With remote work plan, Facebook dashes hopes of paycheck arbitrage - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22Y1IA <comment><USER2> Remote work threads have been the biggest cliché of HN since the pandemic (and were one of the bigger ones already), and arguing about location-based salaries has been the biggest cliché of remote-work threads lately. So normally this follow-up post would get a moderation downweight ([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20follow- up&sort=byDate&type=comment)). But I'm lessening the downweight because it seems to me this bit may count as SNI (Significant New Information):

 _Employees who attempt to wiggle around those compensation adjustments will be subject to "severe ramifications," [Zuckerberg] said, as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws. Zuckerberg said Facebook will monitor adherence by checking where employees access its VPN. Facebook also uses its own apps ' to track employee locations, according to CNBC [...]_

(See [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22significant%20new%20information%22&sort=byDate&type=comment) about SNI.)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very subjective thought experiment and I'm sure you could make all kinds of arguments against it but here goes...

Imagine person A lives in an area with a high cost of living and gets full salary. Person A is able to purchase a house at a high valuation relative to the national average. Person B in a rural area is able to buy perhaps as nice a house on a smaller salary in a below average market.

Now look at the options available to these two people when they want to move. Person A sells at market rate or perhaps a little below and can move to a lower cost of living with a relatively large pile of cash. Person B has no such option. The real estate market arbitrage is available to person A and not to person B.

The salary of person A looks like it produces options and upward mobility. The salary for person B seems to have more limitations.

<comment><USER4> Yep. With these "cost of living adjustments" it's almost always a better move long term to live in the higher COL area, especially if you are living inexpensively and saving the vast majority of your money. I save more per year than I would gross working as an engineer near my hometown...

Although I will say, person B in your scenario has potentially more upside on their housing equity, and they do potentially get a higher standard of living short term. Of course, there are aspects of standard of living such as public transportation, good public schools, people in your area you'd like to date/be friends with that person B may not be able to buy.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, plus CoL differences don't affect ALL things you spend your money on; amazon sells stuff for the same price no matter where you live.

<comment><USER6> I've done the budget calculations based on my own personal spending and found that outside rent, the majority of what I spend money on costs essentially the same no matter where I live (if you normalize out taxes).

<comment><USER7> In the US, state and local taxes can cause a huge variance. Certain states are in debt for multiple tens of thousands of dollars per taxpayer more than other states, and those taxpayers will have to pay far more for debt service.

<comment><USER8> This whole FB thing is actually more nuanced than people talk about:

1) It's only for senior engineers

2) US only right now.

Essentially, this is a play to increase senior retention. California is pretty much unaffordable for most people who weren't pre-IPO or very good at saving.

Therefore, the trend is for more senior people to leave, and move to cheaper places. By allowing remote for seniors, FB have a good shot at keeping people for longer, which is _incredibly_ important for large engineering driven tech- co's as the churn in tools/frameworks/approaches is really high, and keeping people who remember Tool version -2 is super high leverage when they come to consider tool version + 1.

<comment><USER9> I've always assumed these companies _liked_ the senior rotation in order to keep seniority (and wages) lower. It also likely has the effect of keeping average _age_ lower, which would make for an interesting disparate impact lawsuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a thought experiment. Let's say an employer is based out of downtown San Jose, and employs people on-site. Would it be reasonable for them to adjust salaries depending on what city an employee lived in? The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,291 in Mountain View, but $2,390 in Morgan Hill. If an employee moved from Mountain View to Morgan Hill, would the employer be justified in reducing the salary of the employee to adjust for the fact that the (on-site!) employee now lives in a lower cost-of-living area? (Let's assume that other CoL factors are not more expensive in Morgan Hill than Mountain View, which I feel is a safe assumption).

Would it be justified if the company was fully remote?

What about if the employee moved to Sunnyvale? The average rent is $3,016; a smaller difference, but still cheaper than Mountain View.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure that the example is similar to the current topic: rent is cheaper than Morgan Hill largely _because_ it takes an hour to drive to lots of workplaces. People are choosing between paying higher rent in Mountain View and paying with their commute time in Morgan Hill.

It's arguably a different scenario from someone attending VC from their $400K, 5-bedroom mansion in Raleigh, NC.

<comment><USER12> But that's also sort of the point, isn't it? When you are dealing with a remote worker, the commute time doesn't matter. You don't need to consider paying geographical based salaries, because the location isn't relevant. There is no "paying with commute time."

You just need to pay the amount that enables you to get the workers you need. The "fair" thing to do is to pay people without regard to location and let them decide for themselves whether it is worth it to live in a HCOL area or not.

<comment><USER11> Well, in an ideal, completely efficient market for remote workers, of course the "fair" thing to do is to pay for enough salary to hire the best people in Prague or Bangalore. People can decide whether they want to live in San Francisco with that salary. Most people can't, so naturally there will be a diaspora spreading out to low-cost areas, and rent in SF will drop until the area can be "competitive" again.

But this dry description involves a ton of economic/social upheaval, which we (the society) really wouldn't like to deal with, especially right now. (Not to mention a "completely fair market" is an illusion: you can't just fire your entire team on the bay area and hire replacements from Bangalore.) So a compromise is reached, where companies try to keep people they have now at roughly the same price they're paying now, with ugly, stop-gap measures to dissuade people from getting ahead of the equation.

I'm not saying we should _thank_ Facebook - it's behaving completely in its own interest - but people who complain that this isn't "fair" might want to answer what's their position on the logical conclusion of a "fair market" for remote workers.

<comment><USER12> You've given voice to exactly what I intended in my comment, but didn't quite have the words to say. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The lawsuits around this are going to be amazing. African American developer has kids and moves to Georgia to be near family; receives steep pay cut compared to white developers who move to Connecticut to do the same.

And how does Facebook decide what the cost of living in your area is, anyway? The more data-driven Facebook makes that calculation, the more delicious the law suit gets. For example, DC is a fairly high cost of living Metro area, but there are some nice suburbs in PG County 30-45 minutes east of the city that are quite affordable. They're also predominantly African American. Does Facebook set your salary based on living in the DC metro area, or do they drill down further and cut your pay for living in PG County? I can't wait to see what happens.

<comment><USER14> > The lawsuits around this are going to be amazing.

No. They won't. This isn't anything new. GitLab as a company does this. My company does this. US Federal Government does this. It's not controversial. HN is the one making it controversial. YOU are making it controversial by bringing race into it.

If you have clear salary bands ("SWE III makes base 100k to 150k") and clear location bands ("NYC is 35%, Westchester County is 29%, Monroe County is 8%) then it's completely fair.

> And how does Facebook decide what the cost of living in your area is, > anyway?

You could use the same scales the US Federal Government releases. You could base it on the average cost of living. Lots of data-points. Every state and local government collects this data for various reasons. Hell, Walmart and other large Grocery Stores most likely do this as well to localize prices properly.

<comment><USER15> Never heard of a company punitively adjusting COL downward without being explicitly in contract, like with US Fedgov. Finance had people leave NY all the time for Midwestern and Southern states with the same company keeping their NYC paychecks.

<comment><USER16> I've not only heard it, I've been told.

"If you relocate from our San Jose office to our Austin office, there will be a compensation adjustment due to COL and prevailing market rate."

I don't think that's unreasonable.

I'm sure they make exceptions for those employees who they want to retain at all cost.

<comment><USER9> The employer deciding what "the market" is to set "market rate" to a conveniently lower number isn't reasonable. If you're hiring remote-first, you're not competing in a local market.

<comment><USER17> The employer deciding what they're willing to pay employees is eminently reasonable. Most of these companies are NOT going remote first, they're just _allowing_ remote work.

<comment><USER9> No, a dialog or a negotiation is reasonable. Deciding things for both parties is not reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I moved from SF bay area to Austin, my employer didn't lower my salary, but for a few years my yearly increases were small compared to my performance review until my pay grade was right for my pay grade and location combination.

This was a nice way to do it because my salary has always been monotonically increasing, and I wasn't offended that my increases were small for a few years because I knew why it was happening.

<comment><USER19> This right here is the way to deal with the problem. Lowering a salary should only happen if someone is a fuckup or reduces the amount of work they have to do. Doing it over time like this is super classy.

<comment><USER20> I don't know, if the same job gets paid less in Austin then it's not really fair for someone who transfers from SF to Austin to make more than someone who was just in Austin all long. If someone moved from Austin to SF you'd just pay them less than a new hire in SF?

At Google they just openly adjust your salary if you move between cities; move from NYC to Atlanta and you'll take a bit hit, move back for the reciprocal instant raise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well a Swiss court just ruled that companies need to compensate (including part of the rent) employees if they are home officed. [1]

Companies taking advantage of this and thinking they can save money should think again.

