[HN Gopher] What it was like working for Gitlab
___________________________________________________________________
What it was like working for Gitlab
Author : aragilar
Score : 374 points
Date : 2024-02-11 07:29 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yorickpeterse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yorickpeterse.com)
| ganarajpr wrote:
| Companies attempting to pay an engineer according to location, in
| my opinion, is another kind of discrimination. You are supposed
| to pay an employee based on his/her abilities, not her location.
|
| We have rules in govts that companies should not discriminate
| against employees based on sex, religion, sexual orientation etc
| etc.. But it is fair to discriminate the salary of an employee
| based on location? For ex: I know a few friends who have moved
| from Europe to Asia with the same role and are getting paid less
| compared to what they were getting paid in Europe. Its the same
| role, its the same person, but getting paid less just because of
| location ?
| hawk_ wrote:
| Discrimination is around things that an individual can't
| _choose_ (religion being the weird elephant in the room). Fair
| or not, this isn 't discrimination.
| thewakalix wrote:
| I don't think that rule holds in general. For another example
| besides religion, you can choose whether or not to marry
| interracially.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| Many people can't choose where they live either. Getting a
| visa to the US is a ludicrous process and even if they wanted
| to they maybe tied by family obligations.
| hawk_ wrote:
| But people don't choose to be rich or poor exactly either.
| As a general rule, discrimination is around things for
| which there's no _choice_. Having a choice over where they
| live or whether they are rich doesn 't mean it's easy or
| practical. But that can't make it grounds for
| discrimination, even if unfair.
| oldkinglog wrote:
| In the UK, the Equality Act (2010) protects: age, disability,
| gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership (in
| employment only), pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or
| belief, sex, sexual orientation.
|
| Pregnancy, maternity, marriage, civil partnerships and gender
| re-assignment are usually chosen by individuals, not forced
| upon them.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Disagree on gender re-assignment, people don't choose to
| have gender dysphoria just like they don't choose sexual
| orientation.
| oldkinglog wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that people choose to have gender
| dysphoria, sorry if it came off that way.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Pregnancy and maternity are desired by the society as a
| whole. So they might receive some positive discrimination.
|
| (Stress on might and some, probably still not enough in may
| rich countries to stop native population from shrinking.)
| badosu wrote:
| Ability to live anywhere in the world is a choice?
| neoberg wrote:
| yes if you're a citizen of one of the US, CA, EU
| badosu wrote:
| TIL
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| You can't just live in the US as a reason living in the
| EU.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Since when people chose where to be born?
| ganarajpr wrote:
| So, you think a software engineer in India can just "choose"
| to come and work in the US ?
| patcon wrote:
| I disagree. I believe a company should pay based on ability of
| employees to have comfort and wellness, not some universal
| measure of value (which I believe to be impossible). What you
| are advocating for inadvertently breaks community and
| exacerbates gentrification and destruction of social fabric via
| inequality. Location matters.
| jblox wrote:
| Yeah I absolutely hate that. I get why they do it from a
| business point of view but as an engineer, I'm instantly put
| off when I see something along the lines of "up to $x
| (depending on location)".
| ta8645 wrote:
| > You are supposed to pay an employee based on his/her
| abilities, not her location.
|
| I don't believe that is a legal requirement, anywhere.
| Remuneration is based on many factors, which can include the
| cost of living. A company will not be able to hire someone in
| New York City, for the same price as someone in a less
| expensive jurisdiction.
|
| This isn't discrimination, it's simple economic reality.
| samsonradu wrote:
| It s based on suply and demand indeed. The legal requirements
| might affect minimum pay.
| hw wrote:
| > Companies attempting to pay an engineer according to
| location, in my opinion, is another kind of discrimination. You
| are supposed to pay an employee based on his/her abilities, not
| her location.
|
| So you're saying, we should be paying engineers in Europe and
| in the US the same as an engineer in LATAM or India or Asia
| that has the same level of experience and skill.
|
| The only way to be non discriminatory is to have a standardized
| formula of compensation that takes into account cost of living
| (rent, food, healthcare, taxes etc) where the final take home
| pay in locations around the world are equivalent - which I
| believe should be the case at most companies
| mjr00 wrote:
| A worker in country X or country Y are very different for
| companies' balance sheets. For instance, my company is
| Canadian, and we are eligible for significant tax credits
| through SR&ED[0] for software developers. If a software
| developer moved their permanent residence to outside Canada,
| even if we could magically pin exchange rates to pay them the
| CAD equivalent in local currency, it would be a significantly
| different financial impact on the company as they aren't
| eligible for that program. I'm not an expert, but I imagine
| there are many equivalent programs in every country, state, and
| even municipality.
|
| It works both ways, anyway. If those friends had moved from
| Thailand to Switzerland, would it be discrimination to pay them
| more?
|
| [0] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-
| agency/services/scientific-...
| supafastcoder wrote:
| > A worker in country X or country Y are very different for
| companies' balance sheets
|
| Yes, but quite often, workers are in the same country (or
| even same state!) and still get paid differently based on
| CoL.
| neoberg wrote:
| I agree with this in theory but I can't see how it will work in
| practice. There isn't a global "value of ability" to base the
| pay on. It's valued differently in every location.
| ako wrote:
| Why are you supposed to pay based on abilities? Where is that
| stated?
|
| As a company you need certain abilities, and you pay whatever
| the market decides these abilities are worth, and nothing more.
| Depending on location, the market will set a different price on
| these abilities, so you pay different.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> You are supposed to pay an employee based on his /her
| abilities, not her location._
|
| You are supposed to pay them the minimum amount it takes to get
| them to show up to work. When someone moves to a less
| competitive market, where getting another job is harder, then
| they are more likely to show up for lesser pay.
|
| And remember that a country may have a less competitive market,
| even if the workers are remote and not seemly bound by a local
| market, because governments often love to put up huge
| roadblocks when it comes to international hiring. If you are
| being paid less than you were in another country doing the same
| job for the same employer, this is almost certainly why you
| have agreed to take a pay cut.
| stavros wrote:
| Exactly. This isn't a "cost of living" adjustment, it's a
| "we're lucky you have fewer options, so we don't have to pay
| as much" adjustment.
|
| If I get hired in such a company, I'm moving to SF or Zurich
| the next day.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| How would you move there without a visa?
| verve_rat wrote:
| Females generally get paid less for the same work that males
| do. If someone transitions male -> female should they get a
| pay cut?
| randomdata wrote:
| That's up to them. It's the worker who chooses how much it
| takes to show up. I suppose if they want to truly play the
| part of being female they may want to accept less.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Also, the gender pay gap is a myth so there's no reason
| to consider it in the first place.
| ako wrote:
| You could also argue that difference in pay is less
| discriminatory. You are paying employees to have the same
| quality of life, same type of housing, same opportunity to
| provide for family, send your kids to the same type of
| schooling. These things cost differently in different
| countries, so require different income.
| DandyDev wrote:
| Exactly this! Location-based pay is not so much about cost of
| living as it is about buying power. In the end, money is just
| a place holder for real value which comes in the form of
| goods and services. And the real value of the same amount of
| dollars wildly differs per location. So if you want to pay
| fairly and not discriminate, you have to try and make sure
| people can roughly buy the same things in their differing
| locations for the money you give them.
| drewcoo wrote:
| While I'm sure it's very kind of companies to care about my
| quality of life and the type of my housing, it's honestly
| none of their business. Even if they tell me I'm "family."
|
| Fair pay to me, at least, means paying for results. Not
| paying for hours spent toiling. Not paying for where I am on
| the planet. Not paying for how I get the results, just for
| the results.
|
| Instead, there are all of these gamey factors inserted into
| the mix. They're emotional. They're manipulative. Yuck!
| ako wrote:
| That's not how free markets/capitalism is supposed to work.
| Companies are expected to just shop around for the lowest
| price on the capabilities they need. Are you suggesting we
| should adopt something else then capitalism/free markets?
| filleokus wrote:
| > You are supposed to pay an employee based on his/her
| abilities, not her location.
|
| I don't think this make any sense on so many levels. First,
| "abilities" are not a good way to think about wages. If you
| hire a neurosurgeon to do your gardening, you won't pay them
| more than a run of the mill gardener.
|
| Rather, you as the employer compete against other employers on
| different markets in a fairly classical supply and demand
| situation. The "abilities" of an compliance expert with tech
| skills did not change much when GDPR was introduced, but as all
| EU companies scrambled to figure out the regulation (and the
| DPO role was popularised by fiat), the compensation went way
| up.
|
| If the employee can participate in e.g the SF labour market,
| you have to pay a competitive salary in that market, if not you
| don't have to. As long as there are barriers, e.g a on-location
| worker in SF has more opportunities for whatever reason, the
| location premium makes sense.
|
| To take your example in the opposite direction. Let's say a
| east-european company want to expand into the US and open up a
| sales engineering office in SF, and want their best sales
| engineers to go work their, it would be completely insane to
| not raise their wage. "We pay people after ability here you
| have 40k USD, have fun finding housing".
| silisili wrote:
| > Location based salaries are discriminatory
|
| I used to feel this way, but largely grown out of it. In the end,
| you're asking for SF salaries, and those in India are asking for
| NL salaries(or SF salaries). You'd largely find a race to the
| bottom, I think.
|
| The simple fact is you made a good living for your area, and they
| made a good living for theirs. If you want more, move. If you
| won't move, there's likely a reason why.
|
| Everyone wants a SF salary with an Indiana or even India cost of
| living. For obvious reasons, that can't work.
| gbil wrote:
| Big discussion, let me touch another point
|
| >It doesn't matter whether you're paying somebody in the Bay
| Area $100 000 per year, or somebody in the Philippines, because
| the cost for you as a business is the same.
|
| The cost for you as business is NOT the same. Start from the
| taxes part, that 100k is what the employee gets but the cost
| for the business is higher depending on the country/area
| because they also pay tax on top, social benefits etc. Also
| need to have in many cases a local business, doesn't matter if
| that is virtual etc, since they need to adhere to local laws
| thus having resources supporting that etc.
|
| So while I'm on the employee side here as I'm also working on a
| multinational coorp with global role yet paid with local
| standards, there is more than meets the eye
| mjr00 wrote:
| yep. People vastly underestimate how difficult the logistics
| of "pay an employee for services" can be, particularly when
| you don't have a legal corporate presence in the country
| where the employee resides. There are services that handle
| this for you and they charge a _30-40%_ premium on top of the
| employee 's salary. And sometimes this is still worth it,
| because many countries charge an absolutely obscene
| incorporation fee for foreign-owned businesses.
| bmitc wrote:
| > People vastly underestimate how difficult the logistics
| of "pay an employee for services" can be
|
| That's the company's problem.
| skrebbel wrote:
| It's not. If I have to pay some service or agency a lot
| of money to be able to employ you, there's less money
| left to pay you. Employers at distributed companies don't
| look at your take-home salary, they look at the total
| cost to employ you. Fees and taxes differ _wildly_ per
| country, there's no other way to compare. So if a large %
| of that total cost goes to middle men, then that makes
| you a more costly employee at no benefit to either you or
| the company.
|
| If I'm considering two people for a job but one is in a
| place where paying them well means I spend a huge amount
| on fees (or "employer-side taxes" for that matter,
| looking at you Austria), I might well choose the other.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Yep, and they choose not to have it unless there's some
| compelling reason to. We've got staff in many countries,
| but it's not a blanket "work from wherever you like".
| skrebbel wrote:
| Fwiw companies like Remote and Deel charge a fixed fee of
| substantially less than 30-40%. IIRC we pay about 600 euros
| per employee per month to Remote. That's a lot of money
| that I'd rather give to the employees themselves, but it's
| much much less than 30-40%.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Having a freelancer registered in another country paid is
| not as complicated as people make it to be (pay an employee
| for services). As contractors.
|
| The complication is the company prefers to work in one/a
| few jurisdictions only and have "proper" employees. It
| simplifies a lot for the company.
| sitharus wrote:
| so why not set a "total remuneration package" as it's known
| where I live. It's the total value, inclusive of compulsory
| payroll deductions and taxes, and set the salary to match
| that. The cost to the company is the same, but your take-home
| depends on where you live.
| em-bee wrote:
| in many areas salaries must be specified as the take-home
| part (including the taxes you pay as employee, but not
| including the part that the employers pay, which is not
| part of your remuneration), because doing otherwise would
| be confusing and could be considered deceptive.
| Solvency wrote:
| Why is this downvoted? What's wrong about it?
| Scarblac wrote:
| Yes, the result would be that they wouldn't have any employees
| in the Netherlands, let alone in the Bay area.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| From the other angle: There exist companies that do not do
| location based pay. If you're hired, you get a US level salary,
| whether you're in San Francisco or Poland or Indonesia.
|
| These positions are _phenomenally_ competitive. You have swung
| open the doors to the world, and said "Give me what you got!",
| and you reap the benefits by having a much, much larger pool of
| applications and talent to sift through, with a lot of truly
| exceptional people in there - mostly very intelligent, very
| driven people from poorer countries.
|
| That's how supply and demand _works_. If you are offer to pay
| people more, you usually end up hiring a higher quality
| candidate.
| ako wrote:
| You also know that companies are looking to optimize margin,
| so those US level salaries are only temporarily. Given enough
| good people in India, or other low-income countries, that pay
| level will drop significantly.
| jojobas wrote:
| Good enough people from India move elsewhere in no time.
| You still get what you pay for.
| northern-lights wrote:
| Not necessarily. There are costs and obstacles to moving
| (for example moving from India to US is extremely
| difficult these days).
| jojobas wrote:
| There sure are, but there's Australia, Canada, Europe and
| Middle East.
|
| Results of offshoring to Bangalore is a stereotype, but
| it wasn't born from nothing.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| No -- it's born of attempts to cut costs.
|
| I've worked with teams from Bangalore who were staff of
| the bank I was contracting for -- they were amazing, but
| also not appreciably (if at all) cheaper than employing
| someone in London or New York.
|
| Several well-known banks had large offices, and
| competition for talent was high. No race for the bottom
| _there_.
|
| It doesn't particularly matter where you employ people,
| if you're trying to save costs by paying people less then
| you're going to have a bad time.
| ako wrote:
| Good engineers will accept lower payment if their costs
| are lower. Similar to how amazon is operating, by
| lowering costs, minimizing margin, they can win over
| customers and win the market.
| jojobas wrote:
| People don't work like that. They want their costs to be
| high because that's what it takes to live a nicer life.
|
| A tangential proof of my initial statement can be
| observed in US immigrant IQ levels, as compared to the
| general population.
| ako wrote:
| Why would they move away from family and friends if they
| could get equal pay in India, with more spending power?
| jojobas wrote:
| Because living in India sucks even if you're rich.
| ako wrote:
| I recently visited some teams in India, they indicated
| quite a few coworkers moved back to India to be closer to
| family and friends. Not everyone is dreaming about moving
| to the US. And yes, I agree that I couldn't see myself
| living in India, with all the pollution and
| overpopulation...
| jojobas wrote:
| That has to be a small minority. As for missing family,
| chain migration is still a thing.
|
| Nearly nobody is ever going back, even those who can't
| land a proper job just stay and drive ubers.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Sure, that's of course what we would expect. However - and
| I don't know about you - if my options were between getting
| paid $200 a month as a farmer with my dad, or earning $8000
| a month as a software engineer in my room, I would probably
| still take the $8000 option, even if it only seemed like it
| would be around for 3 months.
|
| I may even be grateful for the chance, instead of angry
| that it wasn't a deal that was going to last in perpetuity.
| I admit I may be in the minority here.
| cybrox wrote:
| If you're just in time, yes.
