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Comment by trilila | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to know if they discriminate pay, according to where the person works from.

Edit: Further down the page I saw: "Why they pay based on where team members live". That's petty.

There is nothing petty about it. Everyone does it, but GitLab is just more transparent about it. It is up to you whether you accept the compensation level or not, GitLab is far from a monopoly on labour demand

How do they handle a hire that lives in SF so he has to be paid the max who then moves somewhere else to drop his own cost of living?

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

Everyone does not do this. I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live). Unfortunately I couldn't apply to Gitlab last time I was in the market for work because their salaries are both lower in general and lowered even further due to geo adjustment.

I'm fully a fan and believer of remote work, but you need to pay your employees just like any other top tier company would. It's actually even more important as you really want the best people for remote work since they need to be excellent communicators and more self-directed than in-house employees.

Out of curiosity, how long has your company been in existence for? This seems like something a more established company could do more easily.

It's a startup. I actually find it to be the case that early stage companies are more willing to do remote work. In part because it's a way for them to broaden their options.

Of course, but I think a large part of the incentive for startups to do that is so they can hire high-quality engineers who aren't in SF, so that they don't have to deal with the crazy cost of living expenses when paying salaries, and of course their own costs for living in SF and renting/owning office space there.

So I think I would expect most early-stage remote startups to pay salaries which account for an employee's cost of living (rather than paying a full SF salary whether you live in SF or Montana). But maybe I'm wrong.

> I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live)

Unfortunately there are two misconceptions here: 1) that companies pay based on added value and not on replacement cost, & 2) that "a fair market rate" does not vary with location, when in reality different locations have different labor markets.

The reason SV companies pay so much is because their candidates expect it, and part of why they expect it is the high cost of living in the area. A company that pays less than average will get worse/fewer candidates, thus a local labor market. For a remote company, paying an SV employee the same rate as a midwest employee is to effectively compensate the latter much higher, and what's fair about that?

Companies pay what you can negotiate with them. This is based on value add, and alternatives on both sides of the table. If you can pitch the value you create, you can get paid accordingly.

It's very hard to quantify the marginal business value given by a single employee, especially if they're just starting in the position.

Economics is driven by scarcity - supply and demand. Companies have no financial incentive to pay us any more than it would take to hire a replacement. They're in the business of making profit, which necessarily means paying people less than the business value they add, and if a company wants to be very profitable, the only way is to pay substantially less than the value received.

So even if you pitch based on value add, you're really just signaling that you have top skills which are in short supply, and they'd better pay you more or else some other company will. They have no obligation or incentive to pay commensurate with value add, only to pay just enough to keep getting the value add.

I stand corrected. Also their pay is quite high for markets where I expected it to be significantly lower than SF.

> Everyone does it

We don't. Obviously we're not at the scale of Gitlab but we do not care whether you live in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, NL, Canada, the United States or any other place. (But those are the places that our colleagues are in, and there are more on the way.)

So what kind of vacation/sick days plan does your company offer globally?

Our work is pretty intense so we offer 3 weeks 'on' 1 week 'off' as standard + 23 days of paid leave / year for salaried employees. Sick days are dependent on local conditions but in practice we have yet to encounter anything where this would matter, at a larger scale this will no doubt become more of an issue but it is an insurable risk for us so we will simply do whatever the law says we should do for a particular location and insure against the rest.

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.

I work for ConvertKit. We’re fully remote and have public, standardized salaries regardless of where you live in the world. Pay is based on title. If you want more pay you need a new title and if you know someone’s title you know their pay. Not all employees share their title because it’s personal but it’s also not a secret.

It’s way more fair than what Gitlab does IMO.

Also our financials are public. We’re bootstrapped and profitable with no outside investment so saying standardized salaries hurt the company is a lazy cop out at best. https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/

Do you expect to scale up, and if so will you continue with this model? I took a look at your team page and you have 48 members, whereas GitLab is almost at 800.

We do plan on scaling to $100,000,000 in ARR. We are planning on keeping this model. We have actually purposely limited how many people we hire to fewer than 50. I'm curious what GitLabs ARR is. I know GitLab raised nearly $170MM whereas ConvertKit has raised $0. 52% of the profit is distributed twice a year to employees at our company retreats. We're on track to hit $20MM ARR by the end of this year. We have a 401k program with 4% match. We get a $1000 "Paid" Paid time off bonus once a year. GitLab is a "Unicorn" but they've cheated their employees to get there. A billion dollar company can't pay people the same based on their role? Sounds like SV venture sharks speaking under the guise of remote work.

