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Comment by FBISurveillance | Hacker News Reader

You can judge yourself, their Compensation Calculator is at the bottom of https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

For this local area, not only they would offer a good salary but also remote. Amazing transparency i'd say.

Wow, that really is a beautiful piece of software. I think the compensation it returns for Hamburg is very much on point and definitely fair.

It's a little low for Minnesota in the US, in my opinion. I could definitely get a little higher than that in the Twin Cities but I think being able to work remotely is a perk that people are willing to take a small pay cut for

We also continuously iterate on the compensation calculator, often because of feedback from applicants and employees.

Read about the ideas behind it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

While I won't comment on the raw salary numbers, I am curious about how long you feel it should take someone to graduate from "new to the position" to "learning the position"? Because it seems like if that time period is less than two years, you'll be underpaying your long term employees vs. a new hire of equivalent skill, which seems like a not good thing.

Also your Experience Factor Worksheet is private, whether or not you care.

as an American remote worker that interviewed there from Argentina, it was really frustrating for them to tell me they wanted to pay me $50k less because I choose to live in a cheaper city. Even though I was currently making market rate SF money.

They had the budget for me if I lived in SF, but they stuck with their lowball offer.

It’s about fairness. Would it be fair if a SF hire had a lower wage (after expenses) than an argentinian hire? No. So Gitlab tries to optimize for every employee having the same disposable wage, no matter where they live.

That’s why they have this system.

It is not a fair system. Thats like saying, "well, Frank bought a BMW and owns a house, so he gets to get paid more." They chose to live in an expensive city and have an expensive life style.

If a hire lived with their parents in SF, does that mean they get paid less than their coworker that rents an apartment?

Fairness isn’t that simply defined.

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.

This reminds me of a recruiter telling me 'people don't work here for the money, they work here for the opportunity, and it's more than enough to live on' when asking for market rate salary. Big tech company, you can probably guess which.

Chicago is really low... the calculator returns ~$50k for a position that would pay 85 or 90 around here. I imagine they mostly target european employees? I know salaries tend to be much lower in the EU.

I think the issue is that they don't adjust for what the market is offering, they just take a standard NYC salary and adjust it depending on your city's rent.

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).

Yeah, I think it depends on the area. I'm out in Denver and the compensation for an average senior developer seems to be on par with what some salary websites tell me but it's definitely way below what I currently get paid (and below what I've been paid for the past 3ish years).

As a senior dev with 5-ish years of experience in NYC, GitLab's calculator for "Developer" is offering me a $144,106-$157,207 base pay, plus stock options (because they are options I'm giving them an expected value of 0; I could value them more accurately if they were public about shares outstanding but they aren't). If I max out the sliders and call myself a lead, that goes up to $183,408. https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

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.

Sorry but I think its wrong to compare Gitlab to Google, even Etsy tbh.

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.

Yeah, I don't expect GitLab to reach Google salaries, but I do think that the data point is useful for knowing how much they are below Google. (Note also that this was an unnegotiated offer; I tried negotiating, evidently not very well, and only got Google to budge about $5K. I'd imagine the legendary Google offers are the ones you get if you are in a position to get Google into a bidding war for you with another comparably-profitable company, and I certainly don't think those can be called "market rate".)

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.

Actually, there is a good reason to pay SF or NYC salaries to remotes - you get the remote people who're good enough that they can live anywhere and still command a premium salary. I moved to Boulder, Co because I knew that I'd never work here - only in SF or NYC, so I get better quality of life without a meaningful drop in compensation (I'd make more if I picked the right company in NY or SF, but I'm making what many of my friends in NY do, so I'm fine with that.

For India, they have just two areas: Mumbai and Anywhere else. I am living in Gurgaon(near New Delhi) and it is as expensive as Mumbai in terms of renting an apartment. So Mumbai(0.227) and elsewhere(0.103) is not fair. I guess they don't have much data for elsewhere.

I appreciate them being transparent about this. But the calculator suggested salary was too low for me to consider applying :(

Interesting how they consider Puerto Rico to be a country of its own instead of an area under the US.

Gitlab is a remote company and yet location plays into salary. I get that they need to do this to be competitive but still a 1.263x multiplier for San Francisco vs my 0.466x for TN. Seems like the smart play is to briefly live in SF, secure the >2x salary and then move.

Also, kudos on them for this calculator - very transparent!

Nope, they adjust your salary for cost-of-living if you move. It’s on their wiki.

But the calculator is based on rent not cost-of-living. For example rent may be 6% lower in Zürich than in Geneva but Groceries are more than 12% more expensive. [1]

[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

With the difference in salary between 'rest of England' and 'London' you could probably afford to rent a very modest one bedroom flat in London while living elsewhere and still earn more.

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