Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post pledging to combat misinformation about COVID-19 circulating on Facebook.
“We’ve taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading,” Zuckerberg wrote.
But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.
This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook.
Using the same tool, The Markup boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram, the Facebook-owned platform that is incredibly popular with Americans under 30. The ad was approved in minutes.
Even if FB stamped down on these people organizing (which they absolutely should), they'd still find a way to organize. FB just makes it easier for them.
Software is ubiquitous, and TCP/IP was designed to route around censorship and network obstruction/damage. You just end up playing domain whack-a-mole, even if you're a government agency.
This bad penny of an argument always pops up whenever we discuss the issue of white supremacists organizing, and it needs to get flattened. Yes, they'd find a way to organize - that doesn't mean we should make it easy for them. Deplatforming works - while it will never be a perfect solution, it doesn't have to be, as making it so that they can't easily organize in the open makes it harder for them to recruit and weakens their communities by making it harder to reform them after each breakup (because as it turns out, building communities whether online or off is actual work.) Too many techies discount social and emotional labor and its costs, and how network effects impact communities.
Because corporations getting to decide what is and is not acceptable civic organization definitely won't go wrong. *eyeroll*
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Even if FB stamped down on these people organizing (which they absolutely should), they'd still find a way to organize. FB just makes it easier for them.
Software is ubiquitous, and TCP/IP was designed to route around censorship and network obstruction/damage. You just end up playing domain whack-a-mole, even if you're a government agency.
This bad penny of an argument always pops up whenever we discuss the issue of white supremacists organizing, and it needs to get flattened. Yes, they'd find a way to organize - that doesn't mean we should make it easy for them. Deplatforming works - while it will never be a perfect solution, it doesn't have to be, as making it so that they can't easily organize in the open makes it harder for them to recruit and weakens their communities by making it harder to reform them after each breakup (because as it turns out, building communities whether online or off is actual work.) Too many techies discount social and emotional labor and its costs, and how network effects impact communities.
Because corporations getting to decide what is and is not acceptable civic organization definitely won't go wrong. *eyeroll*
Was there this much pushback when they deplatformed all that radical islamic terrorism?
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Even if FB stamped down on these people organizing (which they absolutely should), they'd still find a way to organize. FB just makes it easier for them.
Software is ubiquitous, and TCP/IP was designed to route around censorship and network obstruction/damage. You just end up playing domain whack-a-mole, even if you're a government agency.
This bad penny of an argument always pops up whenever we discuss the issue of white supremacists organizing, and it needs to get flattened. Yes, they'd find a way to organize - that doesn't mean we should make it easy for them. Deplatforming works - while it will never be a perfect solution, it doesn't have to be, as making it so that they can't easily organize in the open makes it harder for them to recruit and weakens their communities by making it harder to reform them after each breakup (because as it turns out, building communities whether online or off is actual work.) Too many techies discount social and emotional labor and its costs, and how network effects impact communities.
Because corporations getting to decide what is and is not acceptable civic organization definitely won't go wrong. *eyeroll*
One, these corporations are already doing this, so that boat has sailed.
Two - and this is the more important point - this is just a variation on the libertarian bad penny argument of "regulation can be done badly, thus we should not engage in regulation." Just because there is a potential for negative effects does not mean that some endpoint should not be pursued - it means that they should be pursued with care to prevent those negative effects. This sort of argument is why free speech "absolutism" is incoherent - a position of "you should accept abuse because otherwise there's a potential for negative effects" in the long run becomes cheerleading for Omleas.
Even if FB stamped down on these people organizing (which they absolutely should), they'd still find a way to organize. FB just makes it easier for them.
Software is ubiquitous, and TCP/IP was designed to route around censorship and network obstruction/damage. You just end up playing domain whack-a-mole, even if you're a government agency.
This bad penny of an argument always pops up whenever we discuss the issue of white supremacists organizing, and it needs to get flattened. Yes, they'd find a way to organize - that doesn't mean we should make it easy for them. Deplatforming works - while it will never be a perfect solution, it doesn't have to be, as making it so that they can't easily organize in the open makes it harder for them to recruit and weakens their communities by making it harder to reform them after each breakup (because as it turns out, building communities whether online or off is actual work.) Too many techies discount social and emotional labor and its costs, and how network effects impact communities.
