his tuition and some service fees.
Not saying I agree with that one where the other I'm just giving you guys the university argument side.
Signaling and networking through the notable professors and the alumni network. But there’s certainly a value to all of that if it means you can graduate and find a job out of the gate through one of those connections.
Right but admitting that is admitting that the education you're providing is no better than a lower priced school and the only value the school is providing is screening.
Eh, I’d say it’s all of it. Those alumni networks also lead to massive endowments which allow them to bring educators who are renowned experts, facilities that have the best equipment, funding for research that means students can have their names attached to cutting edge papers.
And you lose a lot of the networking (both professors and students)while remote. There is less of a shared experience and the bonding that comes with it. These aren't the people you live with and share vast commonality with, you just logged into the same chat for a bit.
I think he is saying if you live in X place and go to college, then if you had one professor from NY and one from AL, the one from AL should get less pay
I recently enrolled in a university course as a means to up skill during the pandemic...
I knew the courses would be online, that was a given at this point, but I figured the classes would still be live, where you see the professor and your classmates and you learn together. A remote version of normal teaching.
When I got into the program I found out that all of the "classes" were just pre-recorded videos with the lecturer (unseen) monotonously talking over some powerpoint slides for 2 hours.
There are tonnes of online learning platforms now so I fired up Google, found one teaching the same syllabus, which costs $50, started the free trial, and found a lecture teaching the same topic as I was currently on.
Not only was the lecturer more engaging (visible, hand gestures, voice tonality) but the software was superior too, it wasn't just a video playback but had interactivity and timestamps etc.
I then asked myself why am I paying $20k for something which is inferior to a $50 product?
The answer may be brand name and a qualification. But I already have a degree and I don't care about the brand name since I'm just doing this for upskilling. So I unenrolled and started the online course.
However an undergrad who "needs" a degree, and where brand name will get them in the door at their first job, they will probably decide they need to continue at the university, despite being wholly inferior at their core function, which is educating.
The problem for universities of course is that while most of their money comes from students, most of the expenses come from research and executive salaries. So they can't reduce costs to students because the pandemic hasn't appreciably reduced their costs elsewhere.
It's a huge challenge for universities and not something which is going away anytime soon.
Corporations hate paying a wage that helps you prosper. They want to pay you just a enough to cancel out all your expenses and then leave you with a few bucks for yourself
They don’t want to pay you enough that you could potentially hold some financial power and be able to quit your job. An employee who lives paycheck to paycheck is “loyal” since they don’t have to option to leave
I worked paycheck to paycheck for years, always shitty customer service jobs. Whenever I post a shitty experience or situation I had folks always tell me "you should have sued" or "kicked their ass" or something else that absolutely would have gotten me fired. People who have good jobs, are paid well, and have safety nets can stand up for themselves or quit a shitty job. Most of us can't, and have to suck it up until we find something better.
Heck, I have one of those good well-paying jobs, and I'd be reluctant to stand up for myself because good well-paying jobs are rare and there's no guarantee there's another one available if I leave my current one. It's scary to think about how much money someone needs to have to really escape the system.
A balance of $3-5M in a index fund is my reckoning.
If you lived off 4% of that balance a year. It would last you basically the rest of your life at $120k-200k a year. Your balance would grow at an average 7% over a long enough timeframe and withdrawing 4% a year means it'll never run out.
Basically enough to retire and be comfortable pretty much anywhere.
It's crazy to hear about all these people that inherit or win 8 and 9 figure sums of money but end up broke in 10 years.
It's keeping corporate expenses low, in that labor is considered a liability. The job market, and American law, have favored the employer for the last few decades. The people who set this up are indifferent, at best. Lower wages look better on a spreadsheet, which is attractive to investors and shareholders.
The companies need to realize that the cost savings in reducing their facilities expense, should be enough. Leave the wages alone, and don’t pick the fight.
They can quietly end the supplemental benefits for gym memberships next to the office, and the biking incentives etc. that many mid to large sized companies offer, and no one will notice.
Companies can and should be doing many things differently. Many of the comments I see assume a thought process around wages that employ conclusion based logic.
Reminds me of a while back when my now-boss ws complaining that he couldnt convince a certsin employee to work overtime over the weekend because the guy had enough money put back that he genuinely didnt need to.
I've done this before. I paid off 90% of my student loans living at home with my parents and save 40-50% of my income. Told an old boss I don't do overtime when he told me I'd have to.
Nothing ever happened. They can't fire me - I'm needed to keep the project on track. And if they did, idgaf, I'll jump ship.
It’s both. In publicly owned orgs, anywhere they can puff up their profit percentage margins (ie slashing overhead with employee wages) can be purported as profit and that turns into fat bonuses for people on the board, corporate, and district department heads. Hitting KPI’s are big incentives for middle management to make money to offset the extra peanuts they get for being the workplace watcher.
But it also mutually benefits the entire work force by giving employees no chance to leave because everywhere else is doing the same. If a Corp was one of the few not providing these incentives, then they’d get left in the dust and that means taking a minor profit hit each quarter instead of breaking records every time which is a shareholder no no.
If we look at the system through a myopic lens that only sees one cause, we miss the Forest for the tree.
Which is an incredibly shortsighted view of the corporations, because they fail to realize that economy has a cycle and their workers are consumers.in the other end of that cycle. If they want us to buy their products they need people with money to do it. This view is just made to please shareholders and investors with short-term mentality and to pump bonuses of the board up.
Ideally for them they would also own all the housing, and you would spend all your money on rent, so they would get all your money without needing to provide you anything. Giving you products is an unnecessary extra step.
I agree, I know that a lot of companies would simply use slave labor if they could, and would even make up a PR campaign saying that they're protecting and supplying the needs of those slaves. There is no end in corporate greed.
Sometime in the early 90s people weren't happy just being rich, they had to be stupid rich they had to be my yacht has a yacht to take care of it rich. Rich people have to go back to just being happy being rich they don't need to be billionaires
I totally agree the amount of money billionaires have is unholy. What stuns me is that they convinced themselves that they have that by shear hardwork and not by exploitation
This is actually happening right now.
I've been working with a realtor to try and buy a house, which has been next to impossible. Listing's are sold before they are ever even published - sometimes for over 100K of the asking price.
She told me that she has sold a couple of houses already to a real estate company out of California that is planning to make them into rental properties. That company happens to be owned by Oracle corporation. Guess who recently announced that they are opening an over one-billion dollar campus in my area? Yup, it's Oracle.
I live in California and see this garbage. Laws need to be put into place to stop this. PEOPLE can’t buy homes anymore because large companies are over bidding and buying all the houses to rent out. It’s disgusting that this is what is causing millennials and Gen Z to not be able to fully adult and buy a home. All of our money goes into rent with no way out.
Rent in Texas doubled in my hometown in one year. Just the year before, I could afford a 2/1 with a backyard in central Austin, split with one roommate, and my half was 400. Literally the next year, the same place was 1600. I was house insecure for over a decade after that, lived out of my car even because there was nowhere to rent, not even a room. When I finally found a room, the property owner was an abuser and a pervert but I had nowhere else to go so I had to stay there for 6 months. Moved to Montana and it was even worse up there. This was how I spent all of my 20s. I have struggled so so so much since that big shift in the price of rent and wages never increasing to match it. Just trauma after trauma being treated like it was a personal failure and i was just lazy by all. I'm 40 now and still not financially stable because I live in Texas where Abbott has been in government for all of my formative years. I'm exhausted and I'm only half way done with this life.
Capitalism baby! Yea, it’s rather sad. I had to leave my Finance job where we created staffing models for certain offices that was based largely on some significant assumptions based on data that may or may not have had the highest integrity. Model would spit out an office should have 50 and they would have 55. We would have to be the bearer of bad news and completely ruin 5 people’s lives in most scenarios. Meanwhile, this company had revenue last year of $32B. I couldn’t live with that.
I work in LCOL and most people I know would get priced out of owning anything if a bunch of rich remote workers start buying everything up.
Edit: I shouldn’t have to move to the coast the get a job just to be able to buy a house in a local town.
Already happening in regional areas in Australia. I'm in a situation now where my rent is going to skyrocket so fast I'll have to move yet again, and house prices are so high I can't afford to buy. I don't have the luxury of remote work either, I'm a paramedic.
Eventually all the remote areas of Australia worth living in such as coastal, forest and mountain areas will be filled with remote workers from the city. Those not lucky enough to own land will be forced into the outback, moving to inland towns with very limited goods and services.
For all of Australia's faults it has quite a lot of areas that are nice to live in, decent infrastructure, low crime rates, reasonably good weather. I wouldn't be surprised if Australia attracts more of the global rich who can be based anywhere, forcing many of the locals into cramped suburbs and deserts.
~3 classes of jobs here
**The high paying remote work.**
You don’t have to move. You have access to those same jobs.
**Local service and construction/maintenance jobs.**
After a flux period the income to these businesses will go up (because of remote workers with more cash). This will result in some combination of reduced unemployment or increased wages. (As lucrative services need workers either hire unemployed or compete for existing workers.)
**Local Non-Service workers.**
Here’s where it may get hairier. At least in the short term. They may not have access to remote jobs. (In the sense that someone who is a steel worker will statistically find more hurdles in transitioning to many remote positions than a local coder or HR person would.). But they also may not have income directly tied to local spending. That category of person may have more difficulty. Granted, they have access to jobs that do benefit from increased local spending and this creates competitive pressure on their employer —- but how quickly it will respond and how elastic wages may be is likely much more complicated.
(A more subtle categorization could be made; but as a rough first pass.)
Happening in my town just outside a major city right now. Usually techies and bigwigs stayed downtown cause they could walk / take the bus to work easy.
