Still paying according to location for the same work?
[0] https://remotewide.co/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31225138
Ok now I am more curious. I looked at another company "Expensify" [1]. They actually want you to ideally relocate to one of their office locations :). So again, not fully remote anywhere in the world. I think employers say it casually but in practice, it is extremely difficult.
Why would I pay the same salary to a good developer in NYC vs India/Thailand. If that's the case, why would I hire from a totally different timezone and not to mention add legal, HR and compliance issues.
Outside of contracting and business-to-business deals, I think we're still in a world where it's hard to legally employ people in countries where you don't have a legal presence (outside of cases where that has been explicitly agreed-upon, like EU).
Something as basic as tax withholding can be literally impossible without creating a subsidiary in that country.
Looking at remotewide.co, they don't say anything about having to accept applicants from all over the world. That is, think SF vs Idaho, not SF vs Siberia.
Out of curiosity, what makes you think Expensify wants you to relocate?
Relocation was not required or suggested when I interviewed with them last year. Their current job ad shows that they support working from anywhere: "Our employees work from all over the world" and "we spend a month abroad working from a remote location as a team".
I hypothesize that the part about visa sponsorship / relocation assistance might give the wrong impression:
> if you're looking for a change of scene we offer visa sponsorship and relocation assistance to join us at one of our rad locations...
Surely, there has to be some sufficiently motivated and intelligent person born in Thailand who is able to do the work you require. Have you hired any of them?
Also happy to answer any other questions you have. And again, if anyone reading this is interested, please take a look at our open roles [0]. This is one of many, many things which makes the company great [1].
[0] https://we.are.expensify.com/#workwithus [1] https://we.are.expensify.com/benefits-perks
> The salary for candidates matched as Programmer is $165,410. The salary for candidates matched as Senior Programmer is $197,819. Irrespective of where in the world you live.
Also, check out remotewide.co for a list of remote companies with location independent pay. I think this is exactly what you're looking for.
They underpay in general which is why their product is buggy
I understand the sentiment but I am not convinced that underpay is the cause of buggyness. They compete with a behemoth and it is quite a feat to stay in the game in spite of having a fraction of resources at their disposal compared to thier completion.
* "This person does the exact same work, obviously they need to be paid 30% more than you because they could afford to move close to an expensive city before applying" doesn't sound exactly fair
* "We'll value your work less financially if you move somewhere cheaper (not the other way around though)" isn't particularly great
* The message(s) of "You can work from everywhere, people can move back to rural places and reverse demographic drain from there, you can be close to nature, ..." seem a bit hollow when paired with "oh, and if you actually do any of those great things we'll cut your salary"
* At least when it was public, their salary calculator had some hilarious blind spots (one would hope they have a better process when it actually comes down to it)
For the other perspective, they've written about why they do it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation..., https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...
Imagine spending so much time and effort to justify paying your employees less. It makes financial sense for a public company with no soul, but I feel bad for gitlab employees.
but with a rental-price index for local-ish area instead of trying to capture that in their regions? or total flat?!
Thank you, I was thinking I imagined that that existed.
Backpedaling on transparency is the antithesis of leadership.
Is there a word for that? Sabotage? Maybe too dramatic, but if we're going to toss around terms like "world leader" maybe it's not.
The problem is that when I saw their compensation tables for Mexico, their offer was going to cut my salary by about 30% of what I was actually earning (I think it was about $70k USD annual at most, I cannot find the calculator now), in another US company with an office in my hometown. Instead, I went to another US company which is also remote, and got a pay bump to $140,000 USD, working from my country.
I am not asking to get paid in FAANG Valley salaries ($400k+) but even paying me 50%-60% of what they pay to someoneone in the US makes a win-win situation IMHO.
Although I recent interviewed for a place (the whole gambit) and their offer didn't even match my salary, let alone total comp. And I was very clear. They blamed their "salary bands."
Just don't call yourself a world leader.
Gitlab might not be a world leader in salaries, but they might very well be a world leader in providing the best remote work environment to their employees.
Either you don't adjust the pay when they move because you are already paying everyone an equal salary. Or you adjust it and pay everyone a local salary.
Gitlab does the latter.
I totally agree. But kirbypineapple's point was about someone's salary not being cut when they move. That's much less interesting than someone in Thailand getting the Bay Area salary when they're hired.
If Kraken pays the same salary for a role regardless of location when they're hiring then that's awesome. I would find that incredibly surprising though, if only because advertising a role on 50* the typical local salary would make hiring really hard because you'd be swamped with low quality applications.
That's as flimsy a strawman as you could find.
(not saying GL are, there could be other unrelated things precluding it)
I worked at a small company that paid me a lot, gave me free stuff, perks etc. It doesn’t mean they’re a world leader in remote work. It just means they offer those things.
The point is — they are not a world leader in remote work. They are a tech company with perks and this is good marketing for them to convince people like you otherwise.
Not sure how I reply to the comment below by lucideer, I guess HN has a limit on children?
Anywho, this is for him, not you :)
Isn't the burden of proof on the one making the claim?
I have yet to see a reasonable case for why they should be called a global leader when they treat their workers differently for the same output.
Inequality is never going to be associated with a leader in my mind. Maybe from a c-level suit perspective they seem like leaders because they are getting away with making more money at the expense of the people building the product.
Yes. It is.
