31–40 of 254 posts
Other HN members have pointed out previously, that it looks like a landing page where you need to leave your e-mail address. You don't. You can download the PDF from here directly.
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Salaries are in large part determined by local factors: cost of rent, food, gas/public transport, tax rates, etc. There is no "universal" salary for a particular position. Developers in San Francisco are not paid 3x of those in Des Moines because their skills are 3x better. Their salaries are higher because living in SF is more expensive. If the cost of living in SF were lower, the salaries would be lower, too. If an…
Software companies like Gitlab don't address a local market. They target a global market, which is the same no matter where you're based and no matter where your employees live. If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much. Let the employees benefit from their cheaper location rather than taking that away from them. Otherwise where is the incenti…
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The regional coefficients they use to set salary are a real turn off. https://about.gitlab.com/salary/data.json
This is really interesting data ! I for once would like to know why they refuse to hire contractors from Western Europe (is it a legal thing ?) : {"country":"*","contractor_factor":1.17,"entity":"GitLab BV"}], "countryNoHire": ["Iran","North Korea","Crimea","Syria","Sudan","Cuba","France","Italy","Brazil","Spain","Romania","United Arab Emirates","Sweden","Argentina","Philippines","Austria"],
When you sell physical stuff worldwide, nobody will be surprised if you won’t ship to some select countries because of local safety regulations, bad postal services or other local difficulties. When you hire people, these local difficulties increase tenfold, and I can totally understand why GitLab does not hire everywhere.
You may also notice that in most “first world” countries they hire through a proxy (listed in the same file), and it seems like in “no hire” countries they just couldn’t find a proxy yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salaries are in large part determined by local factors: cost of rent, food, gas/public transport, tax rates, etc. There is no "universal" salary for a particular position. Developers in San Francisco are not paid 3x of those in Des Moines because their skills are 3x better. Their salaries are higher because living in SF is more expensive. If the cost of living in SF were lower, the salaries would be lower, too. If an…
Software companies like Gitlab don't address a local market. They target a global market, which is the same no matter where you're based and no matter where your employees live. If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much. Let the employees benefit from their cheaper location rather than taking that away from them. Otherwise where is the incenti…
In a lot of ways, this extremely high baseline benefits everyone else in the industry, even if they don't directly work in SF/NYC/etc. The salaries of Des Moines developers are probably higher than they would otherwise be, as compared to other professions.
And while it's nice to think that companies should pay people the maximum amount of money that they can afford, this is unfortunately not a rational economic move and it will collapse the moment any financial difficulties come into play.
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That assumes that all money is of equal value. Which on one level it is, but on another level, the relative purchasing power in different geographic areas is a real thing. Normalising based on that means that in effect you're paying people for the same relative quality of life, rather than same absolute value, which can be very different relatively.
They pay people less not because of "relative purchasing power" or because they want them to have the "same relative quality of life" or some such sentimental nonsense but because they can get away with it. The cost of life is totally irrelevant, the alternative options someone has in he market-place based on their location are. Did you look at those numbers at all?
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This is really interesting data ! I for once would like to know why they refuse to hire contractors from Western Europe (is it a legal thing ?) : {"country":"*","contractor_factor":1.17,"entity":"GitLab BV"}], "countryNoHire": ["Iran","North Korea","Crimea","Syria","Sudan","Cuba","France","Italy","Brazil","Spain","Romania","United Arab Emirates","Sweden","Argentina","Philippines","Austria"],
I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions. But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack? Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ve…
They are totally not the same in EU, not to mention Latin America or Middle East.
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I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions. But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack? Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ve…
Maybe they are too expensive. Austria has huge taxes for self-employed workers, especially if they are payed like engineers.
I appreciate they have a whole section on disadvantages, but this stands out to me: "All-remote companies should consider meetings as a last resort, instead relying on asynchronous collaboration tools[...]" To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. That can be fine for some things. But there's all sorts of work where I really value live discussion.…
With async communication it’s hard to know if everyone got it. If you’re in some kind of synchronous meeting, everyone knows what everyone knows, and it’s usually more clear if people are confused or come from very different POVs, or don’t have the time, attention or other resources they need to get things done. Async communication often feels like shouting into a void, hoping that the right people saw it in time and…
I feel like while that's generally true, it depends. Not only because you might underestimate my ability to sleep with my eyes open. I've seen quite a few projects where in-person meetings were either badly planned, went overboard in terms of frequency / number of participants, or people were simply inattentive for other reasons. There's lots of scenarios where communication devolves to the point of asynchronous communication despite meeting face to face. Quite a few meeting forms type up notes or minutes for a reason. Many meetings in my experience are just superfluous "I felt like talking" scenarios, which is fine but it certainly does not make for a great communication strategy.
I'd say it depends on who would meet, for many groups other forms of communication like e-mail/IRC/slack work just fine for a majority of issues without introducing much friction. But sure, for others it might break down completely.