[LRUG] [JOBS] Required: Rails craftsperson

Fri Mar 26 20:28:07 PST 2021

Hello everyone

Sorry for my slow response. I use batch processing (remember that,
mainframe fans?) to read a digest every few days so I missed out on all the
fun. I'll respond to some of the points to try and justify my wicked ways.

It’s interesting that your salary structure includes a premium for people
> in London. Do you find they are more productive than developers elsewhere
> in the country/world?

Oh definitely. I think perhaps London-dwellers' brains have somehow adapted
to the breakneck pace of life in The Smoke and they just work faster and
better and harder. Maybe it's all that nitrogen dioxide?

I think it's more about cost of life in London.

Yes, that's part of it.

I don’t think it can be that, since other, more expensive cities aren’t
> singled out e.g. Zurich, New York,  Tokyo etc, or even Oxford, Cambridge,
> Bath etc where some areas are more expensive than parts of London.

We only hire in the UK, so it *is* partly to do with the cost of living but
also the local market. We have an uplift in Cambridge too (but it's not as
big), because the market rates are much higher - mainly because people
commute 45 mins to London and so are getting London-level salaries.

I don't think it's perfect. It would be lovely to do a DHH and pay all our
engineers San Francisco salaries, but alas we're not Basecamp, we don't
make bazillions in profit (profit?!?) so we have to set a baseline on what
we believe we must pay in order to attract a high-calibre of engineers,
which is something like about the 70-75th percentile. This is based on
Radford data which is unquestionably the gold standard in understanding
what people get paid, where.

More importantly, paying people more just because they live in a more
> expensive area introduces perverse incentives to move to said areas and
> exacerbates the very problem it would seem to be tackling. It would also be
> discriminatory towards all sorts of people who, perhaps through no fault of
> their own e.g. family situation, economic circumstances etc aren’t able to
> live in the anointed region.

There is zero evidence of this. We only see migration away from London.
Having lived in both places, I would argue that someone on £70k in
Edinburgh will have a far higher quality of life than someone on £85k in
London. And if you live in cheaper regions of the UK, you're even better
off. Come to Scotland! You will be colder though, but it's ok because
you'll have more spare cash to buy a Patagonia parka.

I’m sure an employer would like to recognise and reward people based on the
> value of their contributions, and allow them to make their own tradeoffs
> between location and cost of living.

Yes, of course, this is how it works. People get rewarded by being
evaluated against a broad set of expectations, which includes delivery and
technical skill as well as communication and leadership. However, in order
to ensure fairness and equality pretty much every company (except scrappy
startups who haven't realised this is a thing yet, but will pay for it
later) will have explicit salary bands for distinct roles and levels. It's
the fairest way and works reasonably well.

Sometimes the answer is just straight-forward, example because you can pay
> less.

That's a rather cynical viewpoint and actually wouldn't work in practice.
Paying bottom dollar means you wouldn't be able to hire anyone with the
right skills because they would go work for someone else who paid them what
they're worth.

People in some areas to take up work for less than people in London because
> they may have less offers around. May not be about cost of living but about
> market expectations.

Of course there is a market rate in any given city and town – capitalist
society, market economics etc – and but it's actually reasonably consistent
around the UK *except in the London area* (and, to some extent, Cambridge).
Sure if you live in Hartlepool and want to work for a Rails-friendly tech
company in Hartlepool, then your options are pretty limited (sorry
Hartlepool) and you might have to accept a lower salary. In reality people
will just commute to Newcastle for more cash, or – hallelujah – get a
remote-friendly job.

What an intriguing idea. Someone like me, who has relatively recently left
> London, would presumably now be paid up to £16k less to work for you than I
> would have been if I'd been hired a couple of years ago. Does it follow
> that if I had started working for you while I lived in London, and
> subsequently left, you would have reduced my salary at that point? Surely
> not.

Yes, exactly! You would get a contract that said your salary was £90k (or
whatever) and that this includes an inner London uplift of 20%. We have had
quite a few people do this. You might think it's unfair and decide to get a
job elsewhere, but you will in all likelihood have to take a 20% pay cut
regardless because that's the market rate. Would it be fair for you to earn
20% more than everyone else who we employ at your level in Edinburgh just
because you used to spend £2000 a month on a 1-bed flat in Walworth? I
don't think so.

What is going to be interesting is when all these VC-leveraged London
scaleups decide to close their offices and start hiring remote. Will they
continue to pay £100k for a mid-level engineer who lives in Doncaster? They
might try for a while, but as their runway recedes and the realise their
bloated plane hasn't left the ground, I don't think I need to tell you
where the cost cutting will start.

I think that's probably enough for a Friday night (although there's not
much else to do, amiright?). I hope it explains some of my thinking anyway.
Maybe I'll check back in next week for Episode 2. In the meantime, have a
mimemagic weekend everyone 🥳

Olly

On Thu, 25 Mar 2021 at 20:43, Patrick Gleeson <patrick.c.gleeson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What an intriguing idea. Someone like me, who has relatively recently
> *left* London, would presumably now be paid up to £16k less to work for
> you than I would have been if I'd been hired a couple of years ago. Does it
> follow that if I had started working for you while I lived in London, and
> subsequently left, you would have *reduced* my salary at that point?
> Surely not.
>
> But if not, an enticing loophole appears, and we must ask ourselves: for
> how long, and for what percentage of one's time, does one have to reside in
> London to take advantage of the higher salary offer? Would it make sense to
> camp out at a friend's house in London (or even AirBnB it) for whatever the
> required amount of time was before applying/after starting? It might sound
> absurd, but if there's £16k gross *per annum* at stake, it might be a
> sound investment in the long term.
>
> In fact, is there a service one could offer, in the same way that limited
> companies can get a registered address in London even if they're actually
> based elsewhere, such that one could offer cheap virtual London
> accommodation for remote workers looking to arbitrage London salary
> weighting? How prevalent is this London bonus for remote work? Anyone want
> to help me knock up a quick prototype?
>
> On Thu, 25 Mar 2021 at 16:05, Paul Battley <pbattley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 25 Mar 2021 at 15:13, Edmond Lepedus <ed.lepedus at googlemail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I don’t think it can be that, since other, more expensive cities aren’t
>>> singled out e.g. Zurich, New York,  Tokyo etc, or even Oxford, Cambridge,
>>> Bath etc where some areas are more expensive than parts of London.
>>>
>>
>> You do realise that LRUG is the *London* Ruby Users Group, don't you?
>> Not everyone lives in London, of course, but I'd suggest that it's relevant
>> information to a lot of list subscribers.
>>
>> Paul.
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