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Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here.

I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.

It makes more sense for me to get a PO box in Washington DC and drive there to get my paycheck. Hell, it's probably cheaper to "rent" a single room out of someone's house just to have them forward the mail.

Agreed, the Washington DC and the Fairfax, VA modifier should be the same. Otherwise your not going to be competitive in the Washington DC area as a whole.

Yeah, I put in some pretty conservative estimates for my skills/experience/etc, and got out a salary estimate that is not good for my area (London, UK). I tried the city I went to university in and there is no way they would be competitive there with other companies.

Would love to get more input from you to make sure the calculator reaches its goal of providing fair market compensation in your location. Can you please send me an email to let me know your city and whatever further data you are willing to share? ernst@gitlab.com

My local city, but the data isn't so much mine as data that the US government shares.

Sacramento, CA. Mean Salary (per latest BLS data) [0] for Software Developer, Applications: $107,540; for Web Developer: $78,050

Sacramento, CA Gitlab locality pay index: 0.39+0.25=0.51

Vs.

New York City, same BLS figures [1]: $108,770/$81,430

NYC Gitlab locality pay index: 1.00+0.25=1.25

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (BLS): 0.989/0.958

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (Gitlab): 0.512

Fundamentally, the rent index based methodology you are using is, I would guess, giving you below market pay almost everywhere that isn't NYC or San Francisco, assuming that you've hit the market wage for the skills you are targeting in your NYC baseline.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000

Correction: even though the ratio calculated from it and the calculation for it are correct, I somehow mistyped the Sacramento locality index, which is 0.64, not 0.51.

Didn't notice it until after the edit window was closed.

Thanks; this is useful. I've made an issue ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 ) to make sure we cross check BLS data with the calculator.

I'm not sure what it is about small Midwestern cities but the calculator seems to dislike them. The calculated rates for Cincinnati are roughly half of market rate here. I understand the calculator will not be perfect in every city worldwide but it might be better to have no calculator as the current one is extremely discouraging even though I like GitLab.

It's based on rent. Each city is punished in proportion to how much cheaper its rent is than the rent in NYC. As NYC is one of the top 5 most expensive cities worldwide for real estate [0], any city marginally more reasonable is going to get pummeled.

[0] http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/most-expensive-cities

Perhaps it's that there is lots of cheap housing in the suburbs here, and in the greater metro area but that is outside the city proper. But most of the tech / startup activity ie concentrated in one small gentrifying neighborhood where rent is much higher (+50–100%), so coincidentally people in tech aren't buying those houses because the commute is so far from the core.

I wonder if any of these indexes breaks down a city by zip code. A good analogy for here would be if you averaged all rent over the neighborhoods in Brooklyn then used that number for a bunch of candidates in Williamsburg.

It really penalizes living in a third- / fourth-tier startup hub, for example, vs either a first- / second-tier hub or a non-hub.

Taken from another perspective maybe it's an intentional filter on the candidate pool to specific cities or countries. That wouldn't seem to be consistent with most remote philosophies but it's something to consider.

Interestingly, Buffer's salary calculator is almost the opposite with a relatively small percentage difference between Nashville or Austin vs SF or NYC for instance.

I sent you a more detailed email, but basically it is preposterous to assume a "very experienced" senior engineer in ANY part of the United States is going to be happy with making $65K.

Exactly this. A very experienced engineer who is capable of working remote will likely be pretty intelligent. They'll realize a company is attempting to steal the surplus they created by living a low-cost lifestyle. I don't really understand why a company feels they have any claim to this.

Remote employees who are good at being remote have some very good options at this point of their career. Why the heck would they take less money simply because they had the foresight to move to a low cost of living location? Half the (stellar) people seeking remote work have built their entire lives around this fact - and have made very conscious decisions regarding their career and lifestyle.

Obviously it's working out for Gitlab, but I can't imagine any of my senior remote talent finding this acceptable in any way. I guess I could see it working for a couple years "converting" an engineer who is super excited to move into remote work vs. on-site. But beyond that, this policy seems extremely dangerous to me.

