So much this. There's companies out there that value output at what you're worth, regardless of where you live at. I'm almost certain that Facebook is one of those companies — when it comes to high output employees. Negotiate.
The counter to that is that there's people that live in cheaper areas that are willing to accept less _because_ their cost of living is lower. If a company can hire them instead of someone )with the same productivity) basing their expected salary on what people make in SV, then why wouldn't they? Following that logic, people living SV should start making less while people living in inexpensive areas should start making more; it should even out to some extent.
The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode. That doesn't make them bad engineers. But it precludes them from passing the incredibly one-dimensional assessment FANGs apply to engineers.
The hiring committees would throw fits if they had to consider hiring even the upper-end of talent in non-competitive markets.
These committees could be in for a reckoning if businesses realized they could be just as effective with mid market talent, because truthfully, not every problem that needs to be solved at a FANG needs a top 1% best-of-breed, (for example) 15+years-of-GPU experience engineer. Not every problem demands niche, hard-to-find specialty.
> The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode
I think this hits on a very real signal that is sent by someone being willing to relocate cross-country for work. I know people from college that moved out to the coasts to work for big name tech companies. They were probably "above average", but none of them were terribly noteworthy.
The thing they were willing to do that the rest of us weren't was uproot from the midwest and go to the coast.
That's a signal that you're willing to tie your self worth to your job in a way that is very valuable (exploitable) to a company.
> The people living in LCOL areas don't hustle. They aren't the type to do 100 hours of leetcode.
> not every problem that needs to be solved at a FANG needs a top 1% best-of-breed, (for example
I honestly can't tell if you're joking or not. The wording in the first sentence is that of someone being sarcastic, mocking the people who would actually use such language and/or expect such things. But the second quote sounds like you're being serious.
The difference between people living in high COL areas and low COL isn't how much they hustle. Some of the best people I've worked with are living in low COL areas, including one I was praising just recently for being a role model for others.
As a side note, if you're doing 100 hours of work a week, you're almost certainly doing a bad job at all of it. With the exception of a small subset of people, it's been shown that work quality decreases drastically when working long hours (for all the work being done, not just the work past the normal hours). Expecting your workers to put in those hours means you're aiming for sub-optimal, low quality work.
Next sentence following the first quote: "That doesn't make them bad engineers." You stated "Some of the best people I've worked with are living in low COL areas". I think we agree here.
The broader point with the first quote: People living in LCOL areas don't pull out all the bells-and-whistles to signal how absolutely amazing of an employee they'd be. Why? Because it doesn't matter in LCOL areas. If you went to a town in the middle of nowhere, and held everyone to the Leetcode hard bar, a smaller proportion would pass than in Silicon Valley. However, the hiring bar is lower in these areas as well -- therefore, one doesn't need to practice leetcode to secure employment in LCOL areas.
Re side note: I didn't say people do 100 hours of leetcode in a specific timeframe (one week was mentioned, but the GP comment didn't suggested that). Typically, interviewees Leetcode in preparation for FANGs. This preparation is done typically over a period of months.
SF, and much of the rest of the Bay Area to a lesser (or greater, on the case of Marin) extent had a notoriously high cost of living before “Silicon Valley” was more than a small part of the South Bay.
It's more than tech work that has drawn people to SF, and that combined with supply restrictions that also aren't driven by the tech workforce have kept prices high since before the tech workforce showed up.
Going back to say 1950’s and it was still the workforce pushing up cost of living. Who those people are and what they are doing is a function of the time period, but people want to live there in large part due to the weather etc.
I don't see that as a counter. Yes, this might be bad long term for people staying in SF, and good long term for people outside of SF/the US. But individually you can look for opportunities in your own local market and get local market rates, or break that paradigm and look at other markets, just like companies are waking up to hiring employees in cheaper markets (beyond hiring consulting firms). Like everything in markets, there's always opportunities for the wise to take advantage of, on both sides
Think about it from the angle of consulting rates as a remote developer.
Would you charge a different rate to companies that operate in the same markets based on where you are at?
Why would you accept a different rate as a FTE, then?
You charge what you're worth, not where
The trouble is there are people who are highly paid because they are legitimately good at what they do. And then there are people who are highly paid because they live in an area where high pay is the norm.
Easy! If you live in The Bay Area it probably applies!
Many companies have a hiring restriction that requires candidates to live near their offices so that they can physically appear for work. This of course constrains the labor pool which artificially inflates salaries. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that in The Bay Area housing itself is also constrained, which multiplies the cost increase on local talent.
> There's companies out there that value output at what you're worth
In any auction the selling price is not the value of the item to the winning bidder, it's the second highest bid plus $1. If you move to a LCOL area the competing offers are all going to be garbage unless you can find a second high-paying company to extend you a remote offer (which may or may not happen, depending on how widespread remote work becomes). Facebook has no reason to unilaterally raise their bids unless you can secure good competing offers as leverage.
