17 ms·

Somewhat off topic, but I was once very interested in working for GitLab. According to their compensation calculator, though, I'd be making less than half what

• kilroy123 10y ago
  I'm also turned off by remote companies that do the same. I work remote and moved to a very low-cost area. That doesn't mean I want a massive pay cut.
  • duncan_bayne 10y ago
    "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a bad principle to run both countries and companies.
    • Yahivin 10y ago
      Why should we run countries like companies?
      • Ellahn 10y ago
        That was never said, we obviously shouldn't. Finding something that applies to both (Or in this case something that works in neither, which makes it even clearer) is not the same as treating both as requiring the same solutions.
  • usrusr 10y ago
    I guess if you are a remote friendly employer, you'd want to avoid both cutting yourself off from talent that happens to live in a high-cost area and getting completely overrun by applications from low-cost areas. And that could be reason enough even before applying the most obvious rule of acquisition, "don't pay more than you need". But yeah, the outcome, remoters from Cheaptown effectively subsidizing their coworkers from Glitter City is incredibly ugly. One should at least hope that the decisionmaking processes at the employer do not completely isolate the one deciding on a hire from the cost difference, so that flyover guy could at least enjoy an increased chance of getting the job.
  • megablast 10y ago
    What is the advantage to the company in hiring remote workers then? You want your cake and to eat it too?
    • stonith 10y ago
      Access to talent in locations where there aren't offices + access to talent who only work remotely.
      • onion2k 10y ago
        So you seem to think a Bay Area company should pay it's remote workers Bay Area money. That'd be lovely, but we should explore what it infers. Let's assume that Gitlab will open a Mumbai office in a month's time. Would you expect the people there to get typical Mumbai wages, or typical Bay Area wages? Assuming you don't think it's Bay Area wages (because that's crazy), why do you think going to an office in your location means you ought to be paid a lot less?
        • jsudhams 10y ago
          Some of us get Bay Area salary in hyderabad and bangalore. Why should we not get bay area salary when we deliver the same or better. I have no control over my cost of living but i do control what i will work for. No matter where.
    • yellowapple 10y ago
      Not having to deal with operating a physical office (beyond the bare minimum necessary to e.g. be served with a subpoena)?
    • stephenr 10y ago
      Getting the best staff and not having to provide an office?
• cookiecaper 10y ago
  They're not really able to attract much talent. Look through the LinkedIn of some of the GitLab people. A lot of them are very junior (this is the first "real job" for one guy I looked up), and they, rather clearly, have an amateur leadership team, as exhibited by their recent spectacular failures, their underwhelming commentary on remote team management, their naive idealistic implementation of "radical transparency", and their grossly inadequate compensation calculator. Most likely, one of their founders is technically adept, there are a small number of other experienced people onboard because they incidentally live in areas where the compensation calculator doesn't screw them, and most others are riding on those coattails. GitLab is really a sad story of lost potential. Most of the time, you can't fix these kinds of problems, because they start at the top and flow down (and you usually can't replace the top). A well-engineered GitLab alternative would be welcome.
  • yuhong 10y ago
    Are there evidence that the founders are not willing to learn or something like that.
    • cookiecaper 10y ago
      Just the fact that they've been around a long time now, and are still like they are.
  • the_common_man 10y ago
    Not sure I entirely agree but I do feel GitLab is caught up now in the hyper-growth circle like every other startup :/ If the enterprise angle does not work out, there is no backup plan. They compete against GitHub and Atlassian in this space and can only grow so much (but VCs was never ending growth).
  • elygre 10y ago
    I can't be bothered to bother that GitLab has junior people, even to the extend that it's the first "real job" for some of them. We hire people for their first "real job" all the time -- someone has to!
• webo 10y ago
  Senior Backend Engineer shows 85-95k in Chicago, which is below average. It shows 45-55k for Fayetteville -- most junior guys/gals start around 75k in Fayetteville at mediocre companies.
  • guitarsteve 10y ago
    So you could get double your pay by moving from Chicago to San Francisco, or multiply by 6 if you move from Fayetteville to San Francisco. Seems backwards to have such a large incentive to live somewhere more expensive.
    • lrem 10y ago
      Unfortunately, this is the common practice - offer salaries adjusted for the local market. I could keep my current job and move to an office 1500km closer to my parents, but my salary would be slashed in half, because market. But it's pretty funny for remote workers: what if you get hired in SF, but then move to Fayetteville without telling anyone?
