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I find it interesting how they achieve this and it also gives people in remote places the ability to work for such a company. What I don't agree with is the pa

I find it interesting how they achieve this and it also gives people in remote places the ability to work for such a company. What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same.

_pmf_ 7y ago
> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. That would be highly unfair.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
That's one of the advantages from an employers POV - and sorry salary is set by market forces.
earnubs 7y ago
The regional coefficients they use to set salary are a real turn off. https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json
- luch 7y ago
  This is really interesting data ! I for once would like to know why they refuse to hire contractors from Western Europe (is it a legal thing ?) : {"country":"*","contractor_factor":1.17,"entity":"GitLab BV"}], "countryNoHire": ["Iran","North Korea","Crimea","Syria","Sudan","Cuba","France","Italy","Brazil","Spain","Romania","United Arab Emirates","Sweden","Argentina","Philippines","Austria"],
  - skissane 7y ago
    I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions. But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack? Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, etc? Likewise, why would UAE be a problem, but not Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, etc?
    - superpermutat0r 7y ago
      Maybe they are too expensive. Austria has huge taxes for self-employed workers, especially if they are payed like engineers.
      - oblio 7y ago
        Romania definitely isn't too expensive :-)
    - AndriyKunitsyn 7y ago
      Local employment laws. They are totally not the same in EU, not to mention Latin America or Middle East.
      - C1sc0cat 7y ago
        Yes the Eu has directives about employment law which are implemented locally.
    - jo-m 7y ago
      This is detailed in their handbook [1], [2]. TL; DR: For the EU countries it's mostly legal/tax reasons. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines [2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/
    - usrusr 7y ago
      Must be related to employee rights, either something highly specific that is a dealbreaker to them (what would Austria have that Germany has not?) or it's a growing list based on precedence, likely full of permanently encoded biases depending on whoever was the initial candidate.
      - usrusr 7y ago
        (edit: precedent, not precedence, if that wasn't obvious, sorry for the spam)
  - AndriyKunitsyn 7y ago
    Obviously legal. When you sell physical stuff worldwide, nobody will be surprised if you won’t ship to some select countries because of local safety regulations, bad postal services or other local difficulties. When you hire people, these local difficulties increase tenfold, and I can totally understand why GitLab does not hire everywhere. You may also notice that in most “first world” countries they hire through a proxy (listed in the same file), and it seems like in “no hire” countries they just couldn’t find a proxy yet.
- tasuki 7y ago
  Apart from being a turn-off, the location factors are also off: Poland - 33.3 Czech Republic - 37 Belarus - 41 Moldova - 41
  - oakesm9 7y ago
    Same thing for People from Leed, UK having a higher factor than Brighton, UK. Brighton has the highest living costs in the UK outside of London.
    - rdouglas1 7y ago
      The location factor applies to anyone living within commutable distance or 1.75hours / 1hr 45 mins. So someone living in central Brighton would be in the London location factor.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      They can set their salaries however they want I guess - none of my business. And it must work for them if they're hiring the people they want. But I looked at GitLab's compensation recently when I was switching job, and even when I maxed every thing out (not saying I'm that good) the pay for the UK was terrible - completely unworkable for a professional software engineer on the global market. I think they had the UK as having lower cost of living than places like the Czech Republic. I know for a fact that cost of living in the UK is not lower than in the Czech Republic. But worse than that they had these little islands of reported higher cost of living. Individual cities like Bristol. I suspect someone influential lived there and wanted to be paid more and they managed to get a special case. I think I earned more as an intern while a university student with another company, than GitLab's top-tier engineer salary.
  - dempedempe 7y ago
    Vancouver, BC - 60 Seattle, WA - 90 Vancouver is more expensive than Seattle... And Cuba is 41.1, while Mexico is 35??
    - tyingq 7y ago
- thiago_fm 7y ago
  It's completely broken. Living in Sao Paulo is the most expensive thing in Latin America. Even in Berlin the rent is about the same. But yet, even Uruguai has a bigger coefficient. :-)
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  They nicely make this public. Given how rare this is, we probably should praise them for the transparency. Because what we are doing here is the very reason companies are not transparent in the first place: you never get praises, only critics.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Yes, almost everyone does this. It's just opaque in most cases. I will say that, assuming they follow their adjustments literally, you do have some odd situations. Your ideal strategy to maximize comp vs. cost of living is to live in a state where the comp for the whole state is set by a relatively high CoL city but to live in a lower cost area in that state. (At least that was the case last time I looked.) [ADDED: Although it looks as if they've made their calculator more granular so that high CoL city doesn't carry over to other areas as much.]
- Thorentis 7y ago
  Ouch, even within Australia they have large discrepancies between capital cities. One of the reasons why remote work appealed to me, was that I was hoping to escape the unfair wage difference between cities. The fact GitLab maintains it despite not having to pay for real estate in the city you work from is totally unreasonable. Same work, same pay. I'll never apply for them.
  - op00to 7y ago
    I went through the interview process and got turned off by the same thing.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
