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Comment by username332211 | Hacker News Reader

> The author has a poor understanding of economics.

Does he or does the company? If they had decent understanding of economics, they should have shut down their Bay Area operations?

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Why would they? If they're getting more value out of the Bay Area employees than it costs them, why would they do it?

Employees aren't interchangeable cogs. It's funny how HN will complain about outsourcing and offshoring as doomed endeavors when they imagine their own jobs going to someone in a lower cost of living location. Any company that fires an expensive employee to replace them with a cheaper employee in a different location is making a huge mistake! Employees aren't interchangeable cogs!

Then as soon as the roles are reversed we're supposed to believe that the people in the more expensive location are easily replaceable. Any company that pays people differently is making a huge mistake! Employees are interchangeable cogs!

They can always change their multipliers if they think the employees they're hiring there are getting paid more than they're worth relative to other locations. And lots of companies mostly just shrug rather than getting into a bidding war with FAANG in particular.

I mean Bay Area puts you near the big tech companies which is an interesting talent pool; their knowledge, experience and connections will have value beyond the skills needed for their day job.

The Bay Area is probably their birthplace, best talent pool and main source of funding. Similarly, as it's the case in global governance, almost all nations have an office in New York, from where they are able to talk to each other and make use of their seat around the table at the United Nations.

They could have a much cheaper office in Vienna though - if the U.N. backdrop was a main motivator.

Not seeing too many international career opportunities here, sadly.

Gitlabs birthplace is the Netherlands actually, but they wouldn't be Dutch if they let that get in the way of profit making ;)

The Dutch and their history of sailing boats over the ocean... In these modern times, I believe it's about planting a flag on the land of the Vatican/Mecca of the digital tech industry.

I'd bet that GitLab, as an entity or corporation, felt mission-driven and empowered by settling not far from GitHub.

Your opinion on this topic is instantly disqualified when you just assume that the birthplace of Gitlab is “probably The Bay Area”.

Neither/both? It's one of those cases when people don't appreciate the the employer's and employee's interests are rarely aligned. I wrote some thoughts on this a while ago as I realised lots of people I encountered who've been in an individual contributor role their whole career haven't been forced to think about the opposite side of the arrangement: https://glenngillen.com/sensible-remote-compensation/

Thankfully where I work now (ockam.io) indexes to Bay Area salaries, irrespective of where people are based.

Maybe because they have the budget to poach other Bay Area engineers?

Then why don't they poach similar engineers from the Netherlands and pay them half as much?

Did this argument just come full circle back to literally what GitLab is doing by paying engineers in the Netherlands less?

Regardless, it's silly to propose that engineers are interchangeable cogs in a machine and you can find perfectly identical talent anywhere. If that was true, companies would ignore all of these locations and skip straight to the cheapest country they could find.

But network effects matter, and hiring out of the Bay Area taps you into a different set of experience and networks than almost anywhere else in the world. I'm not suggesting that every Bay Area engineer is better than every Netherlands engineer, but the Bay Area talent pool really is unique and well connected in a way that's hard to find elsewhere.

But that's not what Gitlab is saying, that BayAreans are better workers. They maintain that they're merely adjusting for regional CoL, for the same person in the same position. They can hardly get closer to saying people are interchangeable cogs.

I see your point. There are more factors than talent being different in the Bay Area I think. I work for a Bay Area start-up in the Netherlands. They opened their office here for a specific talent. This talent can be found in the Bay Area too, and they can pay the salaries there too but the employees in the Bay Area don't stay that long compared to here. For the company this is a big issue because you keep bleeding out know how. So the reason they came here was a combination of the talent, affordabile salaries (100-150k for staff level), and employee loyalty. We had only 1 person left from a team of 25 people in 6 years while half of the people in the Bay Area office is left. Give us 40 holiday days, 40 hour work week and a decent salary we will stay.

I mean, if they could they would. Why have any engineers in the US at all when you can hire them at 1/2 to less in India, South America and even Africa?

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