Full disclosure, my wife is a gitLabber. Gitlab is uncomfortably transparent with how they compensate their employees. Given their remote policy and openness regarding compensation, no one is surprised with their pay and everyone can take it or leave it, which you can view https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

If you are a developer / professional living in a rural area and don't want to move or have a commute, I'm certain you'd find gitLab both lucrative and a fun place to work.

If they were consequent about paying less or more depending on where you live, they would also charge their customers less or more depending on where they live.

I'd imagine, like most companies, they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver.

While the argument you're making is sound, I'd challenge you to think of it this way: gitLab wants the best talent, no matter where they live. If they happen to live in a high cost area, vs someone that lives in a low cost area, both uniquely qualified, would it make sense to make sure two qualified candidates get approximately the same buying power's worth of compensation? Companies already adjust base pay based on your location, Google, for example.

It also takes a bit of the good versus bad negotiator penalty out of the equation, which provides a level of fairness that doesn't exist in most companies.

> they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver.

So do I, that's why I don't work for a company that says "well you life in a low-cost area, so you need to charge us less".

Their policy is transparent, and it is take-it-or-leave-it. I think the salary gripes you're hearing from many commenters is that they are leaving it, when they'd very much like to work for Gitlab, as it's a company I personally like.

However, what they're doing will either get them developers in the most highly-paid areas (where their salaries are actually competitive) or lower-paid developers that are actually not the best their local market has to offer (because the best developers are already employed elsewhere for higher pay). So, in essence, what they're doing is limiting their top-tier prospects to people who live in high-cost areas.

As another commenter said at some point, living in the Valley has such high cost because there are benefits to it. Developers in SF can find a job more or less the minute they walk out of the door of one company, and that's something that's expensive. I don't have the same luxury, and Gitlab says "well, since you aren't paying for the privilege of job liquidity, we'll give you a lot less money".

Hi, I live in a rural area and work remotely for a market-rate salary. I'm not less valuable because of my zip code.

You should work for whatever you can negotiate; and you are worth what someone is willing to pay you.

That being said, in order to align with their values of transparency, they shared an algorithm that makes sense. It's not the only way to do it, but it's transparent and doesn't seem unreasonable.

Startups are about alignment to the big picture and long-term. I'd imagine that's why they don't change equity based on location. However, The free market being what it is, some will take it and others won't.

I think my point is that their algorithm does not make sense. And is unreasonable.

Anyway, more power to them, great way to filter out remotes who know what they're worth for no particular reason.

If people are willing to work for them, then they are in fact paying the "market rate" - a meaningless term in itself. Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else. Let them decide for themselves.

> Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else.

That's certainly true. But as a GitLab user, I want to make sure they're hiring the best candidates to work on the product. Is that an unreasonable thing to want?

Ok but that's a different topic. I also think you want the best product, regardless of how that's done. Asking for the best candidates is a rather indirect way to get there and I'm sure they understand their business better than anyone here.

I think they understand their business well, but I'm not sure if they understand market salaries well, given that our culture is notoriously opaque about salaries and one would hope that senior leadership at GitLab is not in the habit of applying to individual-contributor jobs at other companies to get a sense of what offers look like. That means that hearing people complain about their pay bands is probably one of the only good ways for them to get information about whether they're significantly below market or not - as I mentioned in another comment, I just didn't bother applying to GitLab because they were so far below what I could get elsewhere, so they have no information from their normal HR process that I even exist, let alone what a competitive salary for me would be. Once they have that information, then yes, I trust them to make decisions that are good for their business (I wanted to work there, after all!), but I still think that it's appropriate for users to express opinions if we think they're making poor decisions.

Their CEO is very active here on HN so I'd assume they do know all the feedback, but the bigger goal here is the business itself which seems to be doing well (as evidenced by this new round) so they are probably meeting all of their talent needs.

You are just rephrasing the flawed argument in favor of not increasing minimum wage.

Flawed? Where was minimum wage discussed? That's a completely separate topic that has no bearing here.

Any argument depends on context and in this case, none of the GitLab employees are facing minimum wage, working in hard labor conditions, or facing removal of their last chance at employment. The reality is that they're paid a very transparent amount without much negotiation hassle and they can easily choose to work elsewhere if they want to.

Nope but your argument is the same.

I wouldn't be in favor of increasing the minimum wage if I knew that most of the workforce could easily find a better paying job elsewhere if they weren't happy with the compensation. This is clearly not the case for the general population but probably mostly true for the type of profiles gitlab wants to hire.

