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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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