That means that as someone working at GitLab, my current wage is competitive compared to local companies, + I get all of the perks of remote work, working on open source, developer tooling, etc, and all of this will still be the case if I were to move elsewhere.
The exact amount of money deposited into my account each month would go up or down, but my lifestyle would stay roughly the same.
I know I’d make a lot more money if I lived in, say, the Bay Area, and if I made that same amount of money pretty much anywhere else I could live like a king, but I honestly don’t care. I quite like my decidedly not-king-like life today, and I love that with GitLab, I can have this same life and job wherever I choose to live.
I’m currently living in the Netherlands, but am planning to move to Mexico in a few years to be closer to my fiancée’s family. If all goes well, GitLab will travel there with us, and while my compensation will see a decrease, our life style won’t.
GitLab’s compensation philosophy is one of competing with the local market, instead of putting a fixed price on the value I or anyone else provides to the company, and that’s totally fine by me. If it wasn’t for GitLab, I’d probably be working at one of those local companies, so aren’t I still better off? For the company, it means that it/we can hire great people wherever they may be on earth, without being limited to the subset of great people who also happen to or want to live in the specific city the company happens to be based in.
This may come as a surprise to some, but there are some amazing engineers out there who have zero interest in living in the Bay Area, and who don’t particularly care about maximizing their yearly take home pay, as long as they make enough money to provide for themselves and their family, and can live in whatever city or country or continent that they prefer. The map on our team page is a testament to that: https://about.gitlab.com/team/ (mobile-friendly: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/teampage-map/)
FWIW, I know of colleagues who have moved to locations with both lower and higher cost of living compared to the location they were hired in, and I’ve never heard about requests to move being rejected.