Employees are never only paid based on value. If that was the case, janitors would make great money, since having a clean work environment is very important and valuable.
What you're missing here is leverage. Janitors don't make much money because most people are capable of basic janitorial tasks, and thus they have little leverage in the job market because they could be easily replaced.
In the case of Gitlab, employees in hotter job markets have more leverage because they could more easily find a high paying job where they live. People living in weaker job markets don't have that. Gitlab is paying the former group more precisely because they have more options.
I don't see any problem with them paying someone in Canberra less than they pay an equivalent person in SF, but I think it's disingenuous to make it about "cost of living." Someone with kids and a mortgage has a much higher cost of living than someone without (in the same location) but do they automatically get paid more?
The local (tech) job market determines what the workers will accept, not (as others have noted) the cost of rent or beer.
Hopefully this equalizes out over time as more tech companies can properly adopt remote workers and thus even out the employment field away from centralizing in a few specific cities but we are a long way from that.
I used to think that way, but in, like, the late 90's/early 00's. "Surely as internet access and software tools continually improve, remote work will become better and more common, democratizing blah blah blah."
Instead, while the internet getting better definitely happened, the pay differential and clustering effect in major tech hubs only increased.
As for why that would happen, I have a few different thoughts, but I think the gist of it is that the internet getting better spawned huge internet giants like Google and Facebook, and organizationally it's still an advantage to have people colocated so they went with that.
Or, that’s where companies are and they’ll take what they can get in the area because they like having warm bodies in the office rather than dealing with better qualified remote workers (like practically every company)?
On the other hand, non-collocated teams are challenging and if you have very little experience running a team (as many young founders do) it might be wise to hire locally -- at least at the beginning. I think a lot of founders also probably underestimate the amount of time they'll need to get off the ground. So if they have $5M, it might seem OK to have a burn rate of $2M per year (I'm using pseudo-random numbers). They'll think, "If we can't get another big round in 2 1/2 years, then we might as well move on to something else". So they are willing to pay the money.
Not anymore, someone will be following the "locality doesn't matter mantra" and will outbid you. What you are saying might be more true for entry level or very generic skill sets. But if you are hiring top talent, you have to offer the same best offer everywhere, because if you won't then someone else will.
Only one of those two things correlates strongly with market wages, though. But you may be right that it may be more transparent to just say "cost of labor" rather than "cost of living".
Just say "we pay the local market rate where you live" and if that's true, you won't have any problem with your offers. If the developer in Canberra expects a Mountain View salary they will presumably explain to you why that's in your interest, and you can be convinced or not. Everyone else will be OK with the local market rate, because markets.
Publishing your "Canberra Disadvantage Index" doesn't seem likely to get you anything but people complaining on the Internet.
(Though I do wonder what GitLab would do if they find someone in Canberra they really want to hire and she already makes a San Francisco wage. My guess is they hire her and ask her to keep quiet about the salary.)
For starters, you'd have to be okay with living a lie to your coworkers and putting your career at risk if you ever let the facade slip. You can't ever talk about local events at the virtual water cooler. Do you live in the same time zone as one of the high-cost-of-living cities? If not, you can't ever mention what time your kids go to school either. Is your employer ever going to fly you out to conferences or all-hands meetings? They're either buying your plane ticket directly or expecting to see a receipt; good luck explaining why you never fly out of your "home" airport. Does your employer report your earnings to the IRS? If so, you'll likely be committing some sort of tax evasion or at least having to submit a ton of corrective paperwork each year. Do they provide insurance? You'll have to explain to the provider why your address isn't what your company thinks it is or else risk voiding your coverage and/or committing insurance fraud. And so on, and so forth.
All in all, it's probably doable, but very few people would consider it worth the effort unless they are pathologically inclined towards fraud in the first place.
Bear in mind though that, for example, in the UK there's a differential of 50% for living 1-2 hours' train ride out.
I don't even know if towns I've previously lived in and commuted into London from would be counted as "London" by their calculator.
Or you work remotely for a year at a lower salary, then leverage documented experience excelling at remote work to get hired in a higher paying remote role.
