Depends on the company. The salary scale at mine doesn't take into account where you live (which I think is smart; we don't target people who live in any particular place, so we try to pay what the work is worth to the company).

Not saying this does not exist, but it's hard to find good companies that offer remote work, and finding one that pays remote workers equally to onsite is even harder from my experience.

> so we try to pay what the work is worth to the company

As in you pay a percentage of the revenue that person generates? How do you work that out per person? Or is it aggregated over all developers? What do you do to determine the worth of cost-centre work like support?

Do you find paying based on worth to the company is massively different to the market rates?

How do you work out the worth of work that isn’t generating revenue yet but might in the future or might never, like research?

I'm not a developer, but the process is the same for them.

Where revenue is directly attributable to something, that's taken into account. For non-technical roles, business decision-making ability is heavily accounted-for, as are skills like legal research that are fairly specific (that's one of mine). It's not a very precise process, but I have yet to see any precise process for compensation that wasn't obviously pretty bad. There's also a requirement around capital contribution in relation to your pay level, and then you also get some quarterly/yearly distributions.

Our entire company is remote, so comparing to market rates is tricky. It's below-market for the Bay Area (but so are most startups), and far above market rates for the area I live in. Anecdotally, my pay (and responsibility) has gone up significantly here compared to previous jobs because this system allows a pretty dynamic evaluation base, whereas my previous employers' compensation systems didn't know how to account for outliers in output and competency, at least below executive levels.