Because corporations getting to decide what is and is not acceptable civic organization definitely won't go wrong. *eyeroll*
Was there this much pushback when they deplatformed all that radical islamic terrorism?
While not quite on this scale, there was some pushback - there's a story where previous Twitter head Dick Costolo had to explain to senior staff why allowing beheading videos was a bad idea:
Weeks later, when a rash of beheading videos appeared, Costolo gave similar takedown orders, causing Twitter’s free speech advocates, Gabriel Stricker and Vijaya Gadde, to call an emergency policy meeting.
Inside the meeting, attended by Costolo, Stricker, Gadde, and product head Kevin Weil (now Instagram’s product lead) and first reported by BuzzFeed News, tensions rose as Costolo’s desire to build a more palatable network that was marketable and ultimately attractive to new users clashed with Stricker and Gadde’s desire for radically free expression.
“You really think we should have videos of people being murdered?” someone who attended the meeting recalls Costolo arguing, while Stricker reportedly compared Costolo’s takedown of undesirable content to deleting the Zapruder film after objections from the Kennedy family. Ultimately, the meeting ended with the group deciding to carve out policy exceptions to keep up grisly content for newsworthiness, according to one person present. Though Stricker and Gadde won, one source described a frustrated Costolo leaving in disagreement. “I think if you guys have your way the only people using Twitter will be ISIS and the ACLU,” Costolo said, according to this person.
The problem isn't humans, it's privilege. There's a certain segment of society that doesn't take online abuse seriously because they're never going to be the main target of said abuse. Unsurprisingly, it's this segment that also is in control of Silicon Valley.
Giphy isn’t a platform in quite the same way that two of Facebook’s biggest prior acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp, are. But Facebook has a habit of gobbling up any rival service that becomes sizable enough to compete with its own or be worth absorbing wholesale into the Facebook blob—in this case, Giphy’s plugins for everything from Twitter and Signal to Slack and Outlook. A Giphy spokesperson told Gizmodo via email that the company won’t disclose the terms of the deal, but that Giphy will be integrated under the Instagram brand.
According to a Facebook blog post announcing the acquisition, it was a natural fit as Facebook already integrates the Giphy API all across its platforms.
Giphy isn’t a platform in quite the same way that two of Facebook’s biggest prior acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp, are. But Facebook has a habit of gobbling up any rival service that becomes sizable enough to compete with its own or be worth absorbing wholesale into the Facebook blob—in this case, Giphy’s plugins for everything from Twitter and Signal to Slack and Outlook. A Giphy spokesperson told Gizmodo via email that the company won’t disclose the terms of the deal, but that Giphy will be integrated under the Instagram brand.
According to a Facebook blog post announcing the acquisition, it was a natural fit as Facebook already integrates the Giphy API all across its platforms.
A more boring answer to this is gif capability has become widely available on nearly every messaging service, but not Instagram for some reason...until recently, and it was complete trash. This seems like a real lazy way for a GIGANTIC company that has like 3 products to fix a problem with one of them.
HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Giphy draws attention. The Facebook empire thrives on attention. Anything to further bring the totality of digital attention under their control will be purchased. Google is doing the same thing with different services, as is Tencent.
Punishing employees for moving from the Bay Area (which we need them to do for a number of reasons) - that's a smart move.
Ha ha ha, no fuck you I don't lose salary because of where I live you shit heads. I cost what I cost cause I've been slaving in the tech mines since I was 13. Now fuck you, pay me.
Local cost of living absolutely does factor into salary amounts. Normally that's just based on the location of the business but how to handle it when moving to completely remote work seems like a difficult question.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Local cost of living absolutely does factor into salary amounts. Normally that's just based on the location of the business but how to handle it when moving to completely remote work seems like a difficult question.
The problem is twofold:
One, Silicon Valley has created an image of a meritocracy, and the salaries are part of that. Acknowledging that COL is a factor in those salaries goes against that.
Two, acknowledging that salaries are high because of Bay Area COL brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions about how the Bay Area COL has been an arms race.
