People don’t want to commute; they just don’t want to miss out

At GitLab, we don't force you to work from home, if you want to work from an office, we’ll pay for that. You can probably find an office space pretty close by, so you don't have to commute long. A lot of people when it's their first time remote working, they first do the office thing so that their family gets adjusted to it. And then also enjoy the benefits of your kids barging in on a meeting and distracting you, it's the best distraction in the world.

I have broken down and just grabbed some bricks or cinder blocks to jack up such desks in the past. It does make me wonder why so many businesses draw the line and refuse to spend a couple hundred dollars to keep an employee that they are spending six figures on happy. This kind of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking is endemic.

Also, with all the cloud stuff, I don't even have to go to the data center anymore, further reducing my need to be on-site.

P.S. Lots of places open to tele-commute. You should NOT have to give up half your income to do it. If you get tired of the current gig, I'm sure you'll find a remote position with a competitive salary.

Up and down my office hallway, I can spot height adjustable or convertible standing/sitting desks, various flavors of adjustable chairs, several kinds of adjustable monitor or laptop stand, as well as a wide range of monitor sizes and orientations.

I prefer remote work too, but I'd get sacked before allowing some PHB to dictate my OS, or sit at some weird communal longdesk. It's so far from my experience as to seem like a joke.

You spent a _year_ at a place that made you sit at a fucking desk that doesn't fit you? My god.

If they were a brick and mortar business operating in all these regions, fine, costs vary and it makes sense that salaries would too. But they are just using the excuse of locale to grow their margins, simple as that. It’s their business, and employees can work wherever they want. But let’s not pretend they are doing anyone any favors with that policy.

Gitlab doesn't have these constraints. They could pay the same, they just don't want to.

On the contrary, as a participant in global economics it has a responsibility to pay its workers fairly. No one is asking them to "fix" the economy, just to not perpetuate unfair hiring and salary practices like regional salary limits.

The work you do is worth it to GitLab or it's not. The value of the work doesn't change whether it's done in Nebraska or New York or Amsterdam.

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

Really? My impression is that nobody wants to live in expensive tech hubs where they can't even own a place to live, but they can't leave because there is much less work elsewhere.

There are some reasons to want the ability to hire anywhere regardless of salary cost. But, if you are going to pay everyone competitive Bay Area salaries anyway even if they work from a beach in Southeast Asia, there's going to at least be a bias towards hiring for nearby timezones, language fluency, the ability to get together physically on a regular basis, etc. You're essentially paying for it after all.

(And if you conversely pay a salary that's decent for a typical midsize city in the South or Midwest, you're probably going to have a lot of trouble attracting talent that can get jobs and wants to live in or near major US coastal cities.)

As others have said, GitLab is transparent about it which most companies are not. It does let you see that the best "deal" is to live somewhere that the salary multiplier is determined by a high CoL urban area--but then live in a low cost area of the same state.

But, even historically in the Bay Area, that's not really the norm. Compensation in high CoL areas is often higher but not really equivalent with respect to housing, etc.

I've been working remotely from different parts of south/southeast Asia for almost a year now and my cost of living is comparable to my previous residence in Amsterdam. If I was paid less just because I'm in Asia now, I'd be a bit peeved.

I spend a somewhat similar amount on rent because I expect a certain standard of living. I also bought recently bought a new laptop, which ended up costing more than if I had bought it in most expensive countries. Last time I checked, most of the items I regularly buy (e.g. a cold brew coffee) cost exactly the same here.

You should be paid for the value you bring to the company. Your location WRT earning potential is none of your employer's business.

Otherwise they re just subsidizing the rent seeking behaviour of crazy expensive cities

Wages and cost/quality of living are in a feedback loop. Remote work will net benefit the cheaper cities and will deflate prices in the expensive ones. I think that is inevitable

That's great for lifting everybody out of poverty of course, but how is this suddenly possible? Can we maybe give everybody a Basic Income to take care of all the cost of living stuff?

Also, if living in an expensive city doesn't cut into your disposable income, then even more people will want to live in those cities, driving housing prices up even more.

I'm absolutely sympathetic to the equality for all argument, but I suspect there's a reason why this is not how capitalism usually works.

in particular, if i want to keep my european lifestyle, malaysia ends up being more expensive than europe. same goes for most other asian countries. it gets worse with kids. education is very expensive in asia if you want to get the same quality as europe. and i also need to factor in expensive travel to visit family back home.

average cost of living is meaningless.

life is only cheaper if you accept the local living standards and if you don't have any family on another continent. so you are telling me that me having to accept a worse standard of living than you is fair?

Why not?

I understand why GitLab does it, it increases profits, but why can’t you pay someone in Malaysia Silicon Valley wages? If there was an individual contributor they wanted badly enough they’d break policy and I’d be surprised if there aren’t some people for whom exceptions have been made.

I understand the other side but I attribute the downsides to the fact that modern lifestyle has not adapted. Americans seem to center their social life around work, so yeah thats gonna be rough if you go remote. Esp. if you work in a boring residential-only suburb. I think we re about to see lots of changes around this culture in the following years

I think the steps outlined in this interview, oriented around taking small, iterative steps fast, is going to soon become the new norm for work, but that will require advancements in the state of technical architecture.

Microservices needs a new, language-agnostic framework. I'm excited for GraalVM, might be the only thing Oracle ever gets right.

I’m in the same position as the other person. I just quit my remote job for a local in-office position.

I now work remotely and do enjoy some aspects of it. However, there is much to be said for the co-location of coworkers. If everyone on your team is in an office and you are somewhere else you lose part of the dynamic. You have to work harder to stay in the loop on things instead of just organically being in the know.

Some things are just easier in person.

Again, this can be solved with tools (some tool that allows a shared drawing surface with video/audio for example), but very few people bother. I've seen $$$$ put into expensive 80" Surface screens and they're still used like a cheap whiteboard.

As you say, while companies take different approaches, most large companies (or even medium large companies) has offices all over the world, teams that have grown and morphed through acquisition and reorganization, etc.

I have a couple different offices I could go into--daily if I wanted to--but most of the people I interact with are elsewhere and many of the people I do work with in those offices spend most of their time traveling and in meetings.

The situation may be different for small development teams of focused projects, but I'd be working across timezones every day whether I was in an office or not.

>That apartment in the bay area has great weather, it's above a fun little Thai fusion dive bar, and within walking (or public transport) distance to some of the worlds largest tech conferences and meetups. Meanwhile, an employee in Iowa has to drive an hour for a P.F. Chang's and has to wake up 5am to shovel his driveway 5 months out of the year to get his kid to school.

Could we inject just a little more Bay Area condescension for the flyover states?

To be clear, I understand the visceral appeal of the fairness argument and reducing two locales to a single ratio is incredibly simplistic. But ultimately, almost every distributed company lets market forces set different salary ranges--which may or may not be a better approach than a preset ratio.

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Personally, I would ditch the header typeface too. You can surely find something which is fairly unique while still being legible.