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Comment by briansteffens | Hacker News Reader

I was interested in working at GitLab a couple years ago but the salary calculator changed my mind. It lumped all the cities in Oregon together which gave some weird results depending on which city you live in. I can't imagine how wonky the data gets internationally, and it seems like the fairness of your salary would depend on the accuracy and granularity of the data GitLab has for your particular region.

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Yup, as a hiring manager I lost a couple of good hires due to the comp calculator. Especially in markets, like where I live.

The market for engineer salaries is much higher, due to the demand. But the cost of living is very low, by comparison.

I've been complaining about this for a while, but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure.

> but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure.

I know you alone can’t do anything about this, but the longer this painful task is put off, the more difficult will be to rectify as Gitlab grows (more people = greater labor cost expense increase when the problem is addressed).

It’s peope ops debt.

Just looking at Germany: the salary calculator assumes everything outside a select few cities is costing the same. I sincerely hope they don't use that calculator to make the actual calculations for candidates but spend the effort to calculate an actual number for the location, otherwise that's entire areas that are just laughably inaccurate. E.g. Stuttgart, according to some numbers the city with the second-highest average rent in the country is not in a special case and thus assumed to be in the cheapest class. Let's estimate CoL 30 % higher than Berlin, 10 % less compensation.

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