Local cost of living absolutely does factor into salary amounts. Normally that's just based on the location of the business but how to handle it when moving to completely remote work seems like a difficult question.
I'm a mercenary, a high class code whore as it were, my price doesn't change depending on where you bring me. I got a fuckin price, you pay me, or you don't get the goods.
Local cost of living absolutely does factor into salary amounts. Normally that's just based on the location of the business but how to handle it when moving to completely remote work seems like a difficult question.
True but dropping peoples salaries is a great way to lose a lot of workers. If you are trying to get into a company and get that offer you may accept it but actually having your current salary lowered always feels like a slap in the face and tends to get people looking elsewhere.
That's perfectly normal and also current practice though. If you were to change offices your comp would change even though it's not like your overall value has changed because of different employment markets
When I moved from the bay back to Canada I "lost" $15k/yr or so, though since I didn't have to pay bay area living costs any more I ended up actually making a little bit more
the concept of COL-adjusted salaries isn't inherently flawed, but this execution almost certainly is...
Like, a lot of government jobs have public salary bands and public locale-based COL adjustments, and those COLAs are reviewed and updated, people's salary will increase automatically if their area goes up, etc etc.
My guess is basically none of that is true for Facebook employees. Salaries individually negotiated and things like yearly COLAs not even on the radar. So it's pretty crass to suddenly invoke COL when it means you get to cut salaries.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
the concept of COL-adjusted salaries isn't inherently flawed, but this execution almost certainly is...
Like, a lot of government jobs have public salary bands and public locale-based COL adjustments, and those COLAs are reviewed and updated, people's salary will increase automatically if their area goes up, etc etc.
My guess is basically none of that is true for Facebook employees. Salaries individually negotiated and things like yearly COLAs not even on the radar. So it's pretty crass to suddenly invoke COL when it means you get to cut salaries.
I don't know what FB is like but here at OtherBigTechCo we do have bands for locations and an explicit acknowledgement of a COL factor in pay
the concept of COL-adjusted salaries isn't inherently flawed, but this execution almost certainly is...
Like, a lot of government jobs have public salary bands and public locale-based COL adjustments, and those COLAs are reviewed and updated, people's salary will increase automatically if their area goes up, etc etc.
My guess is basically none of that is true for Facebook employees. Salaries individually negotiated and things like yearly COLAs not even on the radar. So it's pretty crass to suddenly invoke COL when it means you get to cut salaries.
I don't know what FB is like but here at OtherBigTechCo we do have bands for locations and an explicit acknowledgement of a COL factor in pay
Do you get a raise if you have a kid? I'm gonna assume not. Can you get a COL raise to buy a house in the rich town near you? I highly doubt it. Your cost of living doesn't actually play into shit. All the COL adjustment does is tell the corp how much they can lowball offers based on where people live and give the corp a documented means by which to doc your pay for trying to get ahead in life.
Sleep on
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
Nah I've never been paid enough to live near where I work. I understand what col does to salaries. My in laws all live outside Buffalo while I live outside Boston. I understand why outsourcing happens. It's not new, but just never been the way of our industry because our industry is a mercenary shit show with little to no worker protection or organization. It's a free for all where you get what you can negotiate for. We get what we fuckin claw out of Corp pockets and our compensation follows no fuckin rhyme or reason other than, "what the corp can afford and what you can convince them to give you". They don't get to try and tell me they're not gonna pay me my fee cause I live in the wrong part of the state. A thing I do because I'm perpetually broke as shit. They designed this shit industry, they get to deal with the fact that I'm not taking a pay cut because they don't want me to ever have savings.
Local cost of living absolutely does factor into salary amounts. Normally that's just based on the location of the business but how to handle it when moving to completely remote work seems like a difficult question.
I'm a mercenary, a high class code whore as it were, my price doesn't change depending on where you bring me. I got a fuckin price, you pay me, or you don't get the goods.
Honestly curious. So, let's say you work in the Bay Area at Facebook or whatever, making lots of money, etc. After this, you decide to move to.... Montana. Facebook says they'll drop your salary, you say no. Facebook says "too bad." Now, you're in Montana. What are your options here? I just... don't see how you can possibly have any leverage. It's not like any other Montana company will pay you Facebook Bay Area money!