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

ConvertKit is an absolute rocketship of a bootstrapped company. What Nathan as done is nothing short of amazing, I'm saying that having followed your story for years. But that amazing MRR curve is the bootstrapped equivalent of a unicorn, which is what allows you to have those nice things. Taking them for granted or lamenting why other companies simply don't do the same is entirely unrealistic.

Look at any of the other companies on the Baremetrics open startups page https://baremetrics.com/open-startups (save maybe Buffer). Should Baremetrics itself hire a SF developer, blowing 25%+ of their annual ARR on it? They've been around for years, and are doing pretty well. Of course they should not, that would be crazy, and it has nothing to do with the company being cheap. They should keep hiring for reasonable salaries in anywhere-but-SF.

I do not take ConvertKit for granted. Every point I made is pointed directly at GitLab. GitLab isn't open or bootstrapped. I have nothing but respect for every company on the open startups page of Baremetrics, including and especially Baremetrics themselves.

I have worked for a few startups and I've been laid off from a couple of them. I would never believe a bootstrapped company could do what we're doing but we do and I'm lucky enough to be a part of it. We aren't unique either. Basecamp has been doing this for a lot longer than ConvertKit has.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp/

Bootstrapped companies face many challenges that VC backed companies don't. GitLab isn't bootstrapped. I lament that companies with all this money don't treat their employees better when they definitely can afford it. If they say they can't then they are probably wasting money. @emilycook said in a comment below

> ...I was able to negotiate for a higher salary and they adjusted. If GitLab wants you badly enough then they'll do what every company does and try and make themselves competitive. You just have less leverage to negotiate in general because you're competing with international talent vs local talent.

So, they have the money to pay more but they are simply choosing not to.

The CEO of a VC backed company I worked for got a 40% pay raise immediately after a 60% workforce layoff. He was already the highest paid person in the company.

Demand markets dominated by a single firm are monopsonies, not monopolies.

FYI Gitlab quite readily publicize their salary calculator at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... .

Thanks for posting our calculator. More context about us paying local rates is in https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

Interesting, I calculated the salary in the country I am right now, and pay is way above local pay - which is good. I earn more tho with a different company working remotely, but they don't discriminate based on location. Equal amount of effort, means equal amount of pay in their view.

My take aways from the blog post: "if everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team members" - obviously cheaper labour means more resources.

"If everyone is paid a standard salary, those who live in high-income areas would have less discretionary income when compared to their counterparts in lower-income communities." - that is the choice of those living in high income areas, and I don't see why those who make the financially sensible choice of living in a more affordable area should be penalised.

However, and this is quite important, given how high salaries at Gitlab are (based on the calculator), I see no issue with this kind of discrimination. I assumed the gap might be bigger. At the end of they day it has to be a win win situation. I will refrain from criticising this "issue" from now on as I don't see any ill intention in it. Keep up the good work!

One thing I notice with the calculator is it is a simple scaling factor. While this scales for an employee's cost of living, it also scales how much they can save.

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).

Yes, this is a common issue that I find is missed in conversations about cost of living and location (even outside of remote work). Yes, the cost of living in the Midwest of the US is much lower than the West Coast. However, I find that the lower pay there more than offsets the difference. First, because of the savings issue you mention, but also there are major things that cost approximately the same no matter where you live in the country. Cars, computers, vacations, often even medical procedures (certainly not cheaper in line with the pay difference), etc. Between being able to save less for retirement, and having large purchases (even if infrequent) consume a significantly higher portion of my income, I've never been able to make the math truly work out in terms of moving to a lower cost of living area and keeping a similar quality of life. For those who it works for, that's great, but it's not as simple as it's made out to be when you consider all of the factors.

If you don’t mind, which company do you work for, and how did you find them? Please feel free to respond by email. Thanks!

I can not name the company, also I am not technically an employee - I do remote contracting for them, but it is likely to be long term. I found them through my network, but I am getting emails with offers for UK recruiters on an (almost) weekly basis - so there is remote work out there. It requires a different mindset tho, and what helped me, is that I managed remote teams before - thus I kind of understand what the other side expects.