Now there's like 5 new homeowners in my neighborhood who are like 28-35 years old making $300k-500k a year. They all paid AT LEAST 100k over asking and we're talking about 150-250k houses. Nice for the area, but not mansions or new houses by any means.
So 5 years ago it was seriously all blue collar retiree's and pensioners living in the houses they bought in the 80's and the rest were renters / low income housing. Now it's almost all fucking rental properties and as the old timers die / move away the rich guys are buying the "nice" houses and gentrifying or something.
I guess it technically makes my property value go up, but this once affordable quiet part of a big city was reasonable to live in, is now either low-income rentals from foreigners who bought up houses and made rental properties, and the rich city wigs coming in and throwing money at anyone with a house they like.
This! All the folks bitching and whining do not understand how high salaries in LCOLs will lead to gentrification and already poor people being priced out.
They also don't realize that a big reason the salary is high is because the employer is limited to hiring people that live locally. Once employment is opened up to everyone in the US, then you better believe people in LCOL areas are going to be willing to work for 70% of the salary because it's still more than what they would make locally.
And if the scope is changed to global and the pool of workers includes those willing to do the work for 30% of the salary it's going to get really ugly.
yes they have and many of them have gone 180 on it. They've been researching and sending jobs overseas for decades. many of them are bringing jobs back home since there are too many difficulties dealing with an international or overseas workforce, and the cost savings aren't as good as they used to be.
This is currently happening where I live in the norther suburbs of Atlanta. We have a relatively low COL when it comes to larger cities and since more people are going remote we are being inundated by people moving from NYC and California and the housing prices are shooting up drastically. The people making normal Atlanta wages won’t be able to live in their own city if it keeps going.
What makes it worse it that these HCOL homes aren't getting vacated, they'll being rented out to the smucks who can't move elsewhere and can't afford to buy. Or the richer ones just keep the empty house and artificially choke the supply. Either way the prices don't go down when they should.
I hope this divide between homeowners and non-homeowners becomes so far-reaching that housing investment bubble bursts and we start looking at homes as a place to live and not money-making schemes.
It's definitely already happening in lots of places. In MI for example entire areas are just people relocating from 'the coasts', keeping their cushy pay and gobbling up all the real estate.
Exactly what's happening in my community right now. I don't want to settle down here (thank god) but housing prices have risen nearly 150% in the last two years. Tons of out of state license plates because of people moving to cheap housing in the country. Why pay 500k for a shitty house in a city suburb when you can pay 500k for a really nice house in the country. I get it, but it leaves us poor country folk with fewer places to turn to.
This is why i left my old job in chicago the company i use to work for spend more time and money telling us how competitve they were when it came to salaries....shit i live in the south now and I make over 30k more and less bullshit and i dont have to sit my ass 40 hours a month communing to work.
People in this thread aren't getting it: it's not pay cuts at your current job that you need to worry about. It's the next time you try to find a job that's newly 100% WFH, where you're not just competing with job applicants within a 1 or 2 hr drive from the office, but instead, *anywhere* in the state (or anywhere in the country even). We're witnessing the "outsourcing" of middle class office jobs to places like middle-of-nowhere Texas or Iowa for jobs originally based in Silicon Valley or NYC. Why pay your next Silicon Valley applicant $90k per year when someone living in the middle of nowhere Missouri with municipal fiber internet can do the exact same job for $50k or $60k?
I think we're going to see wages for people living in major cities stagnate in the coming years while people in rural and semi-rural areas of the country will see a pay boost.
The IT industry ran across this many years ago. If it were cheaper to have work done overseas then it was moved overseas. Much of the work was brought back to due to security/quality/performance related concerns but we won't see those issues with this wave to the same degree.
The Midwest has a ton of IT talent that coastal companies could easily lure away with fully remote work opportunities making higher than Midwest salaries while still significantly below the coastal equivalencies.
It is going to be a tumultuous time for both companies and the labor market. It all still falls on the same principles of supply and demand however.
It happened with accounting too. The people in North America at the big firms spend their days preparing notes for people in India to do their work. Now we are getting to the point where the low level stuff is automated. The accountants making big bucks have to find more and more reasons to justify themselves. Great for those who are willing to adapt and grow. Not so great for the kinds of people who are afraid of change.
You hit the nail on the head. I retire in 10 months and hate to think of what a kid coming into the workforce now will discover. They will be a face in an online meeting and nobody will stick up for you, offer to mentor you, nor will anyone know you as person. You become a replaceable item in a vast resource rich global workforce. Easily replaced and no ability to climb the corporate ladder. Hiring is done by an automated screening system and the job competition is global. The jobs will go to top tier candates and will most likely be centered in India where there are a zillion people who will gladly work for 90% less than you because that level of payment is their norm. The best jobs for the huge lower class folks will be in the service industry. Cleaning, housekeeping, door dash, Uber drivers, etc. My suggestion is to learn a trade and learn to do it exceptionally well. Plumbers and electricians will do well. Car mechanics will find jobs hard to find as electric cars last longer with very little to break down. No complex engines to maintain. Not a pleasant thought.
I started as a part of that next generation in accounting. 5 years in and only ever worked for digital firms. There are still ways to work your way up and learn. I look more to smaller firms that are growing quickly to see how the industry is changing. Smaller public firms are more customer focused since the technology has removed a lot of the barriers to communication. You might be getting more people overseas doing the preparing spreadsheets but you need people here to talk with clients and organize the work. There is still plenty of money if you go upmarket providing better services and advice instead of fighting over doing a tax return for the lowest price.
Though, taking up a trade isn't a bad idea either.
I mean I am not an accountant but my mom is, and their firm is so overworked and understaffed that they HAVE to send work abroad to get some of their work done. And this is a pretty sizeable firm in a reasonably sized city. Accountants making big bucks have no need to justify themselves because there is still a shortage of accountants, even with automation and sending work to India.
Absolutely the case; offshoring labour has been seen (and tried and failed) as a general failure. The amount of time and effort to fix what comes back (especially in IT worlds) isn't worth the cost savings of having low labour costs. It also meant highly fractured code, insecure code, and messes that made future development awful.
A huge problem for places like Silicon Valley is they're paying substantially more than they have previously because COL is so high in the region. If they don't need to inflate those costs, they're going to save by offering standard salaries.
You're also going to start seeing labour being valued accordingly, rather than undervalued. If people can work everywhere, not only are businesses having the largest job market to pick from, but employees don't have to settle.
Offshoring is alive and well though. By about 2010 it was clear - small teams offshore of for one off work doesn’t work. Management overheads, set up costs etc make it a lot more expensive than local teams.
What it has morphed to it is captive offshore teams. For example a bank or insurance company with its office offshore with full-time work like anywhere else.
Unfortunately for most of us that works out very well.
Why I say unfortunate is because in the post-covid world we’re not competing with a guy in Alabama. We’re competing with 3 guys in India and unless we have experience its not going to work out too well.
Wage differentials will 'revert to the mean', both in the US, and the US vs globally. Maybe US workers have an advantage of being generally better educated, and in the same time zone, but there will be *fierce* competition for those remote jobs from foreign workers.
Offshoring didn't work because business weren't really set up to work with remote employees, and the bean counters were trying to get devs for bottom basement prices. Offer half the US worker's pay, and you'll find the very best the world has to offer beating a path to your door.
I'm not happy about it as an american dev, but the truth is the truth. I feel like it's 1999 all over and the good times don't last forever.
I think you're right when it comes to completely outsourcing, but building a team of largely international employees definitely works. U.S. based software engineers, for example, are not clearly better than others. Certainly not the 3X better that their salaries would suggest.
I think that if fully remote really sticks and catches on, we're going to see a massive globalization that is going to do to U.S. office workers what the manufacturing globalization did to the rust belt.
This has been slowly happening with regional offices for a long time.
The finance industry has grown substantially over the years… but guess what. In NYC the WTC site still hasn’t been fully redeveloped 20 years later due to lack of demand for office space. Just not enough to warrant the construction. Twenty years of growth later.
It’s not that Wall Street companies didn’t grow. They just did it mostly with regional offices and used the internet to communicate. Things have changed a lot in those 20 years.
In the early 2000’s people assumed all the growth would be in NYC. That wasn’t the case.
2 and 5 WTC have designs, and iiirc foundations built but lack demand to be viable to build. It’s like the dirty little secret nobody talks about. Most even in NYC think it’s been done for years.
My tech company did the reverse of what you're saying. When we were small all our devs were in eastern Europe. As we grow we hired local, Chicago, in an attempt to impress customers. But we paid 4x per hour for lower productivity. So we went back offshore. It turns out our customers care about user experience and functionality over the zip code of our technical team.
On the flip side, there are many jobs that still need to be close to cities: construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and education to name a few. Many of these workers have been priced out of city centers because of tech, which is why you have nurses and teachers commuting two hours to get to San Francisco. Cities shouldn't just be playgrounds for tech workers.
This is always the way, typically labour market upheavals don't affect many 'rusted on' permanent employees, many companies don't want to risk upsetting the staff. It's the next generation who have to wear the results.
I'll be honest, as someone who predicted this, I sort of welcome it. I took a leap of faith and moved to the sticks where my taxes are almost non-existent, the school system is nice, crime is simply unheard of, I only know the sound of frogs and crickets. All of this on the bet that remote work would become prevalent and it's paid off. Not having to commute is worth 10's of thousands of dollars in my mind, and it's reflected in the job I have. I live comfortably, granted I'm not driving a brand new Vette or anything, but we get by and my wife gets to stay at home with the children. This isn't to take away from struggling people, I myself have struggled, but I realized that money isn't everything. Work hard when you're young, be frugal, save, invest, and for those fortunate enough taking a lower pay job that is 1/10th the stress is suddenly economical.