This is precisely what turned me off applying for a job at Gitlab after initially being hugely enthusiastic. My family and I moved away from London to the city we grew up in to save some money, partly because I knew I could work remote for the same sort of money I had been making while paying considerably less on rent and living expenses. The cost of living adjustments Gitlab do would mean entirely negating that benefit.

I'm not really sure what the justification for CoL adjustments is, beyond "we can get away with it". Apparently I'm worth paying $120,000 working from home in London, but if I move 70 miles south I'm worth half that. Not only does it make little sense logically, there's no way cost of living here is less than half that in London, so its not even calculated correctly.

Thanks!

Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Worth.

> Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns.

And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it.

In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too.

[0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html

amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24

Just ran my numbers and got about 55% of my current salary assuming a lead position (what I have now, which I would probably not get with them) and "a lot of experience" which I'm on the fence about and they would probably disagree with.

Getting rid of the COL deduction by selecting NYC as my location actually makes it reasonable so something tells me not pinning the US salary floor to 1.0 is saving them money and simultaneously getting them lower quality developers.

Having that sort of calculator also encourages developers to embellish their competancy level as well, which is not going to help in finding quality developers. I'd much rather a company figure out where I am on their scale (each company I've worked at seems to have different ideas about what makes a junior/mid-level/senior/lead) than taking my word for it.

Yeah, same here. If I max out the possible compensation by setting lead w/ a lot of experience, it's roughly 60% of what I make now (as a non-lead with a lot of experience).

The kicker is that I'm employed remotely by by a company based in a city whose CoL hit is even larger than the one I currently live in. The NYC range they give is plausible for me as someone who lives in a place that is much cheaper than NYC, but it's not exciting and wouldn't really motivate me to apply.

GitLab's numbers may look right on paper (and they do explain their methodology in the second link, discussing rent indexes, etc), but they're absolutely not comparable to what good people earn in the real world. Good talent commands good wages everywhere. A skilled remote worker is not going to come to GitLab for an average-for-their-area salary.

Even when working locally, talented people make much more than the average for their area. I know this because I've hired many good people and unless they're entry-level (meaning they're good but haven't had a chance to prove it yet), they don't start coming in the door until you're offering at least a 50% price premium over the reported median. In fact, we had a lot of bad candidates come in asking for around that much. The senior people I hired would make more than double the median for their nominal role. The stats on these government reports don't account for seniority, skill, niche demand, etc., and likely include some people that self-report as holding a title when they're really just aspiring to that position.

Once you're a mid-level dev, you should be pulling in a bare minimum of 80-85k, no matter where you live. I say this not as a bubble-dwelling San Franciscan (who surely finds such numbers laughable even for entry-level), but someone who has lived in various parts of "flyover country" his entire life. When local opportunities for at least this compensation are not forthcoming, go contract or remote.

There's no reason for good people to leave money on the table, and GitLab doesn't appear to get that.

My wife is a compensation consultant and we have discussed this phenomenon a few times. She says that for some jobs "there is a national market" and comparisons to local salaries is therefore invalid.

Set it to "lead" and "a lot of experience" (I'd grade myself intermediate-to-senior and above-average experience IRL) and the top of that range is less than I make now, and I'm not big on self-promotion/networking and could probably make quite a bit more if I were. Plus their benefits are worse than what I get at my tiny company. Their comp calculation sucks for my area.

They're paying talentless Wordpress dev prices for their mid-tier devs, by local standards. This is in a mid-sized midwestern US city. LOLWUT? No one decent in my city would accept a job there.

It's probably set up to attract cheap Eastern European devs.

It's more likely set up based on an untested (and easily falsified) conjecture about the relationship between local residential rent prices and local market wages in the industry.

We indeed try to track local market wages. From https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

"In developing the compensation formula above, we looked at the compensation of our team members which had been set in the past (without the formula), and found out that there was a statistically significant correlation between compensation and the factors that are now in the formula. We purposefully chose to look for correlations with metrics that are probably causal and definitely relevant in people's lives (the rent!). This also has the advantage of letting us work with data that is readily available publicly, as opposed to trying to scour the web for market compensation rates for all roles in all locations. Perhaps surprisingly, there was a stronger correlation between compensation and rent index than with the more general cost of living index available through Numbeo (or the cost of living with rent index, for that matter); and so we moved ahead with the Rent Index."

