Hacker News Reader

Comment by imsofuture | Hacker News Reader

IMO a better advantage is that you can hire talent from anywhere, without the caveat that they have to uproot their life to join your team. Paying local market rate is shitty (generally) and reduces your competitiveness against other remote employers that don't try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries (which is most of them, FWIW). Not to mention, how could you possibly make 10m rev/employee but with a straight face worry about them making 20k 'too much' because they live in Iowa or something!?

I wouldn't even bother applying at Gitlab because I know they won't pay me competitively. Pass!

TLDR: "can pay local market rates" only works if you're the only company to ever offer remote work, and you have to compete only with other local market offers. Which is a fantasy in 2018.

View on HN

They made $10.5M in revenue _total_, not per employee. It's quite possible they are still not profitable, in which case $20k per employee would be a lot.

They have some 350 employees. That's $30k per employee per year. They are most assuredly NOT making a profit or anything near it.

>and reduces your competitiveness against other remote employers that don't try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries

Well, duh. Google paying its engineers X instead of X + 100,000 reduces its competitiveness against other employers too. Doesn't mean they should raise salaries by 100k across the board though. Companies pay what they must to attract the workers they need, why would they pay more? They're in most cases not a charity being run for the benefit of the employees. And for remote work, being remote is usually a huge perk for the employee so naturally it comes with a shortfall in somewhere else, such as salary.

Sure I agree with your general point, but other remote companies WILL pay more.

I've worked for 3 companies remotely over the past 6 years. Every single one of them, including being employee #8 or so at a seed-round startup paid more than the max Gitlab would pay me for a backend role. Like, in 2012, as employee #10 at a bootstrapped startup, I was paid more. Gitlab pays crazy under market, end of story.

GitLab's rate calculations are really off for a few markets... Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta come to mind there. Software Devs do var above the mean income in the area relatively speaking than in other cities.

> charity being run for the benefit of the employees.

Whose benefit then?

> hire talent from anywhere

> try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries

I guess you're talking about anywhere… in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com