Furthermore while I can believe that gitlab's salaries are below the average I doubt they're below any reasonable proposal for minimum wage. If software developer salaries start dipping below what we consider fair I think the most efficient solution would be unionizing to raise the salaries for the profession at large.

Quite frankly I find it a bit obscene to conflate both these issues.

If their salaries are too low, then they should struggle to hire and it'd be their own damn fault. The calculator salaries are lower for my area than what I see, so they should fail to hire here if they are truly that low.

What does this comment even mean? If their employees do not like the compensation package they should negotiate better or leave. Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary?

Negotiate if you want better comp. Nobody in this industry is a McDonald's/Walmart wage slave. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to work for GitLab.

GitLab has an exclusively remote workforce that is globally distributed. They put their compensation guidelines up on their wiki for the world to see and readily acknowledge that they adjust salaries for cost-of-living. It’s not a huge problem for them, I suppose, because they are willing to hire workers in lower-cost areas where tech jobs at well-known companies are relatively scarce.

Personally, this goes against my hiring philosophy and as a remote manager at another company, I insist on remote salaries for my team that match Bay Area salaries. I make up the difference by getting pick-of-the-litter hires that I wouldn’t have a chance of getting if I was going up against the Facebook/Google/Netflixes for a local SFBA hire.

I don’t know if GitLab employees have much recourse individually or collectively. It will probably take a market change to get them to adjust.

I have no beef with them and would have considered them more seriously during my last move—such a rad product!—�-but their comp is close to $100K less than what I can get working remote for many other SFBA startups.

That's a good thing though, paying with regards to market rate - it's what SF has to do, given how cost of living there is exorbitant and even with the high wages there unaffordable.

I (American) interviewed a Gitlab while earning "SF money" from Argentina. During the phone screen, they told me if I chose to live in SF, they would pay me $121k, but if I wanted to continue to live in Argentina, I would take a massive pay cut $70k. Not to mention, ARG is have massive currency inflation, so each month I would work there, my pay would drop 1-2%.

For remote workers, the job market is actually pretty small. Many of the "remote only" companies (Buffer, Gitlab, RainforestQA, etc) pay based on how expensive of a lifestyle the employee chooses to have.

One remote company I interviewed at mentioned how one of their SF employees moved in with their parents and how they talked about cutting his salary significantly because of his cheaper lifestyle.

I live in Uruguay and I don't earn "SF money", a 70k paycheck would be huge here (and in Argentina as well).

And to avoid the currency inflation you should of course choose to earn in U.S. dollars, or negotiate to be tied to the regular - currently bi-annual in Uruguay - pay increases in countries with inflation (which usually lag inflation and are a bad deal, but offer some buffer to it).

My $0.02 your pay should not be based on how much you spend. If your co-worker chooses to buy an expensive car or live in an expensive city, then they should not get paid more than the guy that lives with his parents because he wants to save money.

Unfortunately that's how it works for companies today - they know they can pay less depending on where you live (even within the same country, like SF vs Midwest US).

It's because it's a market; there is less demand in non-hub / smaller places. Think about the same thing for houses - should you pay SF house prices living in the midwest?

but that logic breaks down when if you factor in competition from other remote companies.

The moment one remote company offers an SF rate compensation outside of SF, then the job candidate's market rate is an SF rate.

I totally understand if a company doesn't have the budget for talent and looks to exclusively hire in non-hub / smaller places in order to keep costs low. But I hate when a company says: we understand you have an SF rate offer and we would normally compete with that if you lived in SF, but, sorry, our excel spreadsheet says we can only lowball you.

Rainforest QA co-founder here; We actually now pay percentile of local equivalent, which is fairer if you want to compare apples-to-apples when looking for work without moving. We found that places like LA, with our previous structure, we just couldn't hire - LA actually has a better $ / living cost ratio for developers than SF! Meanwhile in other places, we'd be 95-100% percentile.

Anyway; compensation is really hard to get right and keep everyone happy, you do your best, but haters-gonna-hate.

p.s. also we're not remote only - we have some great SF engineers - but 90% of our eng is remote; we just want the best people regardless of location :)

I think everyone's financial situation is different. I agree with you that if you try to cater compensation by a hire's lifestyle choices, then it does get really hard to keep everyone happy.

IMHO, living in SF is a choice, especially at a remote company. Just like buying a Tesla or choosing to live in your car instead of renting an apartment is also a choice.

I don't think companies should pay one employee less because they choose to have a cheaper lifestyle than the employees that buy Teslas or live in San Francisco.

