They also openly pay well below market rate, so they should expect to get what they pay for.
For instance I just looked at their jobs listings and they advertise a range for annual compensation, the high end of that range looks about right for the locations I checked SF, and London in the UK for PE positions.
They are out of their minds if they think the top rate for a Senior engineer in Salt Lake City with above average experience is $78k. Most other areas also seem pretty low from what I've looked into but I suppose a few areas could be outliers in their calculator.
Their docs on the calculator are here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
It's a bit strange that they cut or raise your pay by that calculator when you move cities.
Having worked on both coasts, I can say that the quality is the same. Culture and quantity appears to be the biggest difference.
That is odd. Usually if you make more based on your previous location a company won't actually claw anything back you just will likely not be getting any raises.
I wouldn't call their salary range a spit in the face, but its probably around $20k below market rates where I live. Benefits are competitive in my opinion.
The tl;dr is that they start out with a kind of OK but not very interesting rate for New York City. Then they punish residents of other cities based on how much cheaper the rent in their city is than the rent in NYC.
For example, if the cost of rent in your city is 35% the cost of rent in NYC (as determined by the third-party rent index they reference), your salary multiplier will be 0.35, meaning GitLab will offer someone in NYC 130k for that job, but they'll only offer you 45.5k. The experience modifiers range from -20% to +20% so they're not going to help much.
As NYC is literally one of the top five most expensive real estate markets on the planet, most non-NYC cities get totally pummeled by GitLab's salary calculator, and the result is what we see here: an enterprise with $30M in funding that can't figure out how to make backups.
1) It's hard to tell how they assign rank. If they accept any programmer that shows up, the rates are fine. If they have Google level interviews to filter for only Google level candidates, who will join at "junior" level, it's terrible.
2) The numbers are in dollars, thus they are utterly meaningless. It's not a job, it's gambling with the exchange rate and the exchange fees.