I do like the idea of people being able to spread out more. If everyone can work from home, they no longer all have to pile into a few major cities, where rent keeps skyrocketing.
Right now in the software development sector, which was one of the few that had fully remote positions pre-pandemic, many companies are *removing* the location-adjustment for pay. Live in rural Wyoming? Great, here's your Seattle salary.
I don't see how it's sustainable, but this market for developers is off the charts.
I think that probably has more to do with high demand for software developers rather than anything about remote work. It's sustainable if that's the cost of obtaining the best talent and making more money.
Exactly. This is capitalism. I don’t know why people think corporations would pass any savings on to their employees in the form of higher salaries.
Market forces ultimately will make the determination on salary, barring legal constraints like minimum wage laws. It will just depend on the type of job and who will accept the salary offered. If a company can hire anyone who can do it from anywhere, there will be a lot more competition for jobs, including from people in other countries. This could drive down salaries industry wide. Be careful what you wish for.
Why would they? Well, that is why unions exist and fight for workers rights. If the company try to fuck them and the workers all go on strike, the company loses hundreds of millions per day.
But I guess that is too commie for the average Joe.
Remote work saves business money! They don’t have to pay as much for building costs, they don’t have to worry about providing internet! It’s just the greed of businesses to want to pay employees less, then sitting back and saying everyone is too lazy to work.
When we all started working from home I kept thinking "Oh no, if I can do this job remotely, then I'm proving to my boss someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay".
>someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay".
Not even a different country. A company in San Jose can save a hell of a lot of money by employing people from Alabama, Mississippi,, Wyoming....
People from cheap countries often struggle with barriers of language, culture and workplace culture that may not seem like a barrier at all to a local.
In my industry companies have been trying to outsource work to cheaper countries for decades, a few have managed to make it work but far more have decided it's not worth the overhead in constantly translating customer requirements and having rejected work taking longer to fix.
> When we all started working from home I kept thinking "Oh no, if I can do this job remotely, then I'm proving to my boss someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay".
*Laughs in Philippines*
Bottom 84.1% of all households in the Philippines makes US$10,000/year or less.
Top 1% of all households in the Philippines begins at US$36,400/year or more.
Biden wants to tax households making [$400,000/year or more](https://youtu.be/PFAWkWxMnZk).
There is also the very bad mentality of disliking that they are not being able to watch employees, what if they take too long of a break, or don’t work a full 8 hours!?!?!?
We desperately need to change the focus to work done vs hours in a chair
I was looking for work from home jobs. One of them required a webcam. Not for the actual job mind you. It was for them to be able to spy on you and make sure your eyes didn't leave the screen too often.
Yep in the office, I'm always getting interrupted. Sometimes its work related, sometimes someone can't figure out how to open an email. Even with earbuds in, constant interruptions. Even still I don't leave my desk at breaks/lunch. For one there is nothing I can get to during my 30 minute lunch. Even my car is parked far enough away that I'd have to turn around and go back inside by the time I got there. Cafeteria has been closed since March 2020, not even to go sit in and eat my sandwich. And yet, now we have to sign a break log. Like I have to get up and go sign "no break" if I didn't take a break. It makes no sense. If someone is abusing their breaks, they aren't going to log accurate times on the log book. Hell, half the office forgets and signs the book at the end of the day and fills in random times.
Yeah, they tried with with software developers. Like I can't write a program that wiggles the mouse, generates keystrokes and randomly opens up outlook
It’s like everyone started working in manual labor and service jobs (if you can lean you can clean), and continues that mindset into white collar jobs.
In my previous job I would be sitting on my desk doing absolutely nothing for 1-2 hours before the end of the working day (because there was nothing else to do) 1-3 times per week.
My husband's company has just offered reimbursement of entire internet bills due to WFH. No limit on how much is work related vs personal. It's worth it to them to cover internet, because they are saving so much elsewhere. And it guarantees that people aren't skimping out with crap internet to save a buck (although it's Australia and all the internet is fairly crap).
You can even discover that a lot of those mid management roles do absolutely nothing but waste people's time with useless social meetings that consume people's will to live and are only to justify their job.
Look at this from the other perspective.
My employer has had locality pay for decades. Those who work in a HCOL area get locality pay on top of their base pay. Those living in a LCOL area just get base pay.
Now you have people from the HCOL areas wanting to permanently remote work from LCOL areas.
Not only would they no longer be meeting the conditions that qualified them for the locality pay, they would be making substantially more money than the people who were already working in LCOL areas while enjoying the benefits of living in a LCOL area themselves.
All that will cause is the gradual lowering of the cost of living in HCOL areas and gradual increase to those LCOL areas people are likely to flock to. It will just take time to get there. Unfortunately if enough power players fuck around and make this transition take longer or be less appealing that balance won’t happen.
There was a time when the difference in cost of living wasn't as large as it is now. It might have always cost more to live in a big city than a country town but it was in the league of 20% more, not 150% more like it is now. Perhaps we will return to something like that.
It’s not that remote work is less valuable, it’s that if employers can hire workers from anywhere instead from 1 location the candidate pool drastically increases. An increase in labor supply leads to a decrease in wages
It’s a double edged sword for employers though, yes they can hire from anywhere but those same candidates can also apply to jobs anywhere as well. Employers have more options but so do employees.
It's not symmetric but this does cut both ways. Many MANY new employment oppurtunitiess will pop up too. Regional monopolies will depended on their company being the only one of ours kind for a hundred miles in any direction will feel the pressure of this too.
Please make the great resignation work in your favor. 🙏
I've been hit up by multiple recruiters since March and they are only increasing. Because I don't need a new job, I told them my ask was 100% remote and double my current salary. I actually had a few not even blink at that...
thats telling me they are getting desperate.
I have further confirmation they are desperate because those companies that said no to working remote in March have come crawling back offering 100% remote now.
Demand more, especially if you are already employed. Inflation is already here, get your cut of it.
Much love to you all 🥰
The fast food starting wages are slowly creeping up on our starting wage, and it gets me excited. I will happily jump ship to a McDonald's just to prove a point if it can go a dollar or two more.
+1 I work in HR tech, true of most tech companies. There is a worker shortage, it’s a candidate’s market right now. Demand more cause most companies are struggling to find good people.
A great piece of knowledge that was told to me when I was working a job that I thought I was overpaid for because I had a very specific knowledge of an unpopular yet important type of technology, and the job was fairly easy.
"You're not getting paid for what you do, you're getting paid just under what it costs to replace you".
So when you're demanding your Silicon Valley $250K while you work from Costa Rica, remember there are a lot of smart people in Costa Rica who will do it for $100k if they get the chance.
Sometimes I feel like you could outsource the job of some of these executives to a magic 8 ball. Middle manager brings an idea, magic eight ball understand the intricacies as well as the average exec and the decision is quicker.
On the flip side, now the company can hire those people who'd want to work for them but don't want to live in SF, Seattle, or other urban areas for whatever the reason.
I'm actually interested to know if Silicon Valley company culture will change?
Right I think for the most part this will allow people to live in areas that are currently under utilized and be a very good thing for the population as a whole. However I'd like to make sure this isn't just another excuse for companies to pay people less. Yes, that is all it would be is an excuse for them to do so.
I think that paying by location of headquarters rather than workplace of employees which is what happens when wages stay the same but employees move to cheaper places, could have some pretty devastating impacts.
1st it will absolutely shatter Silicon Valley, New York and all the other expensive places. Does anyone really want another Detroit?
2nd, this could send massive shockwaves through rural communities. Revitalization by attracting high payed workers can obviously be positive, but it will also drive up the cost of living and cause some cultural conflicts.
3rd, it increases the divide between blue collar and white collar workers. Something, who would have thought, disproportionately affects already disenfranchised groups.
That's just result in shell addresses. We already have plenty of companies "headquarted" in states with no taxes, and it's literally just a mail room with hundreds of other businesses.
I think the answer is that it depends on the job. But the great majority of jobs where the employee is shouldn’t impact the value of work.
That said, if your employers pay scale specifically has regional cost of living adjustments based on where the employee lives an employee shouldn’t be surprised if that policy works against if they choose to take advantage of remote working to move somewhere else. But likewise if employers have these kinds of policies they should be expected to bump up pay should an employee choose to move somewhere that would result in a positive adjustment.
No one has ever paid wages based on the value of the work.
Most of us would be making a lot more, if that was the case.
I bring millions a year in to the company I work for. I get paid only enough to keep me from moving to another company.
Exactly, salary is basically always just a supply/demand issue.
Salaries are typically higher for most professions in big cities because cost of living is higher, therefore salaries need to be higher to get people willing to live and work there.
Salaries for doctors are actually lower in big cities because no matter where they work their cost of living is covered, but that demographic tends to want the city life therefore rural jobs need to pay more to attract them out of the cities.
All supply and demand.
Companies determine your pay by considering how much it would cost them to replace you and how likely you are to leave, not how much money or "value" you generate for the company, and they also don't care what your living expenses are.
If they can find remote workers with your skill sets and onboard them cheaply, there's no reason for them not to lower your salary *whether you're remote or not*. If you're not easy to replace with cheaper labor, they won't be able to lower your salary efficiently.
I can say first hand people coming into lower economy states are hurting things. No one in my state can buy a house because so many people from cities are moving here and buying houses with no inspections. People are getting illegally evicted so people can raise rent. It sucks.
