throwaway_qcjal

I don't believe this would count as a community contribution, which is generally I believe about contributions to Google's community.

While I don't think it's a bad career move, and that may have been part of their consideration, I find the trivialization of the work put in by someone here to open source something they thought would be a positive contribution hurtful.

The reality is that cost of living is really just a proxy in these conversations, really what we're talking about is the market wage for "premium" developers. I imagine over time remote developers will converge to a single market, but that it will take time, since there isn't as many opportunities for remote developers now there's not much pressure to move towards competing against remote offers. E.g., if I go to my employer and ask for a higher wage working remotely their likely response would be good luck getting a similar remote position. But as more remote opportunities open up you'll likely see more competition.

If there's enough remote positions and they're generally seen as equally desirable as in person positions we might even see everywhere going to a single market within national boundaries regardless of remote or in person, which would be quite interesting.

I think this is making a whole lot of out nothing, or at least not much. Google would determine your pay based on your work location, regardless of whether that's your home or the office. As a result people that lived far from the office in a typically less expensive area could see their pay drop.

Congratulations to the S3 team from a friendly cloud storage neighbor in SLU :-)