> I have yet to see a reasonable case for why they should be called a global leader when they treat their workers differently for the same output.
My point was no-one has made that claim (nor any similar positive claim - your rephrasing uses weasel words* to bias the interpretation)
The claim being made is as follows: "paying workers geo-adjusted wages precludes a company from being a global leader in remote work".
Noone has claimed that geo-adjusted wages do make them a leader, nor that GL even is a leader. Only one commenter has made a claim: that is that geo-adjusted wages preclude leadership.
* Aside to explain my comment on weasel words: paying the same wage could be as easily interpreted "treating workers differently" given spending power is actually a product of wage / cost-of-living ratio; the value of money is geographically variable
That's just a counter-claim; a denial of the original claim, which was Gitlab's "We are a global leader".
With quite a lot of people saying"No, your behaviour is by definition not that of a leader", I'd say the burden of proof still lies squarely on Gitlab's shoulders: They made a rather bold claim, they get to show that it isn't BS.
Nobody here is "convinced by their marketing" or has even mentioned they believe GLs claim. They're only asking for an explanation of your metric: that location based pay grades preclude leadership in remote working. I have yet to see any reasonable case for why this should be?
Unless it's not actually the same work, and location affects work. It does at least affect gross pay in any case, I suppose.
Because they probably want someone from the area working in the company. If they pay a flat rate globally, they only have to pay average or lower and get great people in LCOL areas. But then you have a company with no people in CA or NY, which means you dont have contact with local trends or contacts in the big tech companies.
Quality of talent means not only intelligence and skill but also people who have spent years working on the specific thing you are building (hardware/firmware, AI, at scale codebases or services).
If you assume that timezone matter and relevant experience working in large orgs is important, the Bay Area premium will continue for the foreseeable future.
Scale means you can hire 100-200 talented IC's within a year that meet the quality of talent criteria and have experience working and getting things done in larger orgs, the ability to do so also commands a premium.
Only a few other places in the USA have this scale, i.e New York and Seattle.
Coinbase the company I work for is fully remote and does salary bands by location. Within the USA, Seattle/New York and the Bay Area all are in the same top tier band. Also, the majority of our USA engineering workforce is still based in these hubs despite being fully remote for nearly 2 years. I don't expect this trend to change any time soon.
It's not the only remote company where I've noticed this happening.
I can't answer for GitLab, but widely, people often believe that San Francisco has an "exceptional" talent pool and that companies pay a premium for that because of competition.
Pay for skills not for cost of living. You hire someone for what they can bring to the table not how much you can profit off them.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
Not sure if I agree with this naive view. Yes, you hire people and give them what they want in exchange for work but at the end of the day, I am absolutely trying to save money as a company and increase profits as long as I am doing it reasonably.
why? do you feel that someday you'll be in their shoes and have the power to dictate salaries?
you are likely a worker like everyone else here. demand better.
I don't blame them for applying "Capitalism 101", but on the other hand, Gitlab is selling an ethos, not just a product¹. Surely, nobody likes to hear "when it's about management, we're rainbow and unicorns, but when it comes to the bottom line, we're capitalism 101".
I also think that they target talented but (from a career perspective) inexperienced engineers (a bit like old Google's free lunch and table tennis tables), which I find - at least - distasteful. Gitlab cleverly capitalizes on their brand, and in addition to the location-based salary optimization, they also offer substandard salaries (or at least, they did for a significant time; I interviewed with them, and by that time, they were paying at least 20% less than comparable companies).
¹: amusingly, they're not immune to marketing nonsense; see, for example, https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/all-remo....
Why shouldn't payment for work be tied to local price ranges and cost of living?
Aren't you commenting on a post about remote work? Their job market is global (within limitations.)
What's the market in this context is of course the interesting question.
Remote programming work, on the other hand, is the opposite: At least the demand side is, as this whole discussion exemplifies, global -- Gitlab isn't local to all the locations where their remote employees live. (If it were, they wouldn't be remote.)
But then the employees' supply of labour isn't local either: They're offering their labour to Gitlab, a non-local employer (and potentially to other non-local employers too).
It's utterly baffling how much of this discussion seems to be assuming that Gitlab (or other remote employers) play on a global market, but their employees on a local one. If that were the case, how could any of those employees ever be employed by any of these employers? The very fact that any transactions -- i.e. employment contracts -- ever arise shows that both parties are playing on the same market.
Why should it be? You pay someone enough to get them to work for you instead of someone else. That's the sole reason you pay someone anything at all. And there's no reason to pay them any more than that. How do local prices and cost of living fit into that equation?
If we enter a world where most SWEs work remotely and few other companies are paying location-based, we might see GitLab change their tune. For now, they're competing first and foremost against local jobs.
How do you expect to ever raise the standard of living in poor countries if you exploit their labor for pennies on the dollar. No different from apple and other who move manufacturing to cheap labor.
A real leader in remote work would try to be a part of the solution, not actively fight against it.
Like Gitlab then?
'We keep up with mediocre local jobs' is hardly 'world leader' is it?
The whole reason DVDs had regions was to price the same DVD differently based on location. As long as companies can, they will price and pay different amounts for the same thing based on local factors.
So, you were saying that's the kind of "leadership" Gitlab is boasting about, or...?
It's cheaper for them to hire people while things around foreign works are going up in price. The pay should be adjusted accordingly.
How do you measure this?