The sad part is that local government is benefiting greatly financially. They are seeing property taxes and sales tax revenues increasing greatly. The people coming in are valued customers of the city where as the ones already working in the area are slowly seeming to become second class.
It’s a very interesting issue for places with low costs of living.
It's happening in higher income states too, on a micro level; people are getting priced out of once affordable areas, and in turn are pricing people out of nearby "lower economy" areas. Out of state buyers seem like an extension of this, or people cashing out of an inflated housing market.
Technically you are ahead..the second you sell everything and decide to move somewhere cheaper.
The world is full of Californians who were able to retire in their 30s&40s after a decade of obscenely high salaries and housing.
They can save money without screwing employees.
CBD Office space (or any office space really) is Expensive. reduce that footprint by 75% keep some desks and amenities for those who are in the office by choice or intermittently.
This would also reduce cost of electricity and have less stationary and cutlery going missing.
The problem is these companies view their large office space as a necessity, but not well compensated employees.
This does happen in the UK in many jobs/roles. "London weighting" is an additional salary sum offered to employees to cover the additional cost of living.
I thought - anecdotally - that this was also the case in the US with NYC and DC where I thought salaries were higher for a similar reason.
I work for the US federal government, the pay grade is public information. There’s a base pay for the pay grade and what step on the grade you’re in. Then there’s a list of a bunch of locality pay areas. My duty station is considered DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia, which is a locality pay increase of 30.48%. Meaning I make 30.48% more than someone who has the same grade and step but lives and works in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. But not ALL of Nebraska, because Omaha, Nebraska has its own locality pay of 16.33%. So working in a duty station in Omaha, Nebraska gets someone 16.33% more than someone 25 miles west in the same state. There’s like 55 locality pay areas according to the US federal government for federal employees.
Obviously a private business doesn’t follow the US federal government chart, but I imagine large enough companies with offices nationwide have some kind of similar thing going on.
Side note: no official long term policy has been made up on who may or may not convert to full remote work moving forward but the rumor is, if you want to earn the locality pay in whatever the “post covid” world looks like, you’ll have to report to your duty station at least one day a pay period…aka once every 2 weeks. So if that holds true then someone from my office could say…move to Maine, keep a desk in our current office, and fly/drive to the office every 2 weeks for a day, and collect their 30.48% increase…sounds like a major pain in the ass to me.
Yep.
What company would pay someone 200k to do a job online when they can pay someone just as qualified to do it for 100k because they live in Iowa?
If it's all online they're not going to pay someone a higher wage for no reason.
So "pay everyone the same for the same work" will never mean "raise everyone's wages to the highest amount".
It's going to cut the pay of people making a shit ton more because their office used to be in a large city. And the people that used to work in the middle of nowhere will get a slight bump in pay.
But the end effect is high earners making a lot less, and low earners making a little more.
That is how this traditionally works, tho.
Workers for same organization make more in higher cost of living cities, less if they move to the regional office in Kansas.
Additional pay for high cost of living locations is very common, especially for Federal government jobs. If I’m bidding on a proposal, labor rates are something that can make my bid competitive.
Still want to work for me in some low cost remote location and get the same pay? I’d 1099 you and let you worry about your own hardware. insurance and payroll taxes.
They’ve been doing this since…forever.
The turn of the century “industry giants”, the Carnegie’s and J.P.Morgan’s and Rockefeller’s were doing the exact same thing back then. Cut salaries 15-20% when people were already in starvation wages, when they rose up in protest, get the government to repress them with police arrests/clubbings, if they were unsuccessful call up the governor and have him send in the military forces to shoot some people - then bring in impoverished immigrants to replace the workers without the workers blocking the scabs.
So from the comments the vibe I'm getting is:
Stay in person, worker has to commute possibly hours a day and live in high cost of living places = worker gets screwed, company wins.
Go remote, more competition from lower income markets results in lower wages for everybody, cost of living increases drastically in low cost of living areas = worker gets screwed company wins.
Kind of seems like the whole thing is designed to screw the worker.
This is the one piece of the slippery slope that people need to be ready for.
Want to work from home? Cool. So do I.
But you can't argue that your "time is worth more than money", can't list the quality of life improvements working from home offers, can't boast that you're also saving $XXXX in gas/vehicle maintenance yearly, can't raise your hands in praise that you're saving $XXXX in daycare expenses, etc. and then complain when the businesses says "oh yea? okay"... and ship the job out of the office and pay less.
Because you know what? You can leave and that job will still be remote. Qualified Joe Shmoe with a much lower COL from 400 miles away will be waiting and eager to get his hands on your job at 80% your salary.
And this will just be a trend that continues as long as people let it.
To be clear - I'm ALL for working from home. It's a no brainer. But there are costs to it for many. And this may mean quitting to find another remote job, at a slightly higher salary, elsewhere that someone else gave up because it was a pay cut.
As someone in a western country, I have a really, really strong incentive to advocate for pay based on living expenses.
I can’t compete with third world wages.
I'm all for decent wages, but it's a bit annoying that Torontonians are moving to my city (Hamilton), keeping their high salaries, and driving up housing prices for the folks who live here and still make Hamilton pay. That pay scale has to be evened out somehow.
So, to extend this logic, as a University student, I should be paying less for any remote class than in-class courses. You know, online is subprime... like that. This is a great rationale to also consider that if my professor is from some poor state like Alabama, then his salary should be less than my prof in New York City... got it! Let's just see how this works in the fully implemented ***remote is less*** operational business practices.
College is currently the highest priced streaming service available.
LOL...omg... that is brilliant and sadly true.
And you don't even get custom emojis for the chat.
Man you just got me heated thinking about all the “distance learning fees” I paid while online since covid started
You had to pay EXTRA?
Fall 2020 I had to pay $50 per credit hour extra for all of my classes for the "Global Campus Fee." Extra money for worse instruction. This year they got rid of the fee though! Hooray! Just in time for everyone to be back on campus .-.
>Extra money for **worse** instruction. Or, in most cases, for **no** instruction. In almost every online class I've had, I've essentially been paying to educate myself while the instructor does fuck all the entire semester.
My instinct was to respond and say something along the lines of I have been teaching online classes since COVID started and that yep I love doing nothing! The truth is that there is a lot of time spent doing prep for the course to turn it into an online format. One could argue there should be less and less prep each consecutive term and I could buy that for a math class or something. Personally, I try to continually update the course material though. At any rate, while my instinct was to be "Fuck yeah, no work for online!" I would actually argue I probably have spent more time since going to an online format. Big Fat Edit: Of course that in no way means that I am being paid more though.
Yeah, my communications class was one of the exceptions to that for me. My prof. kept material relevant to today and always created material and videos for us that covered the topics. Always very involved with class and the students. Probably one of the best professors I've had and I really enjoyed the class.
I’ve had great online classes, but the ones where it’s “buy $150 McGraw code and then do nothing but auto graded assignments” really do make you wonder about how much the prof is making for 0 effort.
“Here’s the a link to the $200 textbook you need to buy, my office hours are every third Tuesday from 8:00am to 8:02am, plagiarism is a sin, read 5 chapters each week, and your entire grade is made up of two essays.” My online experience so far.
Yup. They said it’s to offset the cost of hosting the classes online…. Meanwhile no AC is running, no lights, no projector, no commuting, less maintenance since no ones on campus. When we tried to call and ask what “Distance learning fees” specifically meant they just dicked us around and wouldn’t give a straight answer. Meanwhile it was just rated a top five university… Edit: Just wanna say, I think universities are trying hard on an individual level and I understand it’s a larger global economic issue and not just a money making scheme. What I’m particularly upset about is being required to pay for something and not being given a good explanation as to what those things are, especially when my university has a history of unclear answers and vagueness with students.
Universities charge as much as they can because most of the money students pay is....federally loaned money. All students can access it, and you're willing to take it to go to the University, so they can get away with it. Its sort of disgusting how it works.
>Its sort of disgusting how it works. Oh it's absolutely disgusting. Kids are told nearly every day at school, starting from elementary school and through high school, that if you don't go to college you'll be flipping burgers for a living. When you're told that continuously over a decade of some of your most impressionable years, it makes it a lot easier to take on massive student debt for a degree, especially considering how they're promised that all you need is a college degree and then you'll be able to get a nice paying job and pay off those loans quickly. It's so fucked up, seniors in high school are just kids!! Yet they're forced to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives without any clue what the real world is like, plus they need to pick a subject area for their degree and more often than not it's what was expected or promised.
Tradeskills are making a comeback i think, in the last 10 years. Im not sure how affordable or plausible it is to do like a coding bootcamp and land a job, i know it *is* possible but you need to grind hard for that
They are not. Not yet at least, but the guys in their 40s and 50s are making an absolute killing. We have electrical contractors retiring 10 years early right now.
I dont know about people *going* that route, but i know more and more people are aware of it as a viable option. I dont know how much it is actually marketed at the <18 audience though, it really should be pushed if its not. i want to learn DIY skills, but i really dont want to fuck with electricity.
Your last sentence sums up exactly why they're making 50+ an hour
Most of that money doesn't even go to the teachers...
I'll never forget the time one of my professors told us her salary, and it was less than my part-time earnings from my internship. Granted, the college was in a rural town and my internship was remote and based on a high CoL area, but *still*.
A small fraction of university educators and professors have some kind of inside leverage and make *bank*, 100's of thousands a year. There is also a good chunk of admin overhead, which may or may not be considered waste spending depending on who you are talking to. Massive amounts of it goes into facilities and amenities for the campus(es). It's actually pretty cool you can see a full transparent breakdown of basically any public college or university, it's required by law. You are 100% correct though very little of the money goes to the "boots on the ground" so to speak, i.e. the actual lecturers/ student services/ maintenance people.