Thank you for publishing this! I work for a small fintech company and I find it really hard to get good data on what salaries should be outside of one-off anecdotes. I also agree that you should pay local rates. I looked at the non-SF California rate and found it to be more than reasonable.

Checked it out, and for my region their salary is barely competitive. Must say, I am disappointed by this approach from a company whose product I admire.

Curious, which region is it?

I second the curiosity.

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.

I suppose at this stage we should also ask about the parameters - role, level, experience factor, country and area.

Looking at Switzerland on payscale.com, for ruby devs, gitlab's compensation seems above average. Might be looking at it the wrong way, or it might be that payscale.com is horribly wrong (wouldn't be surprised).

I used the Salarium [0] for base comparison (unfortunately, the actual calculator is only available in German/French/Italian).

As an example calculation, [1] are the statistics for a 30 y.o. university graduate in the Zurich area. At 13 monthly salaries, the median yearly base compensation works out as 110k to 150k CHF.

I'm assuming that at 30, that person might have around 5 years of work experience, so that would land them around 150k using the Gitlab calculator as well. So a bit above median for Swiss citizens, not so much above median for expats.

[0] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [1] https://www.gate.bfs.admin.ch/salarium/public/index.html#/ca...

Gotcha, makes sense.

What if somebody in SF was employed remotely by a company in a poorer country? Should the person in SF be paid less because employees in originating country have lower salaries?. Having salaries based on location is fair, the same job that pays 120k$ in SF pays 70k$ in my country and that makes me in top 2% earners in the country. I could argue that i actually get more with 70k$ in my country than somebody with 120k$ in SF.

> Having salaries based on location is fair

It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher pay from a remote employer than an employee paying more to live in a bigger house, or to consume more expensive designer drugs outside of work hours.

But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply. If there is a supply of workers willing to work at a lower price in areas outside of San Francisco, then it makes sense for a company to purchase their cheaper labor if it supplies the same value as the more expensive labor.

> But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply

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.)

That may very well happen over time. Non-Bay workers may bid down the price of coding labor, and remote workers from disparate markets will bid against each other, and eventually some "global market clearing price" may be established. Economic theory doesn't operate instantaneously, though. It manifests over time as individual actors bid and negotiate. Remote work is relatively new and its substitutability is being figured out. In the meantime companies may exploit the inefficiencies (and so might workers).

In reality it has nothing to do with fairness, it's a result of real market conditions. An employee in the middle of the country will accept a lower salary than someone in the bay area due to cost-of-living expenses. Same can be said for someone in another country.

Is it 'fair' from a pure salary-to-value ratio? No. But economics isn't about 1-1 'fairness', it's about the allocation of scarce resources at a mutually-agreed upon price, or wage in this case. This is partly why comparing salaries is stupid, especially across locations.

> In reality it has nothing to do with fairness

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.

Starting a remote company is a cost-saving tactic, and the ability to often not have to pay SF salaries can be a motivating factor, especially in the early stages of the company.

Sure, if you make a cost-optimization rather than fairness argument for Gitlab’s policy—that it's simply a way of paying every employee the minimum they can get away with—I won’t argue against that.

Well, it's both cost saving and fairness, I think. It just seems like common sense to me. If one employee by default has to subtract something like $4000 from their monthly income to cover living expenses, and another has to subtract something like $700, then the employee who subtracts less is taking home way more money if they're getting the same salary. The other employee is being punished for where they live.

To be honest, Gitlab is paying way above the market rate in Bucharest, while the cost of living in Bucharest is significantly lower than that of SF. Oddly enough their pay rate is close to that of London for a Tech Lead, and that's a lot of money in a city like Bucharest. Even if pay is half of SF, Bucharest's cost of living if a few times less, so it really is great.

Salary is a market value. 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”

> Salary is a market value.

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.

The fact that employee in SF gets $200k doesn't mean that the labor is worth $200k in Bucharest. It is worth whatever somebody is ready to do the job for and what the company is ready to offer, in this case - SF it is $200k while in Bucharest it is $100k. If the employee is happy with $100k in Bucharest then the salary is fair.

The fact that the purchaser pays $200k for it means that the labor is worth $200k to that purchaser. Assuming that what they get doesn't vary based on the seller's location, the only reason to offer less for identical labor from Bucharest is because they think they aren't competing with other buyers who are likewise location-insensitive, so that the Law of One Price doesn't apply, and they can optimize their cost with market segmentation.

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.

