Pay for skills not for cost of living. You hire someone for what they can bring to the table not how much you can profit off them.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
Not sure if I agree with this naive view. Yes, you hire people and give them what they want in exchange for work but at the end of the day, I am absolutely trying to save money as a company and increase profits as long as I am doing it reasonably.
why? do you feel that someday you'll be in their shoes and have the power to dictate salaries?
you are likely a worker like everyone else here. demand better.
I don't blame them for applying "Capitalism 101", but on the other hand, Gitlab is selling an ethos, not just a product¹. Surely, nobody likes to hear "when it's about management, we're rainbow and unicorns, but when it comes to the bottom line, we're capitalism 101".
I also think that they target talented but (from a career perspective) inexperienced engineers (a bit like old Google's free lunch and table tennis tables), which I find - at least - distasteful. Gitlab cleverly capitalizes on their brand, and in addition to the location-based salary optimization, they also offer substandard salaries (or at least, they did for a significant time; I interviewed with them, and by that time, they were paying at least 20% less than comparable companies).
¹: amusingly, they're not immune to marketing nonsense; see, for example, https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/all-remo....