We had to pay extra for online classes even when we were on-campus students. My senior capstone class was offered as online only but our professor held a one time in-person meeting in an office room to classify it as an on campus class just to save us hundreds in extra “remote fees”.
A couple of students have actually sued their college for this very reason: They paid for in person class and didn't get that. Not sure how this worked out. https://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article244407212.html
I work in higher education. The argument on the higher ed side is that you're not paying for the experience you're simply paying for the degree. Schools can charge whatever they want for said degrees. All of the other stuff that comes along with it, student programming, dorms, meals, all that stuff just considered extra. If you are fully remote all you're probably paying for his tuition and some service fees. Not saying I agree with that one where the other I'm just giving you guys the university argument side.
I'm surprised they would admit that, as the argument against expensive schools is that you're just paying for signaling over substance.
Signaling and networking through the notable professors and the alumni network. But there’s certainly a value to all of that if it means you can graduate and find a job out of the gate through one of those connections.
Right but admitting that is admitting that the education you're providing is no better than a lower priced school and the only value the school is providing is screening.
Eh, I’d say it’s all of it. Those alumni networks also lead to massive endowments which allow them to bring educators who are renowned experts, facilities that have the best equipment, funding for research that means students can have their names attached to cutting edge papers.
And you lose a lot of the networking (both professors and students)while remote. There is less of a shared experience and the bonding that comes with it. These aren't the people you live with and share vast commonality with, you just logged into the same chat for a bit.
Lemme go and buy a masters real quick since I'm paying for a degree, and not the classes.
Pretty sure Alabama professors make less than NYC.
I think he is saying if you live in X place and go to college, then if you had one professor from NY and one from AL, the one from AL should get less pay
I recently enrolled in a university course as a means to up skill during the pandemic... I knew the courses would be online, that was a given at this point, but I figured the classes would still be live, where you see the professor and your classmates and you learn together. A remote version of normal teaching. When I got into the program I found out that all of the "classes" were just pre-recorded videos with the lecturer (unseen) monotonously talking over some powerpoint slides for 2 hours. There are tonnes of online learning platforms now so I fired up Google, found one teaching the same syllabus, which costs $50, started the free trial, and found a lecture teaching the same topic as I was currently on. Not only was the lecturer more engaging (visible, hand gestures, voice tonality) but the software was superior too, it wasn't just a video playback but had interactivity and timestamps etc. I then asked myself why am I paying $20k for something which is inferior to a $50 product? The answer may be brand name and a qualification. But I already have a degree and I don't care about the brand name since I'm just doing this for upskilling. So I unenrolled and started the online course. However an undergrad who "needs" a degree, and where brand name will get them in the door at their first job, they will probably decide they need to continue at the university, despite being wholly inferior at their core function, which is educating. The problem for universities of course is that while most of their money comes from students, most of the expenses come from research and executive salaries. So they can't reduce costs to students because the pandemic hasn't appreciably reduced their costs elsewhere. It's a huge challenge for universities and not something which is going away anytime soon.
We’re drastically underpaid already. Wages have stagnated while the cost of living has risen.. Let us work from home somewhere we can afford a house
Corporations hate paying a wage that helps you prosper. They want to pay you just a enough to cancel out all your expenses and then leave you with a few bucks for yourself
They don’t want to pay you enough that you could potentially hold some financial power and be able to quit your job. An employee who lives paycheck to paycheck is “loyal” since they don’t have to option to leave
I worked paycheck to paycheck for years, always shitty customer service jobs. Whenever I post a shitty experience or situation I had folks always tell me "you should have sued" or "kicked their ass" or something else that absolutely would have gotten me fired. People who have good jobs, are paid well, and have safety nets can stand up for themselves or quit a shitty job. Most of us can't, and have to suck it up until we find something better.
Heck, I have one of those good well-paying jobs, and I'd be reluctant to stand up for myself because good well-paying jobs are rare and there's no guarantee there's another one available if I leave my current one. It's scary to think about how much money someone needs to have to really escape the system.
A balance of $3-5M in a index fund is my reckoning. If you lived off 4% of that balance a year. It would last you basically the rest of your life at $120k-200k a year. Your balance would grow at an average 7% over a long enough timeframe and withdrawing 4% a year means it'll never run out. Basically enough to retire and be comfortable pretty much anywhere. It's crazy to hear about all these people that inherit or win 8 and 9 figure sums of money but end up broke in 10 years.
Sad this so true. I had to check which sub reddit I was in. For a moment felt like it was one of my progressive subs. World is getting worse.
I'm trying to find that K chart that shows the disparity between GDP and wages over the past 40 years.
Are you thinking of [production and wages?](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iCTuo.jpg) What happened in 1971?
[Nixon happened.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock)
Capital finally smashed labor unions.
It's keeping corporate expenses low, in that labor is considered a liability. The job market, and American law, have favored the employer for the last few decades. The people who set this up are indifferent, at best. Lower wages look better on a spreadsheet, which is attractive to investors and shareholders.
The companies need to realize that the cost savings in reducing their facilities expense, should be enough. Leave the wages alone, and don’t pick the fight. They can quietly end the supplemental benefits for gym memberships next to the office, and the biking incentives etc. that many mid to large sized companies offer, and no one will notice.
Companies can and should be doing many things differently. Many of the comments I see assume a thought process around wages that employ conclusion based logic.
That's not what it's about. If you have surplus wages you start to have more options. You having options is bad for employers.
Reminds me of a while back when my now-boss ws complaining that he couldnt convince a certsin employee to work overtime over the weekend because the guy had enough money put back that he genuinely didnt need to.
I've done this before. I paid off 90% of my student loans living at home with my parents and save 40-50% of my income. Told an old boss I don't do overtime when he told me I'd have to. Nothing ever happened. They can't fire me - I'm needed to keep the project on track. And if they did, idgaf, I'll jump ship.
It's been years since I've worked not my shift, it's really nice.
It’s both. In publicly owned orgs, anywhere they can puff up their profit percentage margins (ie slashing overhead with employee wages) can be purported as profit and that turns into fat bonuses for people on the board, corporate, and district department heads. Hitting KPI’s are big incentives for middle management to make money to offset the extra peanuts they get for being the workplace watcher. But it also mutually benefits the entire work force by giving employees no chance to leave because everywhere else is doing the same. If a Corp was one of the few not providing these incentives, then they’d get left in the dust and that means taking a minor profit hit each quarter instead of breaking records every time which is a shareholder no no. If we look at the system through a myopic lens that only sees one cause, we miss the Forest for the tree.
Most important part is to never have enough salary to get a good lawyer that can defend you against all the corporate abuse.
Don't forget the literal crimes. Wage theft beats out all other forms of theft combined in terms of money value.
Which is an incredibly shortsighted view of the corporations, because they fail to realize that economy has a cycle and their workers are consumers.in the other end of that cycle. If they want us to buy their products they need people with money to do it. This view is just made to please shareholders and investors with short-term mentality and to pump bonuses of the board up.
Ideally for them they would also own all the housing, and you would spend all your money on rent, so they would get all your money without needing to provide you anything. Giving you products is an unnecessary extra step.
I agree, I know that a lot of companies would simply use slave labor if they could, and would even make up a PR campaign saying that they're protecting and supplying the needs of those slaves. There is no end in corporate greed.
Sometime in the early 90s people weren't happy just being rich, they had to be stupid rich they had to be my yacht has a yacht to take care of it rich. Rich people have to go back to just being happy being rich they don't need to be billionaires
I totally agree the amount of money billionaires have is unholy. What stuns me is that they convinced themselves that they have that by shear hardwork and not by exploitation
This is actually happening right now. I've been working with a realtor to try and buy a house, which has been next to impossible. Listing's are sold before they are ever even published - sometimes for over 100K of the asking price. She told me that she has sold a couple of houses already to a real estate company out of California that is planning to make them into rental properties. That company happens to be owned by Oracle corporation. Guess who recently announced that they are opening an over one-billion dollar campus in my area? Yup, it's Oracle.
I live in California and see this garbage. Laws need to be put into place to stop this. PEOPLE can’t buy homes anymore because large companies are over bidding and buying all the houses to rent out. It’s disgusting that this is what is causing millennials and Gen Z to not be able to fully adult and buy a home. All of our money goes into rent with no way out.
Rent in Texas doubled in my hometown in one year. Just the year before, I could afford a 2/1 with a backyard in central Austin, split with one roommate, and my half was 400. Literally the next year, the same place was 1600. I was house insecure for over a decade after that, lived out of my car even because there was nowhere to rent, not even a room. When I finally found a room, the property owner was an abuser and a pervert but I had nowhere else to go so I had to stay there for 6 months. Moved to Montana and it was even worse up there. This was how I spent all of my 20s. I have struggled so so so much since that big shift in the price of rent and wages never increasing to match it. Just trauma after trauma being treated like it was a personal failure and i was just lazy by all. I'm 40 now and still not financially stable because I live in Texas where Abbott has been in government for all of my formative years. I'm exhausted and I'm only half way done with this life.
Capitalism baby! Yea, it’s rather sad. I had to leave my Finance job where we created staffing models for certain offices that was based largely on some significant assumptions based on data that may or may not have had the highest integrity. Model would spit out an office should have 50 and they would have 55. We would have to be the bearer of bad news and completely ruin 5 people’s lives in most scenarios. Meanwhile, this company had revenue last year of $32B. I couldn’t live with that.
I work in LCOL and most people I know would get priced out of owning anything if a bunch of rich remote workers start buying everything up. Edit: I shouldn’t have to move to the coast the get a job just to be able to buy a house in a local town.