    Is it unreasonable for a random Indian company not to pay the same wages as one in SF (assuming the work is the same)? What about if both companies are consultancies doing projects for Gitlab? If differences in those cases are fine, why is there a sudden change if the employees of the above companies start working for Gitlab directly rather than through a proxy?
    - bluntfang 7y ago
      I'm not sure anyone here is a big advocate for off-shoring as a cost savings measure, and I don't see anyone in this thread defending it as a practice.
    - Thorentis 7y ago
      I'm not sure what comparison you're making sorry. But I think that if GitLab is able to pay somebody in the US one wage for work, and they hire somebody equally qualified in Australia that will be producing the same work, they should be paid the same. Well, it's up to GitLab to decide what they're paid, they shouldn't be forced to pay them the same, but I wouldn't work for a company that didn't. I'm also surprised GitLab are away to get away with it with all the fuss made recently about discrimination. Is this a form of geographical discrimination in terms of unequal pay?
      - deleted 7y ago
- jcims 7y ago
  Google does the same thing, they just aren’t this transparent about it. In fact every company I’ve worked for has a COL multiplier in their comp plan. It’s odd seeing everyone bandwagon on this about Gitlab as if it’s an uncommon practice.
sturza 7y ago
if we apply the same thinking to other industries, the prices of goods would skyrocket.
- tadzik_ 7y ago
  Perhaps they should. Our current economy of cheap, disposable goods is only possible because of the (relative) exploitation of the poor.
  - dt3ft 7y ago
    True. I experienced both ends of the scale, having lived in a very poor country and currently in a very rich country.
    - tadzik_ 7y ago
      It also works (and is similarly disgusting) in a single country where the salary discrepancy is large. I live in Poland, where the gap between IT and non-IT is staggering. Teaching programming easily nets me 5 times as much money as a regular public school teacher would get. Same goes for regular development work: developer salaries here are 4-6x the average salary. Are we making that much of a bigger impact on society? Any time I visit a hairdresser, a car mechanic or anyone from the services sector and I wonder why things are expensive, I compare their hourly rates to mine. The hairdresser may be getting something like 20% of the money I'd make in that time – and they have to support the salon for some of that as well (also, they're just someone else's employee, so they get maybe half of that in the end). No longer does it seem expensive at all, and it goes for any service I can imagine. Make these people better compensated... and I'd no longer be rich. We'd all be pretty much the same. Perhaps that's where the fear you see in some other comments here stemming from – "but this will lower the salaries for the top X%!". Yes. We'd have to admit that we're not special in terms of our contribution to society – just lucky enough to be in a booming industry. Or perhaps a growing bubble. And sure – my work has the potential to produce a lot of value. I recently wrote software that will (indirectly) enable a large warehouse operator to essentially fire their entire workforce and replace them with robots. Last I checked, the individuals currently in that workforce make something like $5 an hour, and the business owner is proud enough to put that on their job ads. When the automation machine is finished, these people will be unemployed. How will they be making their living? Nobody in the process cares. So how has my work improved the society? In the end I'll still be stuffing myself with delivery sushi and roaring a big car on the highway – thanks to the growing supply of more and more cheap labour. I've now digressed very far from the original discussion. But being aware of this is an endless source of frustration for me, and every discussion about "what is fair compensation" awakens it :|
rizz0 7y ago
> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same? Why is that? I don’t necessarily disagree with your statement. But why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford less food and healthcare just because they live in a place with higher prices and higher taxes? Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule?
- hackerbabz 7y ago
  Because when I work I produce a product for my employer. My employer sells that product at the same price regardless of where it was produced.
  - aaomidi 7y ago
    This is an amazing response. It's not true for every industry (e.g. Games), but definitely true for most. In Gitlab's case it's 100% true.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      Games aren’t sold for the same price regardless of where they were produced? Sure they do. They sell for different prices in different places they’re sold, but where they were produced has little impact on the price in each location.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    They buy your skill at the market rate, and sell the product at the market rate in a different market.
    - flyingfences 7y ago
      For an all-remote, international company, "the market" at both ends of that process is "the world".
      - 7y ago
cnorthwood 7y ago
That assumes that all money is of equal value. Which on one level it is, but on another level, the relative purchasing power in different geographic areas is a real thing. Normalising based on that means that in effect you're paying people for the same relative quality of life, rather than same absolute value, which can be very different relatively.
- pkolaczk 7y ago
  The average global relative purchasing power is already reflected in the currency exchange rates. But generally there is no such thing as a "single" purchasing power. Some local goods may be cheaper in developing countries, but some others can be more expensive. If you don't know exactly what an employee is spending their money on, you can't really tell the purchasing power of their money. A big family with more kids may spend more money on local goods, transportation and housing, but a single person may want to just save-up 80% of their salary for a new Tesla, which costs just the same everywhere. Therefore adjusting the payouts to the local prices level will always be unfair to someone. If one could get a Tesla at a 70% discount just because they live in a developing country, then the story would be different. But they can't.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    Currencies are too broad though; as has been stated, cost of living in SF is a multiple of that elsewhere, and that's just in the EU. It's similar in the Netherlands (where Gitlab is from), where living in the urban western cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Utrecht) is unaffordable for the vast majority of people, but that's where all the tech companies decide to settle because that's also where a lot of the tech people have moved to. Somehow. The fact that a lot of people live in run-down overpriced housing or shared student living spaces seems to be ignored there. I for one would love to be encouraged to move further out to the countryside. That's the long-term plan anyway.
