I would prefer that companies follow the law, which is that they are grossly abusing workers' rights demanding the right to use an employee's personal residence as a condition of pay. When you sign on, your offer is, of course, partly based on the locale, but as an employee, you do not have a vote or a decision in where the office you work at is located. By their logic, employers should be required to pay a cost of living differential, which they are not, and rarely if ever meet on initial offering, which introduces the gap observed preceding 1980 that shows striking differences in income growth vs. average living expenses.
I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.
The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.
And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.
It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.
Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.
> And Sundar has needed to go for a long time... How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?)...
> employers should be required to pay a cost of living differentia
They do pay this. It costs a heck of a lot more to hire in The Bay Area than it does outside, and much of this increased salary goes to landlords and rents.
At the same time conversely companies like Facebook are threatening to lower wages if people move outside the bay area.
I feel like if you're a remote employee they don't need to have a right to know where you are living, they only need to know your timezone for planning purposes. Your location should be abstracted out of the equation by remote work tools.
As far as they are concerned you are just an amorphous existence on the planet that is online to provide skills from some time UTC to some other time UTC and they shouldn't have a right to know anything more than that.
It’s likely companies may have been willing to pay extra for an employee who can colocate in a specific office, and if that is no longer required salaries may go down across the board since they can hire from a bigger pool. It’s odd that FB would resort to a punishment like this. They should just reduce everyone’s salaries and encourage them to move out of The Bay Area :).
Reducing everyone's salaries could temporarily backfire though as long as there are other bay area companies paying bay area salaries (even for remote workers), as those people would leave.
However, it may be beneficial for Facebook to do it that way, as they can then get decent talent around the world at a lower price.
A lot of people before would give the advice that if you come to The Bay Area to get a job or fund your startup, you'll eventually succeed because you can easily take meetings with people, find connections, rub shoulders, schmooze, etc, and this was largely true because being in this locale gave an inherent advantage. We're more likely to hire the guy that made a good impression at an event or house party than a random cold email from an anonymous person.
Once Bay Area tech engineer moves to some far off corner of the world, there won't be much differentiation except for raw talent, and there's plenty of raw talent out there in the world who were born in the wrong place.
I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.
The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.
And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.
It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.
Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.