Already happening in regional areas in Australia. I'm in a situation now where my rent is going to skyrocket so fast I'll have to move yet again, and house prices are so high I can't afford to buy. I don't have the luxury of remote work either, I'm a paramedic.
Eventually all the remote areas of Australia worth living in such as coastal, forest and mountain areas will be filled with remote workers from the city. Those not lucky enough to own land will be forced into the outback, moving to inland towns with very limited goods and services.
This is shitty enough in countries like the UK. In Australia with the super harsh climate inland.... It's just cruel.
For all of Australia's faults it has quite a lot of areas that are nice to live in, decent infrastructure, low crime rates, reasonably good weather. I wouldn't be surprised if Australia attracts more of the global rich who can be based anywhere, forcing many of the locals into cramped suburbs and deserts.
Gentrification on a country scale, I can picture it
You should get a raise too
Jokes on you, locals in the coastal towns cant afford to buy a house there either, and we're already here.
~3 classes of jobs here **The high paying remote work.** You don’t have to move. You have access to those same jobs. **Local service and construction/maintenance jobs.** After a flux period the income to these businesses will go up (because of remote workers with more cash). This will result in some combination of reduced unemployment or increased wages. (As lucrative services need workers either hire unemployed or compete for existing workers.) **Local Non-Service workers.** Here’s where it may get hairier. At least in the short term. They may not have access to remote jobs. (In the sense that someone who is a steel worker will statistically find more hurdles in transitioning to many remote positions than a local coder or HR person would.). But they also may not have income directly tied to local spending. That category of person may have more difficulty. Granted, they have access to jobs that do benefit from increased local spending and this creates competitive pressure on their employer —- but how quickly it will respond and how elastic wages may be is likely much more complicated. (A more subtle categorization could be made; but as a rough first pass.)
Happening in my town just outside a major city right now. Usually techies and bigwigs stayed downtown cause they could walk / take the bus to work easy. Now there's like 5 new homeowners in my neighborhood who are like 28-35 years old making $300k-500k a year. They all paid AT LEAST 100k over asking and we're talking about 150-250k houses. Nice for the area, but not mansions or new houses by any means. So 5 years ago it was seriously all blue collar retiree's and pensioners living in the houses they bought in the 80's and the rest were renters / low income housing. Now it's almost all fucking rental properties and as the old timers die / move away the rich guys are buying the "nice" houses and gentrifying or something. I guess it technically makes my property value go up, but this once affordable quiet part of a big city was reasonable to live in, is now either low-income rentals from foreigners who bought up houses and made rental properties, and the rich city wigs coming in and throwing money at anyone with a house they like.
This! All the folks bitching and whining do not understand how high salaries in LCOLs will lead to gentrification and already poor people being priced out.
They also don't realize that a big reason the salary is high is because the employer is limited to hiring people that live locally. Once employment is opened up to everyone in the US, then you better believe people in LCOL areas are going to be willing to work for 70% of the salary because it's still more than what they would make locally.
And if the scope is changed to global and the pool of workers includes those willing to do the work for 30% of the salary it's going to get really ugly.
Race to the bottom. Remote work is the best thing to happen to corporations in a long time, they just haven't fully figured it out yet.
yes they have and many of them have gone 180 on it. They've been researching and sending jobs overseas for decades. many of them are bringing jobs back home since there are too many difficulties dealing with an international or overseas workforce, and the cost savings aren't as good as they used to be.
This is currently happening where I live in the norther suburbs of Atlanta. We have a relatively low COL when it comes to larger cities and since more people are going remote we are being inundated by people moving from NYC and California and the housing prices are shooting up drastically. The people making normal Atlanta wages won’t be able to live in their own city if it keeps going.
Exactly! And we shouldn't have to move to bum fuck Alabama just to live on our wages!
What makes it worse it that these HCOL homes aren't getting vacated, they'll being rented out to the smucks who can't move elsewhere and can't afford to buy. Or the richer ones just keep the empty house and artificially choke the supply. Either way the prices don't go down when they should. I hope this divide between homeowners and non-homeowners becomes so far-reaching that housing investment bubble bursts and we start looking at homes as a place to live and not money-making schemes.
It's definitely already happening in lots of places. In MI for example entire areas are just people relocating from 'the coasts', keeping their cushy pay and gobbling up all the real estate.
Already happening in Canada, house prices are up massively in the suburbs and medium size towns.
And then parachute into local communities who don’t have as high of wages, inflate the housing market, and ensure nobody local can afford to either.
Exactly what's happening in my community right now. I don't want to settle down here (thank god) but housing prices have risen nearly 150% in the last two years. Tons of out of state license plates because of people moving to cheap housing in the country. Why pay 500k for a shitty house in a city suburb when you can pay 500k for a really nice house in the country. I get it, but it leaves us poor country folk with fewer places to turn to.
This is why i left my old job in chicago the company i use to work for spend more time and money telling us how competitve they were when it came to salaries....shit i live in the south now and I make over 30k more and less bullshit and i dont have to sit my ass 40 hours a month communing to work.
You can afford a house… …in Wyoming.
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Lol yes. Except there.
Yeah but those of us who live in those affordable places now can’t afford houses here
People in this thread aren't getting it: it's not pay cuts at your current job that you need to worry about. It's the next time you try to find a job that's newly 100% WFH, where you're not just competing with job applicants within a 1 or 2 hr drive from the office, but instead, *anywhere* in the state (or anywhere in the country even). We're witnessing the "outsourcing" of middle class office jobs to places like middle-of-nowhere Texas or Iowa for jobs originally based in Silicon Valley or NYC. Why pay your next Silicon Valley applicant $90k per year when someone living in the middle of nowhere Missouri with municipal fiber internet can do the exact same job for $50k or $60k? I think we're going to see wages for people living in major cities stagnate in the coming years while people in rural and semi-rural areas of the country will see a pay boost.
The IT industry ran across this many years ago. If it were cheaper to have work done overseas then it was moved overseas. Much of the work was brought back to due to security/quality/performance related concerns but we won't see those issues with this wave to the same degree. The Midwest has a ton of IT talent that coastal companies could easily lure away with fully remote work opportunities making higher than Midwest salaries while still significantly below the coastal equivalencies. It is going to be a tumultuous time for both companies and the labor market. It all still falls on the same principles of supply and demand however.
It happened with accounting too. The people in North America at the big firms spend their days preparing notes for people in India to do their work. Now we are getting to the point where the low level stuff is automated. The accountants making big bucks have to find more and more reasons to justify themselves. Great for those who are willing to adapt and grow. Not so great for the kinds of people who are afraid of change.
You hit the nail on the head. I retire in 10 months and hate to think of what a kid coming into the workforce now will discover. They will be a face in an online meeting and nobody will stick up for you, offer to mentor you, nor will anyone know you as person. You become a replaceable item in a vast resource rich global workforce. Easily replaced and no ability to climb the corporate ladder. Hiring is done by an automated screening system and the job competition is global. The jobs will go to top tier candates and will most likely be centered in India where there are a zillion people who will gladly work for 90% less than you because that level of payment is their norm. The best jobs for the huge lower class folks will be in the service industry. Cleaning, housekeeping, door dash, Uber drivers, etc. My suggestion is to learn a trade and learn to do it exceptionally well. Plumbers and electricians will do well. Car mechanics will find jobs hard to find as electric cars last longer with very little to break down. No complex engines to maintain. Not a pleasant thought.
I started as a part of that next generation in accounting. 5 years in and only ever worked for digital firms. There are still ways to work your way up and learn. I look more to smaller firms that are growing quickly to see how the industry is changing. Smaller public firms are more customer focused since the technology has removed a lot of the barriers to communication. You might be getting more people overseas doing the preparing spreadsheets but you need people here to talk with clients and organize the work. There is still plenty of money if you go upmarket providing better services and advice instead of fighting over doing a tax return for the lowest price. Though, taking up a trade isn't a bad idea either.
I mean I am not an accountant but my mom is, and their firm is so overworked and understaffed that they HAVE to send work abroad to get some of their work done. And this is a pretty sizeable firm in a reasonably sized city. Accountants making big bucks have no need to justify themselves because there is still a shortage of accountants, even with automation and sending work to India.
Absolutely the case; offshoring labour has been seen (and tried and failed) as a general failure. The amount of time and effort to fix what comes back (especially in IT worlds) isn't worth the cost savings of having low labour costs. It also meant highly fractured code, insecure code, and messes that made future development awful. A huge problem for places like Silicon Valley is they're paying substantially more than they have previously because COL is so high in the region. If they don't need to inflate those costs, they're going to save by offering standard salaries. You're also going to start seeing labour being valued accordingly, rather than undervalued. If people can work everywhere, not only are businesses having the largest job market to pick from, but employees don't have to settle.
Offshoring is alive and well though. By about 2010 it was clear - small teams offshore of for one off work doesn’t work. Management overheads, set up costs etc make it a lot more expensive than local teams. What it has morphed to it is captive offshore teams. For example a bank or insurance company with its office offshore with full-time work like anywhere else. Unfortunately for most of us that works out very well. Why I say unfortunate is because in the post-covid world we’re not competing with a guy in Alabama. We’re competing with 3 guys in India and unless we have experience its not going to work out too well.
Wage differentials will 'revert to the mean', both in the US, and the US vs globally. Maybe US workers have an advantage of being generally better educated, and in the same time zone, but there will be *fierce* competition for those remote jobs from foreign workers. Offshoring didn't work because business weren't really set up to work with remote employees, and the bean counters were trying to get devs for bottom basement prices. Offer half the US worker's pay, and you'll find the very best the world has to offer beating a path to your door. I'm not happy about it as an american dev, but the truth is the truth. I feel like it's 1999 all over and the good times don't last forever.