[1] [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nzz.ch/amp/schweiz/arbeitge...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nzz.ch/amp/schweiz/arbeitgeber- muessen-einen-teil-der-wohnungsmiete-uebernehmen-wenn-sie-ihre-mitarbeiter- ins-home-office-schicken-ld.1557921)

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: FB employee.

The company claimed that they don't see this necessarily as a cost-saving measure because they plan on providing for home office equipment for permanent remote workers, kind of like how employees going to the office have monitors and keyboards provided for them.

<comment><USER23> That's pretty funny. I have an amazing home office setup, and even all that high-end kit cost a very small fraction of an FB engineer yearly salary. Are they planning on burning the delta by throwing in high-end telepresence hardware, or something?

<comment><USER22> I don't know if it's high end, but every FTE I know got a Portal.

<comment><USER24> Pardon my ignorance, but what is a Portal?

<comment><USER25> A video-call device they make: [https://portal.facebook.com/](https://portal.facebook.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is generally-expected behavior for an automaker to shift production to the cheapest labor market. Well, maybe not the absolute cheapest. Cost of goods transport, e.t.c. also factor in. But it doesn't surprise anyone for manufacturers to open factories in locations that lower their costs. It's an obvious thing to do.

So it has always baffled me that tech companies do the exact opposite. They motivate the most skilled people to leave low-cost areas and move to the most expensive. They pile them in higher and higher and keep driving their own labor costs through the roof. And VCs exacerbate the problem by refusing to fund anything in less expensive locations.

It's easy to dismiss this as irrational. But is it really? Are there benefits to this that are so huge they outweigh the costs?

If you could pay $10,000,000 to move 1000 devs to Kingman, AZ, then cut their avg salary from $250,000 to $150,000, why wouldn't you do that? What is the downside to saving $90,000,000 after moving expenses in the first year alone?

The obvious first argument is reduction in the standard of living would cause the talented to refuse. I'm sensitive to this, but also skeptical. People making 150 in Kingman would improve their SOL.

I could be wrong, but I think there are more important factors. I think there is too much money at stake for these employers to have not thought it through. When a common behavior looks insanely irrational, it is more likely that you haven't seen all the variables.

<comment><USER27> Companies that require skilled labour don't move to places with cheap labour. They move to places with abundant skilled labour that's available at a reasonable cost. Or, they spend money training and equipping the available labour. There's no way around it.

<comment><USER28> If you think building cars is unskilled labour I can only assume you've not owned anything newer than a Leyland P76, and managed to miss the whole "Japanese car makers eating the US and British industries" thing.

<comment><USER29> Auto workers have a skilled tradesman classification and other classifications and most aren't skilled tradesmen. They still perform pretty complex tasks. It's just a term, like how in insurance contracts you'll read "Act of God". That doesn't mean that State Farm is a theistic organization that believes that supernatural beings are imposing earthquakes upon us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Coming from a country(Poland) that may well be treated as one large outsourcing company (with the notable exception of CDPR and its whopping 1200 employees) here's my prediction on how this is going to play out:

Salaries of remote employees will initially be made much lower according to some woefully inaccurate estimate of cost of living, but from that point on they will increase at a considerably faster rate than normal.

Within a decade they will stabilise at a visibly lower than SV, yet still high level representing the true difference in cost of living - or actually - "cost of deciding not to live in SV".

Eastern Europe experienced an amazing advance in IT compensations when the west figured out that the software engineers there are no worse than their local counterparts.

In the case of SV's surroundings it's obvious that the engineers are talented, so I believe this process should be starting just now.

Overall it's not that bad, because with time any incentive to move back to the high cost of living area fades.

You won't be driving Teslas to work(chiefly because you won't be driving), but you'll enjoy a standard of living higher than a person employed in a local company, and that is nothing to sneer at.

<comment><USER31> SV people are used to being able to afford a model S. Going to european level salaries (not being able to afford even a model 3) is going to be somewhat of a shock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This makes sense in the hiring process, but once you've hired someone, it's a super dick move to lower their salary in spite of their performance. Seems like the sort of decision a robot would make.

<comment><USER32> You pretty much have to do this if you want to maintain different salaries in different geographic reasons. Otherwise people would be highly incentivized to move to SF/NYC for 6 months to get hired then move back to their cheap COL permanent location.

<comment><USER33> Honestly, people working out of the main office for their first 6mo-1y would probably a really advantageous scenario for all involved. The first year is when learning tools and culture as well as developing relationships is most crucial. I would say someone moving from in-office to remote has a big advantage over someone getting hired remote.

<comment><USER32> True. But is there that much of a difference between "working from home in Palo Alto vs working from home in Boise"?

Probably not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >Zuckerberg said Facebook will monitor adherence by checking where employees access its VPN. Facebook also uses its own apps' to track employee locations, according to CNBC

So all I need to do paycheck arbitrage is to use a VPN with private residential IP (yes, that's a thing), and a rooted/jailbroken phone that does location spoofing?

<comment><USER35> It's Facebook. You already know they use hundreds of sources of information to track and categorise people. Zuckerberg and CNBC just mentioned two.

That said, I expect you can fool Facebook for a while with high probability. You might need to commit fraud and/or tax evasion to do so, so that raises the bar.

<comment><USER36> Question: can you even work at Facebook without having an account and using it?

The biggest risk of leak would be during usage of their services like their app and/or website on personal devices. If you can work there while _only_ using their issued work laptop it would be pretty easy to contain by sticking it behind a VPN router.

<comment><USER37> I've heard FB has their own version of FB for work, which is mandatory to have

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Where did Facebook say that "cost of living" will impact salaries? At Google (where I work) salaries vary a lot based on location but cost of living is not part of the equation. It's based on the cost of hiring in the market.

I'm personally in the middle of an SF to London transfer. I'm taking a 25% pay cut. That is not because it's cheap to live in London (it's not) but rather because it's very very cheap to hire developers there.

I imagine Facebook will do something similar.

<comment><USER39> >That is not because it's cheap to live in London (it's not) but rather because it's very very cheap to hire developers there.

lol those are exactly the same thing

<comment><USER40> You misunderstand. While salaries are relatively low in London, the cost of living (i.e. rent) is relatively high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> California might consider making this sort of practice illegal, in the same way they've prohibited requiring a salary history, or enforcing certain non- compete agreements.

Why? It's salary discrimination based on a tangential factor that arguably has no effect on the quality-of-work delivered.

To the extent an employer has the power to demand such a disclosure, it's suggestive of market-concentration & a lack of competition, that prevents an employee's skills, and skills alone, from determining their compensation.

(And, a possible added bonus for California would be that requiring big employers to pay California salaries, even to non-California employees, might deter those employers from seeking such California-tax-base-eroding arrangements.)

<comment><USER42> California has no say over what FB pays its employees in Ohio.

<comment><USER43> I assume California also has some low COL places. From a quick look, SF vs Modoc is quite a big difference.

<comment><USER44> Fresno has housing prices roughly "average" for the nation. It's one of the lower cost cities in California.

"Average" for the nation isn't exactly cheap. There's no place with a genuinely low cost of living anywhere in California that I can tell. Fresno and Victorville are some of the less insanely expensive places and they both more or less serve as retirement communities for the more expensive coastal cities.

Fresno is routinely listed as having some of the worst air quality in the nation. You rarely hear anything good about it. In the movie "Monsters vs Aliens" it is more or less the butt of the joke as a place no one would wish to live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I find it quite counter-intuitive that there would be different salary levels for remote employees depending on the location they live in, since for remote employees the location is now presumably their choice, and not the employer's - analogous to the personal choice of how expensive the employee's choice of dwelling is.

As others have mentioned, anything else runs the danger of creating potentially perverse incentives to move (fake or real) to a more expensive location, thus adding cost to the employer. And when salary costs for some go up, the argument could be made it lowers the pot of total salary money available for the remaining employees, since many large employers are managed to hit overall percentage targets for various cost items (like R&D which for web companies typically has a considerable salary component).

The whole thing sure sounds like a classic large company policy with unintended consequences. -- Running large companies is hard.

<comment><USER46> Companies like Buffer do this too: [https://buffer.com/salary/content- marketer-3/average/](https://buffer.com/salary/content-marketer-3/average/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Facebook also uses its own apps' to track employee locations

Not unexpected, but another reason not to work there.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've worked remotely for 10+ years and I have one piece of advice. Ignore these policies. Live wherever you want and demand whatever salary you think you're producing at. If FB wants to leave high productivity labor on the table, let them. If any company has any kind of policy that stops them from hiring you, that's their problem. We've been in a seller's market for software development labor for nearly 20 years. Stop pretending like these arbitrary rules are your problem, it's theirs. They can't limit you. They can only limit themselves.

<comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> 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.

<comment><USER51> 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.

<comment><USER52> > 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.

<comment><USER53> Pretty much described every H1b-er in HN. Except prolly the body shop employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> If your method of motivating people is "severe ramifications" maybe it's time to chill for a while and go fishing.

<comment><USER55> Consider the "severe ramifications" that Facebook would be facing if they are reporting income for a worker in California when the worker has decided to move to Montana.

<comment><USER56> Imagine paying an employee in a manner that you don't have to worry about them lying about where they are. Rather than judging how much to pay them based on where they live, you just pay them and not worry if you can screw them over or not.

<comment><USER57> Cool. Lets change the laws to make that legal.

<comment><USER58> ...to make it legal to pay someone on the value they bring, rather than where they live? Pretty sure there no obvious laws against that. ETA: as long as the value is high enough, at least.

Probably you meant "to not have to know where they live", but that wasn't what the GP's post was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I understand this, although I disagree with the notion that a job is worth "more" in a high rent area than it is in a low rent area. But that is a different thread.

That said, when my kids were in school there was a phenomena that "Cupertino Schools are the best public schools" so parents wanted their kids to go to those schools. Which you could do if you lived in Cupertino, but Cupertino has higher costs than say living in South San Jose. So creative parents would make their "home" one of the apartments run by a "friendly" landlord who would "rent" them an apartment for $100/month, and give them a utility bill with their name on it so that the student could claim Cupertino residency and go to Cupertino schools. Other scams involved people offering to pay the utilities for someone who lived in Cupertino so that they could get that precious document which saved them $8,000 a year or more on private school tuition.

Depending on the difference in salary, I would not be surprised to see some of that action going on with regards to people's "Facebook home"

<comment><USER32> Worth pointing out that if you lie to your employer and get caught probably the worst that can happen is you get fired.

But if you like to the government and get caught you can go to jail.

<comment><USER60> "You are charged trying to get your kid into a good school through mail fraud"

Eh. Hard pitch for a DA to run with this case. I don't honestly see a poor family being prosecuted for trying to get their kid into a rich school due to their property line. The DA office wouldn't like these optics. Jury?? Not a chance. If it were rich kids taking advantage of a poor school - the DA would run with it.

<comment><USER32> That DA got elected by rich parents who paid high prices for their houses to get in a good school district. Do you think they want their school "ruined" by poor kids sneaking in illegally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Here in Washington, a Seattle salary of $150k is worth around $315k in Spokane. And that's in the same state.

[https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/spokane- wa/seattle...](https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/spokane-wa/seattle- wa/150000)

<comment><USER62> The cost of living scaling doesn't cover the entire salary. Only about 30% of my salary goes towards cost of living, more than half of it goes to savings. If my salary was scaled from Seattle to Spokane levels, my savings at retirement would be enormously impacted.

That sort of cost of living also doesn't account for a huge amount of other things too. Having a holiday in Bali costs the same whether you depart from Spokane or Seattle (probably slightly more departing from Spokane actually, when you account for transport from Spokane to SeaTac). Buying a new 4K big screen costs the same in Spokane as it does in Seattle. Living in Spokane doesn't make your kids college cost less either.

<comment><USER63> > Living in Spokane doesn't make your kids college cost less either.

It would depend on how much of a pay cut you experience moving to Spokane, but that can certainly make colleges with extensive need-based aid cheaper.

<comment><USER64> When you're talking at the levels that most engineering positions are paid pretty much anywhere in the US (even lower cost of living areas), you are unlikely to qualify for need-based aid anyways. A pay cut from (lets say) 200 -> 150 is significant, but I don't believe likely to qualify a student as "low income" by any means.

<comment><USER63> Stanford covers all tuition for parents whose income is $125k or less, and partial tuition for parents making more than that until some cutoff. Regardless, $150k would be getting you a decent bit of financial aid.

<comment><USER62> I don't think "your pay cut might be big enough to qualify you for financial aid" is a typical part of the WFH sale pitch, in any case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con > The biggest loser, he predicted, would be California.

California had been downtown hostile to the tech industry and grown complacent work the status quo because the tech workers had to be there. If tech workers don't have to be there, they will start trickling out.

CA worked hard to make the bed they're about to lie in.

<comment><USER65> Eh, I've heard people predicting the end of tech in California for YEARS. Hasn't panned out, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. Kind of reminds me of the people who say that China's economy is a house of cards and is going to implode any day now. They've been saying it for decades and nothing has happened.

<comment> B-Con CA won't implode soon. But momentum is hard to change and right now the industry is _looking_ for a ways to not be in CA. It hasn't panned out yet, but once they are unlocked and can leave the region there will be a river of people leaving. Let that run for a decade and then there will be trouble.

 _If_ (and that's a big if) the current trend allows CA workers to work remotely from non-CA, I think SV will be a very different place in 15 years. A place not on the trajectory of the last 15.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> GitLab seem to be very open about that. They have a salary calculator that includes the location. [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/calculator/)

<comment><USER67> Wonder how that pays off for them in terms of hiring. Last time I was looking for a job, I put them near the bottom of my list because of the location-based scaling.

<comment><USER68> Same here. It's interesting that they won't know who never bothered to apply. A more typical company which doesn't make their salaries public would notice if candidates repeatedly drop out of the hiring pipeline due to inadequate pay.

On the other hand they seem to be doing well as a business so recruiting evidently hasn't been a big problem for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Piggybacking. This should be no surprise. When your job becomes remote, you now compete with people willing to earn half or less because they choose not to live where you do. Basic econ. Don't be entitled, it's no surprise most of the country hates tech workers.

<comment><USER70> >Don't be entitled

Because you want to maximize your earnings based on the value you bring? LOL..

<comment><USER71> You don't get paid based on the value you bring. You get paid based on supply and demand. Once they can hire from anywhere in the US, the supply increases.

<comment><USER70> The supply does increase.

But the time to properly screen senior engineers remains finite.

Who are the people that can properly vet senior-level talent? A few other senior-level engineers that are on the team?

So you want them to ask questions that are beyond the superficial, phone screen 50 candidates, all the while they're supposed to continue to do product development, fix bugs, comments on PR? Something will suffer - either the hiring process or product development.

For every potential hiree that rejects an offer, an engineer that gets into the late stages of the interview process only to be hired away by a better offer is time wasted by your engineering team.

Engineers in the late stages of hiring have the upper hand. Repeat it to your self. "I have the leverage."

With an offer on the table, push back and counter offer. They don't want you to walk away.

Living in Des Moines and they already have a senior team in SF? Awesome. Ask for the SF salary or walk. They'll counter. And if they don't? You can salvage the deal by approach them in two days with another counter. In two days, they have _not_ lined up another qualified senior engineer.

They've already burned so many resources. The company knows this. Now you do too.

<comment><USER71> We are living in a post-Covid world. All of the money losing companies are laying off people leaving the FAANGMs that have a real business model and making money the only companies hiring at inflated salaries. Now you have both increased supply because they are expanding outside of the west coast and more "smart people" (tm) who spent years at the leetCode alter looking for jobs. You also have reduced demand with VCs not willing to throw good money after bad anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm waiting for this to be framed as a racial equity issue. Are they really going to pay people in Detroit and Atlanta less than people in San Francisco and Seattle for the same job in the same "virtual" location?

<comment><USER38> If they make more working for Facebook in Detroit than for a a Detroit-local tech company, and they will, it's hard to say who's harmed here.

Of course there's gray area here but I think it will be fine. They won't be the first company with localized salaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I can smell the next SaaS offering: pobox.me, rent a po box and real address and take your salary to the next level!

<comment><USER74> This is essentially what Delaware C-Corps do in order to avail themselves of regional regulations.

<comment><USER75> This is a excellent point. What state is FB incorporated in?

<comment><USER76> Looks like... Delaware! [https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/facebook-is-a- delaware-corp...](https://www.delawareinc.com/blog/facebook-is-a-delaware- corporation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> If a developer is 100% wfh and productive, who cares where they live? FB's stance would seem to alienate the technical talent that they spend a fortune to recruit, train, and keep motivated. Not to mention make anyone who wants to move an easy target for competitors to poach.

Edit: Of course the IRS should care, and employers should want to accurately report domicile. His statement came across as the company being more worried about the exploitation of a corporate compensation loophole than adherence with tax law. Maybe they saw so much initial interest in relocating that they felt they had to pour some cold water on it.

<comment><USER78> The IRS cares where you're working. Facebook (or any employer) has to report it accurately.