|
| Everyone after you is out of luck and can develop
| software for $200/m then.
| the_arun wrote:
| What makes you think US level salaries are temporary? Isn't
| this the case for last 40 yrs? Why it will change now? Is
| it due to advance in remote work or more supply?
| ako wrote:
| Salaries have been under big pressure from Asia.
| pooper wrote:
| Also from Europe, Canada, and Latin America.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| > Isn't this the case for last 40 yrs?
|
| Is it? The only place I know off the top of my head is
| maybe ten years old.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Where are all those companies? TFA mentions "oxide.computer"
| but they actually hire people only in US with very rare
| exceptions.
| purrcat259 wrote:
| Hotjar used to do this, with a heavy bias for EMEA timezone
| overlap.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| To be clear: we don't only hire in the US. We have
| employees in at least the US, Canada, and Europe at the
| moment.
|
| We do want some overlap in working hours with the US, so it
| is true that we cannot realistically hire anywhere just
| yet, but not being in the US is not a dealbreaker.
| josebama wrote:
| A consequence of that is that local companies, that have
| local economy level income, can't compete on salary with
| those foreign companies. So they can't get the top-tier
| workforce they used to have access to. Ever increasing the
| economic disparity between countries.
|
| They allow brain drain to happen, without the barriers of
| having to move countries.
| mordae wrote:
| But the money stay in the country and increase the chance
| that the employee eventually starts their own business,
| possibly using the cheaper workforce as an advantage.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| You might be right, if we assume that everyone who takes
| these high paying remote jobs also makes sure to never ever
| spend the money they earn locally, either.
|
| However, if I was earning an order of magnitude more money
| than I currently am, I might want to pay a little extra to
| go to the _really good_ barber, or to eat at the _really
| nice_ restaurant at the riverbank. Or, hell, I might just
| employ a cleaning service every week, to save myself a few
| hours ' time vacuuming my apartment. These necessarily
| local services will also see their revenues rise. To me
| that seems to be a more important effect on the local
| economy at large.
| bobby_table wrote:
| But how would you feel about working as a barber, chef or
| cleaner, when you could earn two orders of magnitude more
| making Internet thingamajings for people on the other
| side of the world?
| pavlov wrote:
| New York never has a critical shortage of barbers, chefs
| or cleaners even though for many decades it's been
| possible to earn 100x as a Wall Street bond trader or
| quant.
|
| A healthy growth economy can tolerate income differences.
| But the balance is certainly precarious, as the example
| of New York or London shows. It's constantly on the edge
| of driving out the remaining barbers and chefs because
| they can't afford rents.
| __float wrote:
| They could build more apartments.
| pzduniak wrote:
| I'm pretty sure someone making 2-4x their local salary for
| a remote company and paying taxes is healthier for the
| economy than working your ass off (or not) for a local
| startup that wants to end up getting acquired OR doing the
| same remote work with 2-3 layers of management extracting
| the difference in pay. At least in Poland I can't think of
| any single company I'd want to work for.
| zokier wrote:
| There is also the factor of the country receiving hard
| foreign currency, which I understand is generally quite
| desireable. This is less relevant for EU vs US
| compensation, but for more developing ("3rd world")
| nations could be significant.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| This. I did the same while living in Eastern Europe +
| working remote for a US startup.
|
| The amount of money I poured into the local economy is
| probably an order of magnitude higher (maybe even 2) than
| if I had worked for a local company.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| If they don't have to move countries, it's not really brain
| drain at all. It's exactly the opposite in fact.
|
| If they did have to move, then they would, and you'd have
| brain drain. But because they can remain in their
| communities (while earning the globally-competitive income
| that they would otherwise have to move for), they now pay
| taxes to their local government, buy from local businesses,
| mentor local youth, and so on. When they've earned enough
| money from their job, they may quit and start a startup in
| their own community, or become an angel investor supporting
| startups in their area, rather than yet another bay-area
| based fund. These are all good things!
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Assuming you actually can hire the best people, and somehow
| do so in an affordable manner when half the planet applies,
| that's a great strategy.
|
| But I'd expect a very low number of firms to succeed at that.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Now see _that 's_ an interesting problem space to be in.
| Keen eye.
|
| To me it seems like a really exciting place to apply recent
| innovations in LLMs. If LLMs can chew through thousand page
| legal binders like toilet paper, there's no reason they
| can't chew through a thousand 1-page resumes and spit out
| "These are the ten most promising ones based off of our
| statistical analysis." Firms can specialize in the
| production, hosting and fine tuning of these LLMs, and even
| play both sides of the market by allowing _candidates_ to
| see how good their resume looks for a given job
| description.
|
| I think this is much likely to become a lot more common in
| the latter half of the 2020s.
| valzam wrote:
| And then you try to look at the top 3 candidates and
| realise the LLM hallucianted them all
| __loam wrote:
| Yes lets make applying to jobs even more of an
| algorithmic hellscape.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Whether or not it is pleasant for the applicants, it'll
| happen if it provides a benefit for the companies. They
| don't care about the applicant experience because they
| have no incentive to.
| Draiken wrote:
| This is the dystopian future that is likely already
| happening. Slowly but surely we will lose control over
| our own labor. As the name implies, we're just human
| resources.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Resumes are candidate controlled which inherently makes
| them useless once social rules on lying too much break
| down.
| notpachet wrote:
| The flipside of this is that there will be an asymmetric
| advantage available to firms that are capable of finding
| excellent candidates that fall into the ML blind spots.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah those companies don't exist because they would be
| wasting money. Salary isn't "location based", it's
| "competitive salary based". It just happens that competitive
| salaries strongly depend on location.
|
| If you were to forget about location and just say "we'll
| negotiate all salaries" then you would end with exactly the
| same result because people in NL are willing to work for much
| lower salaries than people in SF.
|
| I don't get why so many smart programmers don't understand
| this basic fact of economics. Eh maybe they do understand it
| and are just jealous of insane SF salaries (I certainly am!).
|
| I would be wary of demanding equal pay by location anyway
| because you'll end up with all jobs moving to India.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Those companies do exist. I can confirm specifically that
| at least when I had an offer from Supabase they paid
| everyone, internationally, regardless of location, the same
| pay bands. Being USA based it was one of the reasons that I
| turned down the offer because I was able to get a much
| higher salary elsewhere but it would have been extremely
| competitive had I taken the role and moved to some place
| like Vietnam.
|
| I wish I could have taken the Supabase role because it was
| definitely my top pick otherwise. One look at the output
| and caliber of people they hire also indicates that they
| have little issue finding talent.
|
| FWIW this was a couple of years ago and I have no idea
| whether they are still doing this equal pay band thing or
| not. But they were doing it for awhile at least
| Draiken wrote:
| The fact is that location is irrelevant for some roles. If
| you are looking for top talent, you'll pay top talent
| value. If you constrain your hiring to a single location,
| you're simply reducing your own pool of candidates.
|
| Today, most labor arrangements are more and more like
| companies. If you were to select top companies to contract
| for some job that doesn't really care about location, you
| wouldn't be choosing companies based on that. You'd choose
| based on how good they are.
|
| It's the difference between trying to buy the cheapest
| versus buying the best. Of course if you're always looking
| for the cheapest, you'll always move towards overseas jobs.
| But if you're looking for the best, you can get the best
| from all over the world by offering a single solid
| compensation package.
|
| It's all a transaction, isn't it? At the end of the day my
| labor is worth however much I can get for it.
|
| Sure, you could squeeze even more profit by paying overseas
| workers less, but then you create all sorts of imbalances
| that can and will hurt your business in the long run.
|
| I always joke that if you want to hire me (I am not from
| the US) and pay 50-60% less just because I live here, why
| wouldn't I work 50-60% less?
|
| You're getting the 1% of a lower income country, for an
| average local developer salary. If you want the 1% of SF
| you'll have to pay a lot more, even if they are equivalent
| in the value they provide. The company still wins, and as a
| result you get happier employees.
|
| You can always cheap out, but it's never without
| consequences.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Yeah those companies don't exist because they would be
| wasting money.
|
| Basecamp has been around for 20+ years and they publicly
| mention that they hire based on SF rates, not even SF but
| the top 10% of SF[0] for positions around the world.
|
| [0]: https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/minimum-pay-at-basecamp-
| is-now...
| vanviegen wrote:
| Indeed. I don't understand why a remote company would want to
| pay top dollar for a _mediocre_ developer living in the US,
| while refusing to pay the same for an _exceptional_ developer
| living somewhere else.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Because of marginal returns on applicant motivation. A
| $200,000 position sounds great to a person expecting
| $150,000. $200,000 also sounds amazing to someone expecting
| $40,000. But, the same person expecting $40,000 will also
| be amazed by a $100,000 position, and certainly not half as
| amazed as the $200,000 one.
| bluesign wrote:
| This may work if you are only hiring senior people, but
| imagine hiring some mid level or junior employee. if US
| junior salary is Poland senior salary, would you willing to
| hire the senior dev from Poland to junior position ?
| jacquesm wrote:
| If that means you also get US level working conditions and
| job security that can be a net negative.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The issue I see is that software engineering is a team sport.
| Having a bunch of intelligent driven people doesn't mean they
| will together act like an intelligent driven group. Work
| cultures differ greatly between countries including in some
| subtle unconscious ways. Even Western Europe versus the USA
| have a very different dynamic in terms of how ICs and
| managers interact with one another.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| But when Indians, Germans, or Canadians move to the Bay
| Area for better pay, they don't immediately (or necessarily
| ever) become culturally Californian. They might put their
| complaints aside for the paycheque, but they'd probably
| have equally-happily done the same as a remote worker.
| Especially when their whole organization is remote anyway,
| so there's essentially no subtle cultural difference
| between a Canadian working from Canada, and a Canadian who
| just moved to Mountainview while zooming from their spare
| bedroom.
|
| Furthermore, if the difference in compensation is really
| explained by differences in employee productivity caused by
| work culture barriers, then location-based pay must somehow
| maps to the productivity cost of that work-cultural
| barrier. There's no reason to think that this should map
| directly to cost of living, and it would change over time;
| if the workforce composition shifts towards Europeans for
| example, then now it's your workers in the bay area who are
| less productive due to missing subtle cultural cues from
| their German managers.
| concordDance wrote:
| > you reap the benefits by having a much, much larger pool of
| applications and talent to sift through
|
| Interviewing/hiring is incredibly noisy though. If SF
| engineers have a much higher average skill than the rest of
| the world then you might still end up with better people if
| you just hire from SF rather than the world in general, even
| if the latter has a much wider pool with more top people in
| absolute numbers.
| ghaff wrote:
| A smaller company can do it. The post links to a post by
| Bryan at Oxide Computer. The salary scheme for the generally
| senior people they hire is quite egalitarian. It's also
| pretty modest by senior-level Bay Area (and even many other
| locations) standards.
| xiaq wrote:
| The approach taken by Igalia (a co-op) is quite interesting:
| https://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money.
| Basically they target equal pay but adjust it for cost of
| living, rather than cost of hiring.
| em-bee wrote:
| in general i agree, but the problem with location based
| salaries is that they are working for locals, but not for
| expats. expats everywhere have higher living costs than locals,
| in part because they will get more expensive housing that is
| more up to the standard they are used to, and they also may
| have kids that they can't or don't want to send to a local
| school, and they will buy more imported food that they are used
| from home.
|
| when i looked at their salariy calculator i figured that i
| could not live on the salary they would offer for my location.
| school costs alone for each child are as much as i pay for
| rent.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Why is that a problem?
| em-bee wrote:
| it's a problem because it means that many expats can't work
| for gitlab because they can't afford to live on that
| salary.
|
| if i am working for gitlab in my home country, i can't move
| into the home country of my wife because my salary would be
| reduced below what we need to live there
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| But there's no benefit to Gitlab or to society in general
| for Gitlab to subsidize people to move to countries where
| they can be rich compared to the locals. It's a personal
| obstacle to working at Gitlab, not a problem with the
| setup.
| em-bee wrote:
| strongly disagree. there is a big benefit to have
| cultures mix and help with integration into an
| international company, both to gitlab and to society.
| that's why i moved to china.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| So mix and integrate, instead of demanding to maintain a
| lifestyle from elsewhere. Gitlab will even help by giving
| you a locally reasonable income.
| stavros wrote:
| If I work for you, and you're willing to double my salary to
| subsidize my moving to an area that has wildly more
| opportunities for me (which is precisely _why_ the salary is
| higher there), don 't mind if I do move there.
|
| You just need to ask yourself if offering incentives to get
| your employees to move to hot job markets is in your benefit.
| manmal wrote:
| > If you won't move, there's likely a reason why
|
| Kids would have to leave school and all their friends behind,
| wife hasn't finished education here - there's those reasons as
| well.
| foofie wrote:
| > you're asking for SF salaries, and those in India are asking
| for NL salaries(or SF salaries)
|
| No. You got it all wrong.
|
| You're asking for equal pay for equal work. If all your team
| members are paid in full but you, in spite of doing the exact
| same work, are paid a fraction of what they are paid, then
| something is terribly off.
|
| Your contribution to your team does not depend on where you're
| currently located. How much time you waste on commute does not
| change the expectation placed on your output. If your office
| location is prohibitively expensive that means your company
| needs to sort their mess and work on a location that's more
| affordable. It makes no sense that you need to subsidize your
| employer's bad office location.
| intothemild wrote:
| The problem with this line of thinking is that cost of living
| is the same everywhere. It is not.
| tock wrote:
| Why does it matter? Salaries should depend on the value you
| deliver. I don't think companies limit their profits
| depending on the location. Apple devices are often _more_
| expensive outside the US.
| mejutoco wrote:
| While I can empathize with this, this is a moral
| judgement. Price is not determined by fairness, but by
| offer and demand (and other factors). Otherwise teachers
| might earn more than football players. I think one could
| argue they should.
| tock wrote:
| I agree. It's just supply and demand. I just disagree
| with people saying salaries are somehow pegged to living
| standards. No it isn't. Companies don't care about your
| living standards. They pay what the market commands thats
| all.
| intothemild wrote:
| Whilst we all want SF wages, those wages are because
| housing and cost of living in SF are exceptionally high
| compared to say Bali.
|
| So you want to earn 200,000 USD. Whilst living in a part
| of the world where that effectively places you in the top
| 1% of earners.
|
| You're only looking at this from that angle. What about
| the person who's living in SF, and scrapes by paycheck to
| paycheck. Whilst you live in a much cheaper area to live
| in, and you have a very different financial situation.
| Your both paid the same wage.. because "fairness".
|
| You might say, "JUST MOVE". But do you think that's a
| fair thing to tell someone?
|
| Sure people move to places like SF, but people do that
| for more than money, they do it for a variety of reasons.
| And one of them is that there's a lot of demand in that
| area for your talents. So if you wanted to change jobs,
| grow your career, etc.. you can. But that area has a
| higher cost of living.
|
| You sacrifice some of those things when you move to the
| small country town, there's no tech hub. No meetups,
| nothing.
|
| So do you think it's still fair to say to that person
| "Hey I know you're living hard... But at least you can
| spend that little money you have left on public transport
| getting to a meetup!". Whilst the person living in the
| middle of nowhere can afford first class.
| tock wrote:
| I get what you are trying to say. I'm one of those people
| who makes that kind of money in a cheap country. I'm just
| saying its fair from a value delivered perspective.
| Paying you less doesn't mean the company donates the
| money saved to a charity. It just goes to the companies
| balance sheet. I've had plenty of arguments with company
| exec's about this:
|
| 1. its not fair you get to live like a king! -> would you
| move here to live like "a king"? Oh you don't want to
| deal with the pollution and the bureaucracy and lack of
| safety. Ok. Ah so there is a cost I am paying by living
| in a bad country.
