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It's like how GitLab justifies paying people less in lower cost of living areas by saying that they don't want unhappy employees to feel like they should keep w
by dx87 8y ago
It's like how GitLab justifies paying people less in lower cost of living areas by saying that they don't want unhappy employees to feel like they should keep working there just for the money.
- baseballMan 8y agoThat's a real head scratcher
- mikeash 8y agoI always love it when companies act like you shouldn’t be working there for the money. That’s the whole point of having a job! If you want people who aren’t in it for the money, you should post your ad under “volunteers wanted.”
- rubyn00bie 8y agoI’d just go buy a PO Box, or some sort of mail forwarding service, in the most expensive post code I could find.
- chrischen 8y agoYea, and so would everyone else, and you’d be competing against them for the salary still. Your PO box doesn’t merit you the job in the end.
- willio58 8y agoEh that reasoning is weird but the location based income just makes sense to me. Do we really expect everyone to make silicon-valley salaries when they don’t live in such ridiculously expensive areas?
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoIf the work is sufficiently profitable to the employer that they can afford to shell out a SV salary for someone in SV then they can afford to shell out that salary for someone not in SV.
- chrischen 8y agoBut no one is forcing the other guy to take the job?
- mikeash 8y agoI expect salary to be the same for same-skilled remote workers no matter where they live. I would expect that to result in most remote workers not living in Silicon Valley.
- joshuamorton 8y agoWhy would you expect that? It would certainly be nice if I was paid based on value generated (it would mean a big raise even in SV), but that's not normally how economies work.
- mikeash 8y agoEquivalent products have equivalent prices, barring transportation expenses. With remote employees, transportation is irrelevant.
- joshuamorton 8y agoOnly within the same market. The same apartment in Manhattan will cost more than in Houston. The same mixed drink costs more at a fancy restaurant as at a dive bar. Demand is as relative to price as supply is. There is a lower demand for developers in Topeka, and so the cost of developers is lower as a result.
- mikeash 8y agoThere’s no “in Topeka” for remote developers, though. If you could materialize a drink from a distant bar in your kitchen, and the drink from the dive bar was identical to the one from the fancy restaurant, would you pay more for the one from the fancy restaurant? Consider a real-world example. You go to the grocery store and buy some strawberries. Some of the boxes are from a place where they’re cheaper to grow, and some are from a place where they’re more expensive to grow. Would you pay more for the latter? This sort of intermingling is common, and every time I’ve seen it, the prices are the same. The store doesn’t even consider them to be separate products. They have the same bar code and ring up identically. Barring difficulties with international borders or time zones, there is only one market for remote workers. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference if the remote employee is in Topeka or Manhattan. Why pay more for the latter?
- chrischen 8y agoIt matters how much they are paying everyone though. You can also spin it as Gitlab is subsidizing people in high cost of living areas... which is more the truth than your spin since in the end, if the lower cost of living person is being underpaid they wouldn’t be taking the job anyways.
- btasovac 8y agoYou can read why GitLab pays local rates on our blog post [1] [1] - https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/ https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/