<comment><USER79> Do they have to adjust salaries too or is that just saving money on compensation?

<comment><USER80> No government authority requires salaries to vary based on location.

<comment><USER81> Federal salaries have cost of living adjustments.

<comment><USER80> Absolutely, but that's them acting as an employer rather than as a regulation of other employer's choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> What a great way to make people rush to the cheapest and least convenient parts of the highest income areas, further displacing poor people.

<comment><USER83> I don't think high income individuals will try to save a few $ and live in a high crime neighborhood with no hipster 10$ coffee in sight.

<comment><USER84> High crime? I live in suburb 2 blocks from a forested area with trails in a nice area and I'm paying $700 a month in the SF/Bay Area.

The crime in the area I'm in is lower than most of the bay area because the area gets overlooked.

The downside is there are less high end food options, but still some pretty good options. Oh, and the allergies. I get allergies. Too much nature. But it's nice.

<comment><USER85> > I'm paying $700 a month in the SF/Bay Area.

What?? How far out are you considering the Bay Area? Is that for a room or a place to yourself?

<comment><USER84> East Bay. West side of the mountains inbwtween 880 and 680.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I live in a van. Does that mean I'm working around compensation adjustments?

<comment><USER87> What state(s _)|countr(y|ies)_ do you report as your location for tax purposes?

Working for a New York State-based employer is interesting in this regard. NY demands income tax when telework is not for the benefit of the employer. Depending on where you are working and what the tax laws are, you may be paying two states income tax.

[https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/memos/income/m06_5i.pdf](https://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/memos/income/m06_5i.pdf) (PDF)

<comment><USER88> > I live in a van.

>> What state(s)|countr(y|ies) do you report as your location for tax purposes?

I live in my employer's semi truck. I report my "home terminal" as my tax paying state, using my son's apartment in that state as a mailing address. I pay taxes in that state.

Other truckers maintain an actual physical residence of their own. But there are many like me. It's sort of like living in an RV, wrt taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> I'm currently living rent free at my parents place in Palo Alto. Can you imagine how much more Facebook would pay me than someone renting in a poorer neighborhood?

<comment><USER82> This is an extremely important point. Everyone will rush to the cheapest part of the most expensive areas.

<comment><USER90> How is East Palo Alto doing? Serious question, when I was still in SFBA I think the houses there were 2 times cheaper than across the highway and the joke was the weather forecast goes "Palo Alto sunny, East Palo Alto sunny, stray bullets". I was wondering if I should buy a rental house then (~2013)...

<comment><USER82> East Palo Alto is minimum $1mm homes now. Unaffordable to anyone not in tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> I have have worked as freelance contractor for most of my career. In my country 80% of decent IT people do this. We can demand higher income because our contracts only last 3 months so it's easy to lay us off when we are not needed (we have strong labor laws and employees are costly even on top of their salary). Due to this we can demand more salary too. My price goes up for short term prospect contracts, long distance of travel, I'm not particular interested in the project, ... In good times that works great but you better save some of that money for bad times.

I have build a good reputations so employers were ok with me working remote. So I could discount a bit as I didn't have to do long distance travel and because it was better for me. I also took the time to move to a lower cost of living country. Was nice, but the timezone was not that interesting.

Currently I don't work for my home country anymore. I work locally, apparently they pay well for my expertise here. Still I could edge out a few percentages more in my home country. But with the lower cost of living I still have more money in the bank at the end of the month.

If you can't do som form of paycheck arbitrage why would you move? Doesn't mean you need to have same salaries like you had before, you can take a small haircut. But just making the same as people locally? In my case that would be the salary I had when I just came out of school 23 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER92> SV companies are evaluating their employee's BATNA. And if more tech companies are going this route, everyone's BATNA is decreasing. They don't want to overpay an "employee's market". It isn't just about the value an employee brings to the company when working in SV or the middle of Nebraska. It's turning into a buyer's market for tech jobs.

Many people would be/will be/are pissed when a company eliminates remote positions and suddenly require employees to report to an office.

<comment><USER93> Possibly, but I suspect the pain would be less if they suddenly started making 200% more money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Seems like a weird take on what a salary is to me. I don't know if this is an American thing, and linked to the way your benefits work, like health cover. But I don't see my employer as having any reason to know where I'm located (beyond timezone issues for working hours), or what lifestyle I support with the money they pay me. My salary is based on what price the market will bare for the services I provide, what I do with that money isn't really any of their business.

<comment><USER95> Employers definitely need to know where you live to pay myriad of payroll taxes. if you lie, you commit tax fraud. It's true virtually anywhere in the world - including all countries in Europe, not just US thing. You can often skirt law if you are small enough though - nobody cares about random web designer on upwork.

<comment><USER96> That has nothing to do with the salary-question though. You could separate that completely (and many do via contractors: nobody asks a contractor where they live to set a price for their work): have one party in the company negotiate the salary, and have another deal with employee locations as required by law. Those two don't _need_ to have any contact.

<comment><USER9> So the taxes and accounting expenses show up on your salary statement as a negative line item?

<comment><USER96> Taxes would be one of the legal requirements, yes. They are required and have a valid interest (as in "who are you, and how can we reach you?") to know where you live. "So we can figure out how much we need to pay you" is not a valid interest in my view. You're not getting paid to live in a certain area, you're getting paid to provide X hours of your time each week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> If the scaling is proportional to cost of living I don't think much would change. Why would an employee move away from a large city with amenities, culture, and the career advancement opportunities that come from being in an office for a drop in salary? The only advantage I can see to moving is if you're starting a family and you don't want to live in the city.

Facebook is basically telling its employees that they want them to come into the office.

<comment><USER98> Given that the difference between cost of living between the most and least expensive places in the US is in the $40,000 range, and salary drops are occasionally upwards of double that, no, the scaling is not proportional.

For example, I live in Montana. Most COL adjustments say that I'd need about $40,000 more a year to maintain my current standard of living, yet equivalent positions get about $100k to $150k more a year. If one of those poor folks in SF making $250k a year now wants to move to Montana, they can easily expect to be making $150k or less after they move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Paying a salary based on someone's location is utter horseshit, unless they are an unskilled replaceable commodity. So at facebook, which is it?

It's as though people think that they are paid out of some kind of sense of paternalistic fairness. It's leverage, and if a recruiter can tell you "well the cost of living in your area is %30 lower, therefore your work is %30 less valuable" and you believe them, then sure, you are worth %30 less. If an HR person says, "our policy is we pay less in the area you live," you can respond with, "that's really interesting, my policy is GFY, because I work where I deliver value."

Employers do not pay for your time, they pay you for theirs, to shorten the period between their investment and the maximum yield it can return to them.

Facebook is no longer mainly solving growth problems, it is solving sustainability and optimization problems, and if you want do do that, you might as well go work at a bank. They haven't dashed the hope of paycheck arbitrage, they have just made a huge public commitment to inferior talent, and they deserve what they get.

<comment><USER100> > unskilled replaceable commodity

That's a weird way to look at "we pay you X because you'd work for someone else otherwise". There's a middle ground between that and "we pay you X because you create Y value for us".

Or in other words, if they have more people to choose from for a position (due to location being less of a limiting factor), they will be able to find someone accepting a lower wage. This is deeply unsurprising to me and has nothing to do with how skilled the labor is.

<comment><USER99> To frame it as companies paying people mainly as a way to impose opportunity cost on their competitors doesn't reflect the comment, normal economics, or growth. While remote work will flatten the market, it will flatten both sides of the market (employers v. staff).

When you invest in a business, you pay people to manage it and deliver a yield. If you invest in a business to prevent another business from succeeding, that doesn't make any sense unless you are a government or state captured industry.

If your skills and potential value is undifferentiated, sure, someone could undercut you, but if you have something of value to offer, price is much less of a deciding factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> This will accrue many negative comments here. I have to say that I can understand the reasoning behind this. I think it's fair. I would expect that they increase the salary if you move to a more expensive place.

<comment><USER102> Does the value you create for the company depend on location?

I don't think it's fair for businesses to extract more profit from me because I live in a cheaper area than my coworkers

<comment><USER103> Facebook is paying what it takes not to be outbid on hiring you. Currently that depends on supply and demand for the labor market you're in.

If everyone paid for value, Intel and AMD would be getting almost all of my salary.

<comment><USER104> People working remotely from Palo Alto are in the same labour pool as people working remotely from Eugene, Oregon... And the wierdo who lives in a goat farm in the middle of nowhere, Idaho.

The labour pool argument only makes sense if you commute into the office.

With remote work, everyone in the same country + timezone belongs to the same labour pool.