I think employees should be paid fairly (which works both ways) based on where they live; if we can pay you above the local average for your role and you don't want to move, then we're an attractive offer.

JW, but how do you think about taxes? Would an American living in Denmark earn more than a Danish living in Denmark, because the American has much higher tax liability?

Or maybe the American doesn't report the income to Denmark so has very low taxes compared to a danish or American-based co-workers since they qualify for FEIE?

Does the married American with the marriage tax breaks get paid more or less than a single American?

This is why paying a percentile of local rates makes the most sense, imho.

> -100% percentile

not likely :-)

haha, wasn't supposed to be 100% accurate ;), so maybe, but in a small enough market I buy this.

how do they verify where you actually live? do you have to provide them proof of residence everytime you move?

I would not feel right lying to them about my location. I currently changed countries every 1-2 months so maybe I could of worked something out for them to pay me in USD, but they also said they wanted to pay me in local currency.

Ok, getting paid in local currency sucks.

I work for an U.S. company from Uruguay and I get paid in USD.

> Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary?

This is pretty rude given that you're the one who's not knowledgeable here. GitLab is extremely public about salary - if you go any job application page they'll tell you what the pay bands are. There is very limited room for negotiation, on purpose.

I agree that nobody is forced to work for GitLab. I completely skipped them over in my last job hunt because their pay bands were much lower than anything else I could find, even though I would have enjoyed the job. I have a friend who did the same. I think that's unfortunate for GitLab / the world and wish they would raise their pay so they can attract candidates who are getting higher offers elsewhere, so they can build a better service.

This is a very different sort of complaint from wage slavery, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.

> Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary?

There have been multiple threads about this. Some being hundreds of comments related to Gitlab's salaries, which they and some people who work there are pretty public about. I could try to find the threads on HN, but they shouldn't be too hard to find yourself.

GitLab is Europe + remote. But i don't know what you're talking about.

Some clarification would be nice

Is it common knowledge that they don't?

You can judge yourself, their Compensation Calculator is at the bottom of https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

For this local area, not only they would offer a good salary but also remote. Amazing transparency i'd say.

Wow, that really is a beautiful piece of software. I think the compensation it returns for Hamburg is very much on point and definitely fair.

Yeah, I think it depends on the area. I'm out in Denver and the compensation for an average senior developer seems to be on par with what some salary websites tell me but it's definitely way below what I currently get paid (and below what I've been paid for the past 3ish years).

It's a little low for Minnesota in the US, in my opinion. I could definitely get a little higher than that in the Twin Cities but I think being able to work remotely is a perk that people are willing to take a small pay cut for

We also continuously iterate on the compensation calculator, often because of feedback from applicants and employees.

Read about the ideas behind it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

While I won't comment on the raw salary numbers, I am curious about how long you feel it should take someone to graduate from "new to the position" to "learning the position"? Because it seems like if that time period is less than two years, you'll be underpaying your long term employees vs. a new hire of equivalent skill, which seems like a not good thing.

Also your Experience Factor Worksheet is private, whether or not you care.

Chicago is really low... the calculator returns ~$50k for a position that would pay 85 or 90 around here. I imagine they mostly target european employees? I know salaries tend to be much lower in the EU.

I think the issue is that they don't adjust for what the market is offering, they just take a standard NYC salary and adjust it depending on your city's rent.

So if your city has a better market-salary:rent ratio than NYC, their salaries are not competitive.

Conversely, they pay pretty well in Lisbon, since the rent is actually quite high compared to the pittance that software developers earn (which is why long commutes are common).

as an American remote worker that interviewed there from Argentina, it was really frustrating for them to tell me they wanted to pay me $50k less because I choose to live in a cheaper city. Even though I was currently making market rate SF money.

They had the budget for me if I lived in SF, but they stuck with their lowball offer.

It’s about fairness. Would it be fair if a SF hire had a lower wage (after expenses) than an argentinian hire? No. So Gitlab tries to optimize for every employee having the same disposable wage, no matter where they live.

That’s why they have this system.

It is not a fair system. Thats like saying, "well, Frank bought a BMW and owns a house, so he gets to get paid more." They chose to live in an expensive city and have an expensive life style.

If a hire lived with their parents in SF, does that mean they get paid less than their coworker that rents an apartment?

Fairness isn’t that simply defined.

As is tought in any philosophy class in middle or high school, there’s multiple needs.

Give everyone according to their needs? Everyone the same? Fairness isn’t that simple.