|
| 2. paying you SF salaries would be unfair to people
| living around you -> ok so you would be ok paying that
| extra amount directly to a charity right? Oh ok you
| aren't.
|
| I'm saying it's only fair for a employee to think they
| should be paid proportional to the value delivered.
| Companies exist to make more money. This causes a clash.
| In my last company the CEO specifically wouldn't hire
| staff engineers from cheap countries because he didn't
| want to give the other engineers the idea that they too
| can command higher wages.
|
| Just pay people the same amount and let them decide how
| to live their lives. They are adults.
| foofie wrote:
| > The problem with this line of thinking is that cost of
| living is the same everywhere. It is not.
|
| I don't understand what point you think you're making. My
| disposable income is not my employer's business, and I
| definitely do not live below my means to subsidize my
| employer's business.
|
| You wanted me to do my work in exchange for my salary. Pay
| me. Don't think for a minute you are entitled to go through
| my grocery bill to see if you impose pay cuts.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >You're asking for equal pay for equal work.
|
| Equal pay for equal work doesn't mean the same pay. It means
| that an employee from Bay Area, one from Netherlands and one
| from India are able to buy the same amount of goods on their
| local markets from their wage.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Remember that all of those local markets sell iPhones at a
| higher cost in USD than the Bay Area. Exactly which goods
| should they be able to buy the same amount of?
| marcinzm wrote:
| A roof over their heads for one.
| Biganon wrote:
| Rent, obviously
|
| Of course a Bay Area employee needs to be paid more,
| their rent is insanely higher than the rent of employees
| in the NL
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Ok. So the salary difference should be the difference
| between the monthly median rent: for a 1 bed apartment
| that's $1500/month cost difference, double it for taxes
| and fuzzy math, salary increase of $36k/year. Maybe it
| should cover "the median rent", whatever size unit that
| is, so $1500 in Amsterdam vs $4k in SF: +$60k. Or should
| it cover buying a 3 bedroom house, though? That's more
| like an extra $8k/month for SF, so salary difference is
| +$190k.
|
| This kind of detail is where it falls down. Should people
| be able to purchase the same _goods_ , or the same
| relative local position in society?
|
| https://www.ktvu.com/news/in-bay-area-0-of-homes-were-
| cheape...
| intothemild wrote:
| > Remember that all of those local markets sell iPhones
| at a higher cost in USD than the Bay Area.
|
| You're literally arguing that every area has different
| economics. But also failing to also understand that every
| area has different economics.
|
| iPhones don't keep you warm at night.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I'm literally not.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| But money is portable, and Local market means a different
| thing than it did pre-pandemic.
|
| The argument that local cost of living is the only factor
| falls apart when people are moving from high CoL markets to
| low CoL markets with their advantaged savings. Especially
| within a nation, or times of large movement (again,
| pandemic - where folks with higher CoL wages were better
| positioned to acquire prime real estate in lower CoL
| markets).
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I mean, you aren't payed in buckets of rice or whatever. Or
| even a inflation adjusted basket of good and services.
|
| You are paid in dollars (or equivalent). So they don't get
| to claim to be paying the basket of goods if they won't
| automatically match inflation either
| northern-lights wrote:
| Same here. The reality is that what company chooses to pay is
| the minimal amount they can get a candidate to accept for that
| location.
|
| If the candidate had other better offers, then they can either
| reject the offer or propose a higher counter-offer. If the
| company received a counter-offer and chose to accept it, then
| this amount becomes the new minimal amount.
|
| Over a period of time, if there are enough counter-offers (or
| rejections), this continues to increase. Since, the two (or
| however many) locations don't necessarily have the same demand
| or supply, it's inevitable that some location will end up with
| much higher compensation than others. It's the nature of free
| market and why some companies engage/d in hiring collusion (see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This suggests that cost of living in SF is the cause of high
| salaries but in fact the only reason SF/Bay Area has high cost
| of living is because of the high concentration of highly
| capital efficient businesses with strong skilled labor demand
| coupled with the complete unwillingness to build high rise
| density most places in the Valley area. I know quite a few
| people who make SF level salaries working remote in random
| states across the country. Of course it can work. And SF should
| not get too cocky. Detroit used to be the Motor City, Music
| City, and a cultural and technological force in the world, but
| then its core competencies got disrupted by cheaper, more
| efficient labor elsewhere.
| bmitc wrote:
| > For obvious reasons, that can't work.
|
| Why is that? It isn't obvious to me. It seems like an excuse
| companies use to pay people less, especially if the company is
| based in a high-paying city.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Everyone wants a SF salary with an Indiana or even India cost
| of living. For obvious reasons, that can't work.
|
| For some lucky people that does work.
| intellectronica wrote:
| There are two ways to evaluate salaries / compensation
| packages: 1. What is your price in the market? 2. How much
| money do you need to be able to focus on your work and not
| worry about money. Most companies use a mix of both approaches,
| depending on the role and the individual. For most employees,
| the second perspective makes for a better experience. As long
| as you get enough each month to make the money problem a non-
| issue, you get to focus on the work itself, which can be a very
| positive experience. Some people (or the same people at
| different phases of their lives) want to optimise for getting
| the highest price they can get in the market. That's a valid
| choice, but one that in many cases results in a suboptimal work
| experience.
| MikusR wrote:
| If they also don't have regional pricing then it's
| discriminatory.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| By that logic, the only one who wins is the company. I would
| like to believe that most of us, employees, want what's best
| for us, employees.
|
| If company X was paying N for a SF engineer, and suddenly it
| finds out that it can pay N/2 for an engineer that's as good as
| the SF one (but lives, let's say, in Mexico)... well, jackpot
| for company X.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Everyone wants a SF salary with an Indiana or even India cost
| of living. For obvious reasons, that can't work.
|
| Why should someone living in Indiana make less money than
| someone living in NYC for a remote tech job?
|
| Both are located in the US separated by a 2 hour flight. Both
| are in the same timezone too. For a remote company where you
| have employees spread around the US, there's no difference to
| anything here.
| starkparker wrote:
| > Why should someone living in Indiana make less money than
| someone living in NYC for a remote tech job?
|
| There's no moral reason to satisfy "why _should_", but let's
| be honest. A company with equal salaries regardless of geo is
| more likely to cut the salaries of people in expensive places
| to live than raise the salaries of people in less-expensive
| places. This is especially true in places where both salary
| and fundamental necessities like health coverage are included
| in compensation, like the US.
|
| Such companies then lose the employees who prefer to live in
| expensive places, to companies who _will_ pay them more to
| live in more expensive places.
|
| Whether accepting that result produces a more efficient staff
| for a company is the more indicative question IMO. Or asking
| why some places are so much more expensive to live in.
| dilipdasilva wrote:
| Salaries are based on the market economy of supply and demand.
| Salaries for a specific role are different in one location over
| another because that is what the market is in each location.
|
| If you want developer salaries to be the same in all locations
| for the same level of work for reasons of fairness and anti-
| discrimination, you should ask why salaries of developers are
| higher or lower than other roles. Developers get paid highly
| because of supply and demand. Why not advocate for all workers,
| regardless of role, be paid the same - this would also be fair
| and anti-discriminatory. It seems we want to benefit from the
| market economy on one side and then want fairness on the other
| side. The logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning is
| communism where all workers at a company are paid the same,
| regardless of role. We know how that worked out.
|
| If all developers, regardless of location, were paid the same,
| companies would much rather hire all their developers in a
| single location. Why bother hiring in locations far away? Jobs
| would have never flowed out of high paying locations to lower
| paying locations.
|
| The Bay Area has the highest salaries because Silicon Valley
| has had many years to develop and the vast majority of tech
| companies are based in the Bay Area. Many companies are started
| in the Bay Area because people who work together in one company
| often break off and start another company. Many people at these
| successful companies have become wealthy and this has driven up
| home prices. This has made the Bay Area one of the most
| expensive places to live. Other workers cannot afford to live
| in the Bay Area and so there is a shortage of labor. This
| drives up the cost of every thing, including restaurants,
| groceries, and personal services. If the Bay Area does not add
| substantial housing, it will continue to see companies move to
| other metros.
|
| In the US, salaries are different based on metro and state and
| are based on the market economy. Companies move to offices to
| particular metros if they is a healthy supply of workers and
| supply is greater than demand so that it is more cost
| effective. This location competition is healthy.
|
| The role of any government, whether it is metro, state or
| country, is to create thriving economies so people want to move
| to that location. This means investing in critical mass in
| particular industries so many companies in that industry want
| to locate there. It also means ensuring other costs are low. In
| the US, health care insurance cost between $24k and $36k/year
| for anyone with a family. This is higher than the full salary
| in other countries. If the US does not figure out how to solve
| its health care costs, it will continue to see jobs leave for
| lower cost locations.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Supply and demand, yes, and when jobs are tied to locations
| the demand is concentrated. So supply needs to move to where
| the demand is, or face a lack of demand and lower prices. If
| the demand is willing to disregard geography, their supply
| will be that much greater.
|
| With fully-remote working, the demand isn't as concentrated,
| so supply need not be as concentrated either.
|
| As someone not currently living in the Bay Area, or London,
| or another tech hub, I'm quite happy not to be paying the
| cost of living there. And honestly I don't think it's fair
| that people who live there should be better compensated just
| because they decide to live somewhere expensive. But I
| understand why it happens, because when companies hire
| _specifically in a tech hub_ there are lots of people willing
| to work with them _but only if their pay is higher_. It 's a
| vicious circle for employers, a virtuous circle for
| employees, and only sustainable for as long as productivity
| remains above cost. It's not built on a stable economic
| foundation.
|
| I don't want to accept lower pay for the same job, which may
| mean that I _don 't work for those companies_. That's the
| market at work :). On the other hand, if a company wants to
| employ folk to be physically present in London, they're not
| going to want to employ _me_. While if a company is willing
| to pay the same to everyone, they 'll get fewer people in
| London and more people outside London, and they might even be
| the same people just dropping their commute :).
|
| There's enough global demand for Software Engineering to drag
| everyone up. It is universally the case that if you pay
| peanuts you'll get monkeys, but paying an equal wage for
| equal work benefits the company _and_ wider society and I don
| 't particularly care if that's lower than I might get if I
| was willing to work in London (or the Bay Area), so long as
| I'm not required to work in London (or the Bay Area).
| rockyj wrote:
| Ruby's entire programming model was based on the premise that
| language speed does not matter since most of the time you are
| waiting on IO / Network. Well now, both on Node.js and JVM we
| have programming models which say that - while I wait for IO /
| Network let me do some other work or service more requests (Async
| / Webflux / Coroutines).
|
| IMHO - using Ruby/Rails in 2024 can be wasteful, but of-couse for
| the right situation it can be a good choice. (Just) For example
| an enterprise app where you know the number of users will be
| limited, or when you know the development speed is paramount or
| where you want to build a quick proptype to test the market out.
| Rails is a great framework and the productivity is unmatched, but
| with time a 2-3 years old Rails project is always tricky to
| maintain.
| hw wrote:
| Ruby now has Fibers and other constructs for async like Ractor.
|
| > Rails is a great framework and the productivity is unmatched,
| but with time a 2-3 years old Rails project is always tricky to
| maintain.
|
| It isn't any less tricky than a Django or Express project. With
| any codebase discipline and regular tending to the garden of
| code is important to prevent weeds from growing.
|
| If anything that Ruby (and Rails) has going against it is still
| the raw language performance and higher memory
| requirements/usage than its counterparts, which makes it less
| desirable for workloads that require low latency or small
| memory footprint
| sosodev wrote:
| Meh, it's fine for 99% of use cases. Rails only becomes a pain
| in my experience if you have random, huge swings in traffic or
| a ton of active users with websocket stuff (mostly solved by
| anycable). But very few products are going to reach those
| limits and if they do those problems can be solved too.
|
| Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify are the shining examples of Rails
| scaling in all kinds of ways without problem.
| ywain wrote:
| Stripe does use Ruby, but not Rails.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Haven't GitHub been moving out of rails into go based micro
| services? Even their frontend I think is now just react
| wlll wrote:
| I believe Github still use Rails for their main
| application. Spinning services out into microservices, even
| ones that are other languages, isn't really a sign that
| Rails isn't working for them, it's just what happens when
| companies scale. The company I work for is a Rails backend
| (React frontend) and we have some services split out into
| Go based microservices (eg. Twilio webhook handling has
| been offloaded to Go in Lambda), but it's still very much a
| Rails app.
|
| > Even their frontend I think is now just react
|
| It remains to be seen how successful this is and what the
| reasons were for the change. Personally I don't like it,
| it's less reliable and slower than before.
| notpachet wrote:
| > Stripe, GitHub, and Shopify are the shining examples of
| Rails scaling in all kinds of ways without problem.
|
| As a former Shopify dev, I can tell you that "without
| problem" is highly inaccurate. We had lots of Rails scaling
| problems.
| byroot wrote:
| Not sure how long you were there nor which team you were
| on, but as someone who's still working on Shopify infra
| after a decade, I disagree with you.
|
| Scaling problems at Shopify are rarely if ever directly
| Rails related.
|
| The biggest challenge was always scaling the database
| layer, and to some extend the deploy pipeline of the
| monolith given the amount of people working on it.
| jb3689 wrote:
| Stripe doesn't use Rails. Stripe's application of Ruby is far
| removed from your typical Rails app. A lot of custom stuff
| was built into Ruby to make the multi-million line codebase
| work as well as it does.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >the productivity is unmatched
|
| I would like to challenge that.
| wlll wrote:
| Go ahead...
| mdaniel wrote:
| Static typing is not webscale, amirite?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39159481
|
| I guess it depends on how one defines "productivity:" is it
| spitting out code as fast as your keyboard works, or is is
| not having features do weirdo things because who can
| reasonably say _what_ the code does at any given time?
|
| I have more than once tried to contribute fixes to GitLab's
| codebase, and every time I open the thing in RubyMine it
| hurpdurps having no earthly idea where symbols come from or
| what completions are legal in any given context. I trust
| JetBrains analysis deeply, so if they can't deduce what's
| going on, then it must take an impressive amount of glucose
| to memorize every single surface area one needs to
| implement a feature. That or, hear me out, maybe "it works
| on my machine" is a close to correct as the language is
| going to get without explicit type hints as a pseudo static
| typing
| wlll wrote:
| > Ruby's entire programming model was based on the premise that
| language speed does not matter since most of the time you are
| waiting on IO / Network.
|
| Couple of points. 1) You probably mean Ruby on Rails and not
| Ruby and 2) that's not true of either. Ruby or Rails "entire
| programming model" was not based on thoughts around I/O at all,
| a huge about of the driving force behind Rails was DHHs ideas
| about developer happiness, which is intrinsically linked with
| speed of development.
|
| Discussions about I/O /do/ happen in the Rails community
| because it's important when you're running a web server which
| is a lot of the use Ruby/Rails is involved in, but it's not the
| sole (or even a major) focus of the decisions made for the
| language or framework.
|
| > Well now, both on Node.js and JVM we have programming models
| which say that - while I wait for IO / Network let me do some
| other work or service more requests (Async / Webflux /
| Coroutines).
|
| Right, but if the goal is to maximise CPU usage of your web
| servers then you can completely do that using Rails, and have
| historically been able to do so by spinning up multiple
| processes in the same way you'd spin up multiple threads in,
| say, the JVM. Not as convenient perhaps, but a model that's
| been in use since at least the 90s when I started out. Luckily
| it turns out that web requests can generally be run in
| isolation so IPC isn't usually an issue (the same reason why
| multiple physical web servers is simple, just as multiple
| processes is).
