The one-salary experiment, ten years in

One thing that happened over the last 5-10 years is that people’s idea of what “market rate” is for a remote developer job seems to be shifting to the market rate of San Francisco. We pay more than that, but when you become a remote company, people start looking for the $134k USD salary people are making in the top 10% of SF (which seems a bit low to me, but I’ll take their word for it). Basically, we’re playing a game where the success of the company hinges on our ability to hire good developers, but we can’t offer top SF rates without shrinking our staff because our operating costs would be too high due to our flat structure.

Source: iwantmyname.com