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Comment by HatchedLake721 | Hacker News Reader

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HatchedLake721·

> It should be about the value I bring to the company, not where I live.

There are perfectly valid reasons why that's not the case, see here:

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-ra...

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I don’t buy it. Most of their reasons are why it’s better for them and not why it benefits the employees. The employees are still being discriminated against for living in low cost of living areas by being valued at less, regardless of what their final disposable income is.

For example, moving to a low cost of living area is something I did as a choice so that I could save more, and this came with a cost: my friends live further away now. They’re saying I should be penalised for this by not being able to save more compared to their employees who stayed in the high cost of living area.

And if someone moved to a high cost of living area because they wanted to make more, is that different in some way? Would not paying them the amount for a similar quality of life not be the same type of discrimination?

> "It’s something that kind of happened organically," Sid says. "Every time we hired someone, we’d discuss what a reasonable compensation would be. And many times, it came back to what they were making beforehand, and that really depended a lot on where they were.

What a bunch of hypocrites. The perfectly know that what a person is currently making does not come "organically" into the conversation. The employer does whatever is in its power to have this information from the candidate.

Interesting how Gitlab repeatedly emphasizes it's based on "cost of market", not "cost of living".

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