|
| > IMHO - using Ruby/Rails in 2024 can be wasteful, but of-couse
| for the right situation it can be a good choice. (Just) For
| example an enterprise app where you know the number of users
| will be limited, or when you know the development speed is
| paramount or where you want to build a quick proptype to test
| the market out. Rails is a great framework and the productivity
| is unmatched, but with time a 2-3 years old Rails project is
| always tricky to maintain.
|
| Wasteful as a generalisation is blunt. Of course it can be
| wasteful, but so can writing your app in rust, it just depends
| where the pressures are. I'd suggest that not launching is a
| far bigger concern to most people at an early stage, and even
| mid to late stages developer speed is one of the most difficult
| things to scale.
|
| Personally I'm the CTO of a company that uses Rails (backend,
| React frontend) and developer speed is /hugely/ important to
| us. We're always constrained by engineering resources and the
| speed of Rails development continues to be a huge win for us.
| We do have scaling issues, but 99% of the time they're not
| Rails issues, they're in the database.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| > Location based salaries are discriminatory
|
| The article is nice and well articulated, but I'd argue exactly
| the opposite on this point. The author seems to confuse equality
| and equity. He takes the Netherlands and Bay Area as an example
| and don't make a compelling argument as to how and why paying
| differently those employees is akin to discrimination based on
| race.
|
| Were you to pay the same salary in Netherlands and Bay Area, you
| would effectively either (i) pay absurdly high salaries to your
| dutch engineers, similar to what the prime minister earns or (ii)
| pay absurdly low salaries to your Bay Area engineers (to the
| point that you'd basically have none of them).
| globular-toast wrote:
| Who cares if you don't have Bay Area engineers? Their ability
| isn't based on where they live, is it? If they want to lower
| their costs of living so they can compete they can "just move".
| XiS wrote:
| That argument goes both ways of course
| ako wrote:
| The world is moving towards more closed borders, so moving is
| getting harder. But in the end we'll all need to move to low-
| income countries like Yemen, Togo, and Ethiopia, to lower our
| costs, and be most competitive for employers?
| trallnag wrote:
| Maybe the best engineers want to live in SF?
| piva00 wrote:
| Define best engineers first. I seriously doubt that hiring
| in SF will give you the best engineers, it might have one
| of the best ratios of good:bad engineers compared to many
| other places but it's not a given whatsoever that hiring
| one living in SF will be a slum dunk. I worked with many
| terrible engineers from SF over the past 20 years.
|
| Which makes the point: why would a company pay such a
| premium on hiring from a single location if, in the end, it
| can only get the best engineers from there if it pays an
| _even higher_ premium than the ridiculous salaries from the
| place? It doesn 't make much financial sense, seems to be
| mostly based on "feelings" during hiring, like yours.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > seems to be mostly based on "feelings" during hiring
|
| Silicon Valley has a local bubble economy. If overpaid
| engineers spend their money for overpriced health
| insurance, rent, mortgage or juiceros the boat stays
| afloat.
|
| But if the SV companies start sending money abroad the
| bubble would deflate...
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Maybe. But I don't think so. Many moved away during the
| pandemic, when they had the chance.
|
| Most engineers seem to life in SF out of necessity, more
| than anything else. After all, that is where most jobs are.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Not for a second.
| XiS wrote:
| What about (iii) pay a salary that would be in between absurdly
| high and absurdly low?
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| Bottom line you want the best people, which are spread around
| the globe, but within each country is a different price point
| for what you pay the best people. Bidding too high is
| wasteful to your resources, too low makes it impossible to
| compete in higher pay areas, and middle ground is the worst
| of both worlds: loose out on high pay areas, be wasteful in
| low pay areas.
|
| I hope future generations will better understand that
| accumulating wealth should not be the goal of life.
| ksplicer wrote:
| Maybe future generations will not have to worry as much
| about accumulating wealth when countries work harder to
| ensure a high quality of life in the middle class. I doubt
| that will happen for the west until they figure out how to
| relieve all the pressure the housing market is putting on
| their citizens.
| stavros wrote:
| Location-based pay means the company pays more for areas where
| the supply is priced higher. It's not about cost of living,
| because the company won't pay me more if I prefer a Ferrari
| over a Fiat.
|
| Location-based pay pays people more if they're in a market
| where they have other options, _so they don 't go to those
| other options_.
|
| In essence, if you have location-based pay, you're
| incentivizing your employees to move to an area where they'll
| have vastly more employment options than to stay with you.
| TheBigRoomXXL wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Also buying power is just not the same based on your location.
| A hundred dollars in the US and in the Netherlands will
| literally not buy the same things.
| slekker wrote:
| Another point is taxes, sometimes even though gross is lower,
| the net is higher (i.e. Belgium and Estonia)
| dmurray wrote:
| The Dutch Prime Minister gets paid EUR186k annually [0]. He has
| 13 years of tenure in this role and 22 years total in the
| politics industry [1].
|
| I'd hope a high performing, vastly experienced engineer in NL
| could aspire to that, though they might not get the same
| benefits or future opportunities.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_the_Netherla...
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rutte
| kzrdude wrote:
| A prime minister usually has quite good offers after the
| political career. Rutte has been trying to get the leader
| role for NATO, for example, which is probably a step up in
| salary (?)
| lozenge wrote:
| Is that a universal rule that experienced engineers salaries
| should be similar to heads of state? I'm not grasping the
| connection...
| FeistySkink wrote:
| Taking the CoL in NL, particularly the Randstad area, that
| salary is not outrageous. Especially, if you're a new expat
| on a single income, without any social net, and with any
| hopes of owning property, within a reasonable commute
| distance from your work.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| It's fairly universal that politicians are underpaid
| relative to the level of responsibility they hold.
|
| I'd quite like my country (UK) to be run by folk who are
| competent, rather than by only those who can afford to run
| for office without being paid for it. Yes, MPs get a lot
| more than the median income. But many people who are well-
| qualified to be MPs are also well-qualified to hold roles
| that pay at least as well if not more, and without needing
| to run for election to get the job.
| karolist wrote:
| My conclusion after reading this is never give it your all unless
| it's your own company. Burnout after working for someone else in
| tech should not happen at all. The post overall has negative
| undertones so it feels like the burnout was really bad after all
| this time, I hope the author recovers and finds joy and peace
| working on their own projects.
| imafish wrote:
| Also, from my understanding, the burnout did not seem to stem
| from the actual work but more from interpersonal relations and
| disagreements. I am certain that is not uncommon
| redrove wrote:
| Rarely was my burnout caused by actual work. It's usually
| caused by management being asshats.
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| This is what burnout is. Burnout is not caused by working,
| but by stress. The root cause of this stress is personal and
| interpersonal factors. People can burn out on very small
| workloads if the ratio of interpersonal toxicity to hours of
| work is high enough.
|
| Sometimes it looks like people are burning out because of
| extreme workloads. In these situations, I've always asked
| "why is the workload so extreme to begin with?" This gets you
| to the real source of stress.
| karolist wrote:
| It's amazing how many issues in life are caused by the act
| of thinking of these possible issues, than the issues
| themselves. My friend had horrible issues sleeping, he
| tried many things before going to psychiatrist. The
| conclusion was quick and accurate - your issues sleeping
| are caused by your fear of not falling asleep, basically
| anxiety. Anti-anxiety meds fixed it immediately.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The root is mostly stress on things that you have no
| control over.
| aiisdoomed wrote:
| Wu Tang has the best lines to describe corporate workers:
|
| "You're just worms in the worst part of the apple that's
| rotten You squirm and you turn from the right, still plottin
| All slimy cause you stay grimy, petty crimey"
|
| While some have no alternative others enjoy that kind of game
| and are part of the problem. Best stay away from such jobs,
| and undermine corporate at every turn.
| ngc248 wrote:
| Do just enough day to day. Show heroic effort here and there.
| Don't get too attached to your project, service, code etc.
| Always understand the undercurrents so that you can keep
| abreast of things.
| karolist wrote:
| Yes. To add, always try to escape, have a side project,
| dabble in opensource, wake up early and use your best brain
| capacity for that then go to work. I know it's hard but if
| you're just what you do at work then future employment
| prospects are lower than otherwise.
| ngc248 wrote:
| Exactly, every company and org has a meta that you need to
| understand. If you understand the meta and you can/want to
| play the game, then play else start searching.
| garbanz0 wrote:
| This is a great way to articulate it. People operate in
| extremes, caring too much or little
| doublerabbit wrote:
| SSsh, don't leak the secret.
| hnarn wrote:
| > never give it your all unless it's your own company
|
| It's the classic "last founder or first employee" problem. If
| you are an _employee_ at a startup, have no illusions: if
| "they"[1] don't give a shit about you now, you can be sure
| "they" will not give a shit about you later.
|
| [1]: the company is and always be an inanimate and abstract
| object, your boss and colleagues will change
| itronitron wrote:
| It's important to know what 'your all' is for the company. I
| learned early on that working more than 40 hours a week writing
| code results in my introducing bugs into the code base. So
| doing more is counter productive.
|
| Choosing to not care is much harder as we have all had years of
| education conditioning us that we need to achieve more and to
| be the best.
| leetrout wrote:
| > Choosing to not care is much harder as we have all had
| years of education conditioning us that we need to achieve
| more and to be the best.
|
| Very much so. I enjoyed reading Coddling of the American Mind
| as well. Not 1:1 but related to the conditioning, lack of
| maturity, and in some cases, learned helplessness.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Regarding gitlab performance:
|
| I moved from using bitbucket, first own servers and later SaaS to
| gitlab.com SaaS in early 2018.
|
| I cannot say anything else than gitlab performance and UI being
| much better. I was permanently complaining about bitbucket, but
| very happy with gitlab most of the time. They had rather frequent
| partial outages, but resolution was always quick.
|
| Maybe starting 1 year ago I noticed gitlab.com reponse times
| going down. It's not that things hang or are super slow, but they
| seem to consistently take 2 seconds more than what they used to.
| (The number is a complete guess, I have no measurements either
| before or after.) It's still usable, but no longer the pleasant
| experience it used to be.
| usr1106 wrote:
| And following up to myself:
|
| Being able to work from where I happen to live and I have
| thought about whether I would like to work for them.
|
| That it's a good product would certainly be a motivation.
| However, frequent incidents being resolved fast must be
| incredibly stressful for the staff. I prefer to stay where we
| make heavy releases only a few times a year for regulatory
| reasons. (Even though stress levels can raise until the last MR
| for the release has been merged.)
| sph wrote:
| Great retrospective, and apart from the personal burnout story,
| could be titled "what happens to a startup when managers start to
| run the show"
| hassmo wrote:
| As opposed to what, engineers running the show?
| DandyDev wrote:
| I read this meme so often on HN, so I genuinely want to know:
| how do you organize work and get people to act on a common
| vision if there are no managers?
|
| I think people mistake "manager" as being people without tech
| skills. I think a tech company should have managers to create
| alignment and those managers should spend part of their time
| "managing" and part of their time still honing their tech
| skills.
| gtirloni wrote:
| In my experience, people will use "managers" as a proxy for
| complaining about all the other things they don't like.
|
| Of course clueless managers and extreme bureaucracy will
| destroy a company, but I very often see engineers that just
| want to do X and ignore everything around it as if they were
| working in a isolated environment. It's often the managers
| calling these engineers back to reality, which creates
| tension.
| sph wrote:
| The issue is you literally cannot be an engineer if you don't
| know how to build things.
|
| On the other hand, there are plenty of managers that do not
| know how to manage people, that do not even know what is
| expected of them. Should they optimize for cost? For
| productivity? For employee happiness?
|
| Competent managers are a minority. They tend to rise quickly,
| leaving the inept ones to run the day-to-day.
| jumploops wrote:
| > The time it takes to deploy code is vital to the success of an
| organization
|
| I've found this to be one of the most important metrics (if not
| the most important) for maintaining developer velocity as a
| startup scales.
|
| Context switching is one of the most expensive operations in a
| developer's day-to-day work, and also one of the most ignored.
|
| Managers love to build team schedules around their personal
| schedules, but this is often disruptive to ICs' "maker
| schedules."
|
| Many orgs identify this and focus on the scheduling cost w.r.t.
| context switching, but the build-to-deploy time is equally (if
| not more) important for developer ICs.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I recently spent a few minutes applying to a Gitlab position,
| only to get a link to some Gitlab wiki explaining the list of EU
| countries they hire at is limited, and mine isn't among them. I
| wish whoever posted the ad had spent a few seconds copying and
| pasting that list from their wiki.
| csallen wrote:
| _> No matter how you try to spin this, it 's by all accounts an
| act of discrimination to pay one person less than another purely
| based on where they live._.
|
| Companies aren't gods charged with dispensing fair wages to us
| mortals. They are participants in the capitalist market.
|
| And in that market, all prices are a matter of negotiation.
|
| In any transaction, the buyer wants to pay as little as possible,
| and the seller wants to earn as much as possible. This isn't evil
| or greedy. It's a basic incentive that comes from the fact that
| people/companies/literally everyone prefers to have more money
| than less money.
|
| Thus, your company wants to pay you as little money as possible,
| and you want them to pay you as much as possible. The same is
| true when the roles are reversed and you're the one in the buyer
| position. For example, when you're shopping, you want to pay as
| low a price as possible, and the seller wants to charge as high a
| price as possible.
|
| Again, _all_ prices are a matter of negotiation..
|
| Power in a negotiation comes down to your BATNA, i.e. your best
| alternative if negotiation fails. Put simply, whoever cares the
| least has the most power.
|
| In a capitalist market, that BATNA for the buyer is the next
| cheapest option. The next furniture store that's selling this
| couch for cheaper. The next adequately qualified software
| engineer in the Bay Area who's selling their services for
| cheaper. And the BATNA for the seller is obviously the next most
| generous spender. The customer who's willing to pay a little
| more. The company that's willing to pay higher salaries.
|
| If it sounds like I'm conflating two concepts by comparing
| customers with employers, and businesses with employees, it's
| because you've been brainwashed into thinking these things are
| different. They're not.
|
| When money changes hands, whoever receives it is the business.
| Whoever pays it is the customer.
|
| That means, in the relationship between you and your employer,
| _you_ are the business selling a service, and _they_ are a
| customer paying for your service. Your salary is just a price.
| Your resume was an advertisement. Posting it everywhere was
| marketing. Interviewing was your sales pitch. As an employee,
| _you are a business._ (Someone just came along and renamed all
| the terms to confuse you.)
|
| Which raises the question: Why on earth would your customer
| voluntarily pay a _higher_ price than they need to? If all the
| stores in your area are cheap, why would they pay you more for
| your services than your neighbor is asking for?
|
| When you travel to a country cheaper than yours, do you pay every
| restaurant, store, and taxi driver the same way you would at
| home?
|
| No, you don't. Because that would be foolish. You pay local
| rates, which are less.
|
| That's the same thing companies are doing when they pay lower
| salaries in cheaper areas.
| zokier wrote:
| If businesses were perfectly rational economic actors then all
| bay area/sv devs would be out of jobs.
|
| > When you travel to a country cheaper than yours, do you pay
| every restaurant, store, and taxi driver the same way you would
| at home?
|
| > No, you don't. Because that would be foolish. You pay local
| rates, which are less.
|
| But if you could magically teleport to store or restaurant
| anywhere in the world, would you pay high prices to go to SV
| restaurant or store? No, that would also be foolish.
|
| So local prices make sense of physical businesses because
| people pay premium for convenient access, for not needing to
| fly half-way across the world to do your groceries or whatever.