I'm kind of torn here in that I don't like this idea of lowering salaries for people that WFH somewhere else now. But I'm also having a lot of difficulty finding strong logical arguments against it that don't just boil down to "screw the rich" (which I mean, sure I like that, but I'm curious if there's anything else :P )
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
The thing to remember is that the FAANGs sell themselves to prospects as "you work here, you are the elite, and have earned that position" - and from what I've heard Facebook is particularly bad in that regard. It's more about a company pretty bluntly saying "yeah, we lied."
I had a coworker transfer to Santa Clara and they absolutely bump salary for CoL (albeit not as much as housing differences are because woof).
It phases out as you get to higher pay grades. So you start with a large adjustment with a lower salary, and then the extra compensation reduces as your total compensation increases.
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
The thing to remember is that the FAANGs sell themselves to prospects as "you work here, you are the elite, and have earned that position" - and from what I've heard Facebook is particularly bad in that regard. It's more about a company pretty bluntly saying "yeah, we lied."
It depends on how their proposed salaries compare with the markets local to the areas people work at, yeah? Otherwise it sounds like you're just saying everyone in tech was too dumb to think about COL ever in their lives, so they look at their Bay Area salaries and compare them to Montana and think "yeah I'm cool".
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
The thing to remember is that the FAANGs sell themselves to prospects as "you work here, you are the elite, and have earned that position" - and from what I've heard Facebook is particularly bad in that regard. It's more about a company pretty bluntly saying "yeah, we lied."
It depends on how their proposed salaries compare with the markets local to the areas people work at, yeah? Otherwise it sounds like you're just saying everyone in tech was too dumb to think about COL ever in their lives, so they look at their Bay Area salaries and compare them to Montana and think "yeah I'm cool".
Not dumb - egotistical. It's the same reason why tech is notoriously resistant to labor organization - a lot of tech workers like to see themselves as ubermench being compensated because of their abilities. COL adjustments break that illusion.
(Also, as a side note, Montana isn't as low on COL as you think. As a Montana homeowner who had reasons to note prices in the DFW housing market, my money would have gone further in Texas than it did here.)
Cost of living factors into how much companies pay for salaries, and companies want to pay as little as they can. Hell, CoL was part of the pitch when my company was looking to move people out of the tri-state area, it was part of the pitch when I got a job in TX back in the day, and it was part of the motivation for me to eventually move out of NYC. And in all three of those instances the cost of living was directly tied into the relatively lower salaries involved.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
The thing to remember is that the FAANGs sell themselves to prospects as "you work here, you are the elite, and have earned that position" - and from what I've heard Facebook is particularly bad in that regard. It's more about a company pretty bluntly saying "yeah, we lied."
It depends on how their proposed salaries compare with the markets local to the areas people work at, yeah? Otherwise it sounds like you're just saying everyone in tech was too dumb to think about COL ever in their lives, so they look at their Bay Area salaries and compare them to Montana and think "yeah I'm cool".
Not dumb - egotistical. It's the same reason why tech is notoriously resistant to labor organization - a lot of tech workers like to see themselves as ubermench being compensated because of their abilities. COL adjustments break that illusion.
(Also, as a side note, Montana isn't as low on COL as you think. As a Montana homeowner who had reasons to note prices in the DFW housing market, my money would have gone further in Texas than it did here.)
Well, I don't see breaking that egotism as a bad thing. So this COL adjustment seems fine?
(I randomly picked a state I thought may have had a low COL. Research is too hard! :P Thanks for the info)
the concept of COL-adjusted salaries isn't inherently flawed, but this execution almost certainly is...
Like, a lot of government jobs have public salary bands and public locale-based COL adjustments, and those COLAs are reviewed and updated, people's salary will increase automatically if their area goes up, etc etc.
My guess is basically none of that is true for Facebook employees. Salaries individually negotiated and things like yearly COLAs not even on the radar. So it's pretty crass to suddenly invoke COL when it means you get to cut salaries.