Companies that will treat the remote labour pool as uniform will trivially be able to outbid companies that underpay people in low COL areas, and overpay people in high COL areas. Why would I work for Gitlab, with its 0.66 COL multiplier for my town, and a 1.2 COL multiplier for NYC, when I could work for Foolab, which has an across-the-board 0.8 COL multiplier?

Given that situation, you'll quickly find that the only people working for Gitlab are people based in high COL areas. Instead of a money-saving technique, it becomes a money-spending technique, as they end up subsidizing employees relocating to the highest-COL areas.

<comment><USER105> At GitLab our rates are not based on COL but a market rate [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation/#competitive-rate)

So as people are able to earn more in remote locations our rates will go up with them.

I think most companies will end up paying local rates [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local- ra...](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/) so as more companies start hiring remotely the rates will go up gradually. I don't think think that there will be many Foolabs that pay one rate.

<comment><USER104> Market rate is, in reality, a close enough proxy for COL. I'm happy to use the two concepts interchangeably. My point still stands.

Any firm that will provide an equal across-the-board wage, that's significantly below market rate in NYC/Bay Area, but significantly above market rate in low COL areas will eat your lunch, in terms of wage competitiveness among the latter group. They won't hire anyone from the former group - but just being in the bay area does not make you a better engineer.

You'll be stuck paying expensive people in high COL areas, that are doing the same work as cheap people in lower COL areas.

<comment><USER105> Sorry, I made a mistake. I edited my comment to add "don't" to "I don't think think that there will be many Foolabs that pay one rate."

<comment><USER104> Why wouldn't there be, as more work goes remote?

Why compete on the high-billing end of the salary curve, when you can compete on the low-billing end of the salary curve, for the _exact same quality of talent_?

"We won't pay NYC wages, but we will pay the rest of you better wages than our competitors" is a great pitch to employees[1]... While being a net benefit to your payroll.

[1] Except for those living in NYC, of course. But you don't have to hire them.

<comment><USER105> That would restrict all your hiring to the lowest wage markets.

For some considerations also see [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total- rewards/compensation/#why-we-pay-local-rates)

<comment><USER104> > That would restrict all your hiring to the lowest wage markets.

The talent quality is the same.

Some of those reasons in the link are directly contradictory, some are nonsense, and others are inapplicable to other firms (But sure, they may well make sense for Gitlab.)

> A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better > deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.

May be a priority for Gitlab, but that is not a priority for any firms that required people to relocate their butts to Silicon Valley, or that never supported remote work prior to Covid.

> Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones > in low-wage countries with the same role.

Seriously? Do team members with more obligations, like children enrolled in private schools, ailing parents, or overleveraged mortgages also get the same amount of discretionary spending as their less-burdened coworkers? Isn't choosing which zip code to live in discretionary? And why does this even enter the picture, when, as you claim, your wages are set by _market_ , rather than by COL? The market doesn't care about employee discretionary income. There's nothing _fair_ about market wages, just like there's nothing fair about the weather. They just are.

> Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking > around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.

This is an incredibly employee-hostile reason. "We don't want to pay you too much, because imagine if you ever become unhappy." Good lord.

> If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would > increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results.

This, however, is a fantastic reason. See my previous post on why it makes sense for a remote firm to not pay _anyone_ NYC wages.

> If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract > and retain people in high-wage regions.

Why is this a goal of the firm? Scratch that - if that's a goal of the firm, that's fine. It's a weird goal, though. Companies typically don't go into business with the goal of attracting and retaining people in high-wage regions. They typically go into business to make a lot of money by solving problems for their customers. So, it's fine that this is a goal for Gitlab, but it certainly does not seem to be a goal of any company I've ever worked for, or am likely to work for.

You adjust wages up for employees hired in, say, non-NYC, who choose to move to NYC. How would doing so meet that goal? Is someone from Oklohoma who moved to NYC for a raise suddenly providing a diversity-of-skills-and-perspectives need that was unmet, prior to their geographic relocation? Are they now providing more value, that necessitates paying them more? If not, why was hiring in high-wage areas a goal in the first place?

<comment><USER103> > The talent quality is the same.

Before I relocated to the Bay Area, I had never gone on call. Never diagnosed a system by only looking at graphs of metrics it emitted. Never ran experiments against tiny percentages of production traffic. Never had to maintain consistency while failing over between regional datacenters. Being here did make me a stronger engineer, because companies here are earlier adopters with tougher problems, and the scale to make solving those problems worthwhile, and people who have been studying them. Maybe someday these experiences will be evenly distributed among remote workers everywhere, but right now they're concentrated in the strongest labor markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> While tying paychecks to cost of living may appear to be equitable at a surface level, in reality you end up rewarding some workers who insist on living in an expensive area and, in a sense, force those who are willing to live in less expensive areas to subsidize their colleagues' expensive lifestyles.

<comment><USER107> True but there's a balancing dynamic in play.

Living in a high CoL area is an advantage to you because you win when paying fixed expenses and world rates.

Living in a low CoL area gives you an advantage because you will cost the company less and are more likely to get the job.

Big brain play is to find a company that has a policy like this and move up in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Zuck can do whatever he thinks is "fair" but ultimately he has to deal with the realities of the labor market, which will change if remote works really catches on.

<comment><USER108> I'm sure Zuck doesn't know the concept of fairness and would laugh if someone would explain it to him. Words that Zuck understands are "efficient", "justifiable", "profitable".

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> > company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws

Serious question: can some tax-savvy individual explain what the relevant tax laws are? How much could a worker's tax residence affect the corporation's tax liability?

<comment><USER110> If you live most of your days in Missouri, you are a Missouri resident and you need to pay Missouri state income taxes, and maybe local income taxes as well. If you/your company is paying California income tax instead, that's a problem for both of you.

<comment><USER111> And, if you live in a country that does not tax resident foreigners whose entire income is foreign, you pay no income tax at all. The only countries I know that do this cheaply are Costa Rica and Uruguay (the Bahamas have expensive requirements).

One technique is to not live anywhere more than six months but be a residency in one of those countries.

I haven't done this because I have kids and pets.. but it seems pretty awesome if you make a competitive salary (not Facebook!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> > ...salaries will be adjusted to reflect the local cost of living.

So if the employee where to move to say Hong Kong where cost of living is higher will they also in turn increase wages? I think not.

If they keep a local address in some random apartment they never stay at but live elsewhere how would one check on that?

If you're willing to pay California taxes but live elsewhere I find it hard to see how they'd plan to enforce this. You could always argue you were temporarily traveling hence the local address you intended to return to and pay taxes at. Friends of mine do this, returning to the US every 6 months or so.

<comment><USER113> I read somewhere that they were talking about using the Facebook app itself to track remote employees whereabouts. Having trouble finding the reference right now though.

<comment><USER114> Employees who attempt to wiggle around those compensation adjustments will be subject to "severe ramifications," [Zuckerberg] said, as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws. Zuckerberg said Facebook will monitor adherence by checking where employees access its VPN. Facebook also uses its own apps' to track employee locations, according to CNBC [...]

(See [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu..). about SNI.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> Is it required by law so the employer pays the appropriate payroll tax and abides by local labor laws?

<comment><USER116> Yes, the location tracking (wether that be simply asking, or IP checks, etc) is mostly for regulatory compliance.

Salaries adjusted by region is pretty common. My employer does it. My wife's employer does it. Etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> If we're moving to a remote first world, long term it will flatten out salaries regardless of location, but short term, companies will stop hiring in expensive locations as much.

</comment><comment><USER118> > Facebook also uses its own apps' to track employee locations, according to > CNBC here one time using the data to find interns who failed to show up for > work.

Is this legal?

<comment><USER119> > Facebook also uses its own apps' to track employee locations

Is this irony?

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> Cost of living adjustments should only be allowed to be applied if the location is directed by the company.

</comment><comment><USER61> Are we going to see a exodus of high-income newly-remote workers to lower- income locations? This seems devastating to cities that have become dependent on the economic power these workers bring, but at the same time, it could bring new life to poorer areas of the country.

<comment><USER82> Nah it just means more gentrification in rich areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> There's another half of this phenomenon that seems to get ignored. Yes, allowing remote work greatly increases a company's supply of potential employees.

However, if more and more companies offer remote work as an option, that means employees now have a greatly increased supply of companies competing for them as well.

The software engineer living in Ohio who doesn't have the option/ability to move to a tech hub like SF or NYC would've typically had to make due with the small pool of positions available to them locally, meaning less leverage for salary.

If more companies allow remote however, they can now work at any of those, and the local companies will suddenly be forced to compete for talent.

