“As for the funding itself, GitLab says that it plans to use it to add “new functionality for packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring software.”
Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now?
Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now?
If you are a developer / professional living in a rural area and don't want to move or have a commute, I'm certain you'd find gitLab both lucrative and a fun place to work.
While the argument you're making is sound, I'd challenge you to think of it this way: gitLab wants the best talent, no matter where they live. If they happen to live in a high cost area, vs someone that lives in a low cost area, both uniquely qualified, would it make sense to make sure two qualified candidates get approximately the same buying power's worth of compensation? Companies already adjust base pay based on your location, Google, for example.
It also takes a bit of the good versus bad negotiator penalty out of the equation, which provides a level of fairness that doesn't exist in most companies.
So do I, that's why I don't work for a company that says "well you life in a low-cost area, so you need to charge us less".
Their policy is transparent, and it is take-it-or-leave-it. I think the salary gripes you're hearing from many commenters is that they are leaving it, when they'd very much like to work for Gitlab, as it's a company I personally like.
However, what they're doing will either get them developers in the most highly-paid areas (where their salaries are actually competitive) or lower-paid developers that are actually not the best their local market has to offer (because the best developers are already employed elsewhere for higher pay). So, in essence, what they're doing is limiting their top-tier prospects to people who live in high-cost areas.
As another commenter said at some point, living in the Valley has such high cost because there are benefits to it. Developers in SF can find a job more or less the minute they walk out of the door of one company, and that's something that's expensive. I don't have the same luxury, and Gitlab says "well, since you aren't paying for the privilege of job liquidity, we'll give you a lot less money".
That being said, in order to align with their values of transparency, they shared an algorithm that makes sense. It's not the only way to do it, but it's transparent and doesn't seem unreasonable.
Startups are about alignment to the big picture and long-term. I'd imagine that's why they don't change equity based on location. However, The free market being what it is, some will take it and others won't.
Anyway, more power to them, great way to filter out remotes who know what they're worth for no particular reason.
That's certainly true. But as a GitLab user, I want to make sure they're hiring the best candidates to work on the product. Is that an unreasonable thing to want?
Any argument depends on context and in this case, none of the GitLab employees are facing minimum wage, working in hard labor conditions, or facing removal of their last chance at employment. The reality is that they're paid a very transparent amount without much negotiation hassle and they can easily choose to work elsewhere if they want to.
Furthermore while I can believe that gitlab's salaries are below the average I doubt they're below any reasonable proposal for minimum wage. If software developer salaries start dipping below what we consider fair I think the most efficient solution would be unionizing to raise the salaries for the profession at large.
Quite frankly I find it a bit obscene to conflate both these issues.
Negotiate if you want better comp. Nobody in this industry is a McDonald's/Walmart wage slave. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to work for GitLab.
Personally, this goes against my hiring philosophy and as a remote manager at another company, I insist on remote salaries for my team that match Bay Area salaries. I make up the difference by getting pick-of-the-litter hires that I wouldn’t have a chance of getting if I was going up against the Facebook/Google/Netflixes for a local SFBA hire.
I don’t know if GitLab employees have much recourse individually or collectively. It will probably take a market change to get them to adjust.
I have no beef with them and would have considered them more seriously during my last move—such a rad product!— -but their comp is close to $100K less than what I can get working remote for many other SFBA startups.
For remote workers, the job market is actually pretty small. Many of the "remote only" companies (Buffer, Gitlab, RainforestQA, etc) pay based on how expensive of a lifestyle the employee chooses to have.
One remote company I interviewed at mentioned how one of their SF employees moved in with their parents and how they talked about cutting his salary significantly because of his cheaper lifestyle.
And to avoid the currency inflation you should of course choose to earn in U.S. dollars, or negotiate to be tied to the regular - currently bi-annual in Uruguay - pay increases in countries with inflation (which usually lag inflation and are a bad deal, but offer some buffer to it).
The moment one remote company offers an SF rate compensation outside of SF, then the job candidate's market rate is an SF rate.
I totally understand if a company doesn't have the budget for talent and looks to exclusively hire in non-hub / smaller places in order to keep costs low. But I hate when a company says: we understand you have an SF rate offer and we would normally compete with that if you lived in SF, but, sorry, our excel spreadsheet says we can only lowball you.