      • webo 10y ago
        As long as you keep paying taxes in CA, I imagine this is not an uncommon practice.
  • ravitation 10y ago
    Yep, this seems to be a major flaw in their compensation calculator. If you don't live in a high rent, hot bed, you end up with a compensation package that is very (i.e. laughably) low. A lead (maximum seniority), with high (maximum) experience, in Fayetteville, AR makes less than most junior developers (60k-68k)...
  • graton 10y ago
    Yeah, similar for me. In my geo it shows ~87-98K, but if I moved to San Francisco it is ~173-189K. Which seems foolish. They should incentivize people to move to the lower costs geos, not penalize them. And the listed salary for my geo is about 2/3 to 3/4 of my current base pay before any bonuses. The idea of the company sounds good, but the pay is a deal breaker for me. I wouldn't like feeling like I'm providing the company more value but because the person lives in San Francisco they get twice as much pay. Maybe that is me being petty?
• sebastianavina 10y ago
  how can i get a remote work?
• sytse 10y ago
  Mmm, that is pretty far off. If I understand correctly you're a developer intern in Orlando. In most countries interns are paid less than juniors. Maybe that is not the case in the US currently? BTW Our compensation principles can be found at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation-calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
  • hamandcheese 10y ago
    Definitely not an intern anymore ;) Edit: and yeah, I've read a lot about your company including that link. I understand your approach, it just excludes me.
    • sytse 10y ago
      I must have found a different person, sorry. Can you please email ernst@gitlab.com with your case? If the calculator is so far off we would love to add that data point. The most heard criticism seems to be that for low rent parts of the US the calculator is too low. Before our last change the biggest problem was that for hot cities (Phoenix and Austin) it was too low, we now fixed that.
      • hamandcheese 10y ago
        No, you found the right person, it's just dated information :) I was an intern ~2 years ago.
      • tracker1 10y ago
        I'm in Phoenix, and it still seems a bit low.. about 16-20k off at lead with high experience... seeing roles around $130k locally. One of the sites like glassdoor is seeing an average around your top. For U.S. it may be best to establish a floor, and for most cities don't go below that... Remote work in the U.S. tends to be closer to 65-75% of Northern California pay, from what I've seen. Often more than local rates, but harder to come by the jobs.
  • anonymous_green 10y ago
• matthewvincent 10y ago
  I had an interesting interview with one of their recruiters in which within the first 5 minutes I was asked to agree to compensation below what their calculator (which was a part of the job posting) indicated was their pay scale for my location and that position. I was told my resume wouldn't be passed to an engineering lead until I had (in writing) agreed to the lower salary range. Liiike why even... Edit: Didn't intend to make a scene or put anyone on blast here. Just thought the calculator was a little silly. Thanks for the responses gitlab staff.
  • s_kilk 10y ago
    That all sounds kinda weird and sketchy, like the recruiter had a strange hidden motive.
  • connorshea 10y ago
    Sorry this happened to you, I’ve brought it up with our PeopleOps team and we’re looking into it. Something like this absolutely shouldn’t be happening. If you have any more information you can share, it'd be great if you could send it to peopleops at gitlab.com.
  • rixrix 10y ago
    be nice this is my first comment in Hacker News :D Interestingly issues gets noticed here!, there was a posting yesterday about FB hiring issue.
  • sashagitlab 10y ago
    Hi Matt, I am the recruiter at GL, I've reviewed your case, and I wanted to follow up personally. I'd like to address your concern and explain our process. Since the time of your interview, we have changed the process of discussing compensation within the first 15 minutes of a conversation to the end of a phone call. We understand it's uncomfortable and sometimes awkward to talk pay when you've just met someone. Hopefully this improvement will prevent misunderstandings in the future. Secondly, we never would ask you to agree to something that is below the calculators suggestion, however your expectations based on Level, Experience, or Location may differ from the recruiter or hiring managers' assessments. We do talk about compensation early and upfront with every candidate, because we use it to guide our offers. I'm very sorry that your experience was less than ideal, and I apologize for any miscommunication that happened as a result! We are always striving to improve our process so any more details/feedback you'd like to share about your specific situation would be appreciated so our PeopleOps team can ensure this mistake isn't repeated.