By this reasoning, you'd expect to find the most "valuable" baseball players in areas devoid of professional baseball teams.
Something tells me you didn't completely think this through.
Gitlab is willing to pay high salaries for people living in expensive areas for essentially the same reason Google's dev offices are mostly located in expensive areas.
Why? Scarcity is dependent on demand. Something that absolutely nobody wants will never be scarce, even if the quantities of said thing are small in absolute numbers.
If there is no professional baseball team, presumably nobody needs a professional baseball player, and thus professional baseball players won't be scarce at all, but rather infinitely abundant and pay will reflect that by trending towards zero.
Whereas, there are many more software companies that pay roughly the same wages all of the world, and companies offer remote work, which will reduce the differentiation - but not eliminate it.
> there are many more software companies that pay roughly the same wages all of the world
The jobs with the really high salaries (and arguably the most exciting coding jobs) are disproportionately located in a handful of major tech hubs.
I question whether there are many companies that, aside from executives or other high value employees, pay similar salaries around the world. I imagine at least some pay comparable salaries across the US--or at least salaries that don't completely follow CoL--but pay Indian or Chinese developers what they pay Bay Area ones? That seems unlikely at any scale.
It doesn’t hold a candle to a bunch of guys in a room at a physical whiteboard, for the sheer collaboration bandwidth. Fully-remote has its use cases, but it doesn’t cover all use cases.
The issue is that today the people with the desired talent level are likely to have already moved to a HCOL area because that's where the highest concentration of available work is. You have to compete with the other jobs they could take that are scaled to the HCOL area.
Turns out popuplation migration is not instantaneous, spherical, or frictionless.
Maybe compensation/bonuses/promotions are the proper way to reward those who have proven their added value.
No, cost of living does not imply hotter markets for software developers.
Vancouver, London, Hong Kong, Moscow are very expensive with not tons of devs, and devs are lower paid.
> Vancouver, London, Hong Kong, Moscow are very expensive with not tons of devs, and devs are lower paid.
True enough, but rent correlates with tech salary pretty well within the US at least, where I'm guessing most of their employees are.
That's not real leverage. Leverage is provided by the minimum salary demands of the cheapest alternative supplier of labor that provides an adequate substitute. That you can walk away from an offer isn't leverage if I have someone else I can hire for the same salary and get the same benefit from employing.
Location has no relevance (it may be that desirable skill correlates with location, but then paying for that doesn't require a separate location adjustment.)
Now, for on-premise worker a worker in a higher CoL area may have more leverage because the minimum demand substitute workers is higher, but that doesn't apply to remote work where the employer can hire people from elsewhere.
(please excuse my english)
Sure, the employer has more power in that negotiation, but it's not like there aren't others out there.
But... couldn't any dev easily just move to San Francisco? This isn't 1900; it's easy to move to a new city.
Maybe we should start a service that lets everyone receive mail in SF, so you can put a SF address on your resume.
I live on the east coast. My family lives within 30 minutes of me. My closest friends live within 30 minutes.
Moving would require leaving that behind. That's not (emotionally) easy for myself nor my family.
Depression is on the rise. Suicide is on the rise. We have all these "freedoms", society has made all this "progress" and our youth is sadder than ever. Explain? More divorces, more disconnected families, more violence. Offer your theory than the easy trope.
You might have your theories, I have mine. Doesn't make it horse shit and I stand by it, so unless you have something constructive to say, you can shove it up your ass.
Not all devs are in our..."tier" so to speak. They're not picking up full relocation packages or even a few grand upon signing to make the move easier. They'll need cash in hand to get a place.
Funding a move is hard enough as a new grad without many possessions.
It gets even harder (unless you keep sharp enough to get paid relo) to move as you add vehicles, maybe buy instead of rent a property, and gather stuff like furniture.
That's before factoring in how some people have social ties to their current town. SF is good for well-compensated mercenaries or the few lucky people that got to grow up there.
I find it ironic how you point out someone else as tone deaf elsewhere in this thread.