- patrec 7y ago
  They pay people less not because of "relative purchasing power" or because they want them to have the "same relative quality of life" or some such sentimental nonsense but because they can get away with it. The cost of life is totally irrelevant, the alternative options someone has in he market-place based on their location are. Did you look at those numbers at all?
keiferski 7y ago
Salaries are in large part determined by local factors: cost of rent, food, gas/public transport, tax rates, etc. There is no "universal" salary for a particular position. Developers in San Francisco are not paid 3x of those in Des Moines because their skills are 3x better. Their salaries are higher because living in SF is more expensive. If the cost of living in SF were lower, the salaries would be lower, too. If anything, pushing for a worldwide universal salary would likely lower earnings of the top X%, simply because most of the world isn't as expensive as SF/NYC/London.
- eloisant 7y ago
  Software companies like Gitlab don't address a local market. They target a global market, which is the same no matter where you're based and no matter where your employees live. If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much. Let the employees benefit from their cheaper location rather than taking that away from them. Otherwise where is the incentive to declutter cities?
  - FartyMcFarter 7y ago
    The incentive to declutter cities is not Gitlab's.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    I am making a more fundamental point, which is that the current developer salaries (in general, worldwide) would not be as high if the cost of living were not high in the specific places where software companies congregate. These high salaries would otherwise not exist, because they are not based on an objective skills or supply-based metric. It is not as if SF developers are 3x more skilled than Des Moines ones. Clearly the assumption that salaries should factor in the cost of living is a factor. In a lot of ways, this extremely high baseline benefits everyone else in the industry, even if they don't directly work in SF/NYC/etc. The salaries of Des Moines developers are probably higher than they would otherwise be, as compared to other professions. And while it's nice to think that companies should pay people the maximum amount of money that they can afford, this is unfortunately not a rational economic move and it will collapse the moment any financial difficulties come into play.
dzikimarian 7y ago
Would it even made a sense to hire you then? When local employee costs the same? One of reasons to hire remotely is to optimize cost of conducting business. Without it a lot of these positions wouldn't exist in the first place.
- pkolaczk 7y ago
  One of the reasons to hire remotely is access to a bigger talent pool. You can also save up big on not running offices in all major cities.
  - dzikimarian 7y ago
    That's another valid reason, but it doesn't allow to dismiss factor of cost of employee entirely. Company, I work for, has office in capital city, and offices in smaller cities. Talent pool of capital city would easily accommodate us. Other offices exist because it's cheaper to hire there. If cost would be the same, they would simply cease to exist. Cost difference in means of the building is less than 5% of overall monthly budget, so, while helping it's not deciding factor.
mihaaly 7y ago
True. But it is not that trivial. Paying the same will be unfair to those living in an expensive location, finding the means of living while others retain more for the same amount of job.
- mosselman 7y ago
  Could you explain to me how it is unfair for people who choose to live in expensive places that people who don't choose that lifestyle get paid exactly the same amount for the same work?
  - mihaaly 7y ago
    It's cute, you really think it is a choice to move to an expensive place for a high paying job? Believe me, you have no choice, you MUST move there! Then work hard to hang on otherwise you are f*d, paying a lot just for your bare existence! Also some are born there perhaps, all human connections tie them there...? Choice of lifestyle? Hahaha!
    - mosselman 7y ago
      So the people who are living the life in the developing world are the ones who should take they pay hit because you want to socialise with hipsters? Also, why must you move 'there'? I understand that my life is more expensive where I live than it is in the developing world, but I get a in return for living here. I wouldn't find it fair if a remote colleague made less money than I do just because of them living somewhere else.
tinco 7y ago
So you're saying everyone at Gitlab should have their wages slashed? I wonder how good their company would run if they couldn't afford employees in all major tech hubs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hrktb 7y ago
What I found interesting is that Gitlab's ability to operate in your country is a often overlooked limiting factor, and the list can be surprising. France for instance is not supported for full time employees, as far as I know.
cs02rm0 7y ago
I dislike it too, but the reality is they're in competition with local companies subject to local taxes, etc. It does sound quite rigid in its implementation though.
beefield 7y ago
> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. This chain seems to have lots of excuses for not paying same salary for same value added, but I think it is about the same as the thing with sweat equity being somehow less valuable than cash equity. Only real reason they f#ck you is because they can.
avip 7y ago
That is ok. When you start your own distributed company, you could fix that.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  Or just work for Basecamp, which locks all of their salaries at the San Francisco avg even though everyone works remotely and they are based in the Midwest. Probably has something to do with how few people they employ.
statictype 7y ago