• ezekg 10y ago
  Agreed. I actually had a good time interviewing with them. I'm not sure if it was normal, but it was essentially a 2 week email thread with a few GitLab devs asking me to explain various architectural parts of their system. I had fun diving into their system and getting to know it, including a few of their Go projects like workhorse, but I stopped the process after being told I couldn't ask for more than $60,000 for the position. Cool company, but the pay is just too low.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  This has been discussed quite a bit on HN in the past with the general sentiment that their calculator is very off from the market in the US.
• minusSeven 10y ago
  job prospects or salary ? because they are entirely different things.
• akerro 10y ago
  They have developers from poorer countries like Eastern Europe where your twice less is twice more than local market.
  • kilotaras 10y ago
    You vastly underestimate situation in Eastern Europe. It's fairly easily for software engineer to move to Europe, so local companies still have to compete with that. Anyway I've looked at my homecity in Ukraine and salaries proposed are around 80-90th percentile (~$50k for senior developer). The thing is there's no reason for a person to hold onto Gitlab. Once you get some remote experience there're a lot of companies who provide EU/US salaries even if you happen to live in Eastern Europe.
    • sdesol 10y ago
      > The thing is there's no reason for a person to hold onto Gitlab This is the one area, I'm quite interested in seeing how things play out, from a human resources point of view. Since GitLab is so transparent, it'll be interesting to see, if they publish any information on employee turnover in the future. Or any mitigation strategies they may develop, to help retain high value employees.
• homakov 10y ago
  How can anyone verify where I live? What if I say I live in SF just don't wanna meet up personally?
  • cderwin 10y ago
    Assuming you are a law-abiding citizen such information would be critical for tax withholding.
  • sytse 10y ago
    Hi Egor, we rely on team members telling the truth about where they live and when they move. In SF we sometimes meet up so that would be slightly harder to pull off. But all of our physical get togethers are optional so you can probably keep this going for a while.
    • homakov 10y ago
      It was a general question to all companies, because geosalary seems to be popular. Always wondered how it works, and how it can be abused. Also: we, digital nomads, don't have any base. I honestly have no answer to "where do you live"
      • sytse 10y ago
        We had one person before that didn't have a base. He was registered in Estonia as a digital citizen and company. We opted to use that. But we'll look at this on a case by case basis.
• taude 10y ago
  In reading all these responses about the low GitLab pay calculator, does anyone have any good tips on how to underpay and still hire talent. It's pretty incredible to me.
  • leesalminen 10y ago
    It's really hard. I haven't found a way to do it successfully yet. I think a lot of it depends on the "coolness" factor. Also interested to hear from anyone who has done it successfully.
  • marktangotango 10y ago
    Hire entry level and train them. Have a kick ass culture so they want to stay. Preposterous I know. I've seen it once. In reality, job hoppers are the minority I've found.
    • taude 10y ago
      Is a lot of their workforce remote? Because I imagine that would influence the lack of job-hopping.
  • mikekchar 10y ago
    I've worked in several jobs where I've thought, "If I'm going to have to put up with this BS, they're going to have to pay me a lot more". And the funny thing is, often times they are willing to pay you more if you ask. So there have been times in my career where I've been miserable pretty much exactly because I decided to work in a really stressful environment while accepting a large salary. As I get older, I'm not really that interested in putting up with the BS. So if I work in an environment without the BS, or if I have a boss who is willing to shield me from the BS, I'm very happy to pay for it. Actually, there are tons of things I'll pay for. Remote working on a team that knows how to do it and respects remote workers? That's a big discount. A work process that allows me to work effectively in a different timezone or with flexible hours? Another discount. Guarantee that the work I'm doing will be released with a free software license? HUGE discount (really, huge). Working with interesting and talented people? Yep, discount. No inventions agreement? DISCOUNT. You get the picture. Hell, I'll do a fair amount of work for free if you tick all the boxes. I'm nowhere near alone in this. Edit: grammar... :-P
• ed_balls 10y ago
  Yeah I'm really surprised that they don't do something similar to https://buffer.com/salary https://buffer.com/salary or stackoverflow. I applied to Gitlab, but then I noticed the calculator. London is below market rate. In Warsaw is half what Google pays.
• netcraft 10y ago
  It also comes back with half of my current salary, for a senior with a lot of experience. I know what you mean about future prospects.