They should price their service the same. Charge less in ares in the US with a lower cost of living as the wages/revenue will be less for developers/businesses in those areas.

>Should the person in SF be paid less because employees in originating country have lower salaries?

So in your view it's fine to pay different amounts of money for the same work?

Why would it not be? It's a mutual transaction. If an developer in kansas is willing to accept less than the bay area worker, whose living expenses are twice as much, who is anyone to say that's not allowed? 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.

>Why would it not be?

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.

It's not speculation, it's economics. If you have to pay a higher wage the number of available jobs decrease. It's supply and demand. There's not an infinite amount of money in a company's budget.

It's also not a company's job to incentivize where it's employees live.

I understand where you're coming from but there's nothing inherently wrong with paying different wages for the same work if it's a consensual agreement. If one worker is satisfied with his salary, and is being paid well for his area, the only reason to complain about a worker in a costlier area being paid more is envy/jealousy.

Yes it is and it happens all the time because of salary negotiations. The same thing applies to location based salaries - nobody will want to work if the offered money is not adequate. If company X from poorer country Y wanted to open an office in SF they simply wouldn't be able to find anyone that is willing to work for the same amount of money that is offered for country Y employees.

That is similar to paying an employee more because they have children and need it more.

I've never heard of a company doing that.

And yet, a lot of remote companies pay differently based on location. I'm also not quite sure why the choice of location should be factored in but family planning not.

Paying the same, regardless of location, would maybe motivate some people to move away from crowded areas, one of the big chances remote work offers.

i remember one company (i wanna say basecamp?) that pays everyone as if they lived in the bay area.

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

I think the standard argument is not that they're paying according to need, they're paying according to market norms.

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.

Gitlab's idea of market norms is "market where you live + us, literally the only company that hires remote in the world".

Spoiler: that only works hiring those who are ignorant of the remote employment market.

Assuming I'm currently ignorant of the remote employment market, where would I go to find data or job listings that would give me a sense of what competitive rates are for remote engineers?

I'm not sure there's a great canonical and generalized source of this information.

Anecdotally, 7 years ago, remote, at a bootstrapped 15 person company, I made ~10% more than the absolute max Gitlab would pay me right now. The difference is wildly worse now.

What is never factored in is the feeling of resentment people get for doing the same or better work for less pay. While companies can rationalize these pay scales and maybe even require them to be sustainable, loyalty and engagement suffers noticeably.

The only one I know of is the military.

If your boss asks you to work overtime or on the weekends, explaining that you need to bring the kids to soccer is a more convincing argument than explaining that your WoW guild is depending on you for a raid.

Having kids is hard but may make things easier at the office.

Not unless there's an incredibly strong link between having children and having strong alternative employment prospects. Which I don't have data on but doubt, and if I had to take a guess would assume actually works the other way. That the childless have more options.

This is a bad argument, because there are many other remote employers.

I do not live in a low CoL area because I'm from here and never left, nor did I move here to save money. I moved here because I was able to keep a high paying career, and live somewhere I wanted to live.

Gitlab is flat-out non-competitive.

There is an incredibly strong link between having children and alternative employment prospects. People with kids in school have complicated scheduling needs and can't easily relocate, unless they homeschool all their kids.

It's interesting that a lot of people in this thread seem to assume that the end-goal of remote working becoming mainstream and some inherent sense of fairness is that everyone ends up being paid SF wages in the end. But basic economic theory says that if remote working becomes the new standard, you should expect the salaries between high and low COL to average out. So somewhere between SF and an Asian sweatshop... let's say a Berlin developer salary. That's not great for the SF developers, and also why SF is one of the last places I would expect remote work take off.

Companies that want to hire remotely rarely publish wages online for this exact reason. They get called out for being "cheap" and "I can make X times more in SF". Yes, but most companies in the world are not looking for and can not compete for SF developers with the FAANGS in the first place. When the company is not in the Bay Area, them posting a non-SF salary is not trying to screw you over, hiring you was never on the table. Unfortunately they cannot say simply that in the job ad without calling down an epic shitstorm.

You can check your compensation here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

For Canada, Toronto and Vancouver are considered distinct from the rest of their provinces, but not Montreal from the rest of Quebec.

This post from GitLab has their official explanation of why they pay local rates: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

That's a lot of spin on "to save money".

They mention San Francisco rents, but they fail to mention all the advantages of living in San Francisco. Awesome for the folks in San Fran to have their lifestyle's subsidized.

