This is wage economics 101, people have a visceral reaction to any evidence of unfairness. The same issue occurs in a slowing economy, where in an efficient mar

This is wage economics 101, people have a visceral reaction to any evidence of unfairness. The same issue occurs in a slowing economy, where in an efficient market you would want to reduce costs by reducing wages, but in practice this is impossible. What happens instead is people never get a pay rise, and inflation reduces their effective wage. Nobody minds this latter option at all, despite the fact it is materially the same thing as a wage reduction. 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.