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Comment by fyfy18 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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