| But that same does not apply to full-remote developers; the
| work(/value) is getting delivered to the business all the same
| regardless where the employee happens to be physically sitting.
| qznc wrote:
| If the work/value delivered would be the same, then all
| software development would have migrated to Vietnam already.
| For some reason, companies think it is important that some
| developers are physically in Silicon Valley and they pay a
| lot to get that.
|
| Is it about language and timezone barriers? No, because there
| are plenty of alternatives in the US as well.
| zokier wrote:
| If physical location is significant then it's not full
| remote position.
|
| Beyond that, this is not just about sv vs rest of world,
| but about doing per-location adjustment based on local
| economic conditions. And it is pretty difficult to argue
| that the value of a developer to business is in anyway
| linked to their cost of living
| cousin_it wrote:
| So, he joined as employee #28 reporting directly to the CEO, then
| gradually more managers were slotted in above him, then one of
| the managers put him on a PEP, then he got the hint and left. I
| wanna say this story is pretty standard, and probably a big part
| of the reason why people in big companies often don't do great
| things.
|
| Heck, even if you start a project within a company and it gets
| successful, the company can just slot in people above you, so you
| become employee #n in a project that you started, and then these
| people can say you underperform and so on.
| spense wrote:
| are you suggesting a better way?
| nip wrote:
| Management is mostly needed for two things [*]:
|
| - Organising the work and steering it in the right direction
|
| - Ensuring that people work well together, help them grow,
| deal with "people problems"
|
| If and when both of the above is achieved without a person
| holding the title "Manager", you don't need them.
|
| This can be achieved by hiring 51%ers for example [1] and by
| actively monitoring the health of your organisation.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39333921
|
| [1-1] https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Table-Transforming-
| Hospitalit...
|
| [*] YMMV: the hardest problem in any organisation is the
| "people" aspect, there's no silver bullet.
|
| EDIT: Added the link to my other comment about 51%ers
| higeorge13 wrote:
| 51%ers?
| nip wrote:
| I hope I'm not violating any copyrights - page 143 of
| Setting the Table from Danny Meyer [1]
|
| > To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills.
| I've learned that we need to hire employees with these
| skills if we're to be champions at the team sport of
| hospitality.They are:
|
| 1. Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness,
| and a sense that the glass is always at least half full)
|
| 2. Intelligence (not just "smarts" but rather an
| insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
|
| 3. Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well
| as it can possibly be done)
|
| 4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to
| how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
|
| 5. Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what
| makes you tick and a natural inclination to be
| accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and
| superb judgment)
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Setting-Table-Transforming-
| Hospitalit...
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Sounds like a combination of open doors and corporate
| mumbo jumbo to me.
| nip wrote:
| I'm sorry you feel that way
|
| This description helped me put words on the type of
| people I enjoy working with
| eddyg wrote:
| Exactly! I've never been able to express a succinct list
| of why some teams and/or companies feel better than
| others, but "51%ers" explains it perfectly.
| DANmode wrote:
| Not a manager, right?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| For future reference, you are certainly not violating US
| copyright law, because quoting a few sentences from a
| book falls under fair use.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
| nip wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| That's why I love HN so much: a helpful answer with a
| source to boot!
| nightlyherb wrote:
| I was curious why the author decided to call them "51
| percenters." A google search of the term suggests that
| the skills of this group of employees are divided by 51%
| hospitality and 49% technical excellence. Please feel
| free to correct me if there is anything wrong in my
| interpretation.
| mkl wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=51+percenter&ia=web
|
| Someone "whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional
| hospitality and technical excellence" [1]. Seems quite
| bizarre to me to define it so precisely. Even if skills
| were measurable in such a way, how many people will be
| exactly 51% emotional hospitality, and why is 52% or 50%
| not suitable?
|
| [1] https://www.nrn.com/corporate/meyer-51-percenters-
| have-five-...
| chasd00 wrote:
| i think the implication is if a 51%'er has to decide
| between technical excellence and emotional hospitality
| then, all other things equal, they will use emotional
| hospitality since that's the majority of their skills
| (51%). It sounds like preferring to hold a hand vs
| rejecting incompetence. I don't really agree, i get not
| being jerk is important but i would flip it to 51%
| technical excellence 49% emotional hospitality.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Do you have any practical experience with companies running
| as it's described in this motivational book?
|
| Many of those books are selling well because they are well
| written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but
| if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the
| reality can be quite different.
| nip wrote:
| > Do you have any practical experience with companies
| running as it's described in this motivational book?
|
| I do not have experience running it at a company level,
| but at a team level (I have been an engineering lead in
| two companies for the last 6 years).
|
| From all the books I've read (I read a lot), this is the
| one that was most "spot-on" about treating other humans
| and making them feel valued and therefore building a team
| with strong bonds.
|
| > Many of those books are selling well because they are
| well written and say exactly what reader thinks might
| work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the
| author, the reality can be quite different.
|
| Absolutely agree.
|
| In my experience I resonate most with any books when I
| have already, unbeknownst to me, been applying what they
| preach (which has been the case with Setting the table
| that I'm currently in the process of finishing).
|
| I believe that it requires a lot of introspection to be
| able to apply new knowledge (ie, if you haven't thought
| about it or experienced it before reading about it)
|
| EDIT: formatting
| soneca wrote:
| What is a 51%er?
| nip wrote:
| I updated my comment once I was home (and able to get the
| exact definition from the book):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39333921
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's what I like about "agile roles" like Product Owner
| or Scrum Master, they take a slice of traditional manager's
| responsibilities, but they don't have any reporting
| authority over other workers. My EM has like 30 direct
| reports and it works fine because he doesn't really have
| anything to do with our day to day work.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| 30 direct reports? And doesn't have to do anything with
| your day to day job?
|
| So what is his job then?
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Hiring, performance evaluation, vacation approval, team
| direction/strategy, managing up etc.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I'm not sure how you can evaluate 30 people you don't
| interact with closely.
|
| NIMS, the National Incident Management System, talks of
| ICs having between 3-7 direct reports, when there is a
| need to be connected to what they are doing, because
| beyond that, you can't reconcile things easily.
| xorcist wrote:
| Those semi-managerial roles are the biggest problem with
| that model, in my opinion. Sure, it works as long as
| everything is peachy. But as soon as there are any _real_
| conflicts of interest, it will show who is the real
| manager. And it 's not the product owner or scrum master.
|
| With authority comes responsibility for your actions.
| Without responsibility, no authority. The product manager
| is a manager in name only, and product owner even less
| so.
|
| That doesn't mean you can't have several direct reports.
| The classic matrix organization for example. But it means
| semi-managers without real responsibility have no real
| mandate for doing a good job at the slightest hint of
| trouble.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > But as soon as there are any real conflicts of
| interest, it will show who is the real manager. And it's
| not the product owner or scrum master.
|
| If there's a conflict of interest, it needs to be
| discussed based on merit, not based on who has the bigger
| authority.
|
| If there's no agreement, it needs to be escalated to
| somebody who has the authority (manager). But IME this
| doesn't happen very often.
|
| I like this model, because the default position is that
| none of the engineering, product, process is the
| "master", so you need to negotiate. If one of the roles
| also has reporting authority, that automatically skews
| the decision making towards yielding to them.
| eddyg wrote:
| Thanks so much for the "51%ers" reference!
|
| That list of "skills" is _spot on_. I also especially like
| his use of the term _"skunking"_ to describe how somebody's
| personal opinions /problems/issues impact the rest of the
| team. "51%ers" are exactly the kind of people I want to
| work with.
| itronitron wrote:
| A better approach is to have separate career tracks for
| 'people' managers and 'project' managers.
|
| People managers do the performance evaluations and various HR
| administrative tasks (signing time cards, hiring, firing,
| etc.) but they rely on feedback from their group which are
| both individual contributors and project managers.
|
| Project managers lead the projects and have to select/attract
| the right combination of individual contributors to their
| project if they want it to succeed.
|
| A project that 'gets more management' will usually have to
| justify the addition of PMs from a cost-benefit perspective.
| And a project that is overburdened with management types will
| usually see the ICs migrate to other projects in order to
| improve their impact.
|
| All this happens organically, so individual contributors are
| empowered instead of being disenfranchised through
| organizational changes.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That sounds like basically matrix management which has many
| well documented issues. The biggest one in my experience is
| that the people managers need to be themselves judged on
| some rubric. If that rubric is success of projects then it
| tangentially aligns with business goals. If it's something
| else or they don't have power over projects then they are
| encouraged to play constant politics.
| itronitron wrote:
| The general rubric should be that their group is
| performing well. Depending on the organization that could
| mean a number of different things.
|
| >> If it's something else or they don't have power over
| projects then they are encouraged to play constant
| politics.
|
| Why would they need to play constant politics if they
| don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated
| by the same things.
| marcinzm wrote:
| > Why would they need to play constant politics if they
| don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated
| by the same things.
|
| They do have power over the projects. Being able to PIP
| someone is power over everything that person does
| including which projects they work on. Including which
| projects no one works on. Except it's not their direct
| power which means to leverage it they need to play
| politics. Adding layers doesn't remove that power but
| simply increases the amount of politics they play to make
| up for it.
| itronitron wrote:
| The goal with the matrix management is to distribute the
| risk. If your people manager puts you on a PIP then at
| least your project managers will have some ability to
| push back on that.
|
| But there is no good reason for the People manager to
| care anything about what projects have people working on
| them. If they start to care about _which_ projects are
| successful instead of _all_ projects are successful then
| they 're not a good fit for the job. And yes I have
| experienced that, as well as it's opposite.
| mawadev wrote:
| I have that at the current company I work at. Some manager
| started a successful project with me and the management is too
| greedy and busy trying to replace me and the manager by
| bringing in politics, social dilemma and putting layers of
| management between everyone. Truly a sad state to be in. I
| learned my lesson as to why you should never truly care about
| what you do at work. Feels like the project will rather go
| belly up and disintegrate because of that.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Why haven't you moved on?
| flir wrote:
| Not my circus, not my monkeys.
|
| Words to live by.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| You should care about the work you do. Just remember who you
| are doing it for. They own the work they being the company.
| If the company wants to reward incompetent kleptocrats then I
| salute them as long as I get PAID the second they stops
| happening they can with the greatest of respect get f'd. then
| you just take your trade and apply it somewhere else having
| learned expensive lessons they paid for about what worked.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I recognize the feeling of shouting into the void trying to get
| people to care about something.
|
| You'll be telling, showing, raw stats, massaged stats, appeals
| to authority, what have you, but if the only thing the
| directors care about is features, it's all for nothing.
|
| After 3 years it finally became a problem because they noticed
| that releases kept failing, but I don't think it had anything
| to do with me so much as someone typing 'how to stop my
| releases failing' into Google.
|
| I don't know how to solve that, as I'm going through the same
| thing again now (with a different subject).
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I thought it was a great write up of the lifecycle of a
| successful startup. If you stick around you get to see a lot of
| change. Some positive some negative. Of course at 1000+ people
| you can't have everyone reporting to the CEO
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Heck, even if you start a project within a company and it
| gets successful, the company can just slot in people above you,
| so you become employee #n in a project that you started, and
| then these people can say you underperform and so on.m
|
| The trouble with these stories is that they're n=1 anecdotes
| and we only get one side of the story.
|
| There's an implicit claim in many comments here that we need to
| assume that the employee was actually a higher performer,
| didn't need managers, didn't deserve a PEP and so on. That's
| understandable given that we tend to put ourselves in the shoes
| of the person writing a piece and being anti-corporate is
| always popular on HN.
|
| However, those aren't safe assumptions in cases like this. I've
| worked at a couple early stage startups that acquired early
| employees who couldn't (or wouldn't) grow with their role and
| the company. It's common to keep early employees around out of
| respect for their past work, a belief that they hold difficult
| to replace historical knowledge, or simply because they're well
| connected to founders and other early employees who have grown
| into leadership positions.
|
| But in reality, simply being an early employee and being
| involved with early important projects doesn't necessarily mean
| that person is the best person for the job or even a good fit
| for continuing to do it. Some of the early stage employees I
| worked with were great at cobbling something together from
| scraps and keeping it functional with a collection of cron jobs
| and manual interventions, but their operating style doesn't
| work at a bigger company at all. If they can't adapt and change
| or they become disgruntled about having to work on things the
| way you have to at a bigger company, they start to become more
| detriment than help. That's just one example of many different
| potential failure modes of early employees as companies grow
| that we don't like to talk about.
|
| > I wanna say this story is pretty standard, and probably a big
| part of the reason why people in big companies often don't do
| great things.
|
| It's "standard" in the sense that every early company has a
| number of early employees who don't grow with it, but it's not
| the only or even a common fate. GitLab has plenty of employees
| who have been there for a long time, but you're not hearing
| about them from disgruntled blog posts. Consider the selection
| bias when reading this.
|
| As for the claim that they can't do "great things": I've used
| GitLab for a very long time and I disagree. The product
| continues to evolve. It's not a stagnant product at all.
| metricspaces wrote:
| 'He worked remote' thought popped into my head. He wasn't
| there to "grow into leadership role" with the rest of the
| early employees. I do agree with your read of the situation.
|
| btw, that restaurant in Amsterdam is apparently the go to
| place for startups. I am certain I sat in one of those chairs
| (was this on 2nd floor facing the canal?) with another fabled
| startup.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 'He worked remote' thought popped into my head. He wasn't
| there to "grow into leadership role" with the rest of the
| early employees.
|
| GitLab is fully remote. Everyone works remote, including
| leadership.
| rzzzt wrote:
| It's hard to do if the company is still small. Too many
| lead cooks leaves the kitchen unmanned.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| I largely agree, especially with the sentiment that there are
| two sides to any story.
|
| I think one angle I'll nitpick though is this doesn't have to
| be related to whether or not the employee was a high
| performer or had particular leadership needs or whether
| they're adaptable to the current maturity level of the org.
| There can and likely are many other elements such as whether
| the manager/employee even get along, or agree on direction,
| strategy, problems, etc.
|
| And the difficulty is, these types of issues can often show
| up as performance issues. In lots of cases, is the
| performance issue the employees fault or the leaders.
|
| In my anecdotal experience where a job went from the best
| role I ever had to one of the worst happened over a very
| short week or two with the change in a manager. And I think
| to the point you're making, when I resigned I outright
| said... each of us is going to blame the other for my
| departure. The hard truth is the answer is likely if either
| of us had been different people I'd still be in that role
| doing work I really enjoyed, but in that particular
| leader/follower relationship we simply didn't get along well
| at all.
|
| If I ever did a what it was like or why I left post, I'd
| probably have plenty of arguments for my side, because I
| think to your point, I'll be the hero in my own story.
| throwboatyface wrote:
| My read is that he was one of those early employees that is a
| huge pain to manage. They want to do what they think is fun and
| interesting and they have strong opinions about shit that is
| ultimately inconsequential. It's a nightmare to manage an IC
| who is friends with the CEO and doesn't think you're making the
| right choices. But ultimately they don't accept accountability
| for any decisions, they just move bop around and cause
| problems.
|
| One tell-tale sign is endpoint security and using his own
| device. It's the kind of permissive cultural thing that does
| not scale because of compliance issues and developer
| productivity overhead. But it's very hard to wrench these long-
| time devs away from their preferred Linux distribution which
| requires conditional build stuff everywhere to support. Use a
| work computer for work, let them monitor the updates and stuff,
| as long as they're not using the webcam to record you who
| cares?
|
| The database backup story - my guy you were on the database
| team. Backing up the databases is job 1. You can't just
| passive-voice away "oh there were no backups". But of course
| he's more interested in fighting about sharding architecture
| than actually keeping the site running day-to-day.