Cost of living is different in different places. This only works if you pay everyone at the rate you pay in the most expensive location. I think you can understand why that’s not a great idea from a company sustainability stand point.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
>What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. Why? How is it any different from moving manufacturing or support to a country with lower cost of living? A honest question.
alkonaut 7y ago
It's a market, and if I'm sitting in india working for an SF company, then the SF company needs to compete for my skills mostly with other companies in india, because local employment is still the norm. Once remote employment is so widespread that an SF company hiring someone in india actually competes for their competence with every company in the world - then that will change.
nadam 7y ago
As an Eastern Europian such practices really sadden me. Cannot this be hacked though? Could I somehow apply from a rich country and then spend 360 of 365 days in a year in a poor country?
- hocuspocus 7y ago
  Even if you pull this off, you'd be in a situation where the company that hires you (outside the US they mostly use 3rd party employment providers) and/or you are committing tax fraud in a way or another.
  - nitely 7y ago
    Isn't the promise of working fully remote that you can be a "digital nomad"? What if I just want to visit poor countries while my home is in the US?
    - hocuspocus 7y ago
      Whose promise? According to tax and immigration laws that is certainly not the case in most of the world.
      - nitely 7y ago
        The many blog posts (from people doing it) suggesting working remote and traveling the world is as easy as getting a remote job and travel the world: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-i-perfected-traveling-the-world-and-working-remotely https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-i-perfected-tra... https://doist.com/blog/travel-remote-work-digital-nomad/ https://doist.com/blog/travel-remote-work-digital-nomad/ https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/remote-work-digital-nomad https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/remote-work-digital-nomad https://www.thebalancecareers.com/working-remotely-while-traveling-2064102 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/working-remotely-while-tra... etc Here's a US tax attorney talking about it: https://www.whereverwriter.com/digital-nomad-tax-questions/ https://www.whereverwriter.com/digital-nomad-tax-questions/
est31 7y ago
> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. I've studied the system a while ago when considering to apply there and found some areas with comparatively low cost of living while having a large conversion factor. People only complain about conversion factors if they are low but there are also higher ones. If you are ready to move, you can still make lots of money (the priority for this part of my career). With Gitlab I could stay inside europe with the european healthcare system while not worrying about US visas, working remotely and asynchronously (an improved version of just "remotely"). That puts Gitlab well above other companies in my home country of Germany. The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people. If the system allows me to be employed, I'm very happy for it, even if I make less than my colleauges in SF.
- mcny 7y ago
  > The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people. Sytse is a good person but I'd never trust any company to hire more people than it absolutely must. I used to think no company will spend more in employee compensation than it must but i recently learned that board members get paid so together with runaway executive pay clearly I was wrong about that.
userium 7y ago
> I find it interesting how they achieve this There are lots of things, but one valuable thing is to build strong social connections [1] and trust [2] with your remote colleagues. For example by regularly getting the team together on video calls to discuss topics unrelated to work. And sharing a meal at the same time. Small things that make a surprisingly big difference. [1] Guide to Remote Teams https://teamsuccess.io/remoteteam https://teamsuccess.io/remoteteam [2] Harvard Business Review, The Neuroscience of Trust https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust
lbotos 7y ago
Most large multinationals do not pay everyone the same. Remote or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21127827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21127827 Google uses pay scale based on your location. I'm sure hundreds of others do as well.
geodel 7y ago
Does McDonald's burger flipper gets paid same everywhere in the world? Or for any other local service or product do these people will pay Silicon valley prices? Otherwise it would just mean software people do think of themselves as a superior species that earthly rules of economics must not apply to them.
- ratww 7y ago
  McDonald's burguer flippers don't work in the same codebase, nor they work remotely.
  - sschueller 7y ago
    Nor does the Burger cost the same.
globular-toast 7y ago
Yes, you should get paid the same. That's exactly what they are doing. Stop thinking about it in terms of cost to them and think about compensation to the employees. The cost to Gitlab of paying a competitive salary in London vs Berlin is going to be very different. But both developers will receive the same benefits relative to their location. Remember, you can't eat money, you can't drive money or live in money. Paying people the same dollar amount means the actual lifestyle of employees doing the same job will be vastly different.
- crispyporkbites 7y ago
  A mid-level dev on a local salary in India can afford to take taxis everywhere and have a live in cook/cleaner. I know mid-level developers in Ukraine who outright own their apartments (i.e. no mortgage). Mid-level developers in London are lucky if they can buy an hour from the city center. So are people in SF, London and other locations are actually underpaid on the global market? The answer is maybe, because those locations have other benefits too which are less tangible. Measuring quality of living is subjective, some of my Indian and Ukrainian friends will not consider moving to western europe or the US because their quality of life drops signficantly.
dosethree 7y ago
Gitlabs wants to hire people from everywhere. If they don’t pay people enough, they won’t be able to compete for those employees. If they pay everyone SF rates, they will have far less engineers than their competitors and will overpay unnecessarily.

