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Comment by ernstvn | Hacker News Reader

It's definitely not our intent to pay below market in any location. If our calculator shows a large negative adjustment from your current compensation, please send me an email (ernst@gitlab.com) so I can review the data. We don't promise to make overnight changes to the calculator, since changes need to be robust and simple (i.e. no cherry picking city by city numbers), but we do gather data and make edits as we learn.

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The philosophy is flawed. Good people don't make average-for-their-area salaries.

Depending on which of the 5-6 applicable job titles listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Employment Statistics [0] one chooses to apply, my salary is between 40% and 120% higher than the "average mean wage" (itself an inflated statistic) in my area.

This is true not just of myself but of all the good candidates I've hired. Good people don't work for average rates, especially not good people who are capable of doing remote work.

GitLab is doing itself a big disservice by targeting the "average" local wage.

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

Remote employees' market is the entire world though, that's the part you're not taking into account. Your competition is the other NYC or Boston or SFO or wherever companies that are willing to hire me and pay me a generally competitive rate (very roughly 80-100% of SF pay, in my experience). Sure, you don't have to compete with a GoogFaceAzon offer, but you do have to compete with the companies similar to yours that do pay a more globally competitive rate.

There's a very important difference between: "SFO is very expensive so we have to pay people who live there more" and "we can pay people who don't live in SFO less"

No one makes a salary calculator that robust without intent. I think paying twice as much, and cutting your work force in half would do you a greater service, than playing around with these cost of living calculators.

And be net cheaper because of 1/2 the benefit / supervision load.

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