Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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As a senior dev with 5-ish years of experience in NYC, GitLab's calculator for "Developer" is offering me a $144,106-$157,207 base pay, plus stock options (because they are options I'm giving them an expected value of 0; I could value them more accurately if they were public about shares outstanding but they aren't). If I max out the sliders and call myself a lead, that goes up to $183,408. https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/

For comparison, Etsy gave me an offer earlier this year that was $185K, and came out literally in the week they had layoffs, and Google gave me an offer earlier this year that added up to about $215K (base + 15% bonus + RSUs which have an obvious nonzero cash value), with an expectation of year-over-year growth. (The actual job I accepted was higher than either of these.)

I think GitLab's numbers make sense in several markets but not in NYC and probably not in SFBA either. To be fair to them, there's no good reason to pay someone market rates for those cities when they're hiring a remote workforce, but the fact remains that they're significantly under market and probably losing out on good candidates as a result.

Sorry but I think its wrong to compare Gitlab to Google, even Etsy tbh.

Its obvious that Google can offer high salaries. Same with Etsy, while its nowhere near Googles level, I feel like Gitlab's cashflow is nowhere near Etsy's cashflow either.

I checked for London and I can say that Gitlab seems to be giving out a low to average salary at best. Which is not bad considering that you can be working remotely from your home etc etc, and get maybe more shares in a startup like Gitlab.

But ye all and all I feel the OP is a bit right that since they got a better funding they should be looking at accumulating their salaries to go up for their devs that have been getting bellow market rates.

Yeah, I don't expect GitLab to reach Google salaries, but I do think that the data point is useful for knowing how much they are below Google. (Note also that this was an unnegotiated offer; I tried negotiating, evidently not very well, and only got Google to budge about $5K. I'd imagine the legendary Google offers are the ones you get if you are in a position to get Google into a bidding war for you with another comparably-profitable company, and I certainly don't think those can be called "market rate".)

I do expect them to reach Etsy - they had been facing serious investor pressure at that point and laid off a lot of people in a lot of departments including the CEO and CTO, and had not reported a profit for several quarters (they reported one this year after the layoffs). They laid off their summer interns two weeks before the summer, leaving the poor college kids scrambling to find another internship. That's not a company with enough cashflow to make significantly-higher-than-market offers.

And yeah, the comment above (as I read it) was in comparison to GitLab raising a significant funding round.

Actually, there is a good reason to pay SF or NYC salaries to remotes - you get the remote people who're good enough that they can live anywhere and still command a premium salary. I moved to Boulder, Co because I knew that I'd never work here - only in SF or NYC, so I get better quality of life without a meaningful drop in compensation (I'd make more if I picked the right company in NY or SF, but I'm making what many of my friends in NY do, so I'm fine with that.

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