</comment><comment><USER122> Does it work both ways? If so, here is a cheat sheet: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(nominal\)_per_capita)

Enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER123> I'm pretty sure this would be illegal in the UK, the job pays what it pays and where you live shouldn't be a concern of the employer (the exception being if they base you abroad and you get relocation taken into account).

<comment><USER123> Anther exception being if you're a public sector employee, there are certain accommodations made for living in London: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_weighting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_weighting)

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> >Employees who attempt to wiggle around those compensation adjustments will be subject to "severe ramifications," he said, as the company needs to account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.

>Zuckerberg said Facebook will monitor adherence by checking where employees access its VPN.

Do you think facebook employees respond well to these sorts of threats? Do you think I'll get a call from HR when I go visit my parents and log in from their house for a couple of days? I've got an idea, we can fit each of the facebook engineers with an ankle tracker like those guys on parole. Can't be too careful.

<comment><USER125> I work at FB, and yeah, I'm not too fussed by this. Lying about where you are working from goes under the "don't be a fucking idiot" category, and I don't have much sympathy for idiots making life harder for their colleagues. Re "threats", location tracking of company equipment is pretty much a necessity to handle regulatory issues w/ geographies under sanctions (want to be an even bigger idiot? lie about where you're working from, and move to crimea!). Beyond that, internal systems also react to your location to do things like change the timezone displayed in UIs, adjust notification preferences, etc. HR having access to that data would be entirely unsurprising - if you're trying to defraud your employer, this is already in your threat model.

<comment><USER126> I'm not a FB employee but this doesn't faze me either. I would expect to be fired by any employer upon the discovery that I was committing significant tax fraud on my employer's income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> Companies: We are paying you as little as we can get away with. Sorry that is just how capitalism works.

Employees: Sounds good. We will work as little as possible.

Companies: Wait a minute here. We are a family and a team. You need to support the team and the mission, even if that means working extra hours without extra pay.

<comment><USER108> Reminded me of one conversation long time ago:

\- We're offering you whopping 3.5%. How cool is that?

\- Do I hear it right that you want my contribution to your company be 3.5%?

\- Blank stare.

<comment><USER128> 3.5% of what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> it is absolutely precious to see software engineers wake up to the reality that they are, at the end of the day, plain ol' labor and are thus treated like labor when capital gets itself moving in a particular direction.

all of the attempts to rationalize this as fair or unfair are not useful - i'm guessing most SWEs will accept big salary cuts to work from wherever they want in the country. hell, a large portion of the SWE crowd is willing to distribute their labor /for free/ in the form of FLOSS, so i have no doubt that they will not hold the line in any sense if big tech starts implementing this in earnest. add to that fears of another tech recession (e.g. VC money drying up) and mean big tech SWE salary may drop a fair chunk.

anyway, on the plus side, there may be a large cadre of talent available on the cheap - seniors willing to work remotely on a more mission-oriented project from their bungalow in Ohio. so it's probably a great time to start a software company, or might be shortly.

<comment><USER113> I doubt middle america is going to benefit much from this. Once a company has bitten the remote workers bullet there are far cheaper alternatives that hiring a SWE in Ohio. There are huge numbers of highly capable devs right across the border in college towns in Mexico and farther south in multiple South American countries. All on US time zones and working at a fraction of the price of a US developer regardless of their location.

<comment><USER130> True. Why hire an American dev for remote work?

<comment><USER131> Timezones. It's hard enough scheduling meetings across multiple timezones (and boy are there a lot of meetings in FAANG), but going more than +/\- 6 is a huge pain (I meet with east asia and europe on a fairly regular basis).

<comment><USER132> ggp is specifically talking about Latin/South American companies, which have approximately the same time zones as the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> With so many jobs switching to remote work, what is to stop employees from simultaneously working multiple jobs at once? Not that they probably don't already, but it becomes even easier once many high paying jobs are remote. Plus, they can outsource a lot of it, so employees become mini software dev houses in their own right. Then one guy snaps up all the top positions because he is a 1000x developer due to his keen outsourcing sense. Etc.

<comment><USER108> Some non-compete agreements with binding-arbitrage by a employer-chosen arbiter. Employers will try to limit options for labor. Whether it's enforceable is another story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER134> Pretty insane, as if people were not doing same job regardless of where they choose to live. I understand you must offer competitive salary based on location when hiring for on site job, since workers and company is fighting against local competition, but at WFH you are literally fighting with everyone everywhere, so the salary should be fixed for everyone instead punishing more frugal people who choose to live in cheaper location.

</comment><comment><USER135> Seems like there's still MASSIVE room for arbitrage, just maybe not as massive as what people were hoping for. I.e. as long as you live in CA (which is not uniformly unaffordable) it'll be difficult for Zuck to argue that you should make a lot less. The price differential between "half an hour commute to the office" and "two hours one way" can be pretty staggering.

</comment><comment><USER136> I wish instead of trying to force us to live in one place because of geographic tax laws, we would talk about reforming geographic tax (and other) laws.

<comment><USER137> How would that possibly work without a world government?

<comment><USER136> My gut reaction was yes, world government.

But as someone else mentioned, these are problems amongst the US states even with a superceding government.

I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever have a government that is not geographically defined, and if so, what it might look like.

<comment><USER5> I really like having different states and cities be able to make different decisions about the tax/service balance... some states and cities can have higher taxes and provide more services, while others can have low taxes with few services. People are then free to decide which type of system they prefer to live in.

I would hate to have to have only one single balance decided for everyone in the world.

<comment><USER136> I strongly agree! I liie the variations and local differences. The local decision making power. I don't want it all to be the same.

I just think with the internet, while our bodies may be in one place, we interact with people from so many other places. For example, in this thread, I may be interacting with people from maybe 5 different US states and maybe 5 other countries. Which region's law applies? The one where I am physically present? The one where the HN owner is registered? The one where the HN server is located?

If an employee lives in Florida but works for Facebook remotely, a company based in California but maybe registered in Delaware, which state's labor laws apply to that employee?

Maybe these things are obvious to others and I'm just far behind on understanding legal jurisdiction, but I just think things aren't so clearly defined as "local" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER138> > The company, one of Silicon Valley's biggest employers, is giving U.S. > staffers who are approved to work remotely until Jan. 1, 2021 to update the > company on where they plan to base themselves, at which point their salaries > will be adjusted to reflect the local cost of living.

So it's about maintaining control over employees, not managing company expenses. You may be this successful, no more.

</comment><comment><USER139> But salaries aren't a living allowance for living near the office, they're what you negotiate with your employer as compensation for your work.

It's your business whether that's a lot or just enough for where you live.

If your company cuts your pay because you moved, even though you already worked remotely with the same working hours, you have some deficiencies in your relationship to work out.

</comment><comment><USER140> If facebook employees can't figure out some way to... I don't know, "Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates" they'd be able to organize and solve their problems.

There's an incredible power in "No", but most of us aren't French and know very little about how to handle kings.

</comment><comment><USER141> I wonder how that salary adjustment will actually play out. If they drop salaries to location average, they'll still have to compete with other companies (and not just local, many other remote jobs too).

You could work for Initech in your locale, or FANG remotely, and the salary would be the same. Would Initech have to raise their pay, or would the FANG jobs suddenly be too demanding for what they pay?

</comment><comment><USER142> > Employees who attempt to wiggle around those compensation adjustments will > be subject to "severe ramifications," he said, as the company needs to > account for employee locations to avoid violating tax laws.

I guess it depends on the state, but if you decide to not have any taxes withheld from your paycheck and just make quarterly tax payments, then is particular assertion true?

</comment><comment><USER143> Confused why remote location matters for pay (from a tax/legal standpoint, I understand it from a cost of living standpoint).

I work for a company that has remote workers all in different states across the US and they (developers) are all on one shared pay scale _without_ different pays per location and they just pay state taxes in whatever state they choose to live in.

</comment><comment><USER144> Bit of a bummer - This is precisely what I was doing pretty much my whole tech career:

First landed a job in California, turned it into a remote gig, and then all jobs thereafter were remote with either NYC or SF pay while I bummed around in very LCOL places like Bali.

Already moved on to other pastures, but a bit sad to know that fallback isn't there any longer. Ah well.

</comment><comment><USER145> The warm, sunny states with affordable housing and zero taxes will see an influx of educated, rich workers. States will need to cut taxes to keep up,"

Or maybe, just maybe, the zero tax states will need to raise taxes to support all the infrastructure costs that come with a growing population? High tax states aren't high tax just because...

</comment><comment><USER146> will be interesting to see the salary hacks employees come up with

<comment><USER147> How can/will the employer check whether the stated location of its emloyees is correct?

This is indeed a complex categorisation. What really defines my location in relation to remote work? Since I'm not bound to one physical location anymore I can split my time between different places. I might move every 6 months, what then?

