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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean to be more philosophically aligned with one corporation vs another?

I like many things Gitlab does: open-sources most of their product, publishes their documentation openly, promotes remote work.

I strongly dislike some of the things that Github does: suck up open-source code and re-sell it through Copilot, stifle competition by offering free services that their non-MS-owned competitors can't afford to offer.

I don't think either one is purely good or purely evil. Overall, I like both companies better than average, but I'd rather support Gitlab.

GitHub also promotes remote work. Most of the company is remote and will always be remote.

That's fair, but I think Gitlab promotes it more strongly. They're 100% remote, and they publish guides teaching other companies how to replicate their remote-first setup:

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

Gitlab advocates for paying local salaries. That’s actually against my “philosophy“ as you put it, as it is against my direct interest, being a non-US based software developer.

Their way to promote remote work is, ironically, hurtful to my prospects as a remote worker.

Yeah location based salary discrimination is one of the biggest issues in our industry in my opinion. I'm really hoping that the move to more remote-forward working cultures spurred by Covid will lead to this being corrected.

Overpaying remote workers compared to the local market is bad as it create distortion of local markets (on housing especially where local non remote workers cannot afford living where they work).

(I'm a remote worker outside of the US and my personal interest would be to be paid more, but I don't believe it would be the general interest)

This line of reasoning doesn't consider equity, and the fact that people want to move - especially out of low socioeconomic areas. If you're paid a local wage, there's basically no way you'd ever be able to relocate to somewhere more expensive since selling your house wouldn't put a dent in the price of a home elsewhere.

Sure, but paying a high wage relative to the local prevailing wage is different than paying the same high wage everywhere. Part of the problem in the Bay Area is that tech companies distorted the local wages so dramatically.

People are going to min-max whatever system you offer. If you don't pay equally and you adjust for cost of living, people are likely going to go for high CoL locations and make you pay the most. If you don't adjust for CoL, you'll likely see your devs leave high CoL areas for lower ones. While you might be "overpaying" them according to their chosen CoL, you're likely underpaying what the high CoL would have demanded.

It seems counter-intuitive but I imagine that not doing CoL adjustments actually lowers total payroll.

> It seems counter-intuitive but I imagine that not doing CoL adjustments actually lowers total payroll.

That's not the problem that forty was talking about. The issue is that when you drop a ton of employees in an area whose wages are well beyond the norm you create larger societal problems.

I don't really think you do. Even poor rural communities have working rich like doctors and lawyers. There are rich rural folk 5 hours from every city. Adding a developer here and there is just a new face of the same working rich, the top 1-2%.

In fact, concentrating developers in one place like SF is pretty clearly the far greater social evil than ~evenly dispersing them around the country and letting them live in states/cities that perhaps desperately need the benefits of highly trained skilled workers who will pay a ton of taxes.

I would say that packing most developers into SF and California is far worse for America than letting educated and productive workers find communities around the country, potentially growing tech industries all over. Likely far better for equity, diversity, tax outcomes, and social good. I really can't see any argument for packing them all in California and letting all the other states rot.

> I don't really think you do. Even poor rural communities have working rich like doctors and lawyers. There are rich rural folk 5 hours from every city. Adding a developer here and there is just a new face of the same working rich, the top 1-2%.

Those doctors and lawyers aren't getting paid big city salaries.

Sure, they are primary care providers making $110k or real estate attorneys making $120k, instead of $400k in private practice in a rich area or partner at the big firm making millions.

But most developers aren't making that either. I get that there are some few who are making $400k to millions, but the median developer pay in every software field according to the stack overflow survey is ~80k.

Your average small town doctor is likely out-earning your average developer, so I think it's a good comparison.

Well the examples I have seen here in France did not work out so well. There were large arrivals of rich, well paid Parisians to cities like Nantes and Bordeaux, and it completely messed the local housing market, forcing many people who were living there to leave the city because they couldn't afford the rent anymore. Of course it creates a lot of resentment and tensions.

To be fair, France and the US are very very different. When we talk about rural areas in the U.S., we're not talking about Bordeaux, one of the most famous and prestigious wine growing regions in the entire world, a literally world famous rural area beloved by the elite of dozens of nations.