_pmf_ 7y ago

> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. That would be highly unfair.

C1sc0cat 7y ago

That's one of the advantages from an employers POV - and sorry salary is set by market forces.

earnubs 7y ago

The regional coefficients they use to set salary are a real turn off. https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json

luch 7y ago
This is really interesting data ! I for once would like to know why they refuse to hire contractors from Western Europe (is it a legal thing ?) : {"country":"*","contractor_factor":1.17,"entity":"GitLab BV"}], "countryNoHire": ["Iran","North Korea","Crimea","Syria","Sudan","Cuba","France","Italy","Brazil","Spain","Romania","United Arab Emirates","Sweden","Argentina","Philippines","Austria"],
- skissane 7y ago
  I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions. But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack? Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, etc? Likewise, why would UAE be a problem, but not Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, etc?
  - superpermutat0r 7y ago
    Maybe they are too expensive. Austria has huge taxes for self-employed workers, especially if they are payed like engineers.
    - oblio 7y ago
      Romania definitely isn't too expensive :-)
  - AndriyKunitsyn 7y ago
    Local employment laws. They are totally not the same in EU, not to mention Latin America or Middle East.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Yes the Eu has directives about employment law which are implemented locally.
  - jo-m 7y ago
    This is detailed in their handbook [1], [2]. TL; DR: For the EU countries it's mostly legal/tax reasons. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines [2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/
  - usrusr 7y ago
    Must be related to employee rights, either something highly specific that is a dealbreaker to them (what would Austria have that Germany has not?) or it's a growing list based on precedence, likely full of permanently encoded biases depending on whoever was the initial candidate.
    - usrusr 7y ago
      (edit: precedent, not precedence, if that wasn't obvious, sorry for the spam)
- AndriyKunitsyn 7y ago
  Obviously legal. When you sell physical stuff worldwide, nobody will be surprised if you won’t ship to some select countries because of local safety regulations, bad postal services or other local difficulties. When you hire people, these local difficulties increase tenfold, and I can totally understand why GitLab does not hire everywhere. You may also notice that in most “first world” countries they hire through a proxy (listed in the same file), and it seems like in “no hire” countries they just couldn’t find a proxy yet.
tasuki 7y ago
Apart from being a turn-off, the location factors are also off: Poland - 33.3 Czech Republic - 37 Belarus - 41 Moldova - 41
- oakesm9 7y ago
  Same thing for People from Leed, UK having a higher factor than Brighton, UK. Brighton has the highest living costs in the UK outside of London.
  - rdouglas1 7y ago
    The location factor applies to anyone living within commutable distance or 1.75hours / 1hr 45 mins. So someone living in central Brighton would be in the London location factor.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    They can set their salaries however they want I guess - none of my business. And it must work for them if they're hiring the people they want. But I looked at GitLab's compensation recently when I was switching job, and even when I maxed every thing out (not saying I'm that good) the pay for the UK was terrible - completely unworkable for a professional software engineer on the global market. I think they had the UK as having lower cost of living than places like the Czech Republic. I know for a fact that cost of living in the UK is not lower than in the Czech Republic. But worse than that they had these little islands of reported higher cost of living. Individual cities like Bristol. I suspect someone influential lived there and wanted to be paid more and they managed to get a special case. I think I earned more as an intern while a university student with another company, than GitLab's top-tier engineer salary.
- dempedempe 7y ago
  Vancouver, BC - 60 Seattle, WA - 90 Vancouver is more expensive than Seattle... And Cuba is 41.1, while Mexico is 35??
  - tyingq 7y ago
thiago_fm 7y ago
It's completely broken. Living in Sao Paulo is the most expensive thing in Latin America. Even in Berlin the rent is about the same. But yet, even Uruguai has a bigger coefficient. :-)
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
They nicely make this public. Given how rare this is, we probably should praise them for the transparency. Because what we are doing here is the very reason companies are not transparent in the first place: you never get praises, only critics.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Yes, almost everyone does this. It's just opaque in most cases. I will say that, assuming they follow their adjustments literally, you do have some odd situations. Your ideal strategy to maximize comp vs. cost of living is to live in a state where the comp for the whole state is set by a relatively high CoL city but to live in a lower cost area in that state. (At least that was the case last time I looked.) [ADDED: Although it looks as if they've made their calculator more granular so that high CoL city doesn't carry over to other areas as much.]
Thorentis 7y ago
Ouch, even within Australia they have large discrepancies between capital cities. One of the reasons why remote work appealed to me, was that I was hoping to escape the unfair wage difference between cities. The fact GitLab maintains it despite not having to pay for real estate in the city you work from is totally unreasonable. Same work, same pay. I'll never apply for them.
- op00to 7y ago
  I went through the interview process and got turned off by the same thing.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  Is it unreasonable for a random Indian company not to pay the same wages as one in SF (assuming the work is the same)? What about if both companies are consultancies doing projects for Gitlab? If differences in those cases are fine, why is there a sudden change if the employees of the above companies start working for Gitlab directly rather than through a proxy?
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    I'm not sure anyone here is a big advocate for off-shoring as a cost savings measure, and I don't see anyone in this thread defending it as a practice.
  - Thorentis 7y ago
    I'm not sure what comparison you're making sorry. But I think that if GitLab is able to pay somebody in the US one wage for work, and they hire somebody equally qualified in Australia that will be producing the same work, they should be paid the same. Well, it's up to GitLab to decide what they're paid, they shouldn't be forced to pay them the same, but I wouldn't work for a company that didn't. I'm also surprised GitLab are away to get away with it with all the fuss made recently about discrimination. Is this a form of geographical discrimination in terms of unequal pay?
    - deleted 7y ago
jcims 7y ago
Google does the same thing, they just aren’t this transparent about it. In fact every company I’ve worked for has a COL multiplier in their comp plan. It’s odd seeing everyone bandwagon on this about Gitlab as if it’s an uncommon practice.