<comment><USER32> State tax authorities have dealt with these questions for decades. There are well understood answers.

<comment><USER147> Still, working remotely hasn't been around for decades, is it all so straightforward? From an EU perspective I can assure you it's a deep mess.

People have a different, long-term relationship with the tax authorities because 'you're not going anywhere' and this makes it possible to settle at a later time. Also tax authorities take action in retrospect specially because things are difficult to prove on-the-spot, but Facebook will need to pay you next month and next year you might be working somewhere else. How will they be able avoid over/underpaying you?

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/stranded-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-12/stranded- super-rich-confront-tax-chaos-after-pandemic-lockdowns)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And so it begins, the downsizing of sillicon valley level salaries. Soon enough, they will be encouraging remote employees to move to inexpensive locations. Then they will start evaluating whether employees who come to office need to be there or can be encouraged to go remote.

</comment><comment><USER148> One way I've heard the company thinking explained is replacement cost. When a valuable employee gets a better offer a company suddenly may be willing to pay more for the same person, regardless of location. Now if they can replace that person without spending more then they will.

There is no loyalty.

</comment><comment><USER149> This is an issued that existed before COVID-19, more so now.

Here's the thing: what prevents someone from moving after taking a job that allows for "remote work"? And - more importantly - what would be the repercussions should someone be found out?

My guess is that the risk is worth the money.

</comment><comment><USER150> As someone who is considering asking for the first time to move out of my high CoL area to be fully remote, does anyone have any advice on what to expect and how to navigate said conversation? It's a bit nerve-wracking to think about and I want to be best prepared.

</comment><comment><USER151> To be fair, you should be getting a proper adjustment for working from home, because the cost of the office is now on you. You use your own chair, desk, computer, living space, etc. So a % of your rent monthly + few $k on start as a care package.

</comment><comment><USER152> I wonder what the granularity is? Can I move to a WA area with middling CoL and benefit from that Seattle-derived salary bump? If they take issue you could make the claim that you would normally commute to Seattle so you deserve the Seattle remote rate.

<comment><USER153> You can even rent a trailer in the Seattle area and hire lawyers to explain you how to game these rules in the most legal way. When 500k/year are at stake, employees will be very creative (and, afaik, they are hired precisely for their creativity and outstanding intelligence).

</comment></comment><comment><USER154> So basically employees outside the valley subsidize the rents of those that decide to stay. Who's gonna fall for this?

</comment><comment><USER155> Using their own app to track their employees' location sounds very dystopian, and potentially complicates the lives of employees without a clear location but who have established a residence for tax purposes.

</comment><comment><USER42> Until FB publishes how they'll set wages in different locations, discussion about the policy is pretty much useless. Since the actual policy is unknown.

Not that that has ever stopped an online debate before :)

</comment><comment><USER156> I'm struggling to see how this will promote remote work arrangements. Perhaps that's the exact intention? "If you think you can stop coming into the office to save time and money we'll cut your pay"?

</comment><comment><USER111> Location-based salaries is offensive and just plain wrong. Monitoring where employees login from, so the company can cut costs, seems typical of a company like Facebook.. but still makes me mad.

</comment><comment><USER157> I'm thinking why not move to Hawaii or a beach town 1hr - 2hr north or south of Santa Monica CA? Quality of life will improve vastly for those who can afford to do so.

</comment><comment><USER158> Ultimately if you're working for salary your pay is at the whim of your employer. If you want to make real money as a remote worker then switch to consulting.

</comment><comment><USER159> I'm surprised FB would need to ask workers to provide this information given FB usually knows more about an individual than the individual does.

</comment><comment><USER160> Locality Pay if standard. The federal government had been doing it for decades. Base pay plus locality adjustment based on where you live.

</comment><comment><USER161> It says quite a lot about Facebook's culture and employees that they felt the need to be so explicit and public about this issue. Normally, this would be talked about on an individual basis, or an internal HR memo once it was determined there was an actual issue.

At Facebook, they apparently are so worried about their employees lack of ethics as a whole, they felt the need to just immediately threaten the entire company. From what we all know of Zuckerberg and Facebook, this shouldn't be surprising, but it's amazing to see it confirmed.

</comment><comment><USER162> Facebook employees should talk to their union about this.

</comment><comment><USER163> "...because at the end of the day, do not pay the employee any more than absolutely necessary." \- Facebook Executive, probably.

</comment><comment><USER164> What if I work in San Jose but life in a van? Why do I get a high salary but someone in a house in Ohio gets a lower salary?

</comment><comment><USER76> I bet this is a thing a union would help with!

</comment><comment><USER154> Easy- don't work for facebook. I have worked inside and outside the valley and never had a comp change

</comment><comment><USER165> What's the problem? Leave Facebook and join another company that doesn't apply such stupid rules.

</comment><comment><USER166> Still win-win depending on how much they scale.

$50k/year in Thailand or Vietnam is way more luxurious than $200k in SF.

<comment><USER167> Agree with foreign destinations, but I assume any adjustment within the US will be a net negative for the employee since its mostly housing that impact COL.

A 1 bed in SF is $3,000 and say $1,500 in NC. That's $18,000 post-tax or $24,000 per-tax.

If FB lowers your salary from $200k to $175k (not a big jump), you're down a net $1,000 per-tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER168> How will this work for digital nomads? Same as wherever they pay state taxes, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER169> So, employees can move to rural, inexpensive parts of northeast California?

</comment><comment><USER170> So no working for Facebook and moving to Vietnam to live like a king then.

<comment><USER46> A nocturnal king, that has to work midnight to 8am to keep up with the rest of the team, if that's your thing :)

I lived like that for a month (working on a fully remote company, but the majority of the people were on US timezones). It's not for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER170> Does this apply to both managers and engineers?

</comment><comment><USER75> So there are going to be 20,000 engineers with their home in Malibu through a dead drop address and living almost anywhere else.

<comment><USER171> What bout the tracking of phones and laptops? You'd have to have your laptop with a remote desktop software or something like that.. or to spoof the GPS and make sure you connect to an anon wifi that is not sharing its position.

<comment><USER108> Someone who's paid 400k can afford to buy a bunch of phones and laptops, install whatever survelliance software on them and leave them at a rented trailer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER172> .

<comment><USER173> Some friends of mine who live in NYC are actually considering "renting" their addresses for remote employees who get shafted like this.

From my perspective, it's the same as registering your business address in Delaware to take advantage of their low tax rates.

<comment><USER174> Watch as companies start lobbying to make this illegal.

<comment><USER175> For tax purposes, that is already illegal. I.e. most (all?) states determine your residency based on where you actually sleep a majority of the year. My guess is that FB will base it on where you claim residency for tax purposes, so if you lie about it you're committing tax fraud.

<comment><USER172> .

<comment><USER32> No.

So many people seem to think they've come up with clever workarounds to tax laws. It's almost never true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER176> One of my pet peeves is misuse of the term arbitrage. It in no way applies here.

</comment><comment><USER177> Sarcasm on _Offshoring is only allowed for corporations, not for employees. What did those pesky peasants think?_ Sarcasm off

</comment><comment><USER172> stage of grief: denial

</comment><comment><USER178> Is there any transparency on how "a moderation downweight" works? It sounds like a useful feature, but what does it exactly do, and is there a public log for these types of things.

<comment><USER179> Here is a prior discussion of this issue by dang: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23286685)

<comment><USER180> A rather interesting reply.

I'm surprised dang seems to believe communities don't self-enforce overton- window-esque acceptable norms of speech and behavior.

<comment><USER181> I'm not an expert by any means, but I believe that at this point there is some evidence that online communities actually do exactly the opposite.

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01925121176921...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0192512117692136)

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits- contro...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits- controversial-ban-of-its-most-toxic-subreddits-actually-worked/)

<comment><USER180> Sometimes. As is often the case, there is evidence for both (banning/limiting, Chilling Effect, power pressure & scolding, etc), depending on the community.

In your second link, the topics were literally banned from the platform, rendering the question moot in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER182> That's SNI for the article, but not Significant New Discussion in the comments.

I always wondered though, why not let these flamebait discussion topics stay up as a Honeypot to keep the other threads cleaner?

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's an accurate model of how flamewars work. The fire analogy is better: if you let them burn they spread. Worse, they evoke worse from others, and if allowed to persist, they lower the norms of the community. I'd throw the broken windows theory into this metaphor soup also.

(I've detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23295278) to minimize the off-topicness at the top of the page.)

Btw you're largely right about the discussion not being significantly different, and (more importantly) about that being the key thing to look for. This is not widely understood! However, my posting that and pinning it to the top of the thread did lead to a wave of comments about the SNI, which was the intent. Maybe the discussion will shift a bit in that direction.