|
| His big takeaway is that Gitlab didn't spend enough time on
| performance for their hosted offering which was a huge money
| loser. Just because he thinks performance stuff is fun to do,
| if the hosted offering is a money pit of course they're not
| throwing more resources at it. You have to make an actual
| business case for why your thing is more important and makes
| money more than another project. You don't just engineer in a
| vacuum for the fun of it.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Who makes more career? The guy bullshitting about
| architecture or the guy ensuring stuff works that nobody
| notices even what he's doing?
| grogenaut wrote:
| The dev who makes shit work and and tracks measures the ops
| gains / reduced headcount needs and reports their impact up
| the chain. Who also gives talks on how everyone can make
| their stuff run as simple as they do.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You can give talks without do anything. That works just
| as well.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| Your read lines up with another point in the article that I
| found to be stated in strangely absolute terms:
|
| > you need to be able to deploy your code fast, i.e. within
| at most an hour of pushing the changes to whatever
| branch/tag/thing you deploy from.
|
| This sweeps under the rug all of the potential issues with
| fast deploys. I guess it depends on the product. I work on a
| managed database service, and one category of potential bug
| is that we accidentally delete or corrupt customer data. We
| have to be much more careful and can't just deploy what was
| submitted to mainline in the last hour without doing
| significant regression and performance testing.
|
| But anyway essentially the main reason they give for fast
| deploys is:
|
| > being able to see your changes live is nice because you
| actually get to see and make use of your work.
|
| I think this is true. But, it lines up with this negative
| interpretation of this article. The author seems to
| prioritize themselves over the health of the product they're
| working on.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Such an interesting article because there are two main
| reasons I never thought to apply at GitLab:
|
| * Even in the USA the col based pay made them non competitive
| compared to what I could get elsewhere.
|
| * Incidents like the database backups, and others, lead me to
| believe they weren't executing at a high enough level.
| cousin_it wrote:
| Sure, you could argue such people are needed only at the
| early stages of a company, and counterproductive when the
| company gets bigger. But I don't buy that. Why then are big
| companies asking all the time: "Oh, where's our internal
| startup spirit? How can we bring it back?" Right after firing
| the people who encapsulated that spirit, for being "hard to
| manage".
| SheddingPattern wrote:
| Because sometimes all they're after is for slideware on
| GenAI. The people they fired encapsulated a spirit of
| innovation that doesn't fit the operating model and
| therefore is of no value to them.
| depereo wrote:
| I think this trend to talk about startup practices in large
| orgs is more executive nostalgia and a complaint about all
| the processes put in place to catch mistakes that have been
| made before.
|
| The same people as developers would be pursuing rewrites of
| rock-solid 20+ year mature software projects because
| there's a trendy framework.
|
| Large organizations don't have 'startup spirit' because
| 'startup' companies _fail_. Employees of large mature orgs
| with 6000 employees didn 't sign on to a company that's got
| a good chance of not existing next quarter. They're not
| taking massive risks and throwing halfbaked features into a
| brand new product with 1 client hoping to get bought by
| facebook or maybe an insurance company.
|
| If those big companies are really complaining about not
| having startup spirit maybe they should provide an exit for
| the VCs and aquihire (briefly because the engineers will
| all leave asap) a startup!
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| I can assure you that me being a pain to manage wasn't the
| problem, nor was it ever brought up. In fact, the only
| negative/improve-upon-this-thing kind of feedback I got once
| or twice was to adjust my communication style to be less
| blunt/harsh, something I agreed with and did end up improving
| upon.
|
| I can also guarantee you that the work I did very much did
| good work instead of "cause problems". Feel free to ask
| anybody that worked at GitLab during the same time (or is
| still there) and see for yourself :)
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| From my own experience as very early employee, I know how it
| feels, to have them slot in more leads and managers above you
| and step by step losing the mechanisms, that enabled you to be
| very effective early on, when you just got things done. Later
| every step needs to go through some slotted in manager
| position, making sure you don't work on something "wrong", no
| matter how much your early ideas and contributions enablef the
| company to rise in the first place.
|
| I wonder if this is what is behind years old stale issues of
| gitlab, especially regarding Gitlab CI. From the outside you
| get the impression, that they completely lost ability to build
| great things, since they do not seem to care to fix years old
| bugs that still come up again and again.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I've seen some recent data on the salaries they're offering in my
| area. I like Gitlab but wouldn't be prepared to make those kinds
| of sacrifices to apply there.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > This then lead to the discovery that we didn't have any backups
| as a result of the system not working for a long time, as well as
| the system meant to notify us of any backup errors not working
| either.
|
| This seems to be entirely normal for startups. I've asked about
| it during interviews.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> This seems to be entirely normal for startups_
|
| I have trouble understanding this.
|
| Do these startups consciously decide not to have backups (for
| time/money reasons perhaps)? It makes no sense to me.
|
| I've worked at some startups and most senior engineers know
| what's necessary to keep production systems running reliably.
| That includes monitoring and backups.
|
| Could it be that this is entirely normal for startup _with less
| experienced engineers doing things for the first time_?
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Terrible managers are the bane of our industry. OTOH, many
| startups owe their existence to their founders having had to deal
| with terrible managers in their previous jobs. The story of the
| traitorous eight and Fairchild semiconductors comes to mind. In
| my own life, if it weren't for getting a non-technical but
| political and vindictive manager in my last job, I probably
| wouldn't have had the motivation to start my own startup. In
| hindsight, I wish I'd been assigned a manager as bad as the last
| one I had, earlier in my career. :)
| mawadev wrote:
| I wish you could flag companies that have toxic management
| without compromising your privacy or getting outright censored.
| It would also be great to find companies that truly need your
| skills, so you can hop more easily without the HR overhead.
| pooper wrote:
| Microsoft has toxic management but it also has M1 who are
| just trying to navigate the maze and do the right thing. It
| is never straightforward like this.
| pain2022 wrote:
| What is M1?
| pooper wrote:
| Lowest level manager
| notpachet wrote:
| You either quit young, or live long enough to see yourself
| become M2.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| Besides toxicity, i believe the main issue of some bad
| management is uselessness. Perhaps it leads to toxic
| situations, but the root cause is that they don't add value
| to anything in the org.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| It's worse than not adding any value to the org. These
| people actively undermine value in the org by depleting
| their direct reports' morale. OTOH, any organisation that
| tolerates and turns a blind eye towards such subterfuge,
| perhaps deserves it.
| blueboo wrote:
| "People don't leave bad companies, they leave bad managers",
| an aphorism that ringers truer with every departure I
| observe.
|
| (But I also see how the incentives of the org can erode at
| the energy put into cultivating management skills and
| prioritisation of effective management work.)
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I wish the 'More people doesn't equal better results' would be
| put into every manager door and desk. I would also add more
| results to the quote to make it even more accurate.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >For example, sharding is useful if writes heavily outnumber
| reads
|
| If you distribute your data carefully and don't need to do joins
| across shards, I fail to see how sharding doesn't help with
| reads.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| It adds a huge amount of complexity due to those limitations,
| and unlike writes, you can handle reads off of read replicas,
| as they did.
| ahofmann wrote:
| Read replicas are better suited for this situation and way less
| complicated. And you said it yourself: you need to be careful
| and you loose the ability to do joins.
| evanelias wrote:
| Totally agree. Overall the author's arguments against sharding
| seem short-sighted, at best.
|
| All large successful user-generated content applications
| eventually need to shard, and most of them are read-heavy just
| like gitlab.com. The two primary motivators for sharding in
| this case are database size and blast radius, rather than
| needing to scale writes.
|
| For database size, even if your DB still can fit on one beefy
| server, operational activities like backup/restore and new
| replica cloning take an increasingly long time. This in turn
| becomes a major risk to the business -- for example he even
| discusses how long the restore took when he had to restore the
| prod DB from the staging DB.
|
| For blast radius, it's the ability to have outages (e.g.
| hardware failure) only affect a small subset of users. Or for a
| more extreme situation, the massive difference between "I
| accidentally dropped _the_ database " and "I accidentally
| dropped _a_ database ".
|
| Sharding does indeed add terrible complexity to the application
| as well as operations. But in any case, _eventually_ the data
| size motivator becomes unavoidable for user generated content:
| you eventually must shard, and the longer you wait, the more
| difficult it will become.
| dalyons wrote:
| Remember most of the business is on prem installs .
| Introducing the huge complexity of sharding to the codebase
| would have benefited these installs approximately zero.
| evanelias wrote:
| The existence and uptime of gitlab.com is essential to the
| company's customer acquisition. If gitlab.com goes offline
| for an extended period of time (due to database size issues
| or anything else), it's a huge hit to the reputation of
| their brand. This will directly affect their bottom line
| even if it isn't the main direct source of their revenue.
|
| And again, what's the alternative? If you offer a
| successful user-generated content platform, _eventually you
| must shard_. User-generated content only grows over time,
| it never shrinks, and at some point you exceed the maximum
| amount of storage that can be attached to a single server.
| And long before that point, you encounter horrendous
| operational headaches, such as full backups taking longer
| than 24 hours to make (let alone restore from).
|
| It's also conceivably possible that their largest on-prem
| customers would be interested in sharding their self-hosted
| installations, so theoretically this could be a valuable
| high-cost enterprise feature.
| dalyons wrote:
| I somewhat agree with what you're saying, but it still
| really depends. On growth rate in users and content,
| access patterns, UGC incremental size etc. Machines keep
| getting bigger, if your growth rate is low/moderate you
| might never reach storage limits. Or might theoretically
| reach them in 5+ years in which case many other things
| could change before then, in tech or the business. The
| alternative (to expensive front loaded investment in
| sharding) is just not doing it, until you have to,
| because its likely you might never actually have to.
|
| Of course if you're growing like a popular B2C ala early
| facebook or whatever, yes you have to, asap, otherwise
| you'll die. That probably isnt the case for companies
| like gitlab.
|
| Do your realistic growth projections, and your
| cost/benefit analysis, and pick the cheapest thing you
| can get away with.
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| Every time we'd look into this, we'd look into the challenges
| we'd have to face and see if they changed since last time. One
| of the problems GitLab faces is that it JOINs all over the
| place. In addition, while most data can be shared on a
| group/namespace basis, GitLab also does a bunch of cross-group
| queries in frequently accessed pages.
|
| To put it differently, try to think of an application that does
| all the things you _don't_ want to be doing if you're going to
| (or want to) shard. Then imagine that that's basically GitLab,
| coupled with the load patterns simply not justifying it.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >A SaaS and self-hosting don't go well together
|
| There are countless counterexamples.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >In spite of all this, I'm not sure what alternative I would
| recommend instead of the combination of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
| Languages such as Go, Rust or Node.js might be more efficient
| than Ruby, but none have a framework as capable as Ruby on Rails.
|
| Go would be a sensible choice.
|
| Both .NET and Java have very good frameworks and are good choices
| for large scale development.
|
| Rails is nice for small to medium websites, but for large
| microservice based apps will present some issues.
| gls2ro wrote:
| Github, Gitlab and Shopify are built with Ruby on Rails. That
| seems big enough for me.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Location based salaries are discriminatory
|
| How is that true? If a company pays $30k monthly in Bay Area and
| $10k in Netherlands, what should the unique, non discriminatory
| wage should be? $30k or $10k?
| michaelt wrote:
| Some people believe that every employee's productivity and
| contribution to value can be precisely quantified, and fairly
| split between employer and employee.
|
| I've always been sceptical of this myself - how do you value
| that code review where I stopped a junior engineer's XSS
| getting into production? Incredible value? Or 10 minutes of
| work?
| raccoonDivider wrote:
| Always wondered that. It means everyone's salary is determined
| by the highest-cost of living area you want to hire from.
| Doesn't really make any sense seen that way.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Reading this was quite refreshing, as I realized I am not the
| worst developer out there.
| ahofmann wrote:
| Do you think that the author is a bad developer? Why?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| No, I don't think the author is a bad developer. I was
| thinking more at the general situation at Gitlab.
| tovarisch wrote:
| Everywhere I've worked there's always been one burnout engineer
| like this who doesn't really know what anyone else does or why
| but is absolutely convinced that everyone else except for him is
| an irredeemable moron.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Loved this read.
|
| One part didn't resonate with me though:
|
| > _In practice this lead to GitLab building many features over
| the years that just weren 't useful: a serverless platform nobody
| asked for and that was ultimately killed off, support for
| managing Kubernetes clusters that didn't work for three weeks
| without anybody noticing, a chatops solution we had to build on
| top of our CI offering (thus introducing significant latency)
| instead of using existing solutions, or a requirements management
| feature that only supported creating and viewing data (not even
| updating or deleting); these are just a few examples from recent
| years._
|
| If my company ever grows to be as successful as Gitlab, I'm going
| to much more worried about innovation grinding to a halt than
| about people trying stuff that doesn't work, or trying stuff the
| wrong way. It's so much easier to shoot an idea down than to
| believe in it long enough for it to have a chance. I strongly
| agree with the author about making engineers be the decision
| makers on how to build out an engineering product, but I'm not
| convinced that this list of failed ideas is a bad sign at all.
| pgeorgi wrote:
| It's a matter of focus: Having some time to tinker and try out
| stuff that might just fail is great. If it consumes so much
| development time that the must-haves deteoriate, you let down
| your customers.
| aragilar wrote:
| I think it's less innovation and more failing to understand the
| requirements (i.e. only implementing half of what's needed, and
| then moving to the next thing). E.g. adding labels to gmail,
| but no way to have filters, so you have to manually apply them.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, some of Gitlab's features are hilariously half assed.
| Of the 'one crud form but missing the delete and update part'
| level.
| ehmc wrote:
| This part of the article resonated with me, as I used to work
| as a tech lead for a very similar startup to Gitlab. We were
| always pushed to "ship MVP's" and "move fast and break things"
| by product and design, which always resulted in a half-broken
| features getting pushed to production and left there once the
| sprint was over. This also led to a constant inexorable growth
| of tech debt, that made me feel like we'd never be able to get
| things remotely stable in our corner of the product. I've since
| come to the conclusion that it's much better to build small,
| flexible, feature-complete systems that can be used for
| multiple iterations of ideas.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| If the failed ideas aren't then purged, then they become
| problems. And maybe they cause problems when implementing them
| too.
| jatins wrote:
| Story of bad management aside, this was also a highlight for me
| on the risks of early stage startup even when the startup goes
| big
|
| > In my case the amount of taxes would be so high I wouldn't be
| able to afford it, forcing me to wait until GitLab went public
|
| I have seen a bunch of cases where people really want to leave
| the company but can't due to short exercise windows and taxes
| that come along with exercise.
|
| One of the companies I know had to partner with a lender just so
| that their employees could exercise stocks. So now if the company
| IPOs you owe the lender a load compounding at 15%
|
| Thankfully many newer companies seem to be going towards 10 year
| exercise windows, but they are still a minority
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| > Thankfully many newer companies seem to be going towards 10
| year exercise windows, but they are still a minority
|
| I'm actually a bit on the fence for the 10 year exercise
| window, as I'm not sure it's always a benefit. As I understand
| it, startup exits timelines are on an upward trend, so in 10
| years will the average exit still be below 10 years, and even
| then are you working for a company that meets the average
| timeline. Then, from a taxation perspective, if you do want to
| exercise before the 10 year expiry, if it's cost prohibitive
| now, it should be bankrupting after a few more investment
| rounds and increases to the 409A valuation.
|
| So I'm curious if there is a side effect here that the 10 year
| exercise window actually leads to many more shares becoming
| even more cost prohibitive to exercise right before the company
| reaches a liquidity event and as such not exercised (if you're
| in the early stage employee group).