sturza 7y ago

if we apply the same thinking to other industries, the prices of goods would skyrocket.

tadzik_ 7y ago
Perhaps they should. Our current economy of cheap, disposable goods is only possible because of the (relative) exploitation of the poor.
- dt3ft 7y ago
  True. I experienced both ends of the scale, having lived in a very poor country and currently in a very rich country.
  - tadzik_ 7y ago
    It also works (and is similarly disgusting) in a single country where the salary discrepancy is large. I live in Poland, where the gap between IT and non-IT is staggering. Teaching programming easily nets me 5 times as much money as a regular public school teacher would get. Same goes for regular development work: developer salaries here are 4-6x the average salary. Are we making that much of a bigger impact on society? Any time I visit a hairdresser, a car mechanic or anyone from the services sector and I wonder why things are expensive, I compare their hourly rates to mine. The hairdresser may be getting something like 20% of the money I'd make in that time – and they have to support the salon for some of that as well (also, they're just someone else's employee, so they get maybe half of that in the end). No longer does it seem expensive at all, and it goes for any service I can imagine. Make these people better compensated... and I'd no longer be rich. We'd all be pretty much the same. Perhaps that's where the fear you see in some other comments here stemming from – "but this will lower the salaries for the top X%!". Yes. We'd have to admit that we're not special in terms of our contribution to society – just lucky enough to be in a booming industry. Or perhaps a growing bubble. And sure – my work has the potential to produce a lot of value. I recently wrote software that will (indirectly) enable a large warehouse operator to essentially fire their entire workforce and replace them with robots. Last I checked, the individuals currently in that workforce make something like $5 an hour, and the business owner is proud enough to put that on their job ads. When the automation machine is finished, these people will be unemployed. How will they be making their living? Nobody in the process cares. So how has my work improved the society? In the end I'll still be stuffing myself with delivery sushi and roaring a big car on the highway – thanks to the growing supply of more and more cheap labour. I've now digressed very far from the original discussion. But being aware of this is an endless source of frustration for me, and every discussion about "what is fair compensation" awakens it :|

rizz0 7y ago

> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same? Why is that? I don’t necessarily disagree with your statement. But why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford less food and healthcare just because they live in a place with higher prices and higher taxes? Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule?

hackerbabz 7y ago
Because when I work I produce a product for my employer. My employer sells that product at the same price regardless of where it was produced.
- aaomidi 7y ago
  This is an amazing response. It's not true for every industry (e.g. Games), but definitely true for most. In Gitlab's case it's 100% true.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    Games aren’t sold for the same price regardless of where they were produced? Sure they do. They sell for different prices in different places they’re sold, but where they were produced has little impact on the price in each location.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  They buy your skill at the market rate, and sell the product at the market rate in a different market.
  - flyingfences 7y ago
    For an all-remote, international company, "the market" at both ends of that process is "the world".
    - 7y ago

cnorthwood 7y ago

That assumes that all money is of equal value. Which on one level it is, but on another level, the relative purchasing power in different geographic areas is a real thing. Normalising based on that means that in effect you're paying people for the same relative quality of life, rather than same absolute value, which can be very different relatively.

pkolaczk 7y ago
The average global relative purchasing power is already reflected in the currency exchange rates. But generally there is no such thing as a "single" purchasing power. Some local goods may be cheaper in developing countries, but some others can be more expensive. If you don't know exactly what an employee is spending their money on, you can't really tell the purchasing power of their money. A big family with more kids may spend more money on local goods, transportation and housing, but a single person may want to just save-up 80% of their salary for a new Tesla, which costs just the same everywhere. Therefore adjusting the payouts to the local prices level will always be unfair to someone. If one could get a Tesla at a 70% discount just because they live in a developing country, then the story would be different. But they can't.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  Currencies are too broad though; as has been stated, cost of living in SF is a multiple of that elsewhere, and that's just in the EU. It's similar in the Netherlands (where Gitlab is from), where living in the urban western cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Utrecht) is unaffordable for the vast majority of people, but that's where all the tech companies decide to settle because that's also where a lot of the tech people have moved to. Somehow. The fact that a lot of people live in run-down overpriced housing or shared student living spaces seems to be ignored there. I for one would love to be encouraged to move further out to the countryside. That's the long-term plan anyway.
patrec 7y ago
They pay people less not because of "relative purchasing power" or because they want them to have the "same relative quality of life" or some such sentimental nonsense but because they can get away with it. The cost of life is totally irrelevant, the alternative options someone has in he market-place based on their location are. Did you look at those numbers at all?