I don't know what FB is like but here at OtherBigTechCo we do have bands for locations and an explicit acknowledgement of a COL factor in pay
Do you get a raise if you have a kid? I'm gonna assume not. Can you get a COL raise to buy a house in the rich town near you? I highly doubt it. Your cost of living doesn't actually play into shit. All the COL adjustment does is tell the corp how much they can lowball offers based on where people live and give the corp a documented means by which to doc your pay for trying to get ahead in life.
Of course not, it's a general COL adjustment for the entire region not your family on your street. I'm not being lowballed in any way here and I'm sorry if you are
Right, so:
<ul>
<li>Cost of living has always been a factor in wages.</li>
<li>If you are a small business that only has one work location that is just factored into you having to provide competitive pay for where you are.</li>
<li>Large companies and organizations like government agencies have always factored it into payment offers in different branches or offices</li>
<li>This is pretty easy to do if you just base it off the work location, you don't need to go interrogating every employee about where exactly they live. If you want to live farther out and trade commute time for lower housing costs that's up to you.</li>
<li>If you have a couple people working remotely, it is a minor enough issue that you can just ignore it.</li>
<li>Companies that are based around remote work can not care about it and set their prices based on just overall global demand for the type of people they are employing and this is probably contract work anyway.</li>
</ul>
But if we are looking at the idea that Covid is going to kickstart a transformation to make remote work much more common, traditional companies that previously just assumed that people lived near where they worked will need to adapt and come up with new ways to handle this. In particular I imagine positions that were always meant for remote work already had this consideration baked into their compensation one way or another. Taking what was previously an in office job and making it remote doesn't have that.
Is this the right way to handle it? Honestly I think probably not unless you already had very explicit pay grades based on location like it sounds federal employees have. Interrogating people about how expensive their neighborhood is and cutting existing pay are both things I see as pissing people off more than it's worth. If anything this actually seems more of an attempt to discourage work from home.
HamHamJ on
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Yeah I took that as Zuck wanting everyone back in the office as of 1/1/21
Reducing existing pay is not a good approach. Baking it into negotiations for new hires with WFH is fine (and allows Sleep to say “lol fuck off” if so desired).
So say you want to work from home and you VPN or use an address in the Bay area for the Bay salary, but actually live a long way away. What's stopping you from doing so?
Yeah I took that as Zuck wanting everyone back in the office as of 1/1/21
Reducing existing pay is not a good approach. Baking it into negotiations for new hires with WFH is fine (and allows Sleep to say “lol fuck off” if so desired).
This is ickier. This just means incoming engineers (or whatever) get paid arbitrarily less than people who happened to graduate a year earlier.
Remember, the actual trigger here is the employee wanting to move. If they don't want a pay reduction, don't move. Problem solved. This only reduces existing pay if you take a specific action to otherwise increase your work experience, you decide if you want that tradeoff.
If anyone is suggesting reducing pay for employees in the Bay Area just because that WFH instead of commuting to the office, that's horribly dumb and not being suggested I think?
So say you want to work from home and you VPN or use an address in the Bay area for the Bay salary, but actually live a long way away. What's stopping you from doing so?
Well, that's fraud, no? Assuming you managed to pull it off while still having a permanent address (for HR, tax records, etc) somewhere else, you may get away from it. If you get caught then you get fired and fined probably though?
So say you want to work from home and you VPN or use an address in the Bay area for the Bay salary, but actually live a long way away. What's stopping you from doing so?
Well, the law for one. You would need to truthfully declare which state you lived in at the minimum for tax purposes. Then only give a bay area premium to the working in office people and everyone else gets general California money
I hope a ton of people just start sub-leasing (if they rent) or renting out (if the own) their bay area place, using that as the location for their salary rate, and then moving out to wherever they want anyway.
This just fundamentally feels like a poorly thought out plan that creates stupid incentives. Like how granular are they going to be with COL adjustments (block by block, by zip code, etc)? Are they going to require evidence of your address, or how much your rent is, or some other nonsense?
edit - The only thing I can see being reasonable is pay reductions for obligation reduction trade offs. Most companies, even if you're working from home, require that you are able to come in to work on short notice (lets say the night before). If they are going to waive that requirement so that you can move to the next city, or some other state, then I can see them saying that anybody who would like that benefit will have to take a pay cut. But it wouldn't be tied to a location, it would just be a flat percentage. If you're willing to live in some remote locale you get a huge raise because the pay cut is way less than the COL decrease. If you move somewhere remote with a higher COL you take a large pay cut. Because all the company should care about is if what they get from you is worth less.
