the salary of remote job depends heavily on the current location of the person
but if we took out rent from the equation what should a person be getting?
This is a nonsensical question and of course there is no answer.<p>Any time you are asking about universals in regards to the lived experiences of human beings you need to take a step back. This principle applies to issues many orders of magnitude less complicated than employee pay which i think goes to show how absurdly far off track this question is.<p>To illustrate the point,say you conclude some "universal pay" (good luck even defining what that means, who it applies to and when it applies) . Why do I care? I'm still going to go live my life and maximize my pay for my particular situation. So your universal pay is already not universal after the thought experiment of trying to apply it to the first person who you cannot directly control .<p>You'd be just as good debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Living in a poor country shouldn't be a reason to get a low rate. But this is really common, mostly because companies look for people in third-world countries to get the same level of employees waaay cheaper. I'm from Uruguay and have had interviewers thinking they're doing me a favor for extending me an offer in USD, even if it's ridiculously low for my experience. In the end it depends on how the potential employee negotiates their salary
Long ago I was part of startup based in developed country which was hiring people from one of developing countries. Salary offered was lower than if it was somebody from startup's area, but it was very competitive on the market where developers was recruited from. Developers was very happy to be offered salary higher than their peers, in the same time startup was happy to get qualified engineers for less money than it would have to pay if sourced locally. This would not work today because salary expectations are now similar in both countries - this same startup is now bringing those jobs back to the local market.<p>I was observing similar situation 15 years ago in one of big corps who outsourced everything to India. For a price of one engineer from developed world they was getting many engineers in India, and those engineers could afford services like personal chauffeur. I could not believe when I heard it first time from friends I have there. Again - situation now is much less in favor of big corp, which is now trying to bring some of those jobs back to the local market.
I worked at a remote first company once, where EVERY developer in the team earned 150k USD. We had one person from Nigeria, a bunch from Austin and a few all over Europe!
We have that now and it's called the market-based salary.<p>> if we took out rent from the equation<p>Then we only need to consider<p><pre><code> - employee's age
- employee's education
- employee's experience
- industry
- job requirements
- local, state, federal taxes (income, sales, excise, tariff, etc)
- number of family members supported
- public transportation availability
- local auto insurance premiums
- local school district
- local cost of food
- local cost of health care
- local cost of child care
- union requirements
- hours working
- pay period
- local/national requirements for paid/unpaid vacation / sick days
- inflation
- if employee would rather own a home than rent:
- avg local property taxes
- avg local homeowners insurance (basic, flood, fire, earthquake, tornado)</code></pre>
A thing I never understood is, what happens if, let's say, I stay in a HCOL area until I am doing interviews (eg Switzerland) and then when hired I move back instantly to a LCOL area (eg Albania): what happens now to my salary? Do I get a cut just because I decided to move?<p>And what if I am a digital nomad and know I want to change nation in which I stay every x months?
Some studies suggest happiness per dollar salary peaks around $65k to $90k USD. So for an international corporation where obviously most people will have cheaper cost of living than the United States, that seems a good starting point. This is low for Silicon Valley salaries so it may dissuade those accommodated to salaries in that high range.
Assuming that there should be a universal salary, I seem to recall a lesson an economics lesson on the interaction of supply and demand in determining price.<p>The bigger question is whether there should be a universal job salary for remote working jobs.
The person should get what the market process decides.
If a person lives in a "poor" country, it changes nothing. They can spend less? Sure, but peeping in other's pocket under capitalism is a huge communist red flag :-) Maybe the person has opportunities to relocate to a "developed country", but chose deliberately to get more money instead of "social support".