[e12e]

Indeed. There are two views of employee compensation - you can have people that you compensate as a share of value added/profit share (this is very common for sales:its easy to record who sells what;selling more means more revenue - giving a share of that revenue to the seller aligns goals. In theory, and for commodities; in software you also get sales people that overpromise and lead to developers working themselves into an early grave, never having a hope of satisfying any customers..) - and you can have "wage slaves": people you pay wages to for a share of their time.

In the latter case, from a strictly economic standpoint, you'd prefer workers to pay you (eg us prison labour...).

In a strictly value-add/profit share the more value a worker produce, the higher the compensation and the higher the company revenue.

Now software business (knowledgewwork) is typically somewhere on the scale between these two.

I'd personally say that given gitlab's product and business - they would probably be better off leaning a bit more towards the latter - allow a great softare engineer in rural UK or eastern Europe get (locally) silly rich;and allow those that feel like it to move to less crowded locations without docking their compensation. As long as they only get a share of generated added value, this should be a win-win.

But I am not the owner of gitlab.