10 ms·

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note that this does not mean a highly educated workforce, which may actually be a contraindication). GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living (both of which may modify the base downward; my CoL adjustment is -40%, and I live in the United States!). They explicitly state on their hiring page that they prefer people from cheaper areas. [0] [1] On top of that, just from their headcount, it sounds like they have way too many people. 160 for a technical company like this is hard to manage when the employees are local; it's even harder to manage when employees are remote. Again, for remote work, you need mature, highly-skilled staff with a strong history of successful self-direction. You're not going to get that when you're chopping their salaries in half based on their location. Bad local wages is a major reason to work remotely in the first place. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ ; use the calculator at the bottom of the page [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... ; gems include "you are required to notify us when you move and we may adjust your compensation up or down" and "[a]ll things being equal we will hire people in lower cost markets vs. higher cost markets."

bgxor 10y ago
Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here. I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.
- pc86 10y ago
  It makes more sense for me to get a PO box in Washington DC and drive there to get my paycheck. Hell, it's probably cheaper to "rent" a single room out of someone's house just to have them forward the mail.
  - compuguy 10y ago
    Agreed, the Washington DC and the Fairfax, VA modifier should be the same. Otherwise your not going to be competitive in the Washington DC area as a whole.
- danpalmer 10y ago
  Yeah, I put in some pretty conservative estimates for my skills/experience/etc, and got out a salary estimate that is not good for my area (London, UK). I tried the city I went to university in and there is no way they would be competitive there with other companies.
- ernstvn 10y ago
  Would love to get more input from you to make sure the calculator reaches its goal of providing fair market compensation in your location. Can you please send me an email to let me know your city and whatever further data you are willing to share? ernst@gitlab.com
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    My local city, but the data isn't so much mine as data that the US government shares. Sacramento, CA. Mean Salary (per latest BLS data) [0] for Software Developer, Applications: $107,540; for Web Developer: $78,050 Sacramento, CA Gitlab locality pay index: 0.39+0.25=0.51 Vs. New York City, same BLS figures [1]: $108,770/$81,430 NYC Gitlab locality pay index: 1.00+0.25=1.25 Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (BLS): 0.989/0.958 Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (Gitlab): 0.512 Fundamentally, the rent index based methodology you are using is, I would guess, giving you below market pay almost everywhere that isn't NYC or San Francisco, assuming that you've hit the market wage for the skills you are targeting in your NYC baseline. [0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000 [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      Correction: even though the ratio calculated from it and the calculation for it are correct, I somehow mistyped the Sacramento locality index, which is 0.64, not 0.51. Didn't notice it until after the edit window was closed.
    - ernstvn 10y ago
      Thanks; this is useful. I've made an issue ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 ) to make sure we cross check BLS data with the calculator.
      - tedmiston 10y ago
        I'm not sure what it is about small Midwestern cities but the calculator seems to dislike them. The calculated rates for Cincinnati are roughly half of market rate here. I understand the calculator will not be perfect in every city worldwide but it might be better to have no calculator as the current one is extremely discouraging even though I like GitLab.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Worth.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    > Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns. And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it. In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too. [0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html
    - ernstvn 10y ago
      amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24
pc86 10y ago
Just ran my numbers and got about 55% of my current salary assuming a lead position (what I have now, which I would probably not get with them) and "a lot of experience" which I'm on the fence about and they would probably disagree with. Getting rid of the COL deduction by selecting NYC as my location actually makes it reasonable so something tells me not pinning the US salary floor to 1.0 is saving them money and simultaneously getting them lower quality developers.
- scaryclam 10y ago
  Having that sort of calculator also encourages developers to embellish their competancy level as well, which is not going to help in finding quality developers. I'd much rather a company figure out where I am on their scale (each company I've worked at seems to have different ideas about what makes a junior/mid-level/senior/lead) than taking my word for it.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yeah, same here. If I max out the possible compensation by setting lead w/ a lot of experience, it's roughly 60% of what I make now (as a non-lead with a lot of experience). The kicker is that I'm employed remotely by by a company based in a city whose CoL hit is even larger than the one I currently live in. The NYC range they give is plausible for me as someone who lives in a place that is much cheaper than NYC, but it's not exciting and wouldn't really motivate me to apply. GitLab's numbers may look right on paper (and they do explain their methodology in the second link, discussing rent indexes, etc), but they're absolutely not comparable to what good people earn in the real world. Good talent commands good wages everywhere. A skilled remote worker is not going to come to GitLab for an average-for-their-area salary. Even when working locally, talented people make much more than the average for their area. I know this because I've hired many good people and unless they're entry-level (meaning they're good but haven't had a chance to prove it yet), they don't start coming in the door until you're offering at least a 50% price premium over the reported median. In fact, we had a lot of bad candidates come in asking for around that much. The senior people I hired would make more than double the median for their nominal role. The stats on these government reports don't account for seniority, skill, niche demand, etc., and likely include some people that self-report as holding a title when they're really just aspiring to that position. Once you're a mid-level dev, you should be pulling in a bare minimum of 80-85k, no matter where you live. I say this not as a bubble-dwelling San Franciscan (who surely finds such numbers laughable even for entry-level), but someone who has lived in various parts of "flyover country" his entire life. When local opportunities for at least this compensation are not forthcoming, go contract or remote. There's no reason for good people to leave money on the table, and GitLab doesn't appear to get that.
