Companies everywhere are solidifying their plans to bring technologists (and other employees) back to the office. While many of these organizations will require their employees to return to their office desks full-time, some are giving workforces the opportunity to work from home for part of the week (i.e., a “hybrid” schedule). Still others plan on giving select employees the ability to work remotely full-time.
For some of those companies offering full-time remote work, there’s a catch: Any employees who move to a location with a lower cost of living may need to take a pay cut. Last summer, some tech giants—including Facebook, VMware, and Stripe—announced that any employees moving from Silicon Valley to a cheaper city would see a lighter paycheck as a result.
Of course, such a move inevitably sparks countermoves, and some other prominent tech companies—most notably Reddit—announced no pay cuts for remote workers, no matter where they chose to live. “To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US,” Reddit wrote in a statement at the time. “It means that our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live. We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live.”
With all that in mind, is your company only allowing you to work remotely full-time if you take a pay cut? Please sound off in our quiz below, and we’ll post the results in a future article!
It’s also important to note that many technologists absolutely refuse to take a pay cut in order to work remotely. Last summer, for example, Dice took a series of pulse surveys in which the majority of technologists said they wouldn’t suffer more than a 5 percent pay cut in exchange for remote work; that attitude remained remarkably consistent over a few months, even as technologists’ opinions on other matters evolved considerably. Any company that wants to cut salaries, in other words, may risk technologists quitting in favor of a rival with a more generous policy.
