I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalized talent pool.
Edit: Didn't intend to make a scene or put anyone on blast here. Just thought the calculator was a little silly. Thanks for the responses gitlab staff.
If you have any more information you can share, it'd be great if you could send it to peopleops at gitlab.com.
Interestingly issues gets noticed here!, there was a posting yesterday about FB hiring issue.
It seems to me the issue is more there was a difference in expectations between what the candidate perceived was their situation and what the recruiter believed. This is of course not uncommon, however from the sounds of it the candidate was not given an opportunity to reason their position. It could be that GitLab is simply not offering competitive renumeration based on what the candidate believed they could achieve in the same market. It could also be that GitLab undervalued the particular skill sets of the candidate. Of course the opposite may also be true.
Clearly there were differences in opinions, however by asking the candidate to sign an agreement to a specific salary based on no discussion is only going to cause issues for everyone. Either the candidate agrees, goes through the interview and decides "it's not worth it, and now there's no flexibility", they disagree and a potentially good candidate is immediately lost or they agree, take the job and feel like they are not being fairly compensated, which can have all sorts of consequences.
This is usually why the discussion happens at the end of an interview process, after the candidate has had the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and experience. Then if there is still a perception of a mismatch this can be reasoned with respect to what has previously been discussed.
> Secondly, we never would ask you to agree to something that is below the calculators suggestion, however your expectations based on Level, Experience, or Location may differ from the recruiter or hiring managers' assessments.
The candidate has clearly stated they were offered less than what the calculator suggested. It was your recruiters opinion that they did not meet the parameters entered into the calculator, however clearly the candidate believed that they did. In this case the recruiter must judge the cause of the disparity through discussion with the candidate and set expectations in terms of the results of this discussion. Again, simply telling a candidate "this is our opinion, you must agree to it" is not going to benefit anyone.
Matt, since I deal with the comp calculator every now and then, if you'd like to provide more specifics of your situation, can you please email me on ernst@gitlab.com ?
We have to decline 200 applicants a week at GitLab. We realize that interviewing is very stressful. We send a survey afterwards to get a net promoter score. The current average is 4.2 out of 5 for people that did not sign with us. Most applicants don't fill out the survey, we're not sure how that influences results.
Your data-source for this is very clearly wrong.. any income/cost-of-living report for India will show that the cost of living is the same for these 2 cities.
Just FYI.
I had an interview with Parsely a few years back. Took over 3 weeks of back & forth before they rejected me with a reason that should have been squashed the first hour of the interview.
What if you hire a great remote developer who lives in San-Jose, then she moves to Kentucky 6 months later, and their contribution is still the same. Why should their pay be adjusted?
> Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?
Yes?
This is the sentiment I usually see but how are one's expenses or expected living standard is relevant regarding compensation for work? Imo it is very hard to argue against equal work => equal pay. At least from a moral pov.
Btw that is a lot of incorrect assumptions about expenses, including where someone's children might want to go to college, globally fixed costs like work equipment and cloud services, not to mention goods which are actually cheaper in the US.
Since when? I'm pretty sure I've never seen any variation in software prices except international variances, which are most often a case of with/without tax and currency fluctuations.
> > Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?
> Yes?
No. If I understood that, I wouldn't have replied as I did, would I now?
> go on with replying that you still think it's wrong to base the compensation on the location's living expenses
But why is it a location's living expenses? If a company is paying people to work remotely, location should have zero impact on remuneration: they aren't asking you to live anywhere specific, so there is no business reason to use location as a cost factor.
Why is that a requirement? Do you somehow think the Bay Area has a monopoly on good developers?
If a person wants to work for the company but their offered salary isn't high enough to sustain a high cost of living environment, the person will need to either move or find another job.
The company has literally the entire world to find staff - that's the whole point of remote workers.
GitLab claims to be "Remote Only": https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
We have a 'headquarters', which is also where Sytse (CEO) lives, where there are a number of desks available for special occasions, but no one is ever required to work from a particular place.
> Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?
PS it is not about GitLab, I like their service (even better than GitHub) and it is great they are transparent about compensations. IMO if they were to eliminate location from their calculator they could get the cream of a very big talent pool.