The immediate problem with the method of developing your formula that is described is that it assumed that the pay of your staff before you had a systematic formula already accurately reflected prevailing market wages in the locality of every employee.

And, for US locations, BLS data is readily available publicly. While that may not have been a suitable source for a worldwide formula, it would have at least been a suitable reality check on the validity of the formula you came up with to see if it reasonably approximated the variations in market rates within the US.

You are right that we used compensation from before we had the systematic formula. However, we then repeated the exercise (of finding linear correlations with various COL indices) when we had a larger cohort but before the formula had been implemented systematically, and it still pointed to the use of the Rent Index instead of another index.

You're also right that we need the calculator to work worldwide, and I suspect that that may be part of the reason here that the calculator works well on that scale and then not always as well as it should on more local scales. We'll continue to explore how to get better on both scales; the challenge is always that we want to keep things as simple as possible also.

I've made two issues based on your comment here and the one where you shared specific data for Sacramento (thanks for that!):

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 to cross check BLS data with the calculator.

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24 to address the global vs local question.

BTW, I know I've been kind of hard (fair, I think, but not gentle) on you guys in this thread, and I want you to know that I really appreciate how well you've taken it and how responsive you've been.

Don't be too impressed. They have a habit of showing up in these threads and feigning concern. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13303948

I won't quote it because I don't have the source in front of me but there is a quote elsewhere on this thread about Gitlab requiring that you tell them when you move so they can pay you less.

A) What's to stop me from getting hired in a 0.21 COL area and moving to San Francisco or Washington, DC? Are you going to fire me or pay me $20k a year because I moved?

B) My labor is not worth less and my work is not lower quality because I move to SE Asia or Eastern Europe. This is idiotic.

You can view how we're spread around the world on https://about.gitlab.com/team/

I applied for a position at Gitlab a week ago, and didn't even get a response. Probably because I am too expensive, too old, and live in an area with strong labour laws and staff protection. It's a shame, because it would have been decent to at least get a "sorry, not interested" reply, but no response at all is just not cool. They write on their hiring page: Always leave feedback, this will help everyone to understand what happened and how you came to your decision.

Nice to "write everything down"

I don't think your local labor laws matter to Gitlab if they're based in your area.

I applied for a remote position, so either "everywhere" is their area, or "nowhere".

@mdekkers glad we saw your post. I tried searching for you in our ATS, but could not find any application under that name. Can you email me directly on jobs@gitlab.com? I'd really like to see what happened to your application and why we didn't respond.

Hey Nadia, thanks for reaching out. Sure, I will send it along.

I think they are screwing this up.

By offering people medicore, local salaries, they are losing a massive opportunity to clean up on the great talent in remote areas.

Why would someone want to live in a low-end city (assuming they are mobile) - when they could live the same 'quality of life' in a much cooler place?

Assuming a degree of mobility - the whole point of living in a 2cnd tier place is that you can save a lot of money, which makes up for the '2cnd tierendess' of the place.

Montreal is 1/2 Boston. There are a good batch of great devs in Montreal. I could double my salary and move to Boston? I'd probably just do that. And still save more.

If they paid a 20% premium over other Montrealers, they'd be able to attract the best talent - and still save a lot of money over Boston/SF/NYC.

Paying 'regular market wages' for remote localities is not a winning proposition - it doesn't take advantage of the fact they are great startup, reasonably well financed etc..

Even talking about "Boston" as a single thing is tough. There's Boston/Cambridge urban folks and there are people who live an hour west or an hour north. That's an enormous difference in terms of housing prices. And even that is an oversimplification. School districts and other factors make a huge difference within that same one hour radius.

There's variation on a single street :)

But what neighbourhood you live in Boston is a choice.

Picking up and leaving a city is not a choice for most people.

Also the 'cost of everything except housing' is pretty consistent - everyone pays roughly the same a gallon of gas, and an identical basket of groceries.

There are a lot of great people who don't want to move to the US.