Is it expensive? Sure. But it's still pretty easy to move if you don't have a family tying you down. Moving anywhere is a pain, but people do it.
No, someone not already working at SF wages quite likely can't easily just move to SF.
I’ve seen companies that’ll reimburse all moving expenses, offer an upfront cash moving bonus, provide temporary furnished housing for the first couple months, and, if necessary, help handle immigration and other legal details. Sometimes companies even provide a moving consultant that the new hire can delegate tasks to like hiring a moving company or arranging for their childrens’ school transfer.
Janitors often make more than you think (both in terms of compensation and benefits), because while their job is easily replicated, they also require a great deal of trust.
I think this concept can extend across all jobs - you're not just paying for skill. If someone is dependable and trustworthy, it might be worth paying a small premium to keep them around versus an unknown quantity.
Every time an employee who might have stayed if that had a slightly higher wage, you run the risk of a toxic person coming in.
Government janitors, sure, because the government consistently pays above market-rate for low-skilled positions and under market-rate for high-skilled positions.
But in the private sector, I'd have to see some data. I'm not saying they all make minimum wage, but I don't think it's good money.
I can just move to London.
Pay differences across visa barriers might make some sense. Within a country it's just odd.
It's effectively saying 'go and live in London, or we'll pay you less'.
The barrier of entry to 'live in London' is about 6k a year for a flat share. Way less than GitLab's pay differential.
(It's actually kind of funny that a hack would be to subsidise someone living in London, have that registered as your address, and live in a place with a lower cost of living in a nice house.)
Well, guess I'm never working at GitLab now. Oops. :P
But it's more hassle, and it would mean giving up your current friend network, may be a burden on your family, like if you have kids, or your spouse already has a good job. Someone already in London doesn't have to deal with that. Ergo, they have more leverage.
I get a small flatshare and do the Mon-Fri working thing. (Loads of people do this for on prem jobs because homes in London are small and/or pricey. You get the train in on Mon, stay till Fri, and go home to your big country house).
Then I stop doing the commute because it's a remote job and this is obviously silly.
Basically it seems like this whole thing rests on arbitrary rules set for no reason.
I can't figure out how working for GitLab in a northern English town would work at all and why anyone would apply when they could rent a postbox (or even an entire flat) in London and come out way ahead.
If the differences were a few grand it'd be different. It's more like half the money for living a couple hours north on a train.
Paying the same wage in different regions would lead to:
1. A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
2. Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.
3. Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and unlikely to leave even when they are unhappy.
4. If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results.
5. If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions.
1. This is meaningless.
2. This is FAR more a factor of lifestyle choices than CoL. I've lived in extremely high and extremely low CoL places and there is not a big difference. I have a $1500 mortgage instead of a $1700 lease. Maybe apples are 20c cheaper a pound?
3. "It's better if we pay you less, really!" PS Other remote employers pay significantly more than you.
4. Pay people competitively for the role instead.
5. Pay people competitively for the role instead.
They claim they want a "geographically diverse team", but without saying what benefit that brings them, that doesn't really explain anything.
Hiring is hard. Sure there may be a theoretical "better hire" outside of the Bay Area, but if they have someone in front of them who seems like they would do a great job and wants to work for them, it behooves them to hire that person now, even if it costs more. The cost of not hiring them is probably more, in lost time and productivity.
Maybe as they get bigger and each individual role becomes less critical, they can start to focus their recruiting on areas outside of SF. But right now, given that the founders are in SF, it's probably a lot easier to recruit people here.
It is the same with factory workers, ideally you should pay them all the same and as much as you can. But when you start doing it all kinds of problems pop up like it is not sustainable because people want more, and factory does not earn as much. Then they strike and factory goes bankrupt, no more work.
If you will get concentration of people from one locale it is big risk for remote company. If company at some point will have to pull out from that locale because politics/taxes change for instance that is huge risk for those employees.
Social justice is not as easy as "give people because they deserve".
Can you maybe share what position you where considering and in what metro are you life?
... Oregon... entire state is same modifier?
I can rent a 4 bedroom house 2 blocks away from the university in La Grande for $1200/m.
