I’m an American with American expenses and my terms are that I only work for an American wage. If a company wants to pay me based on the payscale of how much people make in the country where I live, yet they don’t have a presence here, it tels me they’re low balling shuysters and I laugh them off.
The primary restriction limit is I cannot work for companies which have a presence in the country where I live, or then I would pay taxes in that country and would require a work permit. I also cannot work this way frok countries which do not allow for “digital nomad” arrangements.
In my current situation I have the added benefit of being in a close time zone to our team which was in Belarus (who now are in Ukraine and Netherlands). I manage an 8-person devops team and act as liason to our backend and frontend dev teams, as wrll as manage the customer relationship.
Before this job I was an individual contributor getting 3-5 hours of overlap at a company distributed all over the USA.
This afforded me more than enough overlap, extra on-call coverage hours and a solid 4 hours of uninterrupted project time. It is actually a huhe benefit that I get that much uninterrupted project time.
Again, if a company sees value in my skillset and multiple decades of experience then they will have to pay me the salary I want. If not, another one will.
It has been at least a decade sincr I have spent more than 2 weeks per year in-office or worked in a team that wasn’t distributed over 4-10 time zones.
I dont think it should be illegal, companies exist to make as much profit as possible. I work to make as high of a salary as possible. My life us privileged, right now I make almost 5x what a local engineer would make. I also pay more than a local engineer’s salary in child support and get fuck-all in benefits for my americam taxes so I have to save more.
Twice in the past 5 years I interviewed at companies which did “salary leveling” to make sure that there was no discrimination in salaries (moz and zoom). Salaries were all published to prevent gender / age / race discrimination.
Both were about 20% below all of my other offers, if I livdd in the usa. Worse still, I expect make a San Francisco salary working remotely from other countries. They were both shocked when I laughed out loud when their offers were based on the country where I live rather than USA where I pay my taxes.
I’m all for equality, but, fuck you, pay me. I work in tech for the money, nothing else. Cash rules everything around me.
https://youtu.be/3XGAmPRxV48