dorfsmay 10y ago
FWIW, I have seen one example of hiring a remote junior person and it worked really well, BUT there was a conscious effort to do mentoring properly, and the guy running it was a mentoring guru/nut.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I've worked mostly from home for a long time now through a few different jobs. (Always relatively nearby an office where I had a space but I haven't been in a job where I went in regularly for 15 years or so.) I'm mostly happy with the tradeoffs and would be fine with going 100% remote. That said, acknowledging that a lot of things are different from when I was starting out, I can't imagine walking into my first tech industry product management job as a remote worker.
pyb 10y ago
They have picked a strategy consisting in hiring large numbers of less experienced developers, rather than a few great ones. This is very much impossible to reverse, so now, they have to make it work with the people they have.
the_commentary 10y ago
I would agree with this -- Gitlab seems like a company with a great philosophy and I'm sure a lot of people would love to help them achieve their goals... but I just used the calculator for my own area and my pay would be around half what I'm getting currently. I have to assume that makes it really hard to get serious talent, and makes it more of a pass-through for people to get their foot in the door.
ekidd 10y ago
Hmm, in Boston they only pay 2/3rds of what Google does for somebody with my job title (not counting stock or bonuses). And as soon as you get outside of the "hot" markets, those multipliers are pretty bad. If I compare their Rochester, NY salaries with what I've actually earned working in rural college towns, well, I've gotten better paychecks in academia. They seem like nice folks, but as an experienced remote worker (with a history of both remote employment and remote contracting), I wouldn't bother to apply based on what I currently know.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living Their base is off of NYC, apparently, and they adjust based on location; from what I infer from that, if they are really middling for NYC, their modifiers are all wrong for the way market wages actually vary by location; in Sacramento, the adjusted range is below public sector pay for similar roles (salary alone, not considering benefits, etc.), much less private sector pay. The thing is, their basic methodology is arguably somewhat sensible, but they could (at least in the US) use BLS numbers for job categories by location to get modifiers that actually reflect local markets and keep their pay consistent with respect to local markets. By choosing an index that evidently is a poor proxy for variations in market pay, they end up with pay that doesn't make sense.
ernstvn 10y ago
It's definitely not our intent to pay below market in any location. If our calculator shows a large negative adjustment from your current compensation, please send me an email (ernst@gitlab.com) so I can review the data. We don't promise to make overnight changes to the calculator, since changes need to be robust and simple (i.e. no cherry picking city by city numbers), but we do gather data and make edits as we learn.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The philosophy is flawed. Good people don't make average-for-their-area salaries. Depending on which of the 5-6 applicable job titles listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Employment Statistics [0] one chooses to apply, my salary is between 40% and 120% higher than the "average mean wage" (itself an inflated statistic) in my area. This is true not just of myself but of all the good candidates I've hired. Good people don't work for average rates, especially not good people who are capable of doing remote work. GitLab is doing itself a big disservice by targeting the "average" local wage. [0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000
- overcast 10y ago
  No one makes a salary calculator that robust without intent. I think paying twice as much, and cutting your work force in half would do you a greater service, than playing around with these cost of living calculators.
  - budman1 10y ago
    And be net cheaper because of 1/2 the benefit / supervision load.
- imsofuture 10y ago
  Remote employees' market is the entire world though, that's the part you're not taking into account. Your competition is the other NYC or Boston or SFO or wherever companies that are willing to hire me and pay me a generally competitive rate (very roughly 80-100% of SF pay, in my experience). Sure, you don't have to compete with a GoogFaceAzon offer, but you do have to compete with the companies similar to yours that do pay a more globally competitive rate. There's a very important difference between: "SFO is very expensive so we have to pay people who live there more" and "we can pay people who don't live in SFO less"
biztos 10y ago
Wow, that is bizarre. Obviously you want to take advantage of wage differences in different markets, but why would you tell people ahead of time you're going to lowball them? Why not try to get the best you can get, and then pay whatever the actual market rate is for them? I just checked the calculator for a major German city and I can say they won't be recruiting anybody away from the likes of Siemens. Rocket Internet maybe.
NPegasus 10y ago
That salary calculator is just hilarious. A lead developer in SF gets $203,000 and doing the exact same work in Tucson gets $65,000. Yeah, I'm sure good developers in Tucson are just lining up to be insulted like that. The sad part is the amount of effort they put into all those policies and calculations. The amount of executives' time that must have gone into creating that circle-jerk handbook caused my portfolio to lose 5% just thinking about it. Clearly this is a company run by first-timer 20-something geeks. News flash, the point of your company is not to try to figure out the best way to run a company. If you're so interested in the operations of companies, take a management course or go into management consulting. If I were an investor in GitLab I would force them to hire an experienced CEO that would focus on the business and keep the kids from being distracted by their remote-distributed-only-fully-transparent-handbook-stored-in-rcs-public-merge-requests-welcome utopian wet daydreams. In case anyone from GitLab is reading this and is sure that I'm completely missing the point, please enlighten me as to the point. Do you think you're going to be the next IBM? Are you trying to make this a 50 year company? Fancy yourselves as the harbingers of a revolution in how people work? You're a short-term company destined to not exist in 10 years regardless of success or failure. In 5 years when the executives have all moved on they will look back and wonder why they spent so much time on the meta of running a business instead of just running the business.
minhajuddin 10y ago
There was some previous discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 . I too had to turn down their offer of $2000 USD per month for a Senior position after the second round. This issue keeps coming up in posts about Gitlab and there doesn't seem to be any progress. I love the Gitlab product and what they have done to Git hosting. But, their salary structure is really screwed up.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