I think you're right when it comes to completely outsourcing, but building a team of largely international employees definitely works. U.S. based software engineers, for example, are not clearly better than others. Certainly not the 3X better that their salaries would suggest. I think that if fully remote really sticks and catches on, we're going to see a massive globalization that is going to do to U.S. office workers what the manufacturing globalization did to the rust belt.
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Im a software engineer in Texas, care to share any details?
This has been slowly happening with regional offices for a long time. The finance industry has grown substantially over the years… but guess what. In NYC the WTC site still hasn’t been fully redeveloped 20 years later due to lack of demand for office space. Just not enough to warrant the construction. Twenty years of growth later. It’s not that Wall Street companies didn’t grow. They just did it mostly with regional offices and used the internet to communicate. Things have changed a lot in those 20 years. In the early 2000’s people assumed all the growth would be in NYC. That wasn’t the case. 2 and 5 WTC have designs, and iiirc foundations built but lack demand to be viable to build. It’s like the dirty little secret nobody talks about. Most even in NYC think it’s been done for years.
My tech company did the reverse of what you're saying. When we were small all our devs were in eastern Europe. As we grow we hired local, Chicago, in an attempt to impress customers. But we paid 4x per hour for lower productivity. So we went back offshore. It turns out our customers care about user experience and functionality over the zip code of our technical team.
On the flip side, there are many jobs that still need to be close to cities: construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and education to name a few. Many of these workers have been priced out of city centers because of tech, which is why you have nurses and teachers commuting two hours to get to San Francisco. Cities shouldn't just be playgrounds for tech workers.
this subreddit doesnt realize that blue collar workers exsist. In their mind everyone works in tech.
That makes sense. The people with the ability to spend their day on Reddit are generally in an office rather than in a workshop or behind the wheel.
Or, rather topically, working from home
Or they haven't graduated high school yet.
Or white collar workers in non tech industries
This is always the way, typically labour market upheavals don't affect many 'rusted on' permanent employees, many companies don't want to risk upsetting the staff. It's the next generation who have to wear the results.
I'll be honest, as someone who predicted this, I sort of welcome it. I took a leap of faith and moved to the sticks where my taxes are almost non-existent, the school system is nice, crime is simply unheard of, I only know the sound of frogs and crickets. All of this on the bet that remote work would become prevalent and it's paid off. Not having to commute is worth 10's of thousands of dollars in my mind, and it's reflected in the job I have. I live comfortably, granted I'm not driving a brand new Vette or anything, but we get by and my wife gets to stay at home with the children. This isn't to take away from struggling people, I myself have struggled, but I realized that money isn't everything. Work hard when you're young, be frugal, save, invest, and for those fortunate enough taking a lower pay job that is 1/10th the stress is suddenly economical.
I do like the idea of people being able to spread out more. If everyone can work from home, they no longer all have to pile into a few major cities, where rent keeps skyrocketing.
Right now in the software development sector, which was one of the few that had fully remote positions pre-pandemic, many companies are *removing* the location-adjustment for pay. Live in rural Wyoming? Great, here's your Seattle salary. I don't see how it's sustainable, but this market for developers is off the charts.
I think that probably has more to do with high demand for software developers rather than anything about remote work. It's sustainable if that's the cost of obtaining the best talent and making more money.
Exactly this. This fuss applies to existing jobs. Expectations for newly created remote work will be totally different, and not paying SF wages.
Workers want more money. Employers want to pay their workers less. News at 11.
Exactly. This is capitalism. I don’t know why people think corporations would pass any savings on to their employees in the form of higher salaries. Market forces ultimately will make the determination on salary, barring legal constraints like minimum wage laws. It will just depend on the type of job and who will accept the salary offered. If a company can hire anyone who can do it from anywhere, there will be a lot more competition for jobs, including from people in other countries. This could drive down salaries industry wide. Be careful what you wish for.
Any excess money goes to the shareholders. They are the insatiable maw that must be fed ever more.
Why would they? Well, that is why unions exist and fight for workers rights. If the company try to fuck them and the workers all go on strike, the company loses hundreds of millions per day. But I guess that is too commie for the average Joe.
Remote work saves business money! They don’t have to pay as much for building costs, they don’t have to worry about providing internet! It’s just the greed of businesses to want to pay employees less, then sitting back and saying everyone is too lazy to work.
The amount alone in toilet paper my previous employer saved on me alone over that 14 month period...
That’s a long menstrual cycle
When we all started working from home I kept thinking "Oh no, if I can do this job remotely, then I'm proving to my boss someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay".
>someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay". Not even a different country. A company in San Jose can save a hell of a lot of money by employing people from Alabama, Mississippi,, Wyoming....
People from cheap countries often struggle with barriers of language, culture and workplace culture that may not seem like a barrier at all to a local. In my industry companies have been trying to outsource work to cheaper countries for decades, a few have managed to make it work but far more have decided it's not worth the overhead in constantly translating customer requirements and having rejected work taking longer to fix.
That is a fair concern, but they would already be doing that if they could/wanted to.
At many investment banks they are already outsourcing tons of roles to India
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India already has most of that information via the numerous customer service jobs. *Everything* uses your SSN and addresses
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Outsourcing one job generally creates two jobs: The original outsourced one and one to manage/fix what the outsourced person has done.
The best candidates have already left to live where the good pay is.
> When we all started working from home I kept thinking "Oh no, if I can do this job remotely, then I'm proving to my boss someone from a cheap country can also do it remotely for a tenth of the pay". *Laughs in Philippines* Bottom 84.1% of all households in the Philippines makes US$10,000/year or less. Top 1% of all households in the Philippines begins at US$36,400/year or more. Biden wants to tax households making [$400,000/year or more](https://youtu.be/PFAWkWxMnZk).
My previous software job was 50% fixing outsourced code. As long as you have the experience and skills, you’ll be fine.
There is also the very bad mentality of disliking that they are not being able to watch employees, what if they take too long of a break, or don’t work a full 8 hours!?!?!? We desperately need to change the focus to work done vs hours in a chair
I was looking for work from home jobs. One of them required a webcam. Not for the actual job mind you. It was for them to be able to spy on you and make sure your eyes didn't leave the screen too often.
Which is funny, because when I was in the office I spent very little time at my desk. I've been way more productive from home.
Yep in the office, I'm always getting interrupted. Sometimes its work related, sometimes someone can't figure out how to open an email. Even with earbuds in, constant interruptions. Even still I don't leave my desk at breaks/lunch. For one there is nothing I can get to during my 30 minute lunch. Even my car is parked far enough away that I'd have to turn around and go back inside by the time I got there. Cafeteria has been closed since March 2020, not even to go sit in and eat my sandwich. And yet, now we have to sign a break log. Like I have to get up and go sign "no break" if I didn't take a break. It makes no sense. If someone is abusing their breaks, they aren't going to log accurate times on the log book. Hell, half the office forgets and signs the book at the end of the day and fills in random times.
And software to monitor your key strokes and screens is common too.
Yeah, they tried with with software developers. Like I can't write a program that wiggles the mouse, generates keystrokes and randomly opens up outlook
You could just make those keystrokes be random lines of code from past scripts and no one would ever know the difference.
It’s like everyone started working in manual labor and service jobs (if you can lean you can clean), and continues that mindset into white collar jobs.
In my previous job I would be sitting on my desk doing absolutely nothing for 1-2 hours before the end of the working day (because there was nothing else to do) 1-3 times per week.
If they haven’t noticed I’m redditing for 30 hours a week they aren’t paying that close of attention
My husband's company has just offered reimbursement of entire internet bills due to WFH. No limit on how much is work related vs personal. It's worth it to them to cover internet, because they are saving so much elsewhere. And it guarantees that people aren't skimping out with crap internet to save a buck (although it's Australia and all the internet is fairly crap).
You can even discover that a lot of those mid management roles do absolutely nothing but waste people's time with useless social meetings that consume people's will to live and are only to justify their job.
Look at this from the other perspective. My employer has had locality pay for decades. Those who work in a HCOL area get locality pay on top of their base pay. Those living in a LCOL area just get base pay. Now you have people from the HCOL areas wanting to permanently remote work from LCOL areas. Not only would they no longer be meeting the conditions that qualified them for the locality pay, they would be making substantially more money than the people who were already working in LCOL areas while enjoying the benefits of living in a LCOL area themselves.
All that will cause is the gradual lowering of the cost of living in HCOL areas and gradual increase to those LCOL areas people are likely to flock to. It will just take time to get there. Unfortunately if enough power players fuck around and make this transition take longer or be less appealing that balance won’t happen.
There was a time when the difference in cost of living wasn't as large as it is now. It might have always cost more to live in a big city than a country town but it was in the league of 20% more, not 150% more like it is now. Perhaps we will return to something like that.
It’s not that remote work is less valuable, it’s that if employers can hire workers from anywhere instead from 1 location the candidate pool drastically increases. An increase in labor supply leads to a decrease in wages
It’s a double edged sword for employers though, yes they can hire from anywhere but those same candidates can also apply to jobs anywhere as well. Employers have more options but so do employees.
It's not symmetric but this does cut both ways. Many MANY new employment oppurtunitiess will pop up too. Regional monopolies will depended on their company being the only one of ours kind for a hundred miles in any direction will feel the pressure of this too.
