GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

The EU’s “Freedom of Movement” alone does not guarantee a business a right to employ individuals in all 28 States, even if it does greatly help in removing some barriers and permits you as an EU citizen to work In any of them. Any of these states can place additional legal burdens on Gitlab as the employer that it may not be able to meet in its current form, which is presumably what has happened.

Please note that this isn't required, we hire a lot of people who never contributed to GitLab before getting hired.

I've asked our recruiters to comment as well.

While we do keep the bar quite high from a technical perspective, we also do so as it relates to our values. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ With us going through this current hyper-growth phase we have to make sure that everyone who comes into GitLab aligns with these.

For Engineering hires in the month of June we averaged ~65 days to move someone all the way through the interview process.

I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.

Because there really aren't that many of them, and even fewer who aren't also using local rates.

> Living in a cheap area comes with drawbacks.

I agree, I live in a cheaper COL location. But, I was already living here, so I'm not sure how my salary at GitLab affects that. Local companies don't pay you more because of the drawbacks of living in a cheaper location. If I moved to a higher COL location then I would be compensated for that [1]. The mechanics are the same, I just get to do my job from home.

> I’d care a lot if I made a lot less than a colleague for the same type of work at the same company

This is, I think, the most important factor. I didn't decline my offer at GitLab in favor of staying at my previous company because I knew my salary would be the same as every other employee. I compromised on that front so I could work remotely for a company that I really felt like was a better fit for me.

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

To be frank, I don't think the gap in skill between the top-top-top tier employees and those who are competitive candidates for non-SF salary remote positions is all that wide, nor do I think it's necessary for a company's success to only hire the absolute pinnacle of talent. We're also not competing in the same consumer market as many SV startups, so if a different remote company has a higher saturation of top-tier developers, I'm not sure why that affects us unless they're a competitor.

I do see this point though, and I'm sure Sid does as well, but the level of skill that the people I work with have vs the employees at my previous (local) company is incomparable. Everyone is very good at what they do, and are motivated to continue working here because of all of the other perks of working for a company like GitLab.

In the case of this kind of soft/no lede, it comes off as narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness.

The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine that does not differentiate well between a key term hit above the fold or spread over the broad middle of an article.

I’m not demanding anything, I’m just making a statement about my personal taste. If I click on an article, it’s because the headline interested me. If I start reading it to find the content is not at all related to that headline, I just feel annoyed and usually close the page.

Looking back to the history of GitLab you are right that it just took 8 years to scale the company to this size, but I hope that others are already coming.

i found that to be super amazing -- if they are profiting like bay area companies, why not also pay like bay area companies?

Thing is, in high cost of living areas the living cost is extremely pegged to job opportunities, it's almost tautological. Where there are more job opportunities, you have to pay people more to stop them working for competitors. A confounding factor is a hypothesised (not sure if backed by data) trend of talent concentration - that is, areas with lots of job opportunities attract most of the most talented people, driving salaries up further.

All that's to say, if Gitlab want to hire someone living in such an area, the market dictates they must pay more in order to attract that person over a local competitor (for jobs). It's not due to the person needing the money more for a higher cost of living, at all.

An employee on $200k in San Francisco spending 50% on their lifestyle and no kids can retire by 40 to a more economically sane region with similar facilities. A similar employee doing the same job in that more economically sane region for $100k spending that same 50% is working until they are 50.

Which ends up meaning that in the cheaper regions you are only recruiting from the pool of people unable to move to wealthier regions with higher pay (which granted is a high proportion due to family).

As a second data point, last time I checked (I want to say >18 months ago), compensation for my area (Switzerland, urban) was also very low (around the 20th percentile).

Now, it is closer to the median.

If they were based on supply and demand, locality of seller would have no effect on the price buyers were willing to pay for goods that aren't location-sensitive, e.g., remote work, because it's not a location-bound market and goods would trade at the global market clearing price absent (inefficient) artificial market segmentation that is only possible (for buyers) when there is an effective monopsony for the particular good/service being purchased (since competition would exploit the underpriced segments buy buying up what they are selling at a price above what the attempted segmenter was offering.)

Well, yes, when I argued against the idea it was fair without also arguing against the clear fact that it occurs, I was rather clearly saying that the fact that it occurs has nothing to do with fairness.

> it's a result of real market conditions

Yes, specifically, the absence of robust competition for remote labor of the precise kinds Gitlab is buying is the “real market condition” that allows them to do this kind of segmentation.

Ironically, the more attention (and copycats) all-remote firms like Gitlab get, the less viable this cost-saving tactic will be, provided that they don't involve in illegal (in many jurisdictions) joint cooperation to limit wages of the type that, unfortunately, tech firms have engaged in in local markets in the past.

Were that true, global markets where the location of the seller is immaterial to the utility of the good or service sold and didn't create extra costs to get it to the buyer wouldn't have different rates based on the seller's location, by the Law of One Price.

> Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”

A more precise equivalent would be “there is no rational reason for the same buyer to be willing to pay more to purchase a Big Mac delivered from a neighboring higher CoL city as an identical one delivered with the same latency from a different neigboring community with a lower CoL.” Local prices for Big Macs between countries naturally vary precisely because Big Mac distribution isn't globalized the way remote labor is, and a Big Macs from a McDonald’s in Turkmenistan is not an equivalent substitute for one from a McDonald's next to Market Street for a buyer in Downtown SF.

Local wage policies for remote work are an effort by employers to present a rationalization to employees not to increase their wage demands to what the globalized market they are actually competing in will support. They will only be able to be maintained so long as remote work isn't widely offered and there isn't a meaningful competitive (on both sides) market; once there are enough competing buyers for any given kind of labor, competition for labor will see the best workers from low-CoL area consistently going to employers that aren't lowballing them.

That's obviously what is going on. Trying to sell it with a dishonest narrative about some inherent fairness of scaling compensation to local cost of living is B.S. Local cost of living is just assumed to be a reasonable approximate proxy for what competing bidders, most of whom are presumed to be local and thus location-sensitive rather than remote and thus location-insensitive, are likely to offer. There's no ethical rationale in operation, just cost optimization.

Because they did the same work?

>who is anyone to say that's not allowed?

I didn't say it's not allowed. I think it's poor business practice, and poor for society, incentivizing devs to stay in expensive areas instead of moving out to cheaper remote areas.

>If you forced them to be paid the same then one of them will not be working for you even if they want to; either because you can't afford to hire them both or the bay area engineer can't live on the salary.

That is speculation and I speculate you are wrong.

Most remote working colleagues have chosen to be freelancers though we do offer the option for them to become salaried employees. This is not always in the interest of the person so we do caution them against this, and for one person where putting them on the payroll from NL would be hard a local subsidiary was created which employs them.

Remote workers definitely add a layer of complexity with respect to employment law. But I've found that it is well worth it given the quality and diversity of the people we encounter.

https://convertkit.com/mission https://convertkit.com/careers