Anyway; compensation is really hard to get right and keep everyone happy, you do your best, but haters-gonna-hate.
p.s. also we're not remote only - we have some great SF engineers - but 90% of our eng is remote; we just want the best people regardless of location :)
IMHO, living in SF is a choice, especially at a remote company. Just like buying a Tesla or choosing to live in your car instead of renting an apartment is also a choice.
I don't think companies should pay one employee less because they choose to have a cheaper lifestyle than the employees that buy Teslas or live in San Francisco.
Or maybe the American doesn't report the income to Denmark so has very low taxes compared to a danish or American-based co-workers since they qualify for FEIE?
Does the married American with the marriage tax breaks get paid more or less than a single American?
not likely :-)
I work for an U.S. company from Uruguay and I get paid in USD.
This is pretty rude given that you're the one who's not knowledgeable here. GitLab is extremely public about salary - if you go any job application page they'll tell you what the pay bands are. There is very limited room for negotiation, on purpose.
I agree that nobody is forced to work for GitLab. I completely skipped them over in my last job hunt because their pay bands were much lower than anything else I could find, even though I would have enjoyed the job. I have a friend who did the same. I think that's unfortunate for GitLab / the world and wish they would raise their pay so they can attract candidates who are getting higher offers elsewhere, so they can build a better service.
This is a very different sort of complaint from wage slavery, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.
There have been multiple threads about this. Some being hundreds of comments related to Gitlab's salaries, which they and some people who work there are pretty public about. I could try to find the threads on HN, but they shouldn't be too hard to find yourself.
Some clarification would be nice
Read about the ideas behind it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
Also your Experience Factor Worksheet is private, whether or not you care.
So if your city has a better market-salary:rent ratio than NYC, their salaries are not competitive.
Conversely, they pay pretty well in Lisbon, since the rent is actually quite high compared to the pittance that software developers earn (which is why long commutes are common).
They had the budget for me if I lived in SF, but they stuck with their lowball offer.
That’s why they have this system.
If a hire lived with their parents in SF, does that mean they get paid less than their coworker that rents an apartment?
As is tought in any philosophy class in middle or high school, there’s multiple needs.
Give everyone according to their needs? Everyone the same? Fairness isn’t that simple.
Gitlab is trying to find a solution that is fair in their opinion, and if you disagree with that, you are free to choose a different employer.
For comparison, Etsy gave me an offer earlier this year that was $185K, and came out literally in the week they had layoffs, and Google gave me an offer earlier this year that added up to about $215K (base + 15% bonus + RSUs which have an obvious nonzero cash value), with an expectation of year-over-year growth. (The actual job I accepted was higher than either of these.)
I think GitLab's numbers make sense in several markets but not in NYC and probably not in SFBA either. To be fair to them, there's no good reason to pay someone market rates for those cities when they're hiring a remote workforce, but the fact remains that they're significantly under market and probably losing out on good candidates as a result.
Its obvious that Google can offer high salaries. Same with Etsy, while its nowhere near Googles level, I feel like Gitlab's cashflow is nowhere near Etsy's cashflow either.
I checked for London and I can say that Gitlab seems to be giving out a low to average salary at best. Which is not bad considering that you can be working remotely from your home etc etc, and get maybe more shares in a startup like Gitlab.
But ye all and all I feel the OP is a bit right that since they got a better funding they should be looking at accumulating their salaries to go up for their devs that have been getting bellow market rates.
I do expect them to reach Etsy - they had been facing serious investor pressure at that point and laid off a lot of people in a lot of departments including the CEO and CTO, and had not reported a profit for several quarters (they reported one this year after the layoffs). They laid off their summer interns two weeks before the summer, leaving the poor college kids scrambling to find another internship. That's not a company with enough cashflow to make significantly-higher-than-market offers.
And yeah, the comment above (as I read it) was in comparison to GitLab raising a significant funding round.
I appreciate them being transparent about this. But the calculator suggested salary was too low for me to consider applying :(
Also, kudos on them for this calculator - very transparent!
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
This is a defamatory statement and surprisingly not done anonymously. So, maybe you present us the full story, otherwise it's hard to believe that all employees of Gitlab are underpaid and that one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.
Why is it defamatory?
> one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.
Their salaries are public.