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Comment by elliotec | Hacker News Reader

The pay is not even close to competitive. I've been through the interview process and they wouldn't budge on what would be a 40% cut for me. Very disappointing considering how amazing everything else is. I felt a bit insulted, considering their inflexible rate was several thousand dollars lower than my first dev job.

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Right. It's pretty ridiculous that they don't put that front and center, but that "the low pay issue" has to bubble up somewhere in the comments. I find it rather distasteful to lean on open source as the primary reason for paying engineers less. It's plain from comments here and elsewhere that the main pressure is to keep the burn rate low. Which is fine, that's not a dumb thing to want to keep under control. But as we used to say in the Army, you can shine a turd but it's still a turd. And I mean no offense to Gitlab. I use Gitlab in production and think it's great software. All the more reason to pay the engineers well for their excellent work.

We do try to be open about it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/#compens... "We pay on the lower end of market rates for engineering positions because we offer the benefit of working on open source (great workflow, peers, build reputation); most engineers take a pay cut to join."

And we're working on a Global Compensation Framework https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TEHZTvg9jxlwvKvsc5fm2FvZ... so that you can calculate your compensation before even applying.

Completely agree. Bit of a shame honestly.

Was it due to your location? I read they base salary offer on applicant's location... something I am feeling very undemocratic lol... I was idealist thinking I could get paid as per my skills, talent, effort, contribution etc... hell with my location, I could be in India , then in Indonesia and next year working from Mars :-)

I felt the same way, but then you get a pay cut when you go to Mars, and another when you go to Indonesia. If the max rate they told me was based on my location, I'd be shocked if they are even be able to find a mid level dev within several hundred miles of me.

Pay cut will be awkward. Thank you for adding more info, so offer was not even matched to your location...

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