We're talking about flyover country. The kind of place that rich Parisians would only ever fly over and would never for any reason consider actually going to.

We're also talking about having so much space that the idea that developers could mess up local housing markets is crazy! In the US, packing developers together ruins housing markets (see the SF housing market ruined by tech companies) and spreading them out across the other 49 states and ~thousand+ rural locations prevents most out-sized effects, except in a few prestigious places known for elite vacations.

Gitlab should just offer to cover moving expenses for employees 1 time per X years, then even the poorest-paid person working there would have that freedom (aside from any immigration concerns). I don't think it's in their best financial interests, but would cost maybe 10k at most and whatever the additional salary per year is and garner more support for their "local pay scale" strategy.

This seems like a variation on the fixed pie fallacy. It's absolutely in the general interest for more people to get paid more. How do you expect poorer markets to catch up with richer ones if you believe that it is bad for people in such markets to get paid more? Nonsense.

It's much easier to catch up if you can compete on price to start with. Why would a company take a chance on a developer in a new location if they've got to pay just as much? Once there's a critical mass of employers hiring in my location, competition will raise salaries up to parity, but sharing the surplus is what incentivises that competition in the first place.

I am not competing on price. I compete o quality. In your analogy, I am someone who the company needs to “take a chance”, the company is risking hiring a worse employee because I don’t live in SF or the US. That’s not how I see it.

The pandemic made a lot of people realize they can hire remotely and be fine. Why should I share the surplus with the company? I am a good developer and I will negotiate to get a better pay. Why wouldn’t I?

> Why should I share the surplus with the company?

The whole premise of being employed is that you make more money for the company than they're paying you.

> I am a good developer and I will negotiate to get a better pay. Why wouldn’t I?

So why would you rule out companies that pay location-adjusted salaries? If they're the best offer on the table then you're shooting yourself in the foot.

I don’t understand your last comment.

I rule out precisely because they never were the best offer in the table for me. There are companies that do not pay location-adjusted salaries that pay better. I was able to get a job in those the last two times I switched jobs.

A worse offer is a worse offer, a better offer is a better offer. If Gitlab isn't making competitive offers then of course take a better offer elsewhere, but what matters is the bottom line, not the method they used to come up with it.

> Why would a company take a chance on a developer in a new location if they've got to pay just as much?

They're not taking a chance on location. Location is irrelevant to the job.

Patently untrue. Setting up accounting in a new country may be a huge effort for the company.

The timezone alone may rule out a location.

Culture is closely aligned with location, and every company cares about "cultural fit" (while pledging to support diversity, of course) for better or worse.

Misaligned holidays, internet connection quality, even power supply disruptions... and so many things are directly affected by location.

How can someone think location is irrelevant?!?!

That's all true but besides the point. Paying a developer less because they have bad Internet connection quality, lack availability or because they incur more administrative costs makes sense. Those are all things that can affect their work performance or cost. Paying a developer based on their cost of living or based on what their neighbors are earning is nonsense.

> Paying a developer based on their cost of living or based on what their neighbors are earning is nonsense.

I agree it "looks" like nonsense... but it's not. It's reality. Different countries, even neighbouring countries, can have completely different salaries while doing the same thing... and things can cost completely differently too... Just check the border between the USA and Mexico.

Take the extra cash and go on to invest in new housing?

That's fine. I'm not trying to convince anyone that Gitlab is the messiah or anything. Someone just asked me why I align more philosophically with Gitlab than Github, so I explained what appeals to me personally.

If they don't align with your philosophy, that's cool too. You get to choose how that affects your choice of VCS/CI provider.

That’s fine too. I just not trying to convince you of anything. You said you like Gitlab because they strongly promote remote work. I said I don’t like because they promote local salaries. That’s it, I wasn’t asking for your permission to think different than you, I was just posting a different point of view.

IMO it's better for our long-term interest if companies can pay what the market will bear. For now splitting the surplus is win-win; as remote work takes off then there wil be more competition and salaries will rise. Growing the pie is better than asking SV employers to overpay on some point of principle.