keiferski 7y ago

Salaries are in large part determined by local factors: cost of rent, food, gas/public transport, tax rates, etc. There is no "universal" salary for a particular position. Developers in San Francisco are not paid 3x of those in Des Moines because their skills are 3x better. Their salaries are higher because living in SF is more expensive. If the cost of living in SF were lower, the salaries would be lower, too. If anything, pushing for a worldwide universal salary would likely lower earnings of the top X%, simply because most of the world isn't as expensive as SF/NYC/London.

eloisant 7y ago
Software companies like Gitlab don't address a local market. They target a global market, which is the same no matter where you're based and no matter where your employees live. If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much. Let the employees benefit from their cheaper location rather than taking that away from them. Otherwise where is the incentive to declutter cities?
- FartyMcFarter 7y ago
  The incentive to declutter cities is not Gitlab's.
- keiferski 7y ago
  I am making a more fundamental point, which is that the current developer salaries (in general, worldwide) would not be as high if the cost of living were not high in the specific places where software companies congregate. These high salaries would otherwise not exist, because they are not based on an objective skills or supply-based metric. It is not as if SF developers are 3x more skilled than Des Moines ones. Clearly the assumption that salaries should factor in the cost of living is a factor. In a lot of ways, this extremely high baseline benefits everyone else in the industry, even if they don't directly work in SF/NYC/etc. The salaries of Des Moines developers are probably higher than they would otherwise be, as compared to other professions. And while it's nice to think that companies should pay people the maximum amount of money that they can afford, this is unfortunately not a rational economic move and it will collapse the moment any financial difficulties come into play.

dzikimarian 7y ago

Would it even made a sense to hire you then? When local employee costs the same? One of reasons to hire remotely is to optimize cost of conducting business. Without it a lot of these positions wouldn't exist in the first place.

pkolaczk 7y ago
One of the reasons to hire remotely is access to a bigger talent pool. You can also save up big on not running offices in all major cities.
- dzikimarian 7y ago
  That's another valid reason, but it doesn't allow to dismiss factor of cost of employee entirely. Company, I work for, has office in capital city, and offices in smaller cities. Talent pool of capital city would easily accommodate us. Other offices exist because it's cheaper to hire there. If cost would be the same, they would simply cease to exist. Cost difference in means of the building is less than 5% of overall monthly budget, so, while helping it's not deciding factor.

mihaaly 7y ago

True. But it is not that trivial. Paying the same will be unfair to those living in an expensive location, finding the means of living while others retain more for the same amount of job.

mosselman 7y ago
Could you explain to me how it is unfair for people who choose to live in expensive places that people who don't choose that lifestyle get paid exactly the same amount for the same work?
- mihaaly 7y ago
  It's cute, you really think it is a choice to move to an expensive place for a high paying job? Believe me, you have no choice, you MUST move there! Then work hard to hang on otherwise you are f*d, paying a lot just for your bare existence! Also some are born there perhaps, all human connections tie them there...? Choice of lifestyle? Hahaha!
  - mosselman 7y ago
    So the people who are living the life in the developing world are the ones who should take they pay hit because you want to socialise with hipsters? Also, why must you move 'there'? I understand that my life is more expensive where I live than it is in the developing world, but I get a in return for living here. I wouldn't find it fair if a remote colleague made less money than I do just because of them living somewhere else.

tinco 7y ago

So you're saying everyone at Gitlab should have their wages slashed? I wonder how good their company would run if they couldn't afford employees in all major tech hubs.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

hrktb 7y ago

What I found interesting is that Gitlab's ability to operate in your country is a often overlooked limiting factor, and the list can be surprising. France for instance is not supported for full time employees, as far as I know.

cs02rm0 7y ago

I dislike it too, but the reality is they're in competition with local companies subject to local taxes, etc. It does sound quite rigid in its implementation though.

beefield 7y ago

> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. This chain seems to have lots of excuses for not paying same salary for same value added, but I think it is about the same as the thing with sweat equity being somehow less valuable than cash equity. Only real reason they f#ck you is because they can.

avip 7y ago

That is ok. When you start your own distributed company, you could fix that.

jedieaston 7y ago
Or just work for Basecamp, which locks all of their salaries at the San Francisco avg even though everyone works remotely and they are based in the Midwest. Probably has something to do with how few people they employ.

