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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading that they pay developers based on where they are located so for example developer from SF would get 140k while developer from Minsk would get 50k. Is it still true?

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Looks like that is still true. They’re pretty open about their model of location-based pay [0]:

"Market rates for roles are different for different regions and countries. We pay market rates instead of paying the same wage for the same role in different regions."

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

When I was looking for a new job a few months ago that was still the case, and caused me to totally avoid Gitlab - the numbers on their site were not competitive for the market I'm in.

Yeah, aside from the question of whether local on-premise market rates where employees live are an appropriate guide for payment in the global remote market, the formula they isn't actually driven by particular jobs actual local market rates, but by a theory of how market rates should vary by CoL and other factors, so they are often unreasonable even if you accept the premise that remote work should pay based on the market rates of the worker's locale, rather than being a distinct and non-local market of its own.

I know i'm in a minority opinion here, but to be honest I think it would be totally fair for an employer to pay everyone the same regardless of location in the US (as long as their not forcing you to move to a more expensive city - if they force you to be in a more expensive city, then they need to pay up), if it's a remote company. I know it may sound harsh to some. But, think of it this way, it will encourage more companies to become remote, thus opening more doors for people and allowing more people to work remotely. After all, a low salary in a low cost of living city is usually better than a high salary in palo alto, considering the enormous delta in living costs and taxes.

There is the "fairness" argue for this ("it doesn't matter where the employee is, they create the same clause for the company") however with taxes etc. being different it isn't equal on that level, and whether it is really fair that people in different locations get different value is a complex philosophical question :)

Low salary in a cheap city is almost never better. Your expenses will look very different but at the end of the day, engineers in Palo Alto are left with likely 5x the cash in their pocket than those in a cheaper city. I think the value of the leverage you earn with that larger savings is underestimated by many people.

The whole idea is extremely tone-deaf. If programmer a in SF gets to save 10% of their salary per month, and programmer b in wherever gets to save 10% of their salary... well... it's a huge savings and wealth disparity. I get it, your rent is high, but why does that mean you deserve to save 10 times as much as someone elsewhere? And everything you buy on Amazon still costs the same price. Your cars cost the same. Etc.

That only works if you are single, and live in 200 sq ft studio (which by the way will run you 24K per year after tax dollars). Then you can save and get ahead.

If you have a family of four you will almost ALWAYS be significantly worse off in palo alto. Even if you rent, The average 4 bedroom in palo alto is about 7k per month if your lucky which comes out to 84k which is about 130k in pretax dollars. Day care for 2 kids is about 60k per year. You'll need at least 225K just to scrape by, with no eating out, no vacations, etc..

Still seems to be true, even within countries the discrepancy is pretty bad. They give the formula, but don't have a calculator, but you can use their "Move" calculator to estimate it:

https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/

Someone in London who is on £60k would get £35k if they moved to Bristol, or £30k in Brighton. Definitely a lot lower than market rates.

seems like they moved the calculator to the individual job postings, e.g. https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-en...

and yeah, they have some weird artifacts in their location calculator, e.g. in Germany it doesn't recognize the second-most expensive city as as a region, and thus classifies it as "everywhere else", the lowest level.

In my case, Massachusetts is one region with a probably somewhat reasonable adjustment relative to San Francisco. But that's one number whether you live in the most expensive part of the Boston metro, a far-flung suburb, or somewhere rural or semi-rural in Western Mass, which covers the range from one of the more expensive cities in the country to a fairly rural part of the state that is probably starting to approach Midwestern prices.

The adjustment seems overly aggressive. Salary is proportional to 0.7 * Rent_Index + 0.3, where Rent_Index is normalized to be 1.0 for New York City - so basically they're adjusting salaries as if 70% of your spending goes to rent. They probably should use an index that's a bit less aggressively weighted towards housing costs.

Yeah, if you want to buy a new car or iPhone in Minsk, it's going to cost you the same as in SF (and maybe more).

We ran linear regressions to see which factor was more statistically relevant between Cost of Living, Cost of Living with Rent Index, and Rent Index. We chose rent index from Numbeo based on those evaluations, which expresses the ratio of cost of rent in many metro areas. Since we are using San Francisco salary benchmarks, we divide by 1.26 to normalize the rent index to San Francisco. We multiply the Rent Index by 0.7 and then add 0.3, so the sum would equal 1 (i.e. we pay San Francisco rates in San Francisco).

So where does the 0.7 and 0.3 come from?

Yeah, I posted about this above.

The London salaries are passable. The other ones are comedic. You can commute to London from Brighton.

Basically you're just forcing your employees to live inside the M25 for no reason. Or get postboxes / fake apartments and lie about it.

Yeah I think that's still true and they have a salary calculator somewhere. I don't know why you'd hire SV programmers when your entire company is remote. They're easily double the price of anywhere else and not twice as good.

Here’s a link to their calculator: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

All I see is a formula. Is that the calculator?

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