I can rent a 3 bedroom house 2 blocks away from the university in Portland for $3900/m.
Does not compute.
It doesn't speak well that you need to be told which metro areas to add.
The US government had to address a similar issue and came up with a handy list of metro areas:
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
I find it a little odd that you would be so adamant about your compensation algorithm and not do basic due diligence exploring what others in the space have done in the space.
HN commenters shouldn't need to tell you what metro areas are missing - you should have proactively identified them.
The disparity is slightly decreased since I last run it but still a bit out of touch from "at or above market" in this case.
My local market (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) _severely_ underpays. It's common for people with 5+ years' experience to be making under 60k CAD (50k USD), if not way less. Because of that, many of the city's best devs either work remotely, or they move to Toronto, or New York, or the Bay Area.
When you base your salary calculations on local market rates, in very-low-market-rate areas, you're looking at an artificially lowered pool. I'm not surprised people balk when they find out how low you pay, because in their mind they aren't competing with local onsite developers. That isn't their market.
Also, there are many benefits to working onsite that don't appear to be factored into your calculations. Not all remote workers can work comfortably out of the home, and so there are office rental costs. Many onsite jobs provide things like free lunches, as well. It's possible these things are factored in; if so, it might be worth mentioning them here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/benefits/
EDIT: Removed a complaint about #3, as I saw from another comment that I misunderstood it. I still disagree with the premise - if I was unhappy at my current job, there are plenty of other remote companies that pay well, and even if there weren't, I'd gladly take a pay cut to do more fulfilling work - but it doesn't strike me as condescending anymore. Just ill-informed.
Ironically if you paid a high salary but allowed people to work in a low COL area, this wouldn't be an issue... because the workers could aggressively save for retirement and semi-retire fairly early in their career.
I've heard it used in the context of US government work. (They simply don't want people who are "in it for the money"). I don't know if that's based on studies or just a feeling.
Pensions don't exist anymore, you get a savings account (403b IIRC) w/ some % matching contrib
Did you mean "our" or "their"? If you're a Gitlab employee, please explicitly state that when making comments about your company on HN.
>Paying the same wage would lead to... A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
Weird, since it looks like you don't pay a ton in SF compared to market, and IIRC don't offer stock or large cash bonuses ala Mozilla. So if I had to pick between SF and say, Portland, I'd probably go with Portland since you don't seem to ramp up enough in SF. Basically, your salaries do the opposite of what they intend.
I also took a look at the salary tool, and it seems to lack nuance compared to say, the GS payscale, which differs based on granular localities. I see many states with wildly varying costs of living that only have one "compensation factor" that would have multiple regions on the GS payscale.
In fact, it looks like most of the points are pretty flaccid except for "If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results."
"I don't want to pay a fair wage because I can get more people with less salary" isn't a super compelling argument for workers.
Edit: added italics in quotes for readability and corrected a spelling error.
He's the CEO.
Thanks, and sorry for being harsh in my original reply, I should have couched my language to be less accusatory.
Do you mean this pay scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Schedule_(US_civil_s... ? It would be interesting to see if that would improve our date. I don’t think we have to go more granular than metro area, or did you mean something else?
As for payscale, I meant the locality pay tables:
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
The federal government aims to have everyone at the same grade and step to make roughly the same (adjusted for cost of living). Sounds similar to your goal.
To aid that they broke the USA into a group of metro areas.
You could look at the locality tables, and if there's states that have multiple entries on the GS payscale, adjust accordingly in your algorithm.
For example, Pennsylvania would have a low rate if you're in a small town like the capitol, a medium rate if you're in Pittsburgh (home to CMU) and a higher rate in the east near Philadelphia. Your model (IIRC) had one COL value for all of PA.
Similarly, you could look to the US State Department's per diem table to find a list of international localities that should have their own calculation. Many organizations rely on it. When I traveled on business for a multinational, they used the State Department Per Diem rates to determine what is a reasonable amount of money per day to give:
https://aoprals.state.gov/web920/per_diem_action.asp?MenuHid...
