[LRUG] [JOBS] Required: Rails craftsperson

Fri Mar 26 23:12:57 PST 2021

Appreciated the humour in the first response there Olly.

When I moved from Crawley to London in 1982 it was in Walworth I settled.
I'm sure my room wasn't £2000 a month in those days!

Well explained.

On Fri, 26 Mar 2021 at 20:28, Olly Headey <olly at freeagent.com> wrote:

> 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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