Jebus314 on
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I hope a ton of people just start sub-leasing (if they rent) or renting out (if the own) their bay area place, using that as the location for their salary rate, and then moving out to wherever they want anyway.
This just fundamentally feels like a poorly thought out plan that creates stupid incentives. Like how granular are they going to be with COL adjustments (block by block, by zip code, etc)? Are they going to require evidence of your address, or how much your rent is, or some other nonsense?
Companies already do COL adjustments. They aren't inventing something new.
And you shouldn't not do something because you expect bad actors will try to find exceptions to exploit the system.
Honestly these arguments against this are making me think it's a better idea :P
It's 100% them not wanting everyone to run away from the stupid fuckin tech bro theme park they've turned these cities into.
It's an effort to enforce the classism they've built into the industry where people at certain levels of the corp echelon are only allowed specific joys. People making the attempt to break out of that treadmill is devastating to the ideologies of the people at the top of the heap so as soon as it seems like they won't be able to keep making the same bullshit overtures about why they can't allow consistent WFH which would allow the lowers to get more with their earnings they figure out how to cut pay for folks trying to make their lives better without having to play the bullshit corp ladder.
It's 100% them not wanting everyone to run away from the stupid fuckin tech bro theme park they've turned these cities into.
It's an effort to enforce the classism they've built into the industry where people at certain levels of the corp echelon are only allowed specific joys. People making the attempt to break out of that treadmill is devastating to the ideologies of the people at the top of the heap so as soon as it seems like they won't be able to keep making the same bullshit overtures about why they can't allow consistent WFH which would allow the lowers to get more with their earnings they figure out how to cut pay for folks trying to make their lives better without having to play the bullshit corp ladder.
what
So again, companies do this already. If you work for a big tech company not in the Bay Area or whatever, you get a COL adjustment to your salary. I can't say for certain that every company does this, but it's common. The only thing that's happening here is saying that this will also apply to WFH.
So, you don't get paid more than your neighbor in Dallas because you WFH and they go into the office. You don't get a Bay Area tech salary while they get a Texas tech salary. That's the proposition.
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Because corporations getting to decide what is and is not acceptable civic organization definitely won't go wrong. *eyeroll*
Was there this much pushback when they deplatformed all that radical islamic terrorism?
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
One, these corporations are already doing this, so that boat has sailed.
Two - and this is the more important point - this is just a variation on the libertarian bad penny argument of "regulation can be done badly, thus we should not engage in regulation." Just because there is a potential for negative effects does not mean that some endpoint should not be pursued - it means that they should be pursued with care to prevent those negative effects. This sort of argument is why free speech "absolutism" is incoherent - a position of "you should accept abuse because otherwise there's a potential for negative effects" in the long run becomes cheerleading for Omleas.
While not quite on this scale, there was some pushback - there's a story where previous Twitter head Dick Costolo had to explain to senior staff why allowing beheading videos was a bad idea:
The problem isn't humans, it's privilege. There's a certain segment of society that doesn't take online abuse seriously because they're never going to be the main target of said abuse. Unsurprisingly, it's this segment that also is in control of Silicon Valley.
A more boring answer to this is gif capability has become widely available on nearly every messaging service, but not Instagram for some reason...until recently, and it was complete trash. This seems like a real lazy way for a GIGANTIC company that has like 3 products to fix a problem with one of them.
Conor Sen is a columnist for Bloomberg.
Punishing employees for moving from the Bay Area (which we need them to do for a number of reasons) - that's a smart move.
Ha ha ha, no fuck you I don't lose salary because of where I live you shit heads. I cost what I cost cause I've been slaving in the tech mines since I was 13. Now fuck you, pay me.
The problem is twofold:
One, Silicon Valley has created an image of a meritocracy, and the salaries are part of that. Acknowledging that COL is a factor in those salaries goes against that.