GitLab, diversify/improve your recruitment strategy. Why you only have "the recruiter", aka a single person heading your recruitment, rather than a group of competent personnel, is concerning. Your public image is of a medium-sized company which is already established, not a tiny startup outfit wherein all hires rely on a sole (apparently inadequate) person vetting each potential employee.
There are multiple people involved in the hiring process here at GitLab, specifically several people who handle phone screens and resumes. The responsibility of vetting doesn't rest solely on one person and is actually a pretty collaborative process in my experience. As an example, I was able to vet every single candidate's resume myself for roles I was involved in hiring for.
Either way, the parent comment is full of language that raises red flags to competent developers. Personally, my first thought is "oh hell no!". It's possible that their comment is not representative of the company's effective policies, but when one perceives this kind of reply as an official stance of the company's standpoint, it is difficult to retract.
The way I understood it, at least, was 'the recruiter who handled the interview with "matthewvincent"'. Doesn't imply that there are, or are not, other recruiters at gitlab.
And if so, at least to me it seems honest for said recruiter to come forwards personally, instead of some feel-good mumbo-jumbo from the PR department.
Bluntly, yes, it does put the candidate in a much stronger negotiating position but, hey, if you really want to hire good people then I'm afraid it's hard cheese. Conversely talking about remuneration upfront puts the candidate on the back foot because there's substantially less of a basis for convincing negotiation, so it really becomes about cutting costs for the company.
Unless you absolutely have to - sometimes you might not have any other option, and you shouldn't let pride blind you to that reality when you're facing it - I'd always recommend you avoid working for anyone where you've had to discuss money first.
It really is that basic. When the company cares more about the money than what the employee can bring, they've shown their company cares more about their internal politics then they do about their future success. Simple as that.
Cynical read: We discovered people are more likely to compromise on the salary if they've already committed their time to the interview.
I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable.
At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab).
So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s.
I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves.
All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.
Finding something that applies to both (Or in this case something that works in neither, which makes it even clearer) is not the same as treating both as requiring the same solutions.
But yeah, the outcome, remoters from Cheaptown effectively subsidizing their coworkers from Glitter City is incredibly ugly. One should at least hope that the decisionmaking processes at the employer do not completely isolate the one deciding on a hire from the cost difference, so that flyover guy could at least enjoy an increased chance of getting the job.
You want your cake and to eat it too?
Assuming you don't think it's Bay Area wages (because that's crazy), why do you think going to an office in your location means you ought to be paid a lot less?
I appreciate the openness from GitLab on this matter though, they're pretty up-front about it so if you don't like it don't apply.
[0] When the word "cost of living" is mentioned but it's not reflected in the price for final users then you know you're about to get fucked.
Seems backwards to have such a large incentive to live somewhere more expensive.
A lead (maximum seniority), with high (maximum) experience, in Fayetteville, AR makes less than most junior developers (60k-68k)...
And the listed salary for my geo is about 2/3 to 3/4 of my current base pay before any bonuses. The idea of the company sounds good, but the pay is a deal breaker for me. I wouldn't like feeling like I'm providing the company more value but because the person lives in San Francisco they get twice as much pay. Maybe that is me being petty?
(Their calculator also seems somewhat bonkers (on the extremely low side) compared to the local market where I live. It seems based on a somewhat-arbitrary, quick-and-dirty-wild-guess estimate formula vs what real, on-the-ground competitor companies in those areas are paying.)
EDIT: there seems to be a small trend emerging where every company I've seen with fully-public payscales/pay calculators wildly comes in below what I'm currently making, and what I've heard from local competitors. And I'm not in SF. Wonder if there's some causality there, though it's still just a handful.
Also it's amusing to get a downvote for offering up the info that Gitlab would want me to take a pretty substantial ~30% haircut in base pay based on where I live. What would be attractive to me would be "we'll give you 80% of your current take-home, but you get to live wherever you want," but this is basically the opposite.
[1] I've found this calculator to be decently accurate http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
It seems obvious to me that they should be paying relatively more to people in cheap locations than expensive ones. That saves Gitlab money, biases their hiring to people in cheaper areas, incentivizes people to move to cheaper areas, helps cool down the overheated housing markets in expensive areas.
I can see drawbacks to paying a strict flat amount regardless of local cost of living; some adjustments probably make sense. But Gitlab seems to be doing the opposite. I don't get it.