AND then they spread some FUD with "Remote companies using a standard pay structure are reportedly running into problems with their compensation plans" - nice and vague and ominous. Doesn't even mention what issues they're running into, just "issues".

AND then they end with the weak they " hope location band salaray gaps will continue to narrow", as if they genuinely wish they could pay more, but their hands are tied.

I think gitlab is a great project, but that is some grade A bullshit.

One of the benefits of working remotely is that we can escape our local markets' pay scales. Working from anywhere shouldn't negatively affect one's value.

Thanks for sharing that. I had a look at their stock options page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/ and think that it's very misleading.

> The reason we give stock options instead of straight stock is that you do not need to spend any money to purchase the stock at the date of grant and can decide to purchase the stock later as your options vest. In addition, we do not provide straight stock grants since this may subject you to immediate tax liabilities.

Having worked at pre-IPO companies before, both these statements are untrue

1. Most companies issue RSUs instead of straight up stock. No one makes you 'buy' your RSUs.

2. Every pre-IPO company has a double-trigger vest condition where you 'own' the stock only at IPO or acquisition and you only owe taxes then (and most companies auto-sell a portion at IPO to cover taxes).

This has always bothered me about GitLab and has prevented me from applying for a job there. I want to work remotely so I can move around a lot, both for long-term travel and to check out different places to live. I don't have a home. If I'm hired from NYC and then I move to rural Montana, that's none of their business. So long as I have reliable Internet wherever I am, and can work the hours I need (I'm happy to adjust my work schedule to Eastern Time from anywhere in the world, for example), then I should be paid based on my work. Is GitLab going to pay for my rental homes and airfare as I wander around the world? Are they going to adjust my pay every time I move? Are they going to pay me more because I spend a year in an RV and fuel is expensive? Are they going to adjust my pay for rent in the Cayman Islands even though food and electricity are the primary expenses there, rather than rent?

The whole thing smacks of socialism as well, and reminds me of the line from some Ayn Rand novel (not endorsing her): "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Do they also plan to pay their employees based on their medical expenses and how many kids they have?

> This has always bothered me about GitLab and has prevented me from applying for a job there.

That seems exceedingly silly to me. If they offer you pay you're happy with, what does it matter to you? As for your concerns about moving, then that would be a logical thing to ask about, just like discussing your remote working needs would be important with any other prospective employers. As it stands, fully remote employment opportunities are rare enough that it'd seem bothering to actually clarify details would be worthwhile if they otherwise seem like they might be a good fit.

> The whole thing smacks of socialism as well, and reminds me of the line from some Ayn Rand novel (not endorsing her): "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Do they also plan to pay their employees based on their medical expenses and how many kids they have?

This, to me, is ridiculous. It smacks of a private company optimizing pay for what they can get away with in different locations, rather than paying based on the most expensive area they want to be able to hire in. The missing piece that distinguishes what they do from socialism is that there is no indication that Gitlab aims to pay out as much as possible of their revenue after other costs to employees vs. building shareholder value. As far as I'm aware Gitlab is not a workers coop.

The line was incidentally popularized by Karl Marx "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875), and variations of it in the socialist community and elsewhere long preceded the Critique. Arguably it originates in the Bible (Acts 4:32-35; describing the community of Christians in Jerusalem), but then early Christianity was in many ways a "proto-socialism" (and e.g. in Europe, things like public healthcare in most countries have come about thanks to interplay between Christian democrats and socialists, not due to socialists alone; Germany, in fact, got its first insurance system as Bismarck appealed to Christian morality to get support for a system designed to kill of support for the socialist groups he at the same time outlawed).

Ayn Rand borrowed it explicitly for one of her attacks on socialism, but missed the mark badly in that Marx in the Critique itself points out that "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby," or in other words, according to Marx a company in a capitalist economy can not successfully act as a socialist company - doing so is impossible because it needs to interact with and compete with capitalist companies on capitalist terms, which means the ability to optimize salaries and employment to minimize cost for example. So Ayn Rand concocted a scenario that Marx would have agreed with her was doomed to failure.

They pay you according to how much they think you'll keep. If your rent is $3500/month, you'll take home less than if it's $600/month.

Let's say Gitlab hired you in rural Montana with a salary appropriate for that location. If you then decide to move to NYC, would it be fair for you to retain the same pay ?

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