[linuxjobs] Ubuntu / Canonical Hiring

[Steve Hill]

Ar 05/03/21 08:10, ysgrifennodd Ralph Corderoy:

> Turning the question around, a London-based company wishes to recruit a
> bare-metal ARM programmer to work from home with no requirement to ever
> visit their London office.  Should they advertise a salary which
> compensates for the skill required plus the weighting needed to exist
> in London?  Or should they take the UK's mean or median living costs
> into account because why should they subsidise the employee's choice to
> live somewhere expensive?  Or given their new recruit could live
> anywhere, do they have to assume he's in one of the California hotspots
> because he used to work for Apple?  Do they state a core salary and say
> a weighting will be added based on the digital nomad's location this
> week?

Surely that depends on where they expect most of the talent they are 
trying to recruit to live already?  If they expect to be able to find 
the talent they need in (say) Sheffield, why would they bother to 
advertise London rates, whereas if they think they will struggle to find 
suitable candidates outside of London they need to advertise London 
rates (and pay the advertised rate, regardless of where the eventual 
recruit lives)

Basically: lowering the salary reduces the size of your candidate pool. 
  So set it at a rate where you expect your candidate pool to be big 
enough to meet your needs, irrespective of their location.

You'd probably expect the result of this calculation to be somewhere in 
the middle - slightly high for outside London, slightly low for inside 
London, which I think is a good thing because it slightly incentivises 
people to move to cheaper areas, which in the long term probably reduces 
the business's outgoings.


As I said before, I certainly don't think that organising any kind of 
meeting in London is a good idea unless your clients are in London (or 
possibly if you're expecting lots of attendees from overseas).  For me, 
going to an all day conference in London usually involves about 2 days 
away from my normal work, expensive travel and 2 nights in a hotel, 
whereas the same event almost anywhere else in England or Wales would be 
a day trip.  So I don't think "we need our offices in London because 
that's best for the clients" really works for most businesses - it just 
feels like an excuse made by people already in London to justify why 
they are paying over the odds for both staff and office space.

-- 
- Steve