Gitlab compensation calculator is not open to everyone anymore
gitlab.com
gitlab.com
I am not attempting to promulgate any opinion about their compensation model or their chosen level of openness, only to point out that if the compensation model is working for them and they want to keep it, closing it off is a logical choice on their part.
I think transparency is so highly promoted by the managerial class and their media because by appearing to have a certain kind of ethics and virtue that do not impact the bottom line, it allows them to rationalize their actions to themselves or to others.
For example, if a powerful person performs an action in the open that is kind of sneaky and underhanded and no one says anything because they're afraid, then to the powerful person it seems like it's A-OK.
That said, I prefer transparency to opacity because without information you are blind and have to criticize the lack of information rather than material conditions.
Let say there's a CEO who presents facts and figures signalling their company's success. Investors are happy, employees are happy, regulators are happy. A month later, the company goes bankrupt.
How did no one see it coming?
Chances are the CEO did but knew other people wouldn't. She knew the decay was not yet solid enough, not yet visible enough, for outsiders to recognize it as decay. So, she chose not to highlight it. She gave their followers a nice, wide window into the company's activities as required by law, focusing on the easy parts, while leaving the decaying lines between the parts decaying in the dark.
The journalist phrase "shine a light" comes to mind: if leaders don't give followers a true belief they need (honesty) to organize the information they're given (transparency), then outsiders must bring or draw their own insight instead. To peer through the cracks and connect the dots while others fumble in the dark.
Effectively, transparency without honesty becomes a tool for manipulation. It enables the powerful to appear clear while maintaining their invisibility, and therefore their invulnerability.
Perhaps "quickly enough" is over 3 years. Regardless even when it does go poorly with one candidate, I've had 3 years of people I've at least been a normal person to, instead of acting like a drone who is constantly afraid of the proverbial lawsuits from candidates.
Caveats: this is in Australia, and I believe we've had legal advice a few times encouraging us to stop, because it could expose us to litigation.
The situation in the EU is the exact opposite. As any company can be compelled to disclose electronic records, and all recruitment is done that way now, good companies get ahead of GDPR requests by proactively providing feedback.
Source: recent experience on both sides of the table. Location: South Wales.
OTOH, sounds like you made the right call on hiring :)
I was using HN as a proxy for "geeks being Mad Online" on the basis that reactions everywhere else were probably if anything worse.
I agree re competitive advantage, though, I was explaining one of the reasons I thought that had come to pass.
That said, the resource will become more and more obsolete as the time goes on.
Well I wouldn't rely on it if I were you as it gave nonsense results for where I live. Recommending senior salaries so low that I wouldn't advise a new-grad to take them.
[1] https://buffer.com/salary/
[2] https://buffer.com/resources/salary-formula-changes-2019/
So if I wanted to predict the salary range from the job opportunities in Gitlab, I would have to take the "location" of the user into account. That's interesting.
I mean, thanks for being open, but I don’t get this at all. Cost of living depend on so many factors. Why take it into account at all? Why charge customers based on value you provide, but pay employees by what their own expenses are?
To be totally fair, companies that sell in more than one market universally charge higher prices for the same thing in areas with higher cost of living.
That's pretty much what "higher cost of living" means.
Say a company has a choice between engineer H from a high CoL area and engineer L from a low CoL area. They are otherwise comparable in their skills, experience, etc. Why would they hire H when L is expected to be able to do the job to the same standard?
How is this eliminating competition based on location? People would move to a lower CoL area, so they could get an advantage.
How so? If the CoL adjustment is high enough, they should have equal costs.
But I do see your overall point that with a CoL adjustment people in a low CoL area would in theory be able to be hired easier, because in theory they wouldn't need to be held to as high of a hiring bar.
And when it comes to location, I was talking about the location of the buyer. You're talking about the location of the employee. With a physical product being sold by onsite employees, the location of the buyer and the employee are the same. But with a digital product the location of the buyer and the employee are not necessarily the same, so something purchased in a high CoL area could have been produced by an employee in a low CoL area, and vice versa. So it doesn't make much sense to change the price of a product based on the location of the buyer in that case.
Typing this out, I realized there's an error in my previous comment, I didn't need to say "and fully remote employees". A digital product is sufficient to uncouple the employee's CoL from the buyer's CoL. The employees can all be onsite and the CoLs between the buyer and employees would still be uncoupled.
I'm intrigued by the progression of the subthread from "it's weird for GitLab to do this on the employee side when nobody does it on the customer side" to "it's weird for GitLab to do this on the employee side when everybody does it on the customer side".