| intellectronica wrote:
| This is an interesting read and I am grateful for the author
| sharing their experience.
|
| One thing that I could pick up is that the author is somewhat
| bitter about their experience, but isn't really taking
| responsibility for their own contribution to getting into the
| situation.
|
| At most companies that are not evil and not exceptionally
| dysfunctional (and I presume GitLab is neither) getting to a
| state where one is put on a PEP/PIP is preceded by a longer
| period where they had indications that they are not performing in
| accordance with what is expected of them. Also, at most larger
| companies consistently "meeting expectations" is not hard, if
| you're in a role you're skilled for (which it sounds like the
| author was) and willing to receive the explicit and implicit
| signals from your environment, especially the hierarchy above
| you, and adjust.
|
| Being able to make these adjustments and work effectively as part
| of a complex environment is an important part of working at a
| larger company. Not taking responsibility for the need to learn
| how this system works and adjust accordingly is counter-
| productive. It sounds like the author realised that rather late.
| Perhaps they could have had a better experience if they figured
| that out earlier.
| kunley wrote:
| Very interesting to read as a former employee of a company being
| Gitlab's customer, self-hosting EE production and solving
| everyday problems, with their support also, during the described
| years
| tnolet wrote:
| Interesting that the OP puts "caring about performance" so high
| where he admits that it had very little impact on business
| results.
|
| If the data shows it does not matter for success of the company,
| why care so much and stress it is important?
| qznc wrote:
| My guess for a reason would be that developers rarely care for
| business results. The technical challenge of scalability looks
| more like fun than fixing yet another enterprise permission
| issue.
| eadmund wrote:
| > A mistake GitLab made, and continued to make when I left, was
| not caring enough about scalability. Yes, directors would say it
| was important and improvements were certainly made, but it was
| never as much of a priority as other goals. At the heart of this
| problem lies the way GitLab makes money: it primarily earns money
| from customers self-hosting GitLab Enterprise Edition, not
| GitLab.com. In fact, GitLab.com always cost much more money than
| it brought in.
|
| Is that really a mistake, then? As a first approximation, company
| has to invest in the thing which makes money, not the thing which
| loses money. Now, higher-order thinking might suggest that a
| more-performant gitlab.com might bring in more customers, build a
| stronger reputation and so forth. Still, if the company's real
| business is selling self-hosted software, it makes sense to focus
| development resources on self-hosted software.
| insensible wrote:
| Yes, it's a mistake to design your company's output in a way
| that results in shipping a defective product.
| foobarbazboff wrote:
| Is it a defective product, or is it a fully-featured demo
| that is just good enough to show companies what they could
| have if they host the software themselves? "You get all these
| features, plus all the speed and security that comes with
| running this in your own corporate environment"
|
| Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
| zero_ wrote:
| But to be honest I do see the point of the author. Either stop
| "half-assing" GitLab.com or remove the product (GitLab.com)
| entirely (and focus only on self-hosting customers (GitLab
| Enterprise Edition)) might be a better decision in the long
| run.
|
| But I am sure no one on management level wants to do this
| decision. So you half-ass a product.
|
| This kind of situation can be frustrating for people working on
| the product itself (at least when they care). And each new
| developer that joins the product will probably suggest: "Oh we
| should care more about scalability." And each senior will be:
| "yeah yeah, i know..."
| jacquesm wrote:
| Gitlab.com is a marketing instrument and if you 'remove the
| product entirely' then the enterprise edition will sell only
| a small fraction of what it sells today.
| zero_ wrote:
| I do not know if your statement holds true. But you
| shouldn't half-ass a marketing instrument either IMHO.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That I agree with. There are some weird incentives at
| work though: a commercial user of Gitlab.com might see
| their frustration with Gitlab.com as the reason to go for
| an enterprise license rather than to switch to the
| competition.
| dijit wrote:
| If Gitlab.com is a money losing product why is it the same
| price as the self-hosted option.
|
| I literally bought licenses from gitlab before realising that
| the seat cost is the same if I let them host it or we do it. So
| why take the infrastructure cost?
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| I'd guess because many IT departments figure that on-
| premise=secure and provides them the illusion that they can
| prevent source code from leaking this way.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their own
| computers almost astounding. However small an organization is, it
| should be insisting on providing a company-owned machine and
| having all company business be conducted on that machine.
|
| This has massive benefits to the company in terms of control of
| corporate IP, huge benefits to the employee in terms of
| separation of work time and personal time, and it doesn't even
| cost that much to do.
| hnarn wrote:
| Not to mention the inability to enforce full disk encryption
| and (hopefully) avoid leakage when someone quits.
|
| It's obviously not a silver bullet but at least then leakage
| must be hostile action or incompetence by transferring
| sensitive data outside of authorized channels.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > the inability to enforce full disk encryption
|
| Here's what my previous company did: "please jump on a
| videoconference call, now please share your screen, and go to
| the disk encryption settings to show me it's enabled, thank
| you"
|
| You get the same benefit as with stronger enforcement since
| as you said disk encryption won't protect you from hostile
| actions anyway.
| hnarn wrote:
| > You get the same benefit
|
| I strongly disagree, because if the employee isn't handing
| in their device when they exit that data is still out
| there.
|
| As I said, this is not a silver bullet, but for the data to
| still "be out there" the employee must at some point
| transfer the data out of the company device, which should
| be a policy violation.
|
| Also, I honestly personally think a company not providing
| hardware is a huge red flag, I've never encountered it in
| 15 years (but maybe it's less common in Europe, I don't
| know).
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Unless your company provide automatic backup management
| with straightforward recovery for your employees (which
| I've never seen, including at customers), your most
| cautious employees will backup their device in order not
| to lose their work, and then there's always data
| "somewhere out there".
|
| Again, the way you deal with employees having company's
| IP remaining on their computer is to set up a call and
| ask them to remove it. Good faith employees will do it,
| bad faith ones would have copied it on their drive before
| handing out the computer in the first place.
| 4hg4ufxhy wrote:
| All popular operating systems support multiple users. There is
| no worklife balance benefit whatsoever for the user to require
| a separate machine. It is only inconvienient.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Until your employee walks out the door with a clone of your
| company private repository on _their_ hardware. Good luck
| untangling the legal mess.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I have a few 10-15 year old repositories backed up
| somewhere, but surprise surprise, nobody (including myself)
| cares.
|
| It's theoretically possible for someone to do something bad
| with them, but it's just not realistic for 99.999% of the
| population. I guess it becomes an issue when you have 100k
| employees.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I would care. 10-15 year old is probably no longer an
| issue but technically they're a liability and if they
| were much younger (which at some point they were) they
| would be a much larger liability as well as an issue if
| you ever went to work for a competitor and this came to
| light (like it just did...). It's not to your advantage
| to have copies of your former employer's IP and possibly
| even data laying around. Hostile audits are a thing too,
| again, on 10 to 15 year old code probably not because
| that code either has changed considerably or it may have
| been abandoned.
| xorcist wrote:
| That is still clearly intellectual property after 15
| years. There could be trade secrets in there. And the
| slightest suspicion of which is a good reason to sue you,
| should anyone every need a reason to. It could be an
| personal conflict spun out of control or an incompetent
| manager needing someone to blame for a failed business or
| whatever.
|
| If there are any customer data or logs in there, then you
| could be personally liable under data protection laws.
| They might not even have an expire date, depending on
| what kind of data it is.
|
| Better safe than sorry, unless you think you have
| something to gain from keeping that data around.
| askonomm wrote:
| And using a company computer somehow prevents me from doing
| that? Most spyware that they force upon you doesn't seem
| to, in any way, prevent me from just uploading a zip file
| to wherever I want.
| acdha wrote:
| Some things to consider:
|
| 1. What happens when you have a legal dispute and all of your
| personal data is now caught up in the legal discovery
| process? Repeat for layoffs, etc. where you have no warning
| to make backups in advance. Don't forget to think about what
| happens if you look for another job and your record of that
| is on their system.
|
| 2. How painful will the conversation be when someone's
| personal activity leads to them getting malware, and now you
| have to treat that as a company breach, rotate everything
| they have access to, contact every user whose PII was in test
| data or bug reports, etc.?
|
| 3. Say you work on something on your spare time, but some
| suit insists that it's company property since it was
| developed on company equipment. How much fun will it be
| arguing that you only worked in your spare time?
|
| 4. Where is the convenience, really? It's probably not
| actually the case that you are getting paid to swap
| interchangeably between work and home, or that you work on
| the exact same things (if so, good luck convincing the
| lawyers that they don't own your work), so you're probably
| using that convenience to contribute unpaid overtime to your
| employer. Having a hard boundary between those is usually
| mutually beneficial.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Semi-related, I would recommend to anyone who is a Linux native
| to try to find some kind of "minimum viable setup" that is
| really really easy for you to run out of VirtualBox or
| Parallels or something for this reason. No matter where you go,
| you know you can have a suite of tools which work just as you
| want them to there. Being able to tear it down and rebuild it
| quickly is also a great way to deal with debugging certain
| kinds of problems of the "it runs/doesn't run on my machine"
| category.
|
| How you do this is of course up to you. At one end of the
| spectrum is just relying on your memory. At the other end is
| using NixOS https://nixos.org/ to get fully reproducible builds
| anywhere you go. Between these are a vast field of options. I
| know a guy who maintains an Ansible file set to `host:
| localhost` which installs everything he wants from that file.
| For me, I just stick with the latest Ubuntu version and
| maintain a few shell scripts [1] that install 80% of what I
| like to have on a new install.
|
| If you like the scientific approach, you can install something
| like https://atuin.sh/ and do some statistics on what programs
| you _actually_ run most frequently based on your long term
| shell history.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Giving the choice is what benefits the employees more: sure if
| you want more separation that's nice to have the option, but I
| prefer by far use my own computer when I'm WFH because it's a
| beefy desktop. In any case being forced to use a company
| mandated operating system is a nuisance for productivity... (be
| it Windows, where productivity is just bad, or MacOs where I
| need to relearn everything starting from the most basic key
| bindings ...).
|
| Also, companies have no control over corporate IP that land on
| an employee-controlled PC anyway.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Honestly, the company will never care as much about my machine
| as I do. It's always an uphill battle to get anything more than
| whatever they think the default spec should be, so I'd consider
| it a feature if I could use my own machine.
| pbasista wrote:
| > huge benefits to the employee in terms of separation of work
| time and personal time
|
| While I agree that separate work and personal computers might
| help in this regard, in my opinion it only helps a little.
|
| I believe that behavior related to separating work time and
| personal time is influenced primarily by one's own habits,
| abilities and, in the end, decisions.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer so take the comment with a grain of salt, but
| employee's should likely insist on using company devices as
| well. If the company were to be sued it may open up the
| personal devices to all sorts of subpoena for the contents of
| the device.
| askonomm wrote:
| From an employers perspective, maybe. From an employee
| perspective? Yeah I'd much rather use my (much more powerful)
| machine where I have everything set-up exactly how I like
| instead. Tons more convenient.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > I find the bit about employees being permitted to use their
| own computers almost astounding. However small an organization
| is, it should be insisting on providing a company-owned machine
| and having all company business be conducted on that machine.
|
| I've worked with small and startup healthcare/healthcare-tech
| companies who not only permit it, but have formal BYOD
| policies... when they are dealing with PHI.
| hnarn wrote:
| > This then lead to the discovery that we didn't have any backups
| as a result of the system not working for a long time, as well as
| the system meant to notify us of any backup errors not working
| either.
|
| Reminder that validating backups for critical systems is
| _everyones_ [1] job in organizations where there's not a literal
| backup team working on it full time.
|
| This is probably one of the worst experiences a developer or
| sysadmin can have, but in no situation can it just be one persons
| fault.
|
| If multiple lines of defense have failed (backup validation,
| monitoring etc.) and _nobody_ noticed, it's simply a question of
| when.
|
| [1]: all technical personnel that can be remotely considered
| stakeholders in the backups not failing
| Aeolun wrote:
| I really enjoy RDS for not having to worry about this. Point-
| in-time rollbacks for the past 24 hours, and if we accidentally
| drop the whole database we can restore it from the periodical
| snapshots.
| hnarn wrote:
| ZFS snapshots are really nice too, if ZFS is an option.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| You should probably still try it occasionally :).
|
| For one of my team's services, we don't just back up the
| data: we then also restore it into a parallel environment. If
| the backup fails, the restore fails, and then the environment
| fails, and while our monitoring might miss some instances of
| spurious success, it's less likely that the whole chain will
| look like it's working if the actual backup is not actually
| working.
| wlll wrote:
| I noticed that we weren't validating backups at a company I
| used to work at so I did a /really/ simple hack where I checked
| that the backups were within a certain number of bytes in size
| of the previous dump.
|
| Literally a couple of weeks later after putting this live (I
| think it was a Nagios check) it alerted that the backups had
| gone down from many 10s of GB to a few k in size. I can't
| remember what had gone wrong now, it was years ago, but we
| /did/ catch the issue.
|
| Obviously this isn't a comprehensive check, I later wrote a
| tool that pulled backups down, restored them, and did some
| sanity checks on the data, but the quick hack worked as an
| interim.
| deng wrote:
| > Think about it: if a company pays a person less because of the
| color of their skin or their gender, the company would be in big
| trouble. But somehow it's OK to pay a person less based on their
| location?
|
| I'd suggest the author thinks yet a bit more about this. "color
| of the skin", "gender", "location of living", I'm sure the author
| can figure out what differentiates the first two from the latter.
| For a start, one could think about which of these things one is
| able to change. Or you might ask the question: which of these
| things have actually something to do with my job? And yes,
| location matters: the company usually needs to create a
| subsidiary in the country of the employee, get familiar with
| their judicial and tax system, then there's also the issue of
| time zones, travel cost to company meetings, etc.
|
| Don't get me wrong: one can surely discuss whether
| differentiating pay based on location is OK or not. However,
| comparing this to discrimination because of skin color or gender
| will not help this discussion at all, as in effect the author is
| comparing GitLab to a racist and sexist organization, which will
| end any discussion fairly quickly.
| dijit wrote:
| Thats a somewhat uncharitable interpretation.
|
| As you are almost certainly aware, the majority of racial
| problems in the US boil down to the very simple fact that black
| people are on average of low socio-economic standing; and if
| there is one thing the US system is geared against its any
| person of low socioeconomic standing.
|
| Put succinctly:
|
| You might consider that its ok to pay differently based on if
| you're in Los Angeles or Bryan, Ohio- but would you feel the
| same if pay was different depending on if you lived in
| Inglewood vs Santa Monica?