Two, acknowledging that salaries are high because of Bay Area COL brings up a lot of uncomfortable questions about how the Bay Area COL has been an arms race.
I'm a mercenary, a high class code whore as it were, my price doesn't change depending on where you bring me. I got a fuckin price, you pay me, or you don't get the goods.
True but dropping peoples salaries is a great way to lose a lot of workers. If you are trying to get into a company and get that offer you may accept it but actually having your current salary lowered always feels like a slap in the face and tends to get people looking elsewhere.
When I moved from the bay back to Canada I "lost" $15k/yr or so, though since I didn't have to pay bay area living costs any more I ended up actually making a little bit more
Like, a lot of government jobs have public salary bands and public locale-based COL adjustments, and those COLAs are reviewed and updated, people's salary will increase automatically if their area goes up, etc etc.
My guess is basically none of that is true for Facebook employees. Salaries individually negotiated and things like yearly COLAs not even on the radar. So it's pretty crass to suddenly invoke COL when it means you get to cut salaries.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I don't know what FB is like but here at OtherBigTechCo we do have bands for locations and an explicit acknowledgement of a COL factor in pay
Do you get a raise if you have a kid? I'm gonna assume not. Can you get a COL raise to buy a house in the rich town near you? I highly doubt it. Your cost of living doesn't actually play into shit. All the COL adjustment does is tell the corp how much they can lowball offers based on where people live and give the corp a documented means by which to doc your pay for trying to get ahead in life.
The idea that tech workers are suddenly discovering that cost of living impacts salaries is laughable.
Nah I've never been paid enough to live near where I work. I understand what col does to salaries. My in laws all live outside Buffalo while I live outside Boston. I understand why outsourcing happens. It's not new, but just never been the way of our industry because our industry is a mercenary shit show with little to no worker protection or organization. It's a free for all where you get what you can negotiate for. We get what we fuckin claw out of Corp pockets and our compensation follows no fuckin rhyme or reason other than, "what the corp can afford and what you can convince them to give you". They don't get to try and tell me they're not gonna pay me my fee cause I live in the wrong part of the state. A thing I do because I'm perpetually broke as shit. They designed this shit industry, they get to deal with the fact that I'm not taking a pay cut because they don't want me to ever have savings.
Honestly curious. So, let's say you work in the Bay Area at Facebook or whatever, making lots of money, etc. After this, you decide to move to.... Montana. Facebook says they'll drop your salary, you say no. Facebook says "too bad." Now, you're in Montana. What are your options here? I just... don't see how you can possibly have any leverage. It's not like any other Montana company will pay you Facebook Bay Area money!
I'm kind of torn here in that I don't like this idea of lowering salaries for people that WFH somewhere else now. But I'm also having a lot of difficulty finding strong logical arguments against it that don't just boil down to "screw the rich" (which I mean, sure I like that, but I'm curious if there's anything else :P )
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The thing to remember is that the FAANGs sell themselves to prospects as "you work here, you are the elite, and have earned that position" - and from what I've heard Facebook is particularly bad in that regard. It's more about a company pretty bluntly saying "yeah, we lied."
It phases out as you get to higher pay grades. So you start with a large adjustment with a lower salary, and then the extra compensation reduces as your total compensation increases.
It depends on how their proposed salaries compare with the markets local to the areas people work at, yeah? Otherwise it sounds like you're just saying everyone in tech was too dumb to think about COL ever in their lives, so they look at their Bay Area salaries and compare them to Montana and think "yeah I'm cool".
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Not dumb - egotistical. It's the same reason why tech is notoriously resistant to labor organization - a lot of tech workers like to see themselves as ubermench being compensated because of their abilities. COL adjustments break that illusion.
(Also, as a side note, Montana isn't as low on COL as you think. As a Montana homeowner who had reasons to note prices in the DFW housing market, my money would have gone further in Texas than it did here.)
Well, I don't see breaking that egotism as a bad thing. So this COL adjustment seems fine?
