Incredibly transparent about their low-ball salaries.

The salaries are low for San Francisco but high for most of the country. The people working remotely are getting a great deal, provided they're using the opportunity to live cheaply. The people working locally in SF not so much.

Maybe the lesson there is not to hire in SF, if you can make a global (or even national) workforce work.

They are low, even figuring in the locality pay.

I'm not sure I agree. Take the $88k salary for the frontend engineer. See if you can go get that salary with little experience out in Springfield, MO or a place like that. You'll be very lucky if you get $60k. I think you underestimate how much salaries plummet in truly cheap areas. You're probably thinking of "cheap" areas that aren't actually cheap at all, like Houston or Austin.

I'm in SF, so I little expereince with the salaries in those places. It may be that it's their 'cost-of-living' difference that is at the heart of the issue.

It seems like instead of being low across the board, their base salary is too high and the premiums for expensive locations and for experience are too low. For instance, a junior engineer working in Manilla is making a killing while a lead engineer working in San Francisco is getting horribly low-balled.

What do you think they should be?

The SF salaries listed are really, really low. Where I'm currently contracting several of my colleagues converted to full time. Only the COO and CEO on that list earn more than their base salary. My hourly rate makes my salary-equivalent more than everybody but the CEO.

When I was a developer in a low cost of living area prior to moving to the bay area several months ago my salary was within 10% of the "Senior" engineer positions listed. This was at a non-profit, doing some really junior level CRUD work (so glad I'm not there anymore).

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to discern whether that means the salaries are "lowball" or not. And it's for Buffer to determine whether it can afford more, what the Buffer-market-rate is, etc. Nobody else. Frankly I wish more companies were transparent about salaries. Information asymmetry is a killer when it comes to negotiations.

IMHO, those figures are ~~20% under market. Maybe it's a really good place to work.

From the table a junior engineer is 92k from 60k base + 22k SF locality + 10k cash over stock option. Is 92k that bad for junior?

Maybe not that specific position, but the salary list at the end looked very roughly 20% low to what I am used to seeing on Angel list etc, etc., even giving the lack of locality pay.

As I read this, Buffer doesn't pay remote employees less. Rather, you're payed more if you work from expensive cities (eg. Hong Kong), than if you work from cheaper cities (eg. Bucharest)

I've never understood or agreed with this approach. Your lifestyle choices should have no bearing on your salary. If somebody reduces costs by choosing a cheaper city to live in, it should be regarded as any other frugal activity. That is, an independent and completely personal affair.

I understand the cost saving benefit from an employer's perspective, but since that's not me, I've chosen my side.

I work at a satellite campus for a large tech firm, and I've come to the conclusion "cost of living adjustments" are just HR BS for the company's belief that talent markets are local, not national or global, and they are using that belief to exploit satellite/remote workers.

I've seen two general explanations. I'll present them without comment, though I recognize there is plenty of room for that on both: 1) it's considered easier to justify internally, since the worker in the more expensive area is being paid at a closer to market rate for their market (rather than above rates in their market); or 2) the management of the organization is usually located in the more expensive area and internally evaluates rates there as the baseline (and the remote rate(s) as the negotiated special cases).

People don't (usually) pick a city to live in because of the cost of living, it is simply a good/bad side effect. Family/friends/job opportunities are what really affects the decision to go live somewhere. From that perspective it makes sense as an employer to try and give all your employees a chance of the same living standard, regardless of city choice.

Also, from a employees perspective if you feel you're getting a lower wage than someone who is of less value to the company, you can always try and renegotiate your salary.