While the per diem rate itself may or may not be useful, a list of cities that should have a unique value for COL is a useful piece of data in itself.
To be honest, I'm surprised that nobody with input to the algorithm used either data source or a similar one - I don't know if say, Canada or the EU do their own calculations or leverage the US federal govt's. I know a few multinationals that use the federal guidelines for setting per diem costs rather than spend the effort calculating that in house. But the general idea - that a larger entity had to tackle this issue long ago and published their solution... I think it's a useful data source.
It's not about the idea of a salary calculator, it's about the ratios that you set. Not everything scales linearly and while you could absolutely live in a total dump and consider nearly 100% of the salary "disposable income", in order to live at a similar level to Western Europe, the expenses start increasing rapidly.
There are many counter examples of companies paying equal regardless of the location and:
1. Not everyone lives where it cheap. There are many factors when choosing where to live: Friends, family, emotional attachment to a place, ...
2. That's linked to 1, if they choose to move somewhere expensive that's on them, not imposed by the company.
3. Not true, someone unhappy isn't going to stick around just because they can make more money.
...
At the end of the day the main goal of paying less where the cost of living is cheaper is to increase the company profit. It's 100% reasonable but masking the reason behind some "fairness" bullet points is BS to me.
If you live in Omaha where tech salaries for the best of the best top out at $70-80k, but you're making $175k at Gitlab, it's going to take a lot to get you to leave.
Honestly the thing that bothers me most about all this "fairness" stuff if the implication that business is supposed to be fair in the first place. Salary negotiation is a leverage and your/the company's BATNA. That's why software developers can make $200k in certain areas and janitors make minimum wage. Yes, value provided to the company has something to do with it. Yes, scarcity of skill has something to do with it. But all those just flow into the equation of leverage and BATNA and you come out the other end with a range, and where you fall on that range is largely just your negotiating skill and whether or not you're willing to negotiate in the first place.
That being said, if you live in Omaha, and working for GitLab, you're going to need to be executive/director level to be making $175k. FrontEnd manager? $110, tops. Security manager, $130, tops.
I disagree. If I was making 175k in a city like that, I would probably work for a few years, then semi-retire. Maybe take a nonprofit job, do less hours and consult, or work for a local university with low pay but good work life balance. I wouldn't just ride it out for 10-20 years if I didn't enjoy the job.
If you're mid career and had aggressively saved prior to acquiring 400k, you could totally take up some sort of minimum wage gig to pay for insurance while your nest egg goes or take a nonprofit job.
That's my definition of "semi retirement", maybe yours is different.
With all due respect, this is b.s. Your company does this because it can, and because developers stuck in second and third tier cities (or countries) have little choice. It is blatant exploitation and a black mark on your company.
Edit: On closer examination, your third reason simply translates to : we are your best/only option right now so deal with it, this is borderline unethical practice.
However top tier talent can be hired remotely, and will generally be worth well above market in less sophisticated markets. When I first looked at your salary scale a few years ago when I was living in Oakland and the discrepency between SF and Oakland was absolutely ridiculous. I assume that has been fixed, but even as someone who might accept your SF pay, I know my worth, and would not consider working for you in any other region. I'm sure you'll find some good talent that doesn't know their own value, but you'll miss out disproportionately on the seasoned talent.
That's like saying that I'll work for free cause the boss wants to buy his wife a new ferrari.
Bottom line is that you pay market rate for the programmer. Whether he is programming out of a cardboard box in slum or working in a golden palace in Switzerland, it should not matter cause to the employee, your personal life does not matter. Any body that hears any of these reasons during a salary negotiation or raise should immediately look for work elsewhere. I know I would.
Granted, I do believe there is wiggle room for personal reasons("I just had a baby" etc)but gitlab should be paying employees based on the value they bring the company and/or market rate.
My major criticism is they have some states where there is one rate of pay for the entire state. Oregon being the most egregious - it's my understanding the difference in COL in Portland versus a rural area in Oregon (or small town like Eugene) is a lot.
I don’t work at Gitlab, use it, or anything.
