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Comment by webo | Hacker News Reader

Senior Backend Engineer shows 85-95k in Chicago, which is below average. It shows 45-55k for Fayetteville -- most junior guys/gals start around 75k in Fayetteville at mediocre companies.

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Yeah, similar for me. In my geo it shows ~87-98K, but if I moved to San Francisco it is ~173-189K. Which seems foolish. They should incentivize people to move to the lower costs geos, not penalize them.

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?

They're not trying to incentivize people to move to SF; they're trying to maintain a competitive hold on the market of talent which is already there, as the realities of our current climate are that many of the highest-talent candidates are to be found in that pool.

If they're ok with people working remotely, they'd do much better to pay everyone as if they lived in a very expensive area, and attract all the people who don't want to give up a lot of the flexibility of a large paycheck but would love to be able to save even more of it by living somewhere cheaper.

(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.

I get $45k - $48k which would actually be about a 50% pay rise for me. UK wages outside of London really do suck.

So you could get double your pay by moving from Chicago to San Francisco, or multiply by 6 if you move from Fayetteville to San Francisco.

Seems backwards to have such a large incentive to live somewhere more expensive.

Unfortunately, this is the common practice - offer salaries adjusted for the local market. I could keep my current job and move to an office 1500km closer to my parents, but my salary would be slashed in half, because market. But it's pretty funny for remote workers: what if you get hired in SF, but then move to Fayetteville without telling anyone?

As long as you keep paying taxes in CA, I imagine this is not an uncommon practice.

Yep, this seems to be a major flaw in their compensation calculator. If you don't live in a high rent, hot bed, you end up with a compensation package that is very (i.e. laughably) low.

A lead (maximum seniority), with high (maximum) experience, in Fayetteville, AR makes less than most junior developers (60k-68k)...

I used a cost of living calculator[1] and compared it to theirs. Found the numbers don't match up. Just matched Nashville vs SF and the low end of Nashville was higher than the low end of SF (-3000 SF dollars) but the high end of Nashville was lower than the high end of SF (+3000 SF dollars).

[1] I've found this calculator to be decently accurate http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...

Simple solution. Don't work there. If they can attract talent at that price then good for them.

Same deal in Sacramento; it'd be more cost-effective (even factoring in time and cost of transportation) to just commute to the Bay Area, which quite a few people already do.

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