Your 'global remote' salary band has a Lagos discount. Let's talk about it (1/14)

1/ A European company posts a "fully remote, work from anywhere" role. A senior engineer in Lagos and one in Lisbon get the same title, the same tickets, the same on-call rota. One salary is 40% of the other. Let's talk about why, and whether it holds up.

2/ The company's argument is cost of living: "we pay for the local market". It sounds reasonable. It is also convenient, because it is always the company that decides which market you are in.

3/ What cost of living misses: many costs for a remote engineer in Africa are priced in dollars. The laptop. The phone. The backup internet. The inverter and batteries. The conference ticket, and the visa fee to attend it.

4/ And the local costs move with the currency. When the naira loses half its value, rent and food follow the dollar within months, as Tobi has written about here. A salary set in local terms in 2023 was a pay cut by 2024.

5/ Then there is value. Same pull requests, same incidents fixed at 3am. If the work is the same, the company is paying less for the same output and calling it fairness.

6/ Timezone is not a discount either. Nairobi is UTC+3 and overlaps almost the entire European working day. Lagos is UTC+1, the same as London in winter. Many of us are easier to schedule than your colleagues in New York.

7/ Now the honest counterpoint, because I promised data and not anger. Paying San Francisco salaries in Nairobi has real side effects. Local startups cannot compete for talent, and that can hollow out a local ecosystem. This is a real problem, not a talking point.

8/ There is also the employer of record fee, legal setup and currency risk on the company side. Those are real costs too. They are not 60% of a salary.

9/ So what does fair look like? Models I have seen work: one global band per level, no location factor. Or a small number of regional bands, published, with the method written down.

10/ The key word is published. Most of the anger comes from discovering the gap by accident, on a call, when somebody mentions their salary.

11/ For developers: quote in USD or EUR. Know the band for the role before you name a number. Never open with "I am in Nairobi, so I am flexible". Your location is not a coupon.

12/ For companies: if you think the Lagos discount is fair, publish it next to the job ad. If you would be embarrassed to publish it, you already know the answer.

13/ For everyone: this is not charity. It is pricing. You are buying senior engineering, and the market for it is global now. You told us so when you went remote.

14/ Sources: published salary bands from the companies that share them, remote salary surveys, and far too many DMs from engineers who found out by accident. Pole to all of you. Ask for the number.