[bgxor]

Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here.

I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.

[pc86]

It makes more sense for me to get a PO box in Washington DC and drive there to get my paycheck. Hell, it's probably cheaper to "rent" a single room out of someone's house just to have them forward the mail.

[compuguy]

Agreed, the Washington DC and the Fairfax, VA modifier should be the same. Otherwise your not going to be competitive in the Washington DC area as a whole.

[vonmoltke]

Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Worth.

[amyjess]

> Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns.

And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it.

In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too.

[0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html

[ernstvn]

amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24

[danpalmer]

Yeah, I put in some pretty conservative estimates for my skills/experience/etc, and got out a salary estimate that is not good for my area (London, UK). I tried the city I went to university in and there is no way they would be competitive there with other companies.

[ernstvn]

Would love to get more input from you to make sure the calculator reaches its goal of providing fair market compensation in your location. Can you please send me an email to let me know your city and whatever further data you are willing to share? [e-mail]

[dragonwriter]

My local city, but the data isn't so much mine as data that the US government shares.

Sacramento, CA. Mean Salary (per latest BLS data) [0] for Software Developer, Applications: $107,540; for Web Developer: $78,050

Sacramento, CA Gitlab locality pay index: 0.39+0.25=0.51

Vs.

New York City, same BLS figures [1]: $108,770/$81,430

NYC Gitlab locality pay index: 1.00+0.25=1.25

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (BLS): 0.989/0.958

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (Gitlab): 0.512

Fundamentally, the rent index based methodology you are using is, I would guess, giving you below market pay almost everywhere that isn't NYC or San Francisco, assuming that you've hit the market wage for the skills you are targeting in your NYC baseline.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000

[ernstvn]

Thanks; this is useful. I've made an issue ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/23 ) to make sure we cross check BLS data with the calculator.

[tedmiston]

I'm not sure what it is about small Midwestern cities but the calculator seems to dislike them. The calculated rates for Cincinnati are roughly half of market rate here. I understand the calculator will not be perfect in every city worldwide but it might be better to have no calculator as the current one is extremely discouraging even though I like GitLab.

[cookiecaper]

It's based on rent. Each city is punished in proportion to how much cheaper its rent is than the rent in NYC. As NYC is one of the top 5 most expensive cities worldwide for real estate [0], any city marginally more reasonable is going to get pummeled.

[0] http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/most-expensive-cities

[tedmiston]

Perhaps it's that there is lots of cheap housing in the suburbs here, and in the greater metro area but that is outside the city proper. But most of the tech / startup activity ie concentrated in one small gentrifying neighborhood where rent is much higher (+50–100%), so coincidentally people in tech aren't buying those houses because the commute is so far from the core.

I wonder if any of these indexes breaks down a city by zip code. A good analogy for here would be if you averaged all rent over the neighborhoods in Brooklyn then used that number for a bunch of candidates in Williamsburg.

It really penalizes living in a third- / fourth-tier startup hub, for example, vs either a first- / second-tier hub or a non-hub.

Taken from another perspective maybe it's an intentional filter on the candidate pool to specific cities or countries. That wouldn't seem to be consistent with most remote philosophies but it's something to consider.

Interestingly, Buffer's salary calculator is almost the opposite with a relatively small percentage difference between Nashville or Austin vs SF or NYC for instance.

[dragonwriter]

Correction: even though the ratio calculated from it and the calculation for it are correct, I somehow mistyped the Sacramento locality index, which is 0.64, not 0.51.

Didn't notice it until after the edit window was closed.

[bgxor]

I sent you a more detailed email, but basically it is preposterous to assume a "very experienced" senior engineer in ANY part of the United States is going to be happy with making $65K.

[phil21]

Exactly this. A very experienced engineer who is capable of working remote will likely be pretty intelligent. They'll realize a company is attempting to steal the surplus they created by living a low-cost lifestyle. I don't really understand why a company feels they have any claim to this.

Remote employees who are good at being remote have some very good options at this point of their career. Why the heck would they take less money simply because they had the foresight to move to a low cost of living location? Half the (stellar) people seeking remote work have built their entire lives around this fact - and have made very conscious decisions regarding their career and lifestyle.

Obviously it's working out for Gitlab, but I can't imagine any of my senior remote talent finding this acceptable in any way. I guess I could see it working for a couple years "converting" an engineer who is super excited to move into remote work vs. on-site. But beyond that, this policy seems extremely dangerous to me.

[jon-wood]

This is precisely what turned me off applying for a job at Gitlab after initially being hugely enthusiastic. My family and I moved away from London to the city we grew up in to save some money, partly because I knew I could work remote for the same sort of money I had been making while paying considerably less on rent and living expenses. The cost of living adjustments Gitlab do would mean entirely negating that benefit.

I'm not really sure what the justification for CoL adjustments is, beyond "we can get away with it". Apparently I'm worth paying $120,000 working from home in London, but if I move 70 miles south I'm worth half that. Not only does it make little sense logically, there's no way cost of living here is less than half that in London, so its not even calculated correctly.

[ernstvn]

Thanks!