(I randomly picked a state I thought may have had a low COL. Research is too hard! :P Thanks for the info)
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Of course not, it's a general COL adjustment for the entire region not your family on your street. I'm not being lowballed in any way here and I'm sorry if you are
<ul>
<li>Cost of living has always been a factor in wages.</li>
<li>If you are a small business that only has one work location that is just factored into you having to provide competitive pay for where you are.</li>
<li>Large companies and organizations like government agencies have always factored it into payment offers in different branches or offices</li>
<li>This is pretty easy to do if you just base it off the work location, you don't need to go interrogating every employee about where exactly they live. If you want to live farther out and trade commute time for lower housing costs that's up to you.</li>
<li>If you have a couple people working remotely, it is a minor enough issue that you can just ignore it.</li>
<li>Companies that are based around remote work can not care about it and set their prices based on just overall global demand for the type of people they are employing and this is probably contract work anyway.</li>
</ul>
But if we are looking at the idea that Covid is going to kickstart a transformation to make remote work much more common, traditional companies that previously just assumed that people lived near where they worked will need to adapt and come up with new ways to handle this. In particular I imagine positions that were always meant for remote work already had this consideration baked into their compensation one way or another. Taking what was previously an in office job and making it remote doesn't have that.
Is this the right way to handle it? Honestly I think probably not unless you already had very explicit pay grades based on location like it sounds federal employees have. Interrogating people about how expensive their neighborhood is and cutting existing pay are both things I see as pissing people off more than it's worth. If anything this actually seems more of an attempt to discourage work from home.
Reducing existing pay is not a good approach. Baking it into negotiations for new hires with WFH is fine (and allows Sleep to say “lol fuck off” if so desired).
This is ickier. This just means incoming engineers (or whatever) get paid arbitrarily less than people who happened to graduate a year earlier.
Remember, the actual trigger here is the employee wanting to move. If they don't want a pay reduction, don't move. Problem solved. This only reduces existing pay if you take a specific action to otherwise increase your work experience, you decide if you want that tradeoff.
If anyone is suggesting reducing pay for employees in the Bay Area just because that WFH instead of commuting to the office, that's horribly dumb and not being suggested I think?
Well, that's fraud, no? Assuming you managed to pull it off while still having a permanent address (for HR, tax records, etc) somewhere else, you may get away from it. If you get caught then you get fired and fined probably though?
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Well, the law for one. You would need to truthfully declare which state you lived in at the minimum for tax purposes. Then only give a bay area premium to the working in office people and everyone else gets general California money
This just fundamentally feels like a poorly thought out plan that creates stupid incentives. Like how granular are they going to be with COL adjustments (block by block, by zip code, etc)? Are they going to require evidence of your address, or how much your rent is, or some other nonsense?
edit - The only thing I can see being reasonable is pay reductions for obligation reduction trade offs. Most companies, even if you're working from home, require that you are able to come in to work on short notice (lets say the night before). If they are going to waive that requirement so that you can move to the next city, or some other state, then I can see them saying that anybody who would like that benefit will have to take a pay cut. But it wouldn't be tied to a location, it would just be a flat percentage. If you're willing to live in some remote locale you get a huge raise because the pay cut is way less than the COL decrease. If you move somewhere remote with a higher COL you take a large pay cut. Because all the company should care about is if what they get from you is worth less.
Companies already do COL adjustments. They aren't inventing something new.
And you shouldn't not do something because you expect bad actors will try to find exceptions to exploit the system.
Honestly these arguments against this are making me think it's a better idea :P
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It's an effort to enforce the classism they've built into the industry where people at certain levels of the corp echelon are only allowed specific joys. People making the attempt to break out of that treadmill is devastating to the ideologies of the people at the top of the heap so as soon as it seems like they won't be able to keep making the same bullshit overtures about why they can't allow consistent WFH which would allow the lowers to get more with their earnings they figure out how to cut pay for folks trying to make their lives better without having to play the bullshit corp ladder.
what
So again, companies do this already. If you work for a big tech company not in the Bay Area or whatever, you get a COL adjustment to your salary. I can't say for certain that every company does this, but it's common. The only thing that's happening here is saying that this will also apply to WFH.
So, you don't get paid more than your neighbor in Dallas because you WFH and they go into the office. You don't get a Bay Area tech salary while they get a Texas tech salary. That's the proposition.
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