I like that acronym, partly because it really is a specialized concept that deserves a pseudotechnical name, but mostly because it's fun to say "snee". SNI SNI SNI.

<comment><USER183> It's also "Server Name Indication", the piece of TLS that allows a single IP to serve multiple hosts by having the client signal the name they're requesting, and also "Secure Networks, Incorporated", my first dev job. You could just call it "snee!" (I advise the exclamation point as well), whimsically, and let people just deal with the weird etymology.

It's a big site! You stand a decent chance at introducing a new word to the lexicon!

<comment><USER184> There's something to be said for casual, no-explanation, no exclamation point use of 'snee'. It suggests to readers they just happen to be unfamiliar with this common internet term like the sort of people people who don't know 'scrome' is 'chat backscroll you don't intend to read'.

<comment><USER185> [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snee](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=snee)

<comment><USER183> That's so dumb; the funniest phoneme in the word "sneeze" is the one with the "z" sound. It should obviously be "peeze".

Another reason to just use "snee" here, to reclaim the word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER186> Who on earth actually wants to work for a company like this?

<comment><USER126> A company that obeys tax law?

I'm not being facetious. Companies face significant legal liability for not paying taxes correctly, and they have to ensure that all applicable federal, state, and local taxes are correctly being withheld and reported for their employees. They can't just look the other way and blindly allow employees to evade tens of thousands in SALT taxes annually.

<comment><USER164> That's a straw man. The real question is why do they have to lower your salary if you move? Is your work less valuable?

<comment><USER187> I agree. This type of action is signalling the company doesn't actually pay you for your knowledge or output. It pisses me off. Flip the argument around; if FB hired you to work remotely from Montana, then you decided to move to San Francisco, would they INCREASE your pay based on COL?

If the answer is "no, of course not", then why is it okay for them (or any company) to pay you less, if you move to a lower COL area? It absolutely isn't fair, and companies want to eat their cake and have it too.

<comment><USER188> > if FB hired you to work remotely from Montana, then you decided to move to > San Francisco, would they INCREASE your pay based on COL?

If you actually transfer to an SF team then yes, most large, multi office companies would adjust your pay to the SF bracket. If course that requires that an SF team has headcount and wants you. You can't just move because you feel like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER189> This is wage discrimination. The problem is that it is, so far, legal discrimination.

If an employee gets married, is that a legal reason to cut their salary? No.

If an employee has a child, is that a legal reason to cut their salary? No.

If an employee comes out as gay, or updates their gender identity, is that a legal reason to cut their salary? No.

The first two could logically be tied to decreases in productivity, but even if it _did_ decrease a workers productivity you can't cut their salary. It's illegal.

So what's the real problem here? Taxes.

Let's say that we correctly argue that the product of ones output should be compensated at the agreed upon rate and that if efficiencies of production are found by the producer they are under no obligation to 1. Disclose that fact or 2. Pass on savings to their customer.

Despite the fact that this is logically and economically sound the _reality_ is that legislators will balk at legislation which would make their state less economically attractive. Convincing them is not an impossible task, but it's a hard one.

The principle of "equal pay for equal work" is not naturally embraced by industry. Almost any distinguishing characteristic that could be used as an excuse to reduce wages has been used to do so. Laws championed by labor movements have been the only way to curb the natural tendencies of companies.

So is it normal and natural for a capitalist CEO to take this position? Yes. The moral and logical ramifications have little power. It's only when those ramifications are instantiated by law advocated for by impacted populations that we should expect change.

<comment><USER190> If you think this is illegitimate wage discrimination I have a question for you, if you order coffee in bumfuck idaho, do you pay the barrista, who does the same work as one in Palo Alto, the same price for their coffee?

<comment><USER189> This is not a valid analogy. There are two decisions

1\. Do I pay the price asked?

If I'm in Idaho and I want coffee and they are asking for Bay Area Starbucks prices the answer is "Yes." But that's because I'm used to it, and its not the point. The question is:

2\. If the store buys a machine that decreases their costs by 20% am I entitled to demand a lower price?

No.

<comment><USER190> Entitlement has nothing to do with it. If there is a machine that lowers the costs of production by 20% the price _will drop_ , because there's now an opportunity for competition to drive down the cost of coffee. That's how things become more affordable in a market economy.

And this is the actual point of the analogy. When people can suddenly work from locations that have lower costs of living, then the cost of labour drops, that is to say more people are willing to do the same work for lower wages than before. That means that firms can purchase that labour more cheaply.

Nobody is entitled to anything here, the price discrimination is simply the result of the market correctly allocating resources, and that's a good thing, because it really does not make much sense to hand surplus profits to starbucks or to tech workers.

One very simple reason why the latter is really bad, if a lot of tech workers suddenly sit in regions with lower costs of living their high salaries will rise the costs of living, creating a huge problem for all the people in the regional economy who don't work at Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER191> Facebook is afraid of a Facebook Boise office , Facebook Salt Lake City office, Facebook Houston office, etc. Their office locations are based on the political preferences of their board members and management. With no offices, they can't control the political makeup of the company.

<comment><USER128> Salt Lake City and Boise are pretty liberal and both vote blue. Houston is overall pretty split, but has voted for a Democrat mayor for more than 30 years.

What "political preferences" are you suggesting Facebook is afraid of from that focuses on the 3 named regions?

<comment><USER191> Facebook managers, who a large portion of are foreign nationals, prefer foreign nationals manage US offices. US citizens might not be as in favor of that and probably prefer US nationals manage US offices.

<comment><USER128> That seems like a pretty outrageous claim. Do you have any evidence to support that? My friend works for FB Seattle and the "site manager" is definitely a white US citizen. What benefit would FB have from having "foreign nationals" run domestic offices?

I'm trying to interpret your comment as anything but xenophobic, but I'm having a really tough time doing so.

<comment><USER191> Just go look at your Seattle org chart. I never said there was a "benefit," just that foreign national managers prefer that foreign national managers manage US offices and that is why they fear offices in areas that don't adhere to this globalist orthodoxy that is in the bay area and Seattle. That should be self evident.

<comment><USER192> This is nonsense.

There is no "Seattle org chart." A given office may have a lead, but only small percentage of people in the office will report to the lead. In some cases the lead isn't even a manager.

Personally, across four teams and six managers, only one has been a non- citizen and he was a permanent resident from an anglosphere country. Looking around, pick a random manager and you'll probably find a white guy from the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Typography-Oriented Web Design - <AUTHOR> https://www.vividmotion.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I've recently rebuilt my own website, mainly to showcase my general skill level in search of new projects and opportunities.

I'm currently working on creating the rest of the pages and integrating it into Contentful for easier management.

I'd love to hear your feedback, the last time I did this on HN,I got some pretty good insights from a few users.

<comment><USER2> On my phone, touching the screen to scroll activates the distortion effect behind the links to your clients. I find it distracting, and makes reading the words even harder, as they are already white on a light photo.

I think the effect only really works well on the 'Switch' link, personally.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the feedback, I've noticed that as well just now.

I still like the effect, but I might have to create individual assets for each Case Study, when I add all my projects so they work well together.</comment></comment></comment>


Internet Society Statement on Internet Blocking Measures in Catalonia, Spain - <AUTHOR> https://www.internetsociety.org/news/statements/2017/internet-society-statement-internet-blocking-measures-catalonia-spain/ <comment><USER2> They mention "measures restricting free and open access to the Internet", which is a gross exaggeration.

The TLD .cat has "over 100 thousand active domain names" [1], but Spanish judges have decreed the shutdown of 10 specific domains [2].

Nobody's restricting "free and open access to the Internet" in Catalonia or elsewhere in Spain; it is very confusing (or manipulative) to say so.

[1] [https://www.internetnews.me/2017/09/20/dotcat-registry- offic...](https://www.internetnews.me/2017/09/20/dotcat-registry-offices- raided-spanish-police/)

[2] [http://www.elnacional.cat/es/politica/juez-proveedoras- bloqu...](http://www.elnacional.cat/es/politica/juez-proveedoras- bloquear-10-webs-referendum_192105_102.html)</comment>


Offshore wind farms become magnets for hungry seals - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/07/offshore-wind-farms-become-magnets-hungry-seals

<comment><AUTHOR> Found this an interesting side effect of the renewable energy technology.

<comment><USER2> Indeed. I'm not surprised. A colleague of mine found that oil production platforms near the coast likely increase the retention of juvenile fish, adding habitat and thus increasing fish stock. The result was unpopular with some environmentalists. Seems that these seals seem to have discovered the same thing.</comment></comment>