Well, I disagree with that, and if I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws to make it unprofitable for people to buy out housing and have it sit empty.
Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior. Just as GP mentioned - vacancy tax.
That's how the country works. It all depends on who has more people in agreement, and can make more of a rallying cry (and has moneyed interests on their side).
(I'm also in favor of land value tax as opposed to property tax to encourage productive use of land. And severely relaxing zoning restrictions)
> I can get enough people to agree with me, we can pass laws
while that's true in this case of vacancy laws, it is not a universally applicable rule to be followed blindly.
Just because a large number of people agreed with a certain set of actions, doesn't mean those set of actions are good to undertake for society. Look at how venezuela got to the place they did, via democratic elections. The a majority of the people wanted the gov't handouts, and wanted nationalization of private property by force.
Correct, because you live in a society and the society imposes some obligations and constraints on you, as all societies have done since the dawn of humanity.
Honest question - are you writing these comments from like the depth of the Amazon jungle where laws don't apply? Because pretty much any civilized country in the world has laws that govern what you can or cannot do with your own private property, even the bastion of "freedom" that is US has loads of regulations about private property. If you live in a place like that and still think that you have some absolute control over actually yours property, then sadly, you are very mistaken.
So yes, I think we know where we stand now, except that it's not where you think it is.
You will still have to pay capital gains tax in $ once you pay for something in Bitcoin though (assuming that your bitcoin has appreciated versus the $)
There is no good way to measure the value generated by an individual engineer in most cases (in large enough companies), only the total/average value produced by a group of engineers - and even then, it's a first order approximation. Hence, the market is not efficient.
Yes, and the cost of labor in that case is not everyone getting an SF salary, it's everyone getting a much lower (but equal) salary. Part of the reason that SF salaries still exist is that the US has a very tough immigration system and artificially restricts the number of people who can claim one of those SF salaries (H1B quotas etc). Same thing for doctors (foreign doctors mostly can't practice medicine in U.S.), lawyers, etc.
Believe me, there are Russian programmers earning 1/3 of a U.S. engineering salary that are much more technically competent - the only thing stopping them from capturing the true "value of their work" is that damn market (and U.S. immigration system...)
The SF salary is high because of high demand and low supply (of competent engineers). If you move remote, you increase the supply of competent engineers (there are likely people in middle-of-nowhere that are just as good as SF engineers but don't want to move because of other reasons - hence market inefficiency). Since you're increasing supply with the same demand, now the SF salary is going to drop (and establish a new market clearing price with the new supply & demand dynamics).
I think in the long run the SF salary (for the average developer) will be a historical anomaly in a place and time - kind of like the California Gold Rush in the 19th century.
(If your argument boils down to SF having more strictly more competent engineers than other places and that being the cause of the pay discrepancy, I strongly disagree)
Google has problems money can't solve as a company. I personally won't, and I coach juniors to stay away from many of the big names purely because of their toxic influence in the tech sector. They are of course free to do as they like, but I have an alright success rate with getting people to pass on those jobs to do something somewhat more constructive elsewhere.
It's like Fintech; a black hole of talent away from actually important work that needs to be done. You get that much capital condensed under one company, and it starts to channel itself against overall societal interests as it seeks to ensure it's own survival distributed across jurisdictions, fueled more by ignoramt adherence to past performance predicts future results amongst the capital management class implicitly picking winners through retarded capital overvaluations through overly aggressive M&A's and purging of the competitive landscape.
Have you missed out on the last 50 years of history of American labor and union busting? Programmers are not special snowflakes in this regard, just currently in a very friendly market environment, but don't think for a moment that the people in charge wouldn't do the same thing if they had the option to (which remote work certainly helps with).
I'm painfully aware. Programmers aren't special snowflakes but they have traditionally been well off in this regard. My worry is that if they are being targetted by these kinds of decisions that it legitimises efforts to increase actions against who don't traditionally have as much social mobility.
Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it wants.
If a recession caused Google to run out of money, the pay cuts could be justified much better, but that's not the situation at hand.
I think the ethics (and legality?) of arbitrary pay cuts go hand in hand with arbitrary firings: cutting a salary to $1 is essentially the same as a firing. Legality then would logically depend on whether the employment contract is under a state jurisdiction with at-will employment or if there is a requirement of a just cause.
> Except that a Google employee moving to someplace with a weaker economy has not reduced their leverage. These are people who have the power to simply move back.
A Google employee that moves away both changes the pool of options that employee has (only companies that offer remote or local ones in his new place of living - versus companies in (SF, NY, whatever)), and the alternative options that the employer has (he is now being compared against a much larger pool of people who can work remotely). That is indeed decreasing leverage.
> Again, not true. That employee can simply... move. You've ignored that.
Well, yes, but we're arguing that they have the same leverage in their new place of residence as they did before the move. If they have to move back in order to exercise that leverage, their leverage is actually location-based, and they will have to choose between their old salary and old location and new salary and new location.
Yes, and they exercise their leverage by applying to those SF or NYC companies from wherever they are. If they can exercise that leverage from anywhere, then how is that not having leverage?
These companies are used to this sort of thing. Relocation costs are nothing compared to the cost of hiring. There is effectively no friction on the company's part. Yes, the employee needs to be willing to go through the process of moving, but, provided they're willing to pay those costs, their leverage in the situation is unchanged.
Those frictional costs (of moving) are the whole problem. SF salaries are where they are at because of those frictional costs (people choosing not to move to SF, whether by personal choice or by way of visa restrictions etc).
