4 ms·

Maybe because they have the budget to poach other Bay Area engineers?

by comprev 3y ago

immibis 3y ago
Then why don't they poach similar engineers from the Netherlands and pay them half as much?
- delfinom 3y ago
  I mean, if they could they would. Why have any engineers in the US at all when you can hire them at 1/2 to less in India, South America and even Africa?
- Aurornis 3y ago
  Did this argument just come full circle back to literally what GitLab is doing by paying engineers in the Netherlands less? Regardless, it's silly to propose that engineers are interchangeable cogs in a machine and you can find perfectly identical talent anywhere. If that was true, companies would ignore all of these locations and skip straight to the cheapest country they could find. But network effects matter, and hiring out of the Bay Area taps you into a different set of experience and networks than almost anywhere else in the world. I'm not suggesting that every Bay Area engineer is better than every Netherlands engineer, but the Bay Area talent pool really is unique and well connected in a way that's hard to find elsewhere.
  - brnt 3y ago
    But that's not what Gitlab is saying, that BayAreans are better workers. They maintain that they're merely adjusting for regional CoL, for the same person in the same position. They can hardly get closer to saying people are interchangeable cogs.
  - bgnn 3y ago
    I see your point. There are more factors than talent being different in the Bay Area I think. I work for a Bay Area start-up in the Netherlands. They opened their office here for a specific talent. This talent can be found in the Bay Area too, and they can pay the salaries there too but the employees in the Bay Area don't stay that long compared to here. For the company this is a big issue because you keep bleeding out know how. So the reason they came here was a combination of the talent, affordabile salaries (100-150k for staff level), and employee loyalty. We had only 1 person left from a team of 25 people in 6 years while half of the people in the Bay Area office is left. Give us 40 holiday days, 40 hour work week and a decent salary we will stay.

Maybe because they have the budget to poach other Bay Area engineers?

immibis 3y ago

Then why don't they poach similar engineers from the Netherlands and pay them half as much?

delfinom 3y ago
I mean, if they could they would. Why have any engineers in the US at all when you can hire them at 1/2 to less in India, South America and even Africa?
Aurornis 3y ago
Did this argument just come full circle back to literally what GitLab is doing by paying engineers in the Netherlands less? Regardless, it's silly to propose that engineers are interchangeable cogs in a machine and you can find perfectly identical talent anywhere. If that was true, companies would ignore all of these locations and skip straight to the cheapest country they could find. But network effects matter, and hiring out of the Bay Area taps you into a different set of experience and networks than almost anywhere else in the world. I'm not suggesting that every Bay Area engineer is better than every Netherlands engineer, but the Bay Area talent pool really is unique and well connected in a way that's hard to find elsewhere.
- brnt 3y ago
  But that's not what Gitlab is saying, that BayAreans are better workers. They maintain that they're merely adjusting for regional CoL, for the same person in the same position. They can hardly get closer to saying people are interchangeable cogs.
- bgnn 3y ago
  I see your point. There are more factors than talent being different in the Bay Area I think. I work for a Bay Area start-up in the Netherlands. They opened their office here for a specific talent. This talent can be found in the Bay Area too, and they can pay the salaries there too but the employees in the Bay Area don't stay that long compared to here. For the company this is a big issue because you keep bleeding out know how. So the reason they came here was a combination of the talent, affordabile salaries (100-150k for staff level), and employee loyalty. We had only 1 person left from a team of 25 people in 6 years while half of the people in the Bay Area office is left. Give us 40 holiday days, 40 hour work week and a decent salary we will stay.