> 1. A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
Wrong. You are assuming that people only care about maximizing disposable income. That is plainly incorrect. The vast majority of people won't move to a 3rd world country with a much worse standard of living, language barrier, uproot their family's life, have safety issues and what not, so that they would have potentially 2x - 5x spending power. The reality is cost of living around the world differs, but not to the extent that this influences a large number of people in an organization into switching countries.
> 2. Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.
Wrong. And, also, WTF. It is also not your place to determine people's discretionary income, who do you think you are - their mum? a slave owner? A TV, a Macbook, a car, fuel costs about the same everywhere in the world, because there's a global market. That's true for pretty much everything but rent and food. And you're also completely unaware of various tax rules in countries that may give long-term benefits / short-term tax hikes that end up fundamentally changing earnings and lifestyle. Not that any of that would be your business, but if you're going to do that using this justification, you need to do extremely detailed and sophisticated research. Otherwise, your social equality goal will definitely backfire.
> 3. Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and unlikely to leave even when they are unhappy.
Wrong again. Any employee can go work for another company that hires remote workers. Most of these companies don't adjust salaries to some perceived cost of living factor, so, in effect, you are making yourself incredibly uncompetitive with this practice. For instance, I am extremely good at what I do and I command the global market rates that reflect that. Therefore, I would never consider working with Gitlab.
> 4. If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results.
That's the only actual reason. If you paid competitive rates globally, you'd spend more money.
> 5. If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions.
LOL, let's pretend that's a thing you could do even if you wanted to. In fact, if you could pull it off, you'd do it.
To sum it up, you just lost a lot of people's respect on here by giving a bullshit answer to a serious question. You should've told the truth, people generally respond well to honesty. It is not unreasonable that a startup (or, indeed, any business) would want to reduce costs as much as possible. This BS response, that tries to make it seem like you're doing everyone a favor by not paying global market rates, is just a turn off for most intelligent people.
It was lose the respect of these people here - or his employees who they have to justify these policies to.
"low-wage regions" includes roughly 98% of the land mass of the world. That sounds like a silly reason.
> 2. Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.
Which is how capitalism works.
> 3. Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and unlikely to leave even when they are unhappy.
...at this point I surrender to their illogic.
With all due respect, this is b.s. Your company does this because it can, and because developers stuck in second and third tier cities (or countries) have few options. It is blatant exploitation on and a black mark on your company.
Gitlab is an otherwise admirable company with a fine product. Consider correcting this policy asap.
I am not going to argue about compensation or how we do compensation at GitLab, but I must say:
> second and third tier cities (or countries)
That is really hurtful to say. Personally I would never want to move somewhere else "just for the money". People happily living somewhere else than SV and being happy without SV compensation is a real thing, believe me.
> The biggest advantage to an all-remote team is obvious: Your hiring pool is gigantic, and you don't need to convince top talent to move for you.
So the impression is, we hire you not because you live far off in Romania, but because you're really talented and we need you. That's some nice marketing hype, of which this article has plenty. I get it though, those people making tons of money at the head of the company, marketing, PR and all that, are making those money for a reason. They know how to spin stories. It's their job. And it's a legit job.
So I agree with you, but I won't expect that to be the official line.
(this is not to say there isn't amazing talent anywhere else, but not paying market rate for SF/NYC based engineers is an easy way to never be able to access the largest chunk of the best engineers in the country)
People (like everything) are paid based on how much their replacements cost, aka supply curve meeting demand curve. I'm not sure how any other pricing mechanism would work.
I think the more accurate description is people are payed the amount they could get if they moved to a different company.
> Our market rates are based on Chicago. Chicago isn’t the top of the market — you’ll find higher rates in Silicon Valley or New York — but it’s not far off either. So whether you live in Tennessee or Arizona or Alaska or Illinois, we pay the same.
> This means everyone has the freedom to pick where they want to live, and there’s no penalty for relocating to a cheaper cost-of-living area. We encourage remote and have many employees who’ve lived all over while continuing to work for Basecamp.
Source: https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...