Hmm, in Boston they only pay 2/3rds of what Google does for somebody with my job title (not counting stock or bonuses). And as soon as you get outside of the "hot" markets, those multipliers are pretty bad. If I compare their Rochester, NY salaries with what I've actually earned working in rural college towns, well, I've gotten better paychecks in academia.

They seem like nice folks, but as an experienced remote worker (with a history of both remote employment and remote contracting), I wouldn't bother to apply based on what I currently know.

Wow, that is bizarre. Obviously you want to take advantage of wage differences in different markets, but why would you tell people ahead of time you're going to lowball them? Why not try to get the best you can get, and then pay whatever the actual market rate is for them?

I just checked the calculator for a major German city and I can say they won't be recruiting anybody away from the likes of Siemens. Rocket Internet maybe.

They have picked a strategy consisting in hiring large numbers of less experienced developers, rather than a few great ones. This is very much impossible to reverse, so now, they have to make it work with the people they have.

> GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living

Their base is off of NYC, apparently, and they adjust based on location; from what I infer from that, if they are really middling for NYC, their modifiers are all wrong for the way market wages actually vary by location; in Sacramento, the adjusted range is below public sector pay for similar roles (salary alone, not considering benefits, etc.), much less private sector pay.

The thing is, their basic methodology is arguably somewhat sensible, but they could (at least in the US) use BLS numbers for job categories by location to get modifiers that actually reflect local markets and keep their pay consistent with respect to local markets. By choosing an index that evidently is a poor proxy for variations in market pay, they end up with pay that doesn't make sense.

I would agree with this -- Gitlab seems like a company with a great philosophy and I'm sure a lot of people would love to help them achieve their goals... but I just used the calculator for my own area and my pay would be around half what I'm getting currently. I have to assume that makes it really hard to get serious talent, and makes it more of a pass-through for people to get their foot in the door.

FWIW, I have seen one example of hiring a remote junior person and it worked really well, BUT there was a conscious effort to do mentoring properly, and the guy running it was a mentoring guru/nut.

I've worked mostly from home for a long time now through a few different jobs. (Always relatively nearby an office where I had a space but I haven't been in a job where I went in regularly for 15 years or so.) I'm mostly happy with the tradeoffs and would be fine with going 100% remote.

That said, acknowledging that a lot of things are different from when I was starting out, I can't imagine walking into my first tech industry product management job as a remote worker.

There was some previous discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 . I too had to turn down their offer of $2000 USD per month for a Senior position after the second round. This issue keeps coming up in posts about Gitlab and there doesn't seem to be any progress.

I love the Gitlab product and what they have done to Git hosting. But, their salary structure is really screwed up.

It's definitely not our intent to pay below market in any location. If our calculator shows a large negative adjustment from your current compensation, please send me an email (ernst@gitlab.com) so I can review the data. We don't promise to make overnight changes to the calculator, since changes need to be robust and simple (i.e. no cherry picking city by city numbers), but we do gather data and make edits as we learn.

The philosophy is flawed. Good people don't make average-for-their-area salaries.

Depending on which of the 5-6 applicable job titles listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Employment Statistics [0] one chooses to apply, my salary is between 40% and 120% higher than the "average mean wage" (itself an inflated statistic) in my area.

This is true not just of myself but of all the good candidates I've hired. Good people don't work for average rates, especially not good people who are capable of doing remote work.

GitLab is doing itself a big disservice by targeting the "average" local wage.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

No one makes a salary calculator that robust without intent. I think paying twice as much, and cutting your work force in half would do you a greater service, than playing around with these cost of living calculators.

And be net cheaper because of 1/2 the benefit / supervision load.

Remote employees' market is the entire world though, that's the part you're not taking into account. Your competition is the other NYC or Boston or SFO or wherever companies that are willing to hire me and pay me a generally competitive rate (very roughly 80-100% of SF pay, in my experience). Sure, you don't have to compete with a GoogFaceAzon offer, but you do have to compete with the companies similar to yours that do pay a more globally competitive rate.

There's a very important difference between: "SFO is very expensive so we have to pay people who live there more" and "we can pay people who don't live in SFO less"