For example, when I lived in England, the difference between rent for a room in a shared house outside city center and a 1 bedroom apartment in the city center was usually at most 100% (excluding the very top and very bottom of the ranges). Meanwhile in Lithuania, where I live at the moment, the difference is about 6 times. You can't capture this in a calculator with such broad coverage.
Approach by mozilla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881004) seems much more reasonable to me, to be honest.
Most likely, one of their founders is technically adept, there are a small number of other experienced people onboard because they incidentally live in areas where the compensation calculator doesn't screw them, and most others are riding on those coattails.
GitLab is really a sad story of lost potential. Most of the time, you can't fix these kinds of problems, because they start at the top and flow down (and you usually can't replace the top). A well-engineered GitLab alternative would be welcome.
When you have an inexperienced crew running your tech, you get a lot of very preventable issues, which sometimes approach apocalyptic scale (like GitLab's February data loss). That's fine for some businesses, but it shouldn't be fine for something as important as GitLab.
What I see is an brilliantly managed company despite having a globally distributed team, which has a great pace of development, which is carving a nice market share in an extremely tough market (developers) and against a fierce competitor (Github), let alone the other multibillion company backed Bitbucket.
And their radical transparency, as you put it, is a fascinating thing in and of itself. If anything it makes me feel intimate with the company. Hard to put it in words, maybe because I was a rather early adopter but if you follow them closely it's a like you're there on their board with spectator mode on. That's some invaluable experience for HN crowd.
Are we even talking about the same company?!
How do you get "brilliantly managed company" when they just had a massive data loss? How can you say that honestly?
My boss makes sure I backup stuff...and we're not taking on millions of dollars in funding and customers.
The radical transparency may be a fun experiment and it may provide a lot of interesting data to parse, but it's not a good way to run a real company. It screams of impractical idealism. A lot of companies are bad, but GitLab wants to make sure that you know they're bad from a distance. In theory this is all great and nice. In practice, it hurts the company in both commerce and recruiting.
So what if a smart experienced developer (their CTO) is able to get good prices on what he/she wants done through remote work? The point you're making is negativity for no reason without evidence on how it's not working, i.e. what's wrong with their product.
Your reflexive defense isn't any more useful than extreme criticism.
I wrote:
"All the things you said could be true, yet their product [could be] amazing."
Grammatically, it's called "elliptical." I then immediately say: "I haven't used it, but I like what I'm seeing"--so what I meant should be quite obvious.
What value are you adding with your criticism of what--in my case--at least has a question:
"What's actually wrong with the product? Why is it not 'well-engineered'?"
My point was extremely clear--his post needed to have evidence of how their processes results in bad product. And I asked that as a question--perhaps you know? Something tells me you even do (perhaps you're a Gitlab user), yet you're choosing to take an unproductive meta route of criticizing my partial criticism with no actual goal. What do you expect to accomplish with that?
I presume you got stuck on one word ("amazing"), made up your mind and didn't read the rest. My bad, i could have been more clear. However, the essence of what I was saying was straightforward, but you chose to see the forrest instead of the trees. A common reason people take that route is because there is something else you wished to express, but didn't--perhaps you have real experience with gitlab in one way or another that resonates more with the person's viewpoint I replied to. I'm not saying he's wrong--I just would like to hear the full reasoning behind that perspective.
I'd love to hear what that actual perspective is. Gitlab is an interesting product I haven't spent much time reviewing until today. Maybe you can provide the evidence to back up the original poster's point??
I haven't used it, but I like what I'm seeing
If you're just talking about what you're seeing, you have the same vantage point as everyone else and the original poster made a number of obvious and valid criticisms - data loss is one, they are selling software and a service.
It probably is trolling on my part, but as harsh as the original poster's words were, he's got some points.
I guess we have one bullet point, do we have more?
Other than that, GitLab is a beast to install and navigate and it requires a lot of resources. Rails is slow. The UI is weird (frequently end up not finding the repo I want due to the way the "trending" tab works). There are other issues. I'm not a GitLab contributor so I don't really have more technical detail, I just use it sometimes.
It seems like you're just assuming they're a great company with a well-engineered product because you like the corporate image they project.
I don't know of anything about them that makes either themselves or their product "amazing". It is somewhat usable, which is good; I'm not trying to besmirch the earnest efforts of people to make something that works, and indeed there are some uses for something like GitLab. That doesn't mean that GitLab is "amazing" or that their product is flawless or even good.
