44% Of Professionals Are Happy To Take A Pay Cut

In late May, Blind, an anonymous community of verified professionals with 3.6 million users, learned that 66% of professionals are willing to relocate out of the Bay Area, New York, and Seattle. After Facebook’s future remote work and pay cut announcement, Blind learned that 32% of working professionals would consider relocating with a pay cut. 

2,800 users across Silicon Valley, NYC, and Seattle show their willingness to reduce their salary.  Other Key Learnings include:

  • 38% of Facebook professionals would consider relocating with a pay cut. 
  • 20% of Bay Area professionals would you be willing to accept a 10-20% pay cut 
  • The Bay Area (35%), New York (30%), and Seattle (31%) showed similar proportions of intent to relocate with a pay cut.
  • New York (75%) has the highest proportion of those wanting to leave the Metropolitan Area.
  • Only (25%) of New Yorkers would not consider relocating out of the metropolitan area.

Download the full report Here.

Since this original survey, the story has evolved. VMware and Twitter are cutting pay for remote employees who move out of the Bay Area, per Bloomberg. On Blind, a Bloomberg user ran a poll asking, “Are folks willing to take the trade off in this new Covid-19 future we have?”

The poll had 5,591 responses and robust dialogue with 561 professionals commenting on their own experiences, here are some key learnings: 

  • 48% of professionals responded to the poll stating “No I shouldn’t get a pay cut if I’m doing the same work.”
      • 61% of VMware professionals responded to the poll stating “Happy to take a paycut for better WLB and reduce Total cost of Living” 
      • 47% of Twitter professionals responded to the poll stating “Happy to take a paycut for better WLB and reduce Total cost of Living” 
      • 63% of Netflix professionals responded to the poll stating “Happy to take a paycut for better WLB and reduce Total cost of Living” 
      • 67% of Square  professionals responded to the poll stating “Happy to take a paycut for better WLB and reduce Total cost of Living”

You can see the report highlighting the overall responses here.

A user at VMware responded to the poll saying, “I’ll gladly do this. It’s only a reduction on base, and base makes up half of my TC. So a net 6.5% decrease in my TC to move to a place where houses are 20% of the price and taxes alone make up ~5-6% difference? Sign me up” 

A user at Hulu responded to the poll with an opposing opinion, You guys aren’t getting it. It doesn’t matter that “pay is always based on location.” That old way of thinking needs to die because it exploits labor. The employee’s labor provides the same value regardless of working location. The circumstances changed, so we need to force things to change as well. Don’t accept a pay cut for changing your location. Ask the company tough questions. Is my value to the company less if I live in North Carolina or Colorado? If they won’t budge, quit.”

What do you think? Is compensation tied to a skill level and independent of geographic location? Join the platform to join the conversation!