bgxor 10y ago

Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here. I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.

pc86 10y ago
It makes more sense for me to get a PO box in Washington DC and drive there to get my paycheck. Hell, it's probably cheaper to "rent" a single room out of someone's house just to have them forward the mail.
- compuguy 10y ago
  Agreed, the Washington DC and the Fairfax, VA modifier should be the same. Otherwise your not going to be competitive in the Washington DC area as a whole.
danpalmer 10y ago
Yeah, I put in some pretty conservative estimates for my skills/experience/etc, and got out a salary estimate that is not good for my area (London, UK). I tried the city I went to university in and there is no way they would be competitive there with other companies.
ernstvn 10y ago
Would love to get more input from you to make sure the calculator reaches its goal of providing fair market compensation in your location. Can you please send me an email to let me know your city and whatever further data you are willing to share? ernst@gitlab.com
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  My local city, but the data isn't so much mine as data that the US government shares. Sacramento, CA. Mean Salary (per latest BLS data) [0] for Software Developer, Applications: $107,540; for Web Developer: $78,050 Sacramento, CA Gitlab locality pay index: 0.39+0.25=0.51 Vs. New York City, same BLS figures [1]: $108,770/$81,430 NYC Gitlab locality pay index: 1.00+0.25=1.25 Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (BLS): 0.989/0.958 Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (Gitlab): 0.512 Fundamentally, the rent index based methodology you are using is, I would guess, giving you below market pay almost everywhere that isn't NYC or San Francisco, assuming that you've hit the market wage for the skills you are targeting in your NYC baseline. [0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000 [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Correction: even though the ratio calculated from it and the calculation for it are correct, I somehow mistyped the Sacramento locality index, which is 0.64, not 0.51. Didn't notice it until after the edit window was closed.
  - ernstvn 10y ago
    Thanks; this is useful. I've made an issue ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 ) to make sure we cross check BLS data with the calculator.
    - tedmiston 10y ago
      I'm not sure what it is about small Midwestern cities but the calculator seems to dislike them. The calculated rates for Cincinnati are roughly half of market rate here. I understand the calculator will not be perfect in every city worldwide but it might be better to have no calculator as the current one is extremely discouraging even though I like GitLab.
vonmoltke 10y ago
Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Worth.
- amyjess 10y ago
  > Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns. And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it. In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too. [0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html
  - ernstvn 10y ago
    amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24

