All jobs everywhere cover living expenses. Some companies, like Walmart, try to exploit the commons by trying to pay less than even living expenses for given area, which causes a strain on taxes and essentially makes Walmart a government subsidized company. But in general most companies pay living expenses and a bit extra. The problem is in the accounting. Right now 100% of the money is adjusted when you move. That is ultimately unfair.
Let's say you already have your salary. There is a program at Cisco that allows employees to reward someone really helpful with recognition. That has a monetary award tied to it. Why is this award adjusted for location? Were you any less helpful just because you lived in Romania? More helpful in Switzerland?
What about a performance bonus. You worked hard and you get 10k performance bonus. But before you actually receive the money, you relocated to Nevada and so now the you see on the paycheck $6700. Same with year end bonus. Clearly none of that has anything to do with living expenses. Could you not survive without that bonus? All your expenses are paid from your base salary presumably. So what is the purpose of me getting more than twice as much as the a level higher engineer in Poland? It is fully based on getting a target accomplished and we work on the same team. Did he somehow contribute less toward that goal? Does it count less because it happened in Poland?
I don't care about some stupid generalization down to janitors or whatever. I am talking about tech companies like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, just like that article and the technical knowledge workers. The current situation is absolutely unfair, it tears teams apart by that unfairness and it does not seem to actually bring sufficient financial benefit even to these corporation to be worth this level of unfairness.
Split the living expenses separately, base those on location and everything else above that should be equal.
