I look forward to seeing a blog post when you have that compensation framework completed. :)
I've seen/heard words like that meaning anything from a 10% paycut to a 55% paycut in practical terms, its too big a range for me to really take away an effective idea of GitLab's pay level which is why I was curious about the more concrete form.
A 10-15% haircut for a place as good as GitLab sounds on paper seems reasonable, a 50% haircut...not so much.
We don't have any hard data on this but I think we're in the reasonable range.
there are places in the world where, say, the real estate is red-hot (obviously making higher salaries more desirable) but where local companies have not kept up with that (making cross-company surveys skew really low) so in that case what would you do?
Managing a distributed remote-friendly company definitely seems challenging, of course you're open source and have an awesome reputation, so salary is very likely not something prospective employees consider as much as they would otherwise when joining (which likely works in your favor in creating a very nice working environment full of engaged folks)
We will maybe end up with a mix of cost of living, cost of labour, and rent.
We address red-hot real estate by considering to add rent to the mix, but it is tricky since some team members might be living in rent-controlled apartments and we want to have a number that doesn't depend on personal circumstances.
For now only are principles are detailed on https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/#compens... one important one: "We pay on the lower end of market rates for engineering positions because we offer the benefit of working on open source (great workflow, peers, build reputation); most engineers take a pay cut to join."