The (good) companies I've been at are location agnostic on pay, or close to it. It's not about getting a discount, it's about expanding the talent pool. We want the best we can get, not the best within 25 miles of a hub.
The hiring market is a market, though.
You're bidding on talent.
If you have an infinite budget you can just outbid everyone, everywhere and get whoever you want. Companies like like Netflix do something like this.
If you don't have an infinite budget, you have to start making compromises. You can try to pay everyone according to the highest possible local salary you might compete against, but now you're arbitrarily paying more than you need to everywhere else. Could be fine if you have unlimited budget, but most companies don't.
So you could try to set a median pay that's higher than the LCOL targets but lower than Bay Area salaries. Now you're attractive to some talent, but other people won't consider your company because it pays less than their alternatives.
Location-agnostic pay is one of those things that sounds great when your company has limitless money (or feels like they do, as in ZIRP), but most companies at scale realize that they're either missing out on certain talent pools or spending unnecessarily to acquire people.
In the case of GitLab, the author was making a great compensation for their location. If the author had zero knowledge that other employees were getting paid more, would they have even cared about their own compensation?
This is the difference. I don't see it as arbitrarily paying more than I need to. I see it as paying people the same for doing the same work. My goal is not to pay as little as possible, or even to pay a high rate relative to their local market.
I can't look at someone in Romania doing the same job as someone in Chicago and tell them I'm paying them less because they're in Romania.
I completely understand that this is not economically optimal, and I love capitalism. I just have no interest in saving money this way.
> So you could try to set a median pay that's higher than the LCOL targets but lower than Bay Area salaries. Now you're attractive to some talent, but other people won't consider your company because it pays less than their alternatives.
Salary is only one part of comp. Comp is only one part of what makes a company attractive.
That's a trade-off you might be willing to make, but I hope you understand that not every company is willing to write off the entire talent pool of the US.
(As a point of reference, the only two countries that Google pays comparably to even the cheapest parts of the US are Switzerland and Israel.)
Talent being "better" is too subjective to really quantify, though.
Something like 15% of devs worldwide are in the US, so if you don't want to play ball, you're losing a nontrivial chunk of the total talent pool (even without accounting for timezone affinity or English fluency).
If you think paying market rate for a Bay Area dev is overpaying, are you exclusively hiring devs in Argentina (with the rapidly-devaluing peso)? You can get 10 devs for the price of one person based in SF! Even paying Amsterdam's market rate is drastically overpaying in comparison to the areas with the lowest cost of labor.
There are great engineers everywhere, but this line of reasoning misses why talent hubs exist in the first place. It's more likely a qualified individual will line near a talent hub along side other companies that demand those skills. A better question to ask is how much time & effort will a company put in finding a qualified candidate outside of the talent hub.
For example, Apple has a similar problem with regards to manufacturing in China.[1] Do talented tooling engineers exist in the US? Of course. Is Apple going to spend 5 years trying to hire 100 tooling engineers in the US, or spend 6 months hiring the engineers it needs in China?
[1] https://twitter.com/mariocavolo/status/1747599350438437364
I agree with the other commentator who said: It's not stupid to pay a location-based salary, but please don't pretend it has anything to do with fairness. It's not about being fair - it's about the company trying to save money by getting a discount on employees when that discount is available.
I'm pointing out that location-agnostic salaries are often trading one segment of the global talent pool for another, since what I've seen in practice is more like "everyone gets paid 80% of a Bay Area salary".
The company I work for paid high-mid US salaries before going remote. It has continued paying high-mid US salaries after going remote, just expanded to hiring from more locations.
So before we had access to the talent pool of one metro area in the US. Now we have access to the talent pool of all of the US besides a few very HCOL locations (which we didn’t have access to before anyway), and also most of the rest of the world. Our costs are the same as before, but hiring is easier and we can often get a higher caliber employee to fill an opening.
As the guy you replied to said—it was about expanding the talent pool, not about saving money.
There are plenty of levers to pull that are not salary, and not based on geography.
If you're remote, IDK why you would want to pay that premium.
Is that a problem?
If no: congrats you used your $$$ very efficiently.
If yes: Determine why (language, time zone, quality, regulations), and raise the price point until you are appealing to employees that satisfy those.
"Overseas" is a symptom.
What positions are you looking for, and how many for each? What are the requirements of those positions?
"Native English speaker" or "live within 50 miles of headquarters" are possible requirements for a particular position, if those are important.
Whatever the requirements are for your positions, you'll pay the least possible market rate to achieve it.