That's fine, but basically it changes who you will hire.
> It started to increasingly seem like an arbitrary choice, and if we were going to make one such, why not go for the best and the top?
> That’s what we did. Starting 2018, Basecamp is paying everyone as though they live in San Francisco and work for a software company that pays in the top 10% of that market (compared to base pay + bonus, but not options).
Source: https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-...
They are counting on an acquisition. The question is who. Microsoft has Github so, Atlassian (and merge with Bitbucket), IBM or Oracle are the most likely.
GitLab's customers are primarily people who want to on-site host, and part of the SaaS marker (though I'd guess that's mostly gone to GitHub).
Google don't do Enterprise offerings well - they don't ship software.
GitLab is the pinacle of doing everything moderately well - they explicitly prioritise "Breadth over Depth" - https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/ - aka doing every 20%, and leaving the bugs and the missing features to the community.
Google are on the overhand fond of polishing something endlessly so they don't have support requests for it.
GitLab's source code is all opensource - Google's source code almost none of it is open source.
(BigTable, Bors, GFS, advertising stuff etc etc).
I'm surprised Gitlab makes their policy explicit, it must create a lot of issues for them eg the reaction here. No doubt other companies achieve the same thing (because at the end of the day, it reduces costs), they just do it in less obvious ways.
But it makes me feel ambivalent about your critique here. It makes me feel like it is maybe more complicated than what is contained in your reasoning, which means the "right"/best answer isn't necessarily obvious.
Their company handbook says you must have moves approved, and it requires multiple levels of management to approve a move to a higher COL area. Looks like IIRC, only your direct manager needs to OK going lower.
Nobody gets paid on value, its not how exchange works.
If you want to make more money (on a paper) and pay more taxes, move to places with higher living costs.
If it's wrong(and illegal) to pay people differently based on their race or gender, I can't see how it should be alright to pay people differently based on their cost of living. There ought to be a movement to outlaw this practice.
EDIT: Before you reply, note that I no longer think my argument is good.
It makes no sense to equate location with immutable characteristics like race or gender. People can move to a new city.
> There ought to be a movement to outlaw this practice.
State and municipal minimum wage laws would be neutered by such a law.
It was not always the case though. Good luck convincing people with moral arguments when it goes against their financial interests. Even cutting away the PR bs would be a major win.
https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...
Insofar as local CoL correlates with race and potentially other protected characteristics (religion seems likely, for instance), there's a pretty good “disparate impact” argument that it would be presumptively illegal if challenged under US federal anti-discrimination law.
Do you mean that you're able to compete because your location(hence, your salary) makes you a better value than someone who lives in an expensive region? That makes sense to me. Perhaps my viewpoint wasn't very thought out.
> As someone who works remotely from a low COL area, please do not outlaw this practice.
I have neither the power nor the desire. :)
Exactly.
I would because it's discriminating someone by their identity and not necessarily their merits. By your reasoning, does is it only rude for Christian employers to discriminate against Muslims, for example? Someone can declare themselves to be of a religion they don't actually believe, but that doesn't mean that we should accept a society that fractures itself based on arbitrary lines of identity. Would you want to live in a society where you have a public race, a public religion, and a public gender while being intimidated to hiding your private identity for the sake of employment or so much as eating at a restaurant? (assuming one could change those things at will)
Perhaps there shouldn't be specific protected classes, but I do not agree that the mutability of a person's traits should open them up to systematic discrimination.
Being a Rick and Morty fan or dressing unfashionably are generally not considered valid identities by most people, although I'm sure many who have such interests would say those things represent their identity.
Anyway, I'm sorry for dragging race issues into a thread about GitLab. xD
First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. Otherwise, aren't we subsidizing those who choose to live in an expensive place like SF or NYC over those who are happy with a smaller city like Portland of Austin?
Second, while many cities have growing tech scenes, SF and Seattle remain fairly unique job markets. If you're outside those cities, you may have less expenses, but you also lose out on networking and may find it harder to find your next job (if for no other reason than the fact nonremote companies will shy away from relocating you if another qualified candidate is local).