statictype 7y ago

Cost of living is different in different places. This only works if you pay everyone at the rate you pay in the most expensive location. I think you can understand why that’s not a great idea from a company sustainability stand point.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

>What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. Why? How is it any different from moving manufacturing or support to a country with lower cost of living? A honest question.

alkonaut 7y ago

It's a market, and if I'm sitting in india working for an SF company, then the SF company needs to compete for my skills mostly with other companies in india, because local employment is still the norm. Once remote employment is so widespread that an SF company hiring someone in india actually competes for their competence with every company in the world - then that will change.

nadam 7y ago

As an Eastern Europian such practices really sadden me. Cannot this be hacked though? Could I somehow apply from a rich country and then spend 360 of 365 days in a year in a poor country?

hocuspocus 7y ago
Even if you pull this off, you'd be in a situation where the company that hires you (outside the US they mostly use 3rd party employment providers) and/or you are committing tax fraud in a way or another.
- nitely 7y ago
  Isn't the promise of working fully remote that you can be a "digital nomad"? What if I just want to visit poor countries while my home is in the US?
  - hocuspocus 7y ago
    Whose promise? According to tax and immigration laws that is certainly not the case in most of the world.
    - nitely 7y ago
      The many blog posts (from people doing it) suggesting working remote and traveling the world is as easy as getting a remote job and travel the world: https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-i-perfected-traveling-the-world-and-working-remotely https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-i-perfected-tra... https://doist.com/blog/travel-remote-work-digital-nomad/ https://doist.com/blog/travel-remote-work-digital-nomad/ https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/remote-work-digital-nomad https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/remote-work-digital-nomad https://www.thebalancecareers.com/working-remotely-while-traveling-2064102 https://www.thebalancecareers.com/working-remotely-while-tra... etc Here's a US tax attorney talking about it: https://www.whereverwriter.com/digital-nomad-tax-questions/ https://www.whereverwriter.com/digital-nomad-tax-questions/

est31 7y ago

> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same. I've studied the system a while ago when considering to apply there and found some areas with comparatively low cost of living while having a large conversion factor. People only complain about conversion factors if they are low but there are also higher ones. If you are ready to move, you can still make lots of money (the priority for this part of my career). With Gitlab I could stay inside europe with the european healthcare system while not worrying about US visas, working remotely and asynchronously (an improved version of just "remotely"). That puts Gitlab well above other companies in my home country of Germany. The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people. If the system allows me to be employed, I'm very happy for it, even if I make less than my colleauges in SF.

mcny 7y ago
> The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people. Sytse is a good person but I'd never trust any company to hire more people than it absolutely must. I used to think no company will spend more in employee compensation than it must but i recently learned that board members get paid so together with runaway executive pay clearly I was wrong about that.

userium 7y ago

> I find it interesting how they achieve this There are lots of things, but one valuable thing is to build strong social connections [1] and trust [2] with your remote colleagues. For example by regularly getting the team together on video calls to discuss topics unrelated to work. And sharing a meal at the same time. Small things that make a surprisingly big difference. [1] Guide to Remote Teams https://teamsuccess.io/remoteteam https://teamsuccess.io/remoteteam [2] Harvard Business Review, The Neuroscience of Trust https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

lbotos 7y ago

Most large multinationals do not pay everyone the same. Remote or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21127827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21127827 Google uses pay scale based on your location. I'm sure hundreds of others do as well.

geodel 7y ago

Does McDonald's burger flipper gets paid same everywhere in the world? Or for any other local service or product do these people will pay Silicon valley prices? Otherwise it would just mean software people do think of themselves as a superior species that earthly rules of economics must not apply to them.

ratww 7y ago
McDonald's burguer flippers don't work in the same codebase, nor they work remotely.
- sschueller 7y ago
  Nor does the Burger cost the same.

globular-toast 7y ago

Yes, you should get paid the same. That's exactly what they are doing. Stop thinking about it in terms of cost to them and think about compensation to the employees. The cost to Gitlab of paying a competitive salary in London vs Berlin is going to be very different. But both developers will receive the same benefits relative to their location. Remember, you can't eat money, you can't drive money or live in money. Paying people the same dollar amount means the actual lifestyle of employees doing the same job will be vastly different.

crispyporkbites 7y ago
A mid-level dev on a local salary in India can afford to take taxis everywhere and have a live in cook/cleaner. I know mid-level developers in Ukraine who outright own their apartments (i.e. no mortgage). Mid-level developers in London are lucky if they can buy an hour from the city center. So are people in SF, London and other locations are actually underpaid on the global market? The answer is maybe, because those locations have other benefits too which are less tangible. Measuring quality of living is subjective, some of my Indian and Ukrainian friends will not consider moving to western europe or the US because their quality of life drops signficantly.

dosethree 7y ago

Gitlabs wants to hire people from everywhere. If they don’t pay people enough, they won’t be able to compete for those employees. If they pay everyone SF rates, they will have far less engineers than their competitors and will overpay unnecessarily.