The most exciting thing about GitLab to me is remotely distributed teams, which I usually love seeing, but I think they've gone about it all wrong.
Just to throw my example in, they would want to pay me at least 20% less than what I currently make -- and I'm already a 100% remote employee working for a financially stable startup. What they offer is simply not even close to market value -- yet they claim it is. In this case it's the D.C. area.
As I get older, I'm not really that interested in putting up with the BS. So if I work in an environment without the BS, or if I have a boss who is willing to shield me from the BS, I'm very happy to pay for it.
Actually, there are tons of things I'll pay for. Remote working on a team that knows how to do it and respects remote workers? That's a big discount. A work process that allows me to work effectively in a different timezone or with flexible hours? Another discount. Guarantee that the work I'm doing will be released with a free software license? HUGE discount (really, huge). Working with interesting and talented people? Yep, discount. No inventions agreement? DISCOUNT.
You get the picture. Hell, I'll do a fair amount of work for free if you tick all the boxes. I'm nowhere near alone in this.
Edit: grammar... :-P
In looking at those GitLab pay scales, it's a pretty SEVERE pay cut for all but the most junior people. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with a 50% pay cut to do "something cool".
If you scroll down to education and look at the chart for education, you will see that the median household income for someone with a bachelor's degree is $68,728. With a professional degree (like a P.Eng) it's up to $100K.
Can you afford to save for your kid's education, retirement savings, etc on the median household income in the US? That depends a lot on your lifestyle. It certainly is possible.
I'm not going to tell you what's good for you. I'm just saying that there are people (myself included) who can live comfortably on less and who value things other than money when accepting a job. I was simply answering the question that was asked: How is it possible to hire quality people while paying below market rate? By making it worth the reduction in pay. Whether or not Gitlab succeeds in doing this, I have no idea.
Top end salaries will still be discounted, naturally, because the costs in high cost areas are real. But not every scales like housing.
Living in Seattle, WA, the salary range I used topped out at ~$120k. However, 30 miles south in Tacoma it tops out at at ~$80k. Moving to Dallas would move the top of the range to ~$105k (Hot Market Adjustment?! but not Seattle?!).
Values I used (I rounded the salary up too): * Lead * Above Average Experience * United States * Dallas, Seattle and Tacoma.
I'm looking to move to the Dallas area (from Tacoma) and my rent will likely end up being less in Dallas (at least 20%).
One thing that I thought was strange was the quiz/test at the end of each interview. I get that you want to make sure that the candidate has an adequate skill level, but I have a lot of open-source projects (hosted in GL), and I am (one of many people) horrible at live quizzes. Mostly because of nerves, being in an interview is stressful enough. The fact that I had to take a 30-45min quiz instead of going over my own code is not ideal. I just don't believe in standardized testing being a good measure to someone's ability. But, I really thought they were nice about it, and I wish them luck.
Nobody should be paid as low as 50-60k per annum when they expect people to perform same as someone paid 90-120k. Here are some of the links where I raised this point as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957
This link suggests their average salaries to be 115k but their calculator is just for people who they'd like to scam into paying below par.
BTW Our compensation principles can be found at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
Edit: and yeah, I've read a lot about your company including that link. I understand your approach, it just excludes me.
For U.S. it may be best to establish a floor, and for most cities don't go below that... Remote work in the U.S. tends to be closer to 65-75% of Northern California pay, from what I've seen. Often more than local rates, but harder to come by the jobs.
Also: we, digital nomads, don't have any base. I honestly have no answer to "where do you live"
Anyway I've looked at my homecity in Ukraine and salaries proposed are around 80-90th percentile (~$50k for senior developer).
The thing is there's no reason for a person to hold onto Gitlab. Once you get some remote experience there're a lot of companies who provide EU/US salaries even if you happen to live in Eastern Europe.
This is the one area, I'm quite interested in seeing how things play out, from a human resources point of view. Since GitLab is so transparent, it'll be interesting to see, if they publish any information on employee turnover in the future. Or any mitigation strategies they may develop, to help retain high value employees.
I applied to Gitlab, but then I noticed the calculator. London is below market rate. In Warsaw is half what Google pays.