Gitlab is trying to find a solution that is fair in their opinion, and if you disagree with that, you are free to choose a different employer.

This reminds me of a recruiter telling me 'people don't work here for the money, they work here for the opportunity, and it's more than enough to live on' when asking for market rate salary. Big tech company, you can probably guess which.

As a senior dev with 5-ish years of experience in NYC, GitLab's calculator for "Developer" is offering me a $144,106-$157,207 base pay, plus stock options (because they are options I'm giving them an expected value of 0; I could value them more accurately if they were public about shares outstanding but they aren't). If I max out the sliders and call myself a lead, that goes up to $183,408. https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

For comparison, Etsy gave me an offer earlier this year that was $185K, and came out literally in the week they had layoffs, and Google gave me an offer earlier this year that added up to about $215K (base + 15% bonus + RSUs which have an obvious nonzero cash value), with an expectation of year-over-year growth. (The actual job I accepted was higher than either of these.)

I think GitLab's numbers make sense in several markets but not in NYC and probably not in SFBA either. To be fair to them, there's no good reason to pay someone market rates for those cities when they're hiring a remote workforce, but the fact remains that they're significantly under market and probably losing out on good candidates as a result.

Sorry but I think its wrong to compare Gitlab to Google, even Etsy tbh.

Its obvious that Google can offer high salaries. Same with Etsy, while its nowhere near Googles level, I feel like Gitlab's cashflow is nowhere near Etsy's cashflow either.

I checked for London and I can say that Gitlab seems to be giving out a low to average salary at best. Which is not bad considering that you can be working remotely from your home etc etc, and get maybe more shares in a startup like Gitlab.

But ye all and all I feel the OP is a bit right that since they got a better funding they should be looking at accumulating their salaries to go up for their devs that have been getting bellow market rates.

Yeah, I don't expect GitLab to reach Google salaries, but I do think that the data point is useful for knowing how much they are below Google. (Note also that this was an unnegotiated offer; I tried negotiating, evidently not very well, and only got Google to budge about $5K. I'd imagine the legendary Google offers are the ones you get if you are in a position to get Google into a bidding war for you with another comparably-profitable company, and I certainly don't think those can be called "market rate".)

I do expect them to reach Etsy - they had been facing serious investor pressure at that point and laid off a lot of people in a lot of departments including the CEO and CTO, and had not reported a profit for several quarters (they reported one this year after the layoffs). They laid off their summer interns two weeks before the summer, leaving the poor college kids scrambling to find another internship. That's not a company with enough cashflow to make significantly-higher-than-market offers.

And yeah, the comment above (as I read it) was in comparison to GitLab raising a significant funding round.

Actually, there is a good reason to pay SF or NYC salaries to remotes - you get the remote people who're good enough that they can live anywhere and still command a premium salary. I moved to Boulder, Co because I knew that I'd never work here - only in SF or NYC, so I get better quality of life without a meaningful drop in compensation (I'd make more if I picked the right company in NY or SF, but I'm making what many of my friends in NY do, so I'm fine with that.

For India, they have just two areas: Mumbai and Anywhere else. I am living in Gurgaon(near New Delhi) and it is as expensive as Mumbai in terms of renting an apartment. So Mumbai(0.227) and elsewhere(0.103) is not fair. I guess they don't have much data for elsewhere.

I appreciate them being transparent about this. But the calculator suggested salary was too low for me to consider applying :(

Interesting how they consider Puerto Rico to be a country of its own instead of an area under the US.

Gitlab is a remote company and yet location plays into salary. I get that they need to do this to be competitive but still a 1.263x multiplier for San Francisco vs my 0.466x for TN. Seems like the smart play is to briefly live in SF, secure the >2x salary and then move.

Also, kudos on them for this calculator - very transparent!

Nope, they adjust your salary for cost-of-living if you move. It’s on their wiki.

But the calculator is based on rent not cost-of-living. For example rent may be 6% lower in Zürich than in Geneva but Groceries are more than 12% more expensive. [1]

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

With the difference in salary between 'rest of England' and 'London' you could probably afford to rent a very modest one bedroom flat in London while living elsewhere and still earn more.

What sources is this argument based on? Don't they have a mainly remote team?

> Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now?

This is a defamatory statement and surprisingly not done anonymously. So, maybe you present us the full story, otherwise it's hard to believe that all employees of Gitlab are underpaid and that one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.

> This is a defamatory statement

Why is it defamatory?

> one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.

Their salaries are public.