[drubio]

Conflating the three is easy, because instead of paying for delivered value, the company is doing arbitrage on location ( like it could do with gender, race or anything else)

All companies will take advantage of maximizing their profit or reducing cost, but it's a slippery slope once a subjective metric to determine value is used.

I for one live in a "low" CoL, but my AWS bill is just the same as a person in NY, SF or Geneva, should I also expect a discount because "my income is lower"? Or is it only fair to be billed equally, because the value all of us get is the.same ?

Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he be paid any less ? Why ?

[Aurornis]

> because instead of paying for delivered value,

This argument falls apart when you consider that some projects have zero or negative value. Developers who work on these projects still get paid and we obviously don’t have to write a check when we make a mistake that costs the company money. Nobody actually likes “delivered value” compensation except under hypothetical circumstances where they imagine it can only increase their pay.

The hiring market is a market. Supply and demand drives compensation.

Delivered value isn’t one of those forces driving supply and demand. It sets the maximum an employer can pay someone and still get an ROI, but that’s it.

> Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he be paid any less ? Why ?

Because it’s a job market and you’re bidding for candidates against their other options.

If you’re house shopping and you find an identical 3 bed, 3000 sq. ft. house in all of those markets, would you expect to bid the same for it? Of course not.

The sooner we accept the realities of job markets and supply and demand, the sooner this all makes sense.

[paulddraper]

> The hiring market is a market.

Yes, and when you are hiring remote, the market is "everywhere."

No need to divide that market up by people living in a city, people owning a sports car, people with large amount of medical debts, etc.

[adolph]

> This argument falls apart when you consider that some projects have zero or negative value.

Null hypothesis would be that on average the null/negative value projects would be evenly distributed.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> This argument falls apart when you consider that some projects have zero or negative value.

...Then why is the company running that project?

[HDThoreaun]

> instead of paying for delivered value

Here's your mistake. Companies have never and will never pay for delivered value. They pay the least they can to get an acceptable candidate. The difference is important, and the mentality that companies are paying for delivered value rather than the minimum acceptable amount leads to these mistaken conclusions often.

As for why? Because their goal is to maximize profit of course. Why pay more when less will do? The overseas dev should be paid less because their opportunity costs are much lower, so they accept a lower wage.