pc86 10y ago

Just ran my numbers and got about 55% of my current salary assuming a lead position (what I have now, which I would probably not get with them) and "a lot of experience" which I'm on the fence about and they would probably disagree with. Getting rid of the COL deduction by selecting NYC as my location actually makes it reasonable so something tells me not pinning the US salary floor to 1.0 is saving them money and simultaneously getting them lower quality developers.

scaryclam 10y ago
Having that sort of calculator also encourages developers to embellish their competancy level as well, which is not going to help in finding quality developers. I'd much rather a company figure out where I am on their scale (each company I've worked at seems to have different ideas about what makes a junior/mid-level/senior/lead) than taking my word for it.
cookiecaper 10y ago
Yeah, same here. If I max out the possible compensation by setting lead w/ a lot of experience, it's roughly 60% of what I make now (as a non-lead with a lot of experience). The kicker is that I'm employed remotely by by a company based in a city whose CoL hit is even larger than the one I currently live in. The NYC range they give is plausible for me as someone who lives in a place that is much cheaper than NYC, but it's not exciting and wouldn't really motivate me to apply. GitLab's numbers may look right on paper (and they do explain their methodology in the second link, discussing rent indexes, etc), but they're absolutely not comparable to what good people earn in the real world. Good talent commands good wages everywhere. A skilled remote worker is not going to come to GitLab for an average-for-their-area salary. Even when working locally, talented people make much more than the average for their area. I know this because I've hired many good people and unless they're entry-level (meaning they're good but haven't had a chance to prove it yet), they don't start coming in the door until you're offering at least a 50% price premium over the reported median. In fact, we had a lot of bad candidates come in asking for around that much. The senior people I hired would make more than double the median for their nominal role. The stats on these government reports don't account for seniority, skill, niche demand, etc., and likely include some people that self-report as holding a title when they're really just aspiring to that position. Once you're a mid-level dev, you should be pulling in a bare minimum of 80-85k, no matter where you live. I say this not as a bubble-dwelling San Franciscan (who surely finds such numbers laughable even for entry-level), but someone who has lived in various parts of "flyover country" his entire life. When local opportunities for at least this compensation are not forthcoming, go contract or remote. There's no reason for good people to leave money on the table, and GitLab doesn't appear to get that.

dorfsmay 10y ago

FWIW, I have seen one example of hiring a remote junior person and it worked really well, BUT there was a conscious effort to do mentoring properly, and the guy running it was a mentoring guru/nut.

ghaff 10y ago
I've worked mostly from home for a long time now through a few different jobs. (Always relatively nearby an office where I had a space but I haven't been in a job where I went in regularly for 15 years or so.) I'm mostly happy with the tradeoffs and would be fine with going 100% remote. That said, acknowledging that a lot of things are different from when I was starting out, I can't imagine walking into my first tech industry product management job as a remote worker.

pyb 10y ago

They have picked a strategy consisting in hiring large numbers of less experienced developers, rather than a few great ones. This is very much impossible to reverse, so now, they have to make it work with the people they have.

the_commentary 10y ago

I would agree with this -- Gitlab seems like a company with a great philosophy and I'm sure a lot of people would love to help them achieve their goals... but I just used the calculator for my own area and my pay would be around half what I'm getting currently. I have to assume that makes it really hard to get serious talent, and makes it more of a pass-through for people to get their foot in the door.