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Thats a somewhat uncharitable interpretation._
|
| No, it isn't. And you are trying to tie racial issues to pay
| issues via correlative methods, instead of causative.
| weebull wrote:
| Inglewood and Santa Monica are close enough to require the
| same level of income in order to afford a certain standard of
| living. Sure the standards of living may not overlap much,
| but they are on the same scale.
|
| That's not true of California and Ohio in general.
| dijit wrote:
| Regardless of Ohio or California: you're saying that
| companies should pay less based on the income of their
| _neighbourhood_ and you don 't agree that it will
| disproportionately affect people of colour.
|
| Interesting perspective, I don't think I agree though.
| weebull wrote:
| Not income of their neighbourhood, but the cost of living
| in their city/state. It needs to be a big enough region
| that a good job gives social mobility, but introducing
| California wages into Ohio would cause massive inflation
| there, driving normal people into poverty. At the same
| time nobody could live in LA on Ohio wages.
| Jaygles wrote:
| The racial disparity situation in America (and all over the
| world) is complex enough a topic that it cannot be boiled
| down to such a simple explanation. I encourage you to
| research the various systemic challenges people of color have
| faced since they were forcibly relocated here such as
| redlining[0], loan discrimination[1] and examples of literal
| war crimes committed against black communities that have been
| swept under the rug for _reasons_ [2].
|
| [0] - https://www.marc.org/news/economy/history-racial-
| discriminat...
|
| [1] - https://www.investopedia.com/the-history-of-lending-
| discrimi...
|
| [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bo...
| navane wrote:
| And, which one has a historic asymmetric power balance.
|
| We discriminate pay on job role, on job level, on performance.
| We discriminate on length (tank crew), eyesight (pilots). That
| is not Discrimination however, because it lacks a historic
| asymmetric power balance.
| wenebego wrote:
| What about western countries using cheap foreign labor? Seems
| like an asymmetric power balance to me
| deng wrote:
| That's actually a point worth discussing. Because here's
| one thing that should be obvious, but apparently many
| people are unaware of: if you work for a large, multi-
| national company, you are almost certainly affected by
| location-based pay. GitLab is not an outlier here, but well
| within the norm for a company that has subsidiaries in
| different countries.
|
| The main difference with GitLab is that a) they are
| completely remote, b) they are called "GitLab" in every
| country instead of creating subsidiaries with different
| names, and c) they have made the "mistake" of making the
| payment differences entirely transparent. They were
| absolutely not forced to do that, but they did it
| nevertheless, and they should be applauded for that.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Western countries do that to each other and within
| themselves. Maybe it's not the west or countries it's
| people.
| navane wrote:
| That is a valid point, but the article compares Netherlands
| wages to US wages, these countries do not have a history of
| exploiting each other.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| A while ago there was a thread about cheap African labor,
| and some Africans showed up in the thread and explained
| that what we (westerners) consider 'cheap' is actually
| still a lot more than the local salaries, so it gives them
| a lot more social mobility.
| surajrmal wrote:
| No one pays based on cost of living. They pay based on
| what people it takes to hire a certain role in a given
| market. There is no point in making companies look good
| because they pay exceedingly well compared to the cost of
| living in some areas if the opposite is true in others.
|
| Obviously there is some correlation with pay vs cost of
| living as it helps people determine what they are willing
| to accept, but it is not the primary mechanism companies
| are using.
|
| Also companies who pay the same regardless of where you
| live are still not paying based on cost of living.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > And yes, location matters: the company usually needs to
| create a subsidiary in the country of the employee, get
| familiar with their judicial and tax system, then there's also
| the issue of time zones, travel cost to company meetings, etc.
|
| remote.com is a good counterexample here:
| https://remotecom.notion.site/Total-Rewards-Glossary-ec96c10...
|
| location-based pay is (generally) a product of how much the
| employer can get away with rather than the operational cost
| etc...
| tmsh wrote:
| The main reason Silicon Valley or where-founded-high-cost-of-
| living companies hire in low cost of living locations is due to
| the value they get in paying less for compensation but getting
| proportionally more value than the lower compensation.
| Requiring that compensation be the same everywhere would simply
| incentivize companies to only hire locally since they'd improve
| communication (even if fully remote) due to offsites, same
| timezone etc. Esp., in an economy where there is a large supply
| of people wanting to be hired in HCOL locations.
|
| That's not to say this couldn't change in the future (sometimes
| it's good to ignore the current "how" and incentives /
| reality). But it's useful to be realistic. There's also
| something to be said for companies taking the risk and hiring
| in other countries. This increases knowledge (not to say the
| company is "better" but it probably has some reasons for why
| the local talent joins), sows the seeds for future companies
| there etc.
| ozr wrote:
| The (good) companies I've been at are location agnostic on
| pay, or close to it. It's not about getting a discount, it's
| about expanding the talent pool. We want the best we can get,
| not the best within 25 miles of a hub.
| vitus wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but in practice offering
| location-agnostic salaries means you're not competitive in
| areas that command higher salaries (notably, large tech
| hubs like the Bay Area, Seattle, New York). If anything,
| you're trading the talent pool near those hubs (and let's
| be honest, the rest of the US) for talent in other
| countries.
|
| That's a trade-off you might be willing to make, but I hope
| you understand that not every company is willing to write
| off the entire talent pool of the US.
|
| (As a point of reference, the only two countries that
| Google pays comparably to even the cheapest parts of the US
| are Switzerland and Israel.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Is there data showing the talent in those tech hubs is
| better than what you can find elsewhere? If not, what are
| you overpaying for? Landlord revenue?
| vitus wrote:
| You have bigger talent pools in the tech hubs, at the
| very least. And recent college graduates from top-tier
| institutions are most likely to either stay put
| (depending on the source, I saw 40-60%) or move to a hub,
| so you have a lot of untapped potential.
|
| Talent being "better" is too subjective to really
| quantify, though.
|
| Something like 15% of devs worldwide are in the US, so if
| you don't want to play ball, you're losing a nontrivial
| chunk of the total talent pool (even without accounting
| for timezone affinity or English fluency).
|
| If you think paying market rate for a Bay Area dev is
| overpaying, are you exclusively hiring devs in Argentina
| (with the rapidly-devaluing peso)? You can get 10 devs
| for the price of one person based in SF! Even paying
| Amsterdam's market rate is drastically overpaying in
| comparison to the areas with the lowest cost of labor.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| My experience is from a fully remote unicorn startup that
| hires globally. Not Gitlab. Have continued equity
| exposure and strongly believe in the remote first model
| as a differentiator. There is exceptional talent
| globally, but you must be intentional about finding it.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Is there data showing the talent in those tech hubs is
| better than what you can find elsewhere?_
|
| There are great engineers everywhere, but this line of
| reasoning misses why talent hubs exist in the first
| place. It's more likely a qualified individual will line
| near a talent hub along side other companies that demand
| those skills. A better question to ask is how much time &
| effort will a company put in finding a qualified
| candidate outside of the talent hub.
|
| For example, Apple has a similar problem with regards to
| manufacturing in China.[1] Do talented tooling engineers
| exist in the US? Of course. Is Apple going to spend 5
| years trying to hire 100 tooling engineers in the US, or
| spend 6 months hiring the engineers it needs in China?
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/mariocavolo/status/17475993504384
| 37364
| immibis wrote:
| If you have the budget to hire someone from the Bay Area
| with a Bay Area salary, then you also have the budget to
| hire someone from Bumfuck Nowhere, with a Bay Area
| salary.
|
| I agree with the other commentator who said: It's not
| stupid to pay a location-based salary, but please don't
| pretend it has anything to do with fairness. It's not
| about being fair - it's about the company trying to save
| money by getting a discount on employees when that
| discount is available.
| vitus wrote:
| I should emphasize that I'm not trying to comment on
| fairness, one way or another.
|
| I'm pointing out that location-agnostic salaries are
| often trading one segment of the global talent pool for
| another, since what I've seen in practice is more like
| "everyone gets paid 80% of a Bay Area salary".
| nucleardog wrote:
| You don't need to lose access to the entire US talent
| pool.
|
| The company I work for paid high-mid US salaries before
| going remote. It has continued paying high-mid US
| salaries after going remote, just expanded to hiring from
| more locations.
|
| So before we had access to the talent pool of one metro
| area in the US. Now we have access to the talent pool of
| all of the US besides a few very HCOL locations (which we
| didn't have access to before anyway), and also most of
| the rest of the world. Our costs are the same as before,
| but hiring is easier and we can often get a higher
| caliber employee to fill an opening.
|
| As the guy you replied to said--it was about expanding
| the talent pool, not about saving money.
| ozr wrote:
| Salary is one part of comp, which is one part of what
| makes a company attractive.
|
| There are plenty of levers to pull that are not salary,
| and not based on geography.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > We want the best we can get,
|
| The hiring market is a market, though.
|
| You're bidding on talent.
|
| If you have an infinite budget you can just outbid
| everyone, everywhere and get whoever you want. Companies
| like like Netflix do something like this.
|
| If you don't have an infinite budget, you have to start
| making compromises. You can try to pay everyone according
| to the highest possible local salary you might compete
| against, but now you're arbitrarily paying more than you
| need to everywhere else. Could be fine if you have
| unlimited budget, but most companies don't.
|
| So you could try to set a median pay that's higher than the
| LCOL targets but lower than Bay Area salaries. Now you're
| attractive to some talent, but other people won't consider
| your company because it pays less than their alternatives.
|
| Location-agnostic pay is one of those things that sounds
| great when your company has limitless money (or feels like
| they do, as in ZIRP), but most companies at scale realize
| that they're either missing out on certain talent pools or
| spending unnecessarily to acquire people.
|
| In the case of GitLab, the author was making a great
| compensation for their location. If the author had zero
| knowledge that other employees were getting paid more,
| would they have even cared about their own compensation?
| ozr wrote:
| > You can try to pay everyone according to the highest
| possible local salary you might compete against, but now
| you're arbitrarily paying more than you need to
| everywhere else.
|
| This is the difference. I don't see it as arbitrarily
| paying more than I need to. I see it as paying people the
| same for doing the same work. My goal is not to pay as
| little as possible, or even to pay a high rate relative
| to their local market.
|
| I can't look at someone in Romania doing the same job as
| someone in Chicago and tell them I'm paying them less
| _because they 're in Romania_.
|
| I completely understand that this is not economically
| optimal, and I love capitalism. I just have no interest
| in saving money this way.
|
| > So you could try to set a median pay that's higher than
| the LCOL targets but lower than Bay Area salaries. Now
| you're attractive to some talent, but other people won't
| consider your company because it pays less than their
| alternatives.
|
| Salary is only one part of comp. Comp is only one part of
| what makes a company attractive.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In a world of free immigration that may be true but many are
| locked into a location because of where they were born
| alberth wrote:
| WFH / Remote
|
| This is a direct consequence of people wanting WFM but not
| understanding the implications.
|
| Going into an office gives employees pay leverage due to cost
| of living in that locale (assuming they live in a top pay
| market, SF/NYC/etc).
|
| But if you have an entire Remote company & culture, now -
| companies can hire in any locale and pay lowest common
| denominator (even if that locale is half way around the world).
|
| Remote work turns everyone into effectively an independent
| contractor competing against all other talent from all around
| the world.
|
| In office means you're mainly competing against other people in
| your locale.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| Interestingly enough, none of the places I worked remotely
| for ever factored in CoL.
|
| A senior dev got paid the same, be it in South Korea, Brazil,
| Romania or New York City.
| chasd00 wrote:
| fortunately, wfh is widespread enough now that if a company
| doesn't want to pay you then you can take your skills
| elsewhere. If the talent pool is worldwide now then so are
| the employment opportunities.
| intelVISA wrote:
| There are corps who pay SF salary globally and reap the
| rewards, GitLab isn't really able to compete at that level imo.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Can you name a few who are reaping rewards from doing that?
| dijit wrote:
| DuckduckGo, Accelbyte and Oxide.Computer are the ones I
| know of.
| surajrmal wrote:
| All of which pay low for the bay area.
| sbrother wrote:
| I haven't looked at the other two, but DuckDuckGo's
| salaries are in no way competitive in the US market.
| mistymountains wrote:
| My (biotech, mostly remote) company does this. They may not
| love it but they realize they have to hire from SF, Boston,
| NYC etc to get the best ML talent and people expect market
| salaries / don't want to up and move if they don't have to.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| > And yes, location matters: the company usually needs to
| create a subsidiary in the country of the employee, get
| familiar with their judicial and tax system, then there's also
| the issue of time zones, travel cost to company meetings, etc.
|
| B2B contracts are a thing. It's very common for many devs that
| work remotely for other companies.
|
| There's also companies that offer something like "Payroll as a
| Service".
|
| Still B2B is superior in every way, and can often net you much
| more money than just being an employee due to being able to
| leverage tax-optimizations.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > my salary was around EUR120 000 per year [...] For The
| Netherlands this is a good salary, and you'll have a hard time
| finding companies that offer better and let you work from home
| full time.
|
| For his country, he was well paid and worked from home 100% as
| well.
|
| > But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would've earned
| at least twice that amount, possibly even more. Not because I
| am somehow able to do my job better in the Bay Area, or because
| of any other valid reason for that matter, but because I would
| be living in the Bay Area instead of in The Netherlands.
|
| He says it was "not fair" that he wasn't paid the same salary
| as people _in a different country_.
|
| There are no Victim Points to be scored here.
|
| The author has a poor understanding of economics.
| username332211 wrote:
| > 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?
| comprev wrote:
| Maybe because they have the budget to poach other Bay Area
| engineers?
| immibis wrote:
| Then why don't they poach similar engineers from the
| Netherlands and pay them half as much?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| 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.
| delfinom wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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!
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| daqhris wrote:
| 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.
| rcbdev wrote:
| 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.
| brnt wrote:
| Gitlabs birthplace is the Netherlands actually, but they
| wouldn't be Dutch if they let that get in the way of
| profit making ;)
| dangus wrote:
| _Not_ paying location-based salary is arguably more unfair.
|
| If you pay the global median salary to everyone, people in
| high cost areas are screwed and you'll never be able to
| recruit there.
|
| If you pay everyone in your company the highest salary,
| people in low cost areas live like kings while their peers in
| high cost areas live a more modest lifestyle.
|
| As a company you're not out to solve global inequity, you're
| out to hire good talent effectively and efficiently. Like
| leaving a 40% tip at a restaurant, overpaying the going rate
| on salary doesn't really get you anything but feel goods at a
| certain point.
| adolph wrote:
| People living in high cost areas have chosen that.
|
| It's kind of like parking. If employees don't pay for
| parking then an employer is subsidizing car driving over
| other options.
| kmac_ wrote:
| Actually, a company's attitude toward this problem has to
| be balanced. I live in a country where most international
| companies pay less than the US and even the EU average. The
| effect is quite easy to predict: they are not attractive to
| senior candidates (i.e., Nokia) and suffer from higher
| employee attrition (not right now, as the job market is
| pretty dead). I don't want to mention the effect on
| employee morale. Is it discrimination, as the author says?
| When you do exactly the same job in the same company, same
| department, same team, with the same output -- then
| definitely it's discrimination. Does it encourage various
| xenophobic behaviors coming from better-earning employees -
| very rarely, but yes. Is it legal? -- Yes.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I live in a country where most international companies
| pay less than the US and even the EU average._
|
| Can I ask which country?
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| Half of the EU?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _chuckles_ That 's On Me, I Set the Bar Too Low.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| What about having a family? If you pay everyone the same,
| those living alone or with a partner will live like kings
| while those with children will live much more modestly. Oh
| wait, we get 2k in tax credits per kid. I forgot that one
| is all good.
|
| My point is, people are going to have different lifestyles
| that cost different amounts and give them different
| benefits. Companies should fuck off pretending they care
| about fairness or cost of living. Just call it what it is -
| competition-based pay. You pay someone in SF more because
| you are forced to by market conditions, and if you could,
| you would pay them less, with zero concern for their rent
| or mortgage. And since you CAN pay someone in Kansas City
| much less, they do.
|
| We've already seen the prevalence of remote work change the
| equation. Many places now pay SF 110% and everyone else in
| the US 100%. The COL difference between SF and KC is not
| that 10 percentage points. Nor could you compensate someone
| for the discomforts - both political and meteorological- of
| having to live in Missouri, who God himself has abandoned.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| > Oh wait, we get 2k in tax credits per kid
|
| The guy who doesn't have kids paid it indirectly in his
| social contributions. The next guy next to him too. And
| the next guy. And so on.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I think their point was that 2k is a joke considering how
| expensive a child is
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Should it be more? Surely something one can think of when
| planning a child (or more)?
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