Do you think location based pay aligns with Gitlab's values?

I have no horse in the race, but I think the answer is "no" but sometimes it makes sense to diverge from a value if the alternative represents an existential threat. I do not believe GitLab is profitable enough to do this satisfactorily.

If a business can't sustainably operate by strictly adhering to their values, is the business sustainable or are the values broken? Is it all a fool's errand? I don't know. It doesn't seem worth closing the book on GitLab for.

(I don't know the details but my impression is that GitLab feels very pressured to minmax their monetization strategy to be able to compete with GitHub. I don't see a viable alternative for them. If they're super profitable and I'm talking out of my ass, let me know.)

There are multiple issues with GitLab as a company. They pay their staff based on location and not the output of their work which is in direct contradiction of their values of "Results" and "Diversity, Inclusivity and Belonging".

And how the location factors are decided is not shared with the staff, just vague hand waving of industry averages. This again is again in contradiction with their "transparency" value.

I can point out a lot more things. They might be transparent, but are not above exploiting folks from weaker economies.

The URL is supposed to be https://growrk.com/blogs/news/location-based-pay/, anyone knows why/how was it truncated?

There is an 80 character limit but you are well inside that. You should still be able to edit the url.

No. Their prices are not adjusted for local market rates because their reasons only make sense when paying their employees.

> Why we pay local rates?

> Team members in high-wage regions having much less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.

I am the original poster from the post linked in this article.

I know these as a fact that a comparable property in my city would cost me much more than what you're paying. All the while I'm getting payed less than half of my colleagues living in your area.

And there are many other costs that are comparable eg. electronics, vehicles and education.

All this is to say that location based pay is not about cost of living, its about getting away with paying as little as possible.

Can we see some sources for those "facts" please?

A comparable sized property listing https://www.nobroker.in/property/buy/4-bhk-apartment-for-sal...

For electronics and vehicles you are free to google iphone and mercedes prices in India vs Us. Its especially higher if I want specific items to import like framework laptop, fairphone, tesla car

Private education can get very expensive very quickly too. Public schools are not even an option as they don't even have furniture sometimes.

You might say remaining costs are low, but they are low only if we use uncertified, unskilled, low quality services/labor. For even decent quality of work the prices will be in multiples.

About my comment about being payed half, the pay scales are visible to everyone in the company so I know that the least in the US also gets payed 2x of my location

If you're paid 50% of what your HCOL breathern are being paid, and living in a higher cost of living than myself, then perhaps it's not location that's the culprit here.

I don't know any company that has a location based pay differential that ranges into 50%.

I get exactly 45% percent of SF rates. Just to be clear, this is an international company

Thanks for this, helps me that people understand me and I'm not being very unreasonable.

From what I've gotten from my discussions on my post is

1) I will start looking for contract work. Not going to be easy, but the best way forward.

2) Use some of the negotiation techniques mentioned like bringing up the fact I'm not competing locally, but internationally

3) Negotiate with my company and threaten to leave? Not fully sure of this. More alligend to leaving anyway as I find the excuses for location based pay pathetic. Will be leaving as soon as I can.

4) Always talk compensation with co-workers

> Negotiate with my company and threaten to leave? Not fully sure of this. More alligend to leaving anyway as I find the excuses for location based pay pathetic.

You should negotiate, but do so from a position of strength and leave emotion out of it. The reality is that location-based pay is standard. This reason for this is labor market incentives. Whatever your manager says is not reality, it's just a story to try to placate you. How defensible the story is or how angry and demotivated you are about it is absolutely meaningless in terms of outcomes, and the sooner you come to terms with that and look at the situation from a purely rational perspective the better.

What matters here is how much leverage you have. The best leverage is having an offer in hand for more money. Short of that, if you are perceived as a top performer, that could confer some leverage, but keep in mind that location-based pay is probably baked into the cost structure of the entire office. You are likely better served by a strategy to demonstrate your individual value so that your raise isn't seen as precedent for why the entire location pay scale needs to increase.

5) Become indispensable in the role you're (before #3). This is true even locally - why should I as an employer pay you more when I can get someone cheaper to do what you can do.

6) While contract work sometimes calls for a generalist (#1 above)... try to be a specialist by becoming an expert in a high demand field(s). At that point you can charge whatever you want regardless of your location.

7) Don't exchange your time for money - get paid for your skillset (related to #1 & #6)

one way is to be good at integrating some common but specialized open source, for example helping companies who've adopted prosemirror (for features but maybe not their whole platform justifying an internal team)

I would not go with option 1 until:

1. You have more experience (why would someone pick you as a contractor?)

2. Get better at negotiation.

Your concerns are valid, but that you didn't have the answers is a signal you're not wise enough to go into the contracting world.

btw - drop me a msg on twitter (throwaway is fine), @aehlke if you'd like to connect on resources for going independent with dev work, I'm starting a full stack resource for this soon and would be happy to share. good luck

"Having a presence and hence a team in another location with a pyrodactyl-like employee doing pyrodactyl-like things. Probably quite a lot."

Though this is absolutely true for traditional companies, this company is actually a fully remote one so they don't have a presence as such? I would just be wfh but in a foreign country? I still don't see the point in my perticular case

Well the product this company makes is uniformly priced across all locations. So if i wanted to consume the product my company makes I would be paying the same price as US/UK.

Haha, this seems important but I don't fully understand what you're saying. Will need sometime to process this.

It's ultimately simple: many people, especially people from professional–managerial class (PMC) which keeps rising in its aggregate wealth & prominence during the recent past, will tell you (maybe in a comment section on HN or some other media) that using "counter-offers" as a career strategy is unethical, akin to blackmail. This is a (often performative) niceness narrative common to the social plane.

Be aware that it very well could be the same PMC people who consistently use various tricks to lowball (google it) offers for productive people like you and me in their day to day hiring practice, simply because they can - this is the logic of harsh business plane.

There is no contradiction here.

Counter-offer is something you can use as well.