• Lazare 10y ago
  The concept of the calculator is very strong, but I don't think they've implemented it well. It seems obvious to me that they should be paying relatively more to people in cheap locations than expensive ones. That saves Gitlab money, biases their hiring to people in cheaper areas, incentivizes people to move to cheaper areas, helps cool down the overheated housing markets in expensive areas. I can see drawbacks to paying a strict flat amount regardless of local cost of living; some adjustments probably make sense. But Gitlab seems to be doing the opposite. I don't get it.
• ianbicking 10y ago
  I feel a little bad contributing to such a very off-topic thread, but... I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable. At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab). So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s. I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves. All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.
• barrkel 10y ago
  The trouble with this kind of calculator is that it fails to take into account the global opportunities that the higher end of the talent distribution has. Salaries to retain highly skilled people in cheap locations don't have as large a discount; not only does the salary need to compete against other employers in the area, it also needs to compete against moving to a better market. Top end salaries will still be discounted, naturally, because the costs in high cost areas are real. But not every scales like housing.
• fbuilesv 10y ago
  Using the GitLab calculator: If you are a developer in Medellín you are paid 3x less than if you are living in the Bay Area. If you are a customer in Medellín you pay the same as a customer in the Bay Area. In this case, "cost of living"[0] only applies to employees and not customers, which in my opinion says a lot about how much the company values their staff. I appreciate the openness from GitLab on this matter though, they're pretty up-front about it so if you don't like it don't apply. [0] When the word "cost of living" is mentioned but it's not reflected in the price for final users then you know you're about to get fucked.
• redbeard0x0a 10y ago
  Yeah, the calculator seems to cause some weird things. Living in Seattle, WA, the salary range I used topped out at ~$120k. However, 30 miles south in Tacoma it tops out at at ~$80k. Moving to Dallas would move the top of the range to ~$105k (Hot Market Adjustment?! but not Seattle?!). Values I used (I rounded the salary up too): * Lead * Above Average Experience * United States * Dallas, Seattle and Tacoma. I'm looking to move to the Dallas area (from Tacoma) and my rent will likely end up being less in Dallas (at least 20%).
• was_boring 10y ago
  I'm happy this comes up in every thread about gitlab, and that they appear to read them. I'm hoping one day someone on the team says "you know, they're right, we should do something about this." Just to throw my example in, they would want to pay me at least 20% less than what I currently make -- and I'm already a 100% remote employee working for a financially stable startup. What they offer is simply not even close to market value -- yet they claim it is. In this case it's the D.C. area.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• gedrap 10y ago
  The problem with GitLab's calculator is that it's simply... too ambitious. They try to calculate the salary for pretty much every somewhat major city in the world and it's simply impossible. You can't capture the details of so many different local economies. For example, when I lived in England, the difference between rent for a room in a shared house outside city center and a 1 bedroom apartment in the city center was usually at most 100% (excluding the very top and very bottom of the ranges). Meanwhile in Lithuania, where I live at the moment, the difference is about 6 times. You can't capture this in a calculator with such broad coverage. Approach by mozilla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881004) seems much more reasonable to me, to be honest.
• anderber 10y ago
  I also had an interview at Gitlab, and I was dinged for being from a smaller market. I thought the interview itself was very nice, straight forward, and friendly. One thing that I thought was strange was the quiz/test at the end of each interview. I get that you want to make sure that the candidate has an adequate skill level, but I have a lot of open-source projects (hosted in GL), and I am (one of many people) horrible at live quizzes. Mostly because of nerves, being in an interview is stressful enough. The fact that I had to take a 30-45min quiz instead of going over my own code is not ideal. I just don't believe in standardized testing being a good measure to someone's ability. But, I really thought they were nice about it, and I wish them luck.
• anonymous_green 10y ago
  This is quite common they like to brand themselves as startup and remote company with all their slimy tactics to pay their employees below market rate. I've had their team deny the proof that the salary expectation I asked for is with-in the normal range even if they are a remote company and a startup. Nobody should be paid as low as 50-60k per annum when they expect people to perform same as someone paid 90-120k. Here are some of the links where I raised this point as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 This link suggests their average salaries to be 115k but their calculator is just for people who they'd like to scam into paying below par. https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Gitlab-Salaries https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Gitlab-Salaries