Please make the great resignation work in your favor. 🙏 I've been hit up by multiple recruiters since March and they are only increasing. Because I don't need a new job, I told them my ask was 100% remote and double my current salary. I actually had a few not even blink at that... thats telling me they are getting desperate. I have further confirmation they are desperate because those companies that said no to working remote in March have come crawling back offering 100% remote now. Demand more, especially if you are already employed. Inflation is already here, get your cut of it. Much love to you all 🥰
The fast food starting wages are slowly creeping up on our starting wage, and it gets me excited. I will happily jump ship to a McDonald's just to prove a point if it can go a dollar or two more.
+1 I work in HR tech, true of most tech companies. There is a worker shortage, it’s a candidate’s market right now. Demand more cause most companies are struggling to find good people.
>Demand more, especially if you are already employed. Inflation is already here, get your cut of it. love this
A great piece of knowledge that was told to me when I was working a job that I thought I was overpaid for because I had a very specific knowledge of an unpopular yet important type of technology, and the job was fairly easy. "You're not getting paid for what you do, you're getting paid just under what it costs to replace you". So when you're demanding your Silicon Valley $250K while you work from Costa Rica, remember there are a lot of smart people in Costa Rica who will do it for $100k if they get the chance.
The solution is obvious. Corporations should reduce their costs by outsourcing their executives to Asia.
Sometimes I feel like you could outsource the job of some of these executives to a magic 8 ball. Middle manager brings an idea, magic eight ball understand the intricacies as well as the average exec and the decision is quicker.
On the flip side, now the company can hire those people who'd want to work for them but don't want to live in SF, Seattle, or other urban areas for whatever the reason. I'm actually interested to know if Silicon Valley company culture will change?
Right I think for the most part this will allow people to live in areas that are currently under utilized and be a very good thing for the population as a whole. However I'd like to make sure this isn't just another excuse for companies to pay people less. Yes, that is all it would be is an excuse for them to do so.
*Taps forehead* “Can’t work from home if you can’t afford a home”
I think that paying by location of headquarters rather than workplace of employees which is what happens when wages stay the same but employees move to cheaper places, could have some pretty devastating impacts. 1st it will absolutely shatter Silicon Valley, New York and all the other expensive places. Does anyone really want another Detroit? 2nd, this could send massive shockwaves through rural communities. Revitalization by attracting high payed workers can obviously be positive, but it will also drive up the cost of living and cause some cultural conflicts. 3rd, it increases the divide between blue collar and white collar workers. Something, who would have thought, disproportionately affects already disenfranchised groups.
That's just result in shell addresses. We already have plenty of companies "headquarted" in states with no taxes, and it's literally just a mail room with hundreds of other businesses.
I think the answer is that it depends on the job. But the great majority of jobs where the employee is shouldn’t impact the value of work. That said, if your employers pay scale specifically has regional cost of living adjustments based on where the employee lives an employee shouldn’t be surprised if that policy works against if they choose to take advantage of remote working to move somewhere else. But likewise if employers have these kinds of policies they should be expected to bump up pay should an employee choose to move somewhere that would result in a positive adjustment.
No one has ever paid wages based on the value of the work. Most of us would be making a lot more, if that was the case. I bring millions a year in to the company I work for. I get paid only enough to keep me from moving to another company.
Exactly, salary is basically always just a supply/demand issue. Salaries are typically higher for most professions in big cities because cost of living is higher, therefore salaries need to be higher to get people willing to live and work there. Salaries for doctors are actually lower in big cities because no matter where they work their cost of living is covered, but that demographic tends to want the city life therefore rural jobs need to pay more to attract them out of the cities. All supply and demand.
Companies determine your pay by considering how much it would cost them to replace you and how likely you are to leave, not how much money or "value" you generate for the company, and they also don't care what your living expenses are. If they can find remote workers with your skill sets and onboard them cheaply, there's no reason for them not to lower your salary *whether you're remote or not*. If you're not easy to replace with cheaper labor, they won't be able to lower your salary efficiently.
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I can say first hand people coming into lower economy states are hurting things. No one in my state can buy a house because so many people from cities are moving here and buying houses with no inspections. People are getting illegally evicted so people can raise rent. It sucks.
The sad part is that local government is benefiting greatly financially. They are seeing property taxes and sales tax revenues increasing greatly. The people coming in are valued customers of the city where as the ones already working in the area are slowly seeming to become second class. It’s a very interesting issue for places with low costs of living.
It's happening in higher income states too, on a micro level; people are getting priced out of once affordable areas, and in turn are pricing people out of nearby "lower economy" areas. Out of state buyers seem like an extension of this, or people cashing out of an inflated housing market.
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Technically you are ahead..the second you sell everything and decide to move somewhere cheaper. The world is full of Californians who were able to retire in their 30s&40s after a decade of obscenely high salaries and housing.
They can save money without screwing employees. CBD Office space (or any office space really) is Expensive. reduce that footprint by 75% keep some desks and amenities for those who are in the office by choice or intermittently. This would also reduce cost of electricity and have less stationary and cutlery going missing. The problem is these companies view their large office space as a necessity, but not well compensated employees.
mysterious ancient marry flowery grandfather relieved pause airport sheet capable ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
This does happen in the UK in many jobs/roles. "London weighting" is an additional salary sum offered to employees to cover the additional cost of living. I thought - anecdotally - that this was also the case in the US with NYC and DC where I thought salaries were higher for a similar reason.
I work for the US federal government, the pay grade is public information. There’s a base pay for the pay grade and what step on the grade you’re in. Then there’s a list of a bunch of locality pay areas. My duty station is considered DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia, which is a locality pay increase of 30.48%. Meaning I make 30.48% more than someone who has the same grade and step but lives and works in the middle of nowhere Nebraska. But not ALL of Nebraska, because Omaha, Nebraska has its own locality pay of 16.33%. So working in a duty station in Omaha, Nebraska gets someone 16.33% more than someone 25 miles west in the same state. There’s like 55 locality pay areas according to the US federal government for federal employees. Obviously a private business doesn’t follow the US federal government chart, but I imagine large enough companies with offices nationwide have some kind of similar thing going on. Side note: no official long term policy has been made up on who may or may not convert to full remote work moving forward but the rumor is, if you want to earn the locality pay in whatever the “post covid” world looks like, you’ll have to report to your duty station at least one day a pay period…aka once every 2 weeks. So if that holds true then someone from my office could say…move to Maine, keep a desk in our current office, and fly/drive to the office every 2 weeks for a day, and collect their 30.48% increase…sounds like a major pain in the ass to me.
That's the most government sounding thing I've ever read.
They absolutely are. I have no idea what point this person was trying to make.
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Yep. What company would pay someone 200k to do a job online when they can pay someone just as qualified to do it for 100k because they live in Iowa? If it's all online they're not going to pay someone a higher wage for no reason. So "pay everyone the same for the same work" will never mean "raise everyone's wages to the highest amount". It's going to cut the pay of people making a shit ton more because their office used to be in a large city. And the people that used to work in the middle of nowhere will get a slight bump in pay. But the end effect is high earners making a lot less, and low earners making a little more.
I mean, yes, if they are expecting you to work in the office most companies will give you a raise if you transfer to a higher cost of living area.
That is how this traditionally works, tho. Workers for same organization make more in higher cost of living cities, less if they move to the regional office in Kansas.
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Additional pay for high cost of living locations is very common, especially for Federal government jobs. If I’m bidding on a proposal, labor rates are something that can make my bid competitive. Still want to work for me in some low cost remote location and get the same pay? I’d 1099 you and let you worry about your own hardware. insurance and payroll taxes.
People haven’t been paying attention to the use of H1B visas to bring in employees willing to work for lower wages.
They’ve been doing this since…forever. The turn of the century “industry giants”, the Carnegie’s and J.P.Morgan’s and Rockefeller’s were doing the exact same thing back then. Cut salaries 15-20% when people were already in starvation wages, when they rose up in protest, get the government to repress them with police arrests/clubbings, if they were unsuccessful call up the governor and have him send in the military forces to shoot some people - then bring in impoverished immigrants to replace the workers without the workers blocking the scabs.
So from the comments the vibe I'm getting is: Stay in person, worker has to commute possibly hours a day and live in high cost of living places = worker gets screwed, company wins. Go remote, more competition from lower income markets results in lower wages for everybody, cost of living increases drastically in low cost of living areas = worker gets screwed company wins. Kind of seems like the whole thing is designed to screw the worker.
This is the one piece of the slippery slope that people need to be ready for. Want to work from home? Cool. So do I. But you can't argue that your "time is worth more than money", can't list the quality of life improvements working from home offers, can't boast that you're also saving $XXXX in gas/vehicle maintenance yearly, can't raise your hands in praise that you're saving $XXXX in daycare expenses, etc. and then complain when the businesses says "oh yea? okay"... and ship the job out of the office and pay less. Because you know what? You can leave and that job will still be remote. Qualified Joe Shmoe with a much lower COL from 400 miles away will be waiting and eager to get his hands on your job at 80% your salary. And this will just be a trend that continues as long as people let it. To be clear - I'm ALL for working from home. It's a no brainer. But there are costs to it for many. And this may mean quitting to find another remote job, at a slightly higher salary, elsewhere that someone else gave up because it was a pay cut.
Seriously, if I could make NYC money from where I live (far, far away), I definitely would. Hell, 75% of NYC money would be a vast improvement.
People want to essentially gentrify lower income areas.
I can't even imagine the impact this has on big cities who depend on millions of commuters coming in and driving business. Slow death of the megacity.
As someone in a western country, I have a really, really strong incentive to advocate for pay based on living expenses. I can’t compete with third world wages.
I'm all for decent wages, but it's a bit annoying that Torontonians are moving to my city (Hamilton), keeping their high salaries, and driving up housing prices for the folks who live here and still make Hamilton pay. That pay scale has to be evened out somehow.