Yes, there is a subset of people that have disproportionate leverage no matter where they are at (by virtue of being really really good devs). But that represents only a minority of SF devs.
That's just the thing. Companies know that, at any given point in time, many people will be unwilling to pay those costs.
A family of four enjoying a large house in some suburb for a reasonable price may find the idea of living in a 2br apartment in SF, or paying a truly exorbitant price for a single family home in the bay area, unappealing.
I keep hearing the trope of "people are paid the value of their work" come up, and it's completely false and absurd. People are paid the market clearing price (a.k.a. better or equal to the alternatives, given some reasonable amount of searching effort).
Yes, this means there are many engineers in SF that are actually/currently paid MORE than they would be in an efficient market (and there are many software developers in developing countries that are paid LESS than they would be in an efficient market). Right now there's enough money going around that nobody cares about market efficiency, but if we have an actual, deep recession in the sector, I expect all the music to stop (and the efficiency of the developer market to go up on the whole).
In software we can pretend to ignore these discrepancies, but it becomes patently obvious if you've ever dealt with international companies who discriminate based on nationality for people doing the exact same job (and not in software, where you can argue talent - literally the exact same job - two performers doing the same act in the same show. I've seen pay discrepancies of up to 2.5X or more for an American Expat in Hong Kong and a worker from the Philippines, for example). It's all about what your individual alternatives are.
You don't get it. This is actually the free market in action. People love to talk about the virtues of the free market, until they actually get one.
In a normal labor market, companies can pay based on geographic concerns because employees aren't mobile. In the case of engineers, designers, etc., these people can work from anywhere, including San Francisco. So, they always have the opportunity to make SF wages by working in SF.
But, the thing is, none of this changes when these same people move to Bumfuck Nowhere. The same companies are still competing for the same employees, who are capable of earning the same wages they were before. And, like it or not, SF is the place where a software engineer can maximize their net income after expenses. So, guess what? Companies in Bumfuck are now competing with companies in SF.
Remote work doesn't enable a truly free labor market, but it does significantly free things up.
Regarding people not being paid what they are worth, I know that. It's also bullshit, but that's another comment. And, as I said in another comment, you know that, I know that, and Google knows that, but there are lots of people out there who either don't know that, or just refuse to acknowledge it to themselves. And, if you're Google, you really don't want to open those peoples' eyes, because it reduces the information asymmetry about the process that you exploit in order to get people to work for less than they're worth.
> In the case of engineers, designers, etc., these people can work from anywhere, including San Francisco.
They can also work in Bangladesh. And unless you are thinking of standardizing pay for software engineers globally in any reasonable timeframe, this argument does not hold up.
What is an engineer worth? I have offshored to skilled developers at rates 1/5th the US rate, and they can do the same work.
The actual answer according to the free market would be to take every engineer of equivalent skill, globally, and find the average. That is what a software engineer is worth according to the market all of us are in.
Uh, I'm not an economist, but what you said doesn't make much sense to me -- isn't "the market clearing price" effectively the same as "people are paid the value of their work"? If the value that a software engineer can potentially produce is lower, then wouldn't the corresponding market clearing price would simply be lower for that person?
Maybe in a world where every software engineer is genetically engineered to have the same output then what you said about market efficiency would make sense, but this isn't that world.
The thing you said about price discrimination is not even related to what the OP said, and you simplified the problem a lot by reducing the problem simple monetary terms. The example you gave about expats is particularly flawed, because it's not unusual that expats are paid more for other values that they bring outside of the work they perform (for instance, academic institutions think of that as prestige in some Asian countries). We were all born unequal, if the market were so efficient there wouldn't be so many unjust things happening around the world.
No, since there is no good way to measure how much a person's individual work is worth (in software engineering). There are ways to do that in finance and sales - that's why the pay bands for those fields are so much wider.
I think the reality is the best engineers are probably worth on the order of multiple millions per year or more (assuming they are working at a place with leverage), and the average engineer is probably worth much less than they are making now. That's the power law we see with YouTube creators, for example. If people had reliable ways of identifying who is actually a really high performer, the pay bands might look more like that. The pay smoothing (since it's hard to make an accurate measurement of efficiency) actually benefits the average engineer over the super high performers.
The innocent until proven guilty only applies in criminal court, not in civil court by the way.
Personal privacy is good, but there are some societal things that should supersede the right to personal privacy in my opinion - I don't think any single right should be absolute.
Whenever two people have conflicting absolute rights, who's right is more absolute?
That's why rights are always relative. The Bill of Rights is a good starting place, but any law should pass the common sense/reasonableness standard - we already make many [reasonable, common-sense] exceptions to the right to free speech (i.e. shouting Fire! in a theatre for a cliche example, or incitement to violence)
I believe that if the leak is proven to be in the public interest, no one should go to jail (but that it should be the rare exception).
I also don't believe Snowden deserves to be in jail (or rather that he should be pardoned). Sometimes you can't fix things without breaking the law - everyone does it on a daily basis with few consequences (jaywalking, etc). Sometimes it has to be done on a larger scale in order to shed light on injustices - otherwise the power of the few will prevail over the power of the many.
Also known as passing laws to impose a penalty on unwanted behavior. Just as GP mentioned - vacancy tax.
That's how the country works. It all depends on who has more people in agreement, and can make more of a rallying cry (and has moneyed interests on their side).
(I'm also in favor of land value tax as opposed to property tax to encourage productive use of land. And severely relaxing zoning restrictions)