Also Facebook’s admission that salary will be tied to cost of living wherever you choose to live sets a bad precedent. Anyone who thought they could just keep their Bay Area salary is going to be disappointed, and it gives cover to every other company thinking of going remote to do the same.
I’m also wondering how easy it would be to change jobs once you go remote. The benefit of being in the Bay is that the number of companies is so high that it makes it easy to interview if you’re looking for a change. While possible to interview remotely it’s much more difficult since the number of companies open to that is still small.
They are not and never have been. They have always been paid what someone is willing to pay them for the work they do.
It's subtle but important distinction.
Salary is a function of demand and supply like any other price on an open market.
This is why its important to not think in terms of work when negotiating a salary. Instead you need to think in terms of cost to find someone to take your place.
If that cost is more than your salary, you can ask for more.
Hard to tell whether you are getting a “fair” deal when cost of living is so different depending on your individual situation
I rarely find publicly available cost of living calcs to accurately reflect lived cost of living.
Facebook didn’t set this precedent, GitLab did with their Salary Calculator years ago [1].
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
It feels like that wouldn’t change even after COVID-19. Partial remote work is definitely coming and I hope it’s permanent, but needing to be at HQ on a semi-regular basis doesn’t seem like it would go away. It’s also probably why the LA-SF airline routes will probably bounce back rather quickly.
But that's good, some people in sv make more money in a year than some other people make in their entire life. If this was allowed it would probably destroy so many places. Faang salary makes you a king just about anywhere in the world besides a few major cities, in my home town you could buy a flat per month and still have some money to invest somewhere else.
Regardless, what I really hope is that at the least this helps companies shift towards more remote-friendly culture and policies. Things like: every meeting has a conference link; one person remote, everyone remote; more async communications and decision making. If you do sit in a room together, have some empathy for remote people, and make sure you have high-quality video and audio, no tapping on the table or "side-conversations" while hovering over a mic, and make sure you have remote videos feeds visible and are sharing the screen you're discussing.
It would be great to see a list like this amended to include how this type of thing is handled at the company as a whole (eg top-down, global policy as opposed to varying by individual teams/managers) - like a "remote-friendly" ranking scale, or maybe a "Joel test".
In the meantime, it can be accessed via https://www.notion.so/cd2571b6bd0b434f8bf2042d5fa0d6ea
As long as you are productive, how would the employers know?
