Not directly about GitLab, but concerning their calculator Comparing Toronto (and much of Canada) in that tool to elsewhere was kind of depressing. Especially

Not directly about GitLab, but concerning their calculator Comparing Toronto (and much of Canada) in that tool to elsewhere was kind of depressing. Especially as the average salaries I've been shown ritually start higher than most places are willing to offer. I find companies who build out those calculators usually work with the most conservative data. A big marker in their calculation was a rent price index given as a comparison to New York average prices as a benchmark. Some external data points to Toronto rents sitting around $1300 for a 900 sqft unit[0]. Local city data puts an average 1 bed unit at ~ $1800 - $1920 (~ 700 - 900 sqft) — this spans to areas outside of the downtown region.[1a,b] You can also easily pay much higher than average in Toronto, depending on which part of the city you're living in.[1c] Gitlab's NYC has a baseline index of 1 and Toronto with a rent index of 0.426. Brooklynn apartments come in around the same[2a,b] as /just slightly higher than Toronto. Am I missing something? The interpretation seems grossly flawed, and it's used as justification all over the map for lowering salaries, or keeping them low. Has anybody worked on the provability of this kind of data being used, and how? Taking an average rent across a metropolis seems to make all kinds of assumptions that aren't even close to real-world. Maybe it would be more honest to perform regular price-scrapes of apartment listing websites, putting together a custom index. Couple that with a model that looks at keywords, locations, and even photos for applying quality of life metric that could influence the outcome of the learning. I wouldn't expect every company running this program to put together something like that, but employing such a service would likely yield very different results, no? Can somebody with more experience in this area weigh in? --- [0] https://www.torontorentals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/block_1-3.png https://www.torontorentals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/block... [1a] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/rent-toronto-canada-1.4002899 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/rent-toronto-canada-1.... [1b] https://blog.padmapper.com/canadian-rent-trends https://blog.padmapper.com/canadian-rent-trends [1c] https://condos.ca/toronto/yorkville https://condos.ca/toronto/yorkville [2a] https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-nyc-neighborhood-is-as-depressing-as-youd-expect-082115 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/blog/map-of-average-rent-by-... [2b] http://blog.nakedapartments.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/misc/nyc-rents.gif http://blog.nakedapartments.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-con...