What? I should not negotiate a better salary with a company on the belief that, in the long term, it will be better for… who? Overpay? How can I be overpaid if the company agrees to pay? Should I be more humble? Should I give up some part of my salary so the company can have more money in their budget? Which pie am I growing by not taking my part? Whose pie?

That’s just silly

You should negotiate the best salary you can. What you shouldn't do is refuse to work for a company that's offering a better package than your current company out of some kind of principle because that company is also offering even better packages to employees somewhere else. Which is what you seemed to be advocating.

I interviewed with Github recently (a pretty mediocre experience overall) and it seemed like they've fully committed to remote work. They don't even bother with on site onboarding anymore.

GitHub has been fully committed to remote work for years before the pandemic. I suspect they’ll bring back on site onboarding at some point, but maybe not. Sorry to hear your interview experience was mediocre. They’ve been tweaking it, and not for the better in my opinion.

The co-pilot concern I get. I think the root of the problem is that everybody seems to have almost signed away their copyright to GitHub as part of their terms of service: https://fossa.com/blog/analyzing-legal-implications-github-c... "If you look at the GitHub Terms of Service, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features"... yeesh

I don't really agree with the concern that they "stifle competition by offering free services that their non-MS-owned competitors can't afford to offer". GitLab is clearly able to differentiate with with their terms of service, as evidenced by your and others' comments here. I don't fault the vast majority of FOSS developers, especially those using permissive MIT-style licenses, for favoring cost-efficiency over control. It's good to have both options.

I feel GitHub is the best thing that ever happened to the Open Source Community.

Before, it was freshmeat and, for collaboration, arbitrary mailing lists each enforcing their same "standards" to send in patches. I can only assume the process was sometimes smooth, sometimes terrible. In any case: I never did it.

In the GitHub era, I have regularly made pull requests. Small ones on a maybe weekly basis, larger ones twice a year or so.

I feel confident in the estimate that the number of contributors has grown by at least an order of magnitude, and that GitHub was a significant factor in this development.

Gitlab, meanwhile, started out as so obvious a clone their CSS still had classes named "gh-large-..." months after launch. Then, they would frequently have the audacity to complain when GitHub copied some minor feature they had first implemented.

Github is social media for code; which is great for discovering things or fly-by addons..

Social media in the workplace is not as great, ask anyone using facebooks communication platform: https://www.workplace.com

I much prefer working with gitlab as a product 9hours a day on internal systems.

Github is nowhere close to "social media in the workplace".

I use github every day and the only time I interact with people I don't know is if I'm submitting a patch to another project I use. Comparing it to facebook workplace is weird.

> Stifle competition by offering free services that their non-MS-owned competitors can't afford to offer.

This is quite absurd complaint, is it not?

Maybe more philosophically aligned with the product, rather than the corporation behind it. Microsoft is slowly turning GitHub profiles into networking tools and the core SCM offering into a social media experience. GitLab is similar in some ways, but not quite as aggressive about it in my view.

Github has always had a social media aspect. Profiles, stars, feeds, followers have been there since early days. One of their tag lines was "social coding".

Whenever I want to view my private repos, I have to navigate a painful UI first.

I'm given badges, and other gamification crap.

Then again, when I publish my projects I tend to post them either here or on Reddit.

Maybe Microsoft, with some justice, wants a cut of the traffic?

I was kind of against this, until I realized the reason I even began programming was purely out of social need (to make a program for me and my friend). I don't really mind it anymore.

GitLab offers a free and open source self-hosted "community edition" and understands it to be in their strategic interests to continue with the open source offering. GitHub does not offer it and does not appear to believe that an open source self-hosted offering is in their best interests.

Supporting GitLab on those reasons alone, and choosing to pay for GitLab Enterprise Edition because they offer the Community Edition, is "philosophically aligned"

That the buyer believes in the same thing the company "believes" in.

Eg: GitLab has an open-core product and GitHub is owned by (evil?) Microsoft.

Also the company is incredibly open, with lots of its documentation and meetings done in public and available on YouTube. Pretty interesting.

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