So while it's not perfectly "fair", the outcome for most people involved is still pretty great.
This is incorrect. Costs and salaries are market based, shaped by supply and demand.
But in the case of remote, isn't the market the whole area to which you're open? If a company is open to hiring from the entire US, the market becomes the whole country. So if you decide on hiring engineer E, why would you pay more if E decides to live in SF instead of [low COL city]? E is the same exact person and whatever work they do is not dependent on where they happen to be.
The only variation I could see as "fair" would be dependent on how taxation varies. I'm not familiar with how these things work in the US, but if there's variation in payroll or income tax due to the state where the employee actually works, I can understand that for a given cost the company, the employee's after tax salary may vary.
Indeed, if all companies went full remote overnight, the demand wouldn't change that much, whereas the supply would be much larger.
If the company doesn't expect the employees to be physically present in a given location, the supply of talent is increased since it isn't restricted to a given area anymore.
So while I understand that people living in SF wouldn't appreciate having their salaries cut to the level of [low COL city], I don't see how companies would continue to pay SF rates when they can access talent for a lower price just because they live someplace else. And said talent could even be the same exact SF engineer deciding to live someplace else for personal reasons.
Could those employees move elsewhere? Sure. That may in fact happen. But right now, an engineer in SF has both remote demand and local demand at FAR higher rates than someone in idaho.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11s9VSyf4yaYUsqBKLaVH...
Added to that, I pay a lot less for rent, food, and entertainment, and I have the freedom to move anywhere I want.
How much of a surcharge do employers need to pay in order to attract people who live in SF? And is the talent pool there worth paying that?
Someone in SF can get high offers from companies in that area, so you have to match to get him.
Global trade & containers are to thank for that, I suppose.
In fact I'd really wager that an iPhone is something that costs much less in manufacturing costs than other things made in China.
This is also how you establish yourself as an outlier ;)
No, they're not. Someone living near the main office (or if the company is fully remote just near the rest of the team), can attend face-to-face meetings with their team, they can be there for in-person client demos without needing prior notice and plane tickets, they're in the same time zone for remote meetings, if the team is international then people in different countries cost most for buying services and dealing with legal stuff..
Having staff live and work remotely does come with additional costs, and there are downsides, so it's not unreasonable to suggest the value isn't the same. When you're assessing the cost of staff you don't only look at the outputs.
Honestly, if I get hired by Buffer while living in a low-cost area, I’d immediately move to a high-cost city to get better pay. Supposedly, HR shouldn’t bat an eye on that, since there’s the calculator? Or would they ask me to not move?
Would an engineer living out of a hostel in LA get paid more than one who has a mansion in Bali?
If anything, creating this situation is actively creating a disadvantage to remote workers by not allowing them access to this privileged information. In my previous role, this was a real problem (and I was part of it!) where the remote team members didn’t have access to the in-depth information that those of us in the office did. That should have been on us to fix, but we didn’t and the company suffered as a result.
At Hotjar, like Gitlab, we’re 100% remote so we don’t have this 2-tier information system. There are costs, however ALL of these are good costs to have. They improve organisational resilience immensely and they’re things colocated offices should have but typically don’t until the time comes (usually after something bad happens).
Unlike Gitlab, we don’t split compensation based on location, it’s simply based on your role and seniority. It comes with some challenges but it makes me feel as valued as someone working from London or Munich, where the cost of living is higher.
The interesting thing will be to see how remote work will change this over the next few decades.
If you’re being hired for a remote role then at most salary could vary according to time zone, perhaps a small difference due to taxation issues.
Paying 40% more to get the same value from someone living in SF has no possible justification (from a business pov) if you’re hiring for a global remote position (which is what Gitlab does)
If there’s actually a business reason someone living in SF might add more value they should hire locally.
This all sounds like a lame way of ratinalizing paying more to some employees who happen to live in SF (early hires likely) while pretending everyone is treated the same according to some equation.
P.S. If you'd like to simply compare two offers, we have a total compensation calculator here: https://www.levels.fyi/calculator/
* Buffer - https://buffer.com/salary/
* StackOverflow - https://stackoverflow.com/company/compensation/calculator
* Codacy - https://www.codacy.com/careers#calculator
* SparkSuite - https://salaries.sparksuite.com/It seems like a really bad idea to use these for a security sensitive product, as an attack on the redirection site or its software could silently change which IP the address points to. IDK why GitLab couldn't use a subdomain of their own name or just buy a new one if needed.
Thanks for flagging this, the subdomain was a work in progress which has now been deployed. We have updated the handbook to reflect this change: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...