ekidd 10y ago

Hmm, in Boston they only pay 2/3rds of what Google does for somebody with my job title (not counting stock or bonuses). And as soon as you get outside of the "hot" markets, those multipliers are pretty bad. If I compare their Rochester, NY salaries with what I've actually earned working in rural college towns, well, I've gotten better paychecks in academia. They seem like nice folks, but as an experienced remote worker (with a history of both remote employment and remote contracting), I wouldn't bother to apply based on what I currently know.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living Their base is off of NYC, apparently, and they adjust based on location; from what I infer from that, if they are really middling for NYC, their modifiers are all wrong for the way market wages actually vary by location; in Sacramento, the adjusted range is below public sector pay for similar roles (salary alone, not considering benefits, etc.), much less private sector pay. The thing is, their basic methodology is arguably somewhat sensible, but they could (at least in the US) use BLS numbers for job categories by location to get modifiers that actually reflect local markets and keep their pay consistent with respect to local markets. By choosing an index that evidently is a poor proxy for variations in market pay, they end up with pay that doesn't make sense.

ernstvn 10y ago

It's definitely not our intent to pay below market in any location. If our calculator shows a large negative adjustment from your current compensation, please send me an email (ernst@gitlab.com) so I can review the data. We don't promise to make overnight changes to the calculator, since changes need to be robust and simple (i.e. no cherry picking city by city numbers), but we do gather data and make edits as we learn.

cookiecaper 10y ago
The philosophy is flawed. Good people don't make average-for-their-area salaries. Depending on which of the 5-6 applicable job titles listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Employment Statistics [0] one chooses to apply, my salary is between 40% and 120% higher than the "average mean wage" (itself an inflated statistic) in my area. This is true not just of myself but of all the good candidates I've hired. Good people don't work for average rates, especially not good people who are capable of doing remote work. GitLab is doing itself a big disservice by targeting the "average" local wage. [0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000 https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000
overcast 10y ago
No one makes a salary calculator that robust without intent. I think paying twice as much, and cutting your work force in half would do you a greater service, than playing around with these cost of living calculators.
- budman1 10y ago
  And be net cheaper because of 1/2 the benefit / supervision load.
imsofuture 10y ago
Remote employees' market is the entire world though, that's the part you're not taking into account. Your competition is the other NYC or Boston or SFO or wherever companies that are willing to hire me and pay me a generally competitive rate (very roughly 80-100% of SF pay, in my experience). Sure, you don't have to compete with a GoogFaceAzon offer, but you do have to compete with the companies similar to yours that do pay a more globally competitive rate. There's a very important difference between: "SFO is very expensive so we have to pay people who live there more" and "we can pay people who don't live in SFO less"

biztos 10y ago

Wow, that is bizarre. Obviously you want to take advantage of wage differences in different markets, but why would you tell people ahead of time you're going to lowball them? Why not try to get the best you can get, and then pay whatever the actual market rate is for them? I just checked the calculator for a major German city and I can say they won't be recruiting anybody away from the likes of Siemens. Rocket Internet maybe.

NPegasus 10y ago

That salary calculator is just hilarious. A lead developer in SF gets $203,000 and doing the exact same work in Tucson gets $65,000. Yeah, I'm sure good developers in Tucson are just lining up to be insulted like that. The sad part is the amount of effort they put into all those policies and calculations. The amount of executives' time that must have gone into creating that circle-jerk handbook caused my portfolio to lose 5% just thinking about it. Clearly this is a company run by first-timer 20-something geeks. News flash, the point of your company is not to try to figure out the best way to run a company. If you're so interested in the operations of companies, take a management course or go into management consulting. If I were an investor in GitLab I would force them to hire an experienced CEO that would focus on the business and keep the kids from being distracted by their remote-distributed-only-fully-transparent-handbook-stored-in-rcs-public-merge-requests-welcome utopian wet daydreams. In case anyone from GitLab is reading this and is sure that I'm completely missing the point, please enlighten me as to the point. Do you think you're going to be the next IBM? Are you trying to make this a 50 year company? Fancy yourselves as the harbingers of a revolution in how people work? You're a short-term company destined to not exist in 10 years regardless of success or failure. In 5 years when the executives have all moved on they will look back and wonder why they spent so much time on the meta of running a business instead of just running the business.

minhajuddin 10y ago

There was some previous discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 . I too had to turn down their offer of $2000 USD per month for a Senior position after the second round. This issue keeps coming up in posts about Gitlab and there doesn't seem to be any progress. I love the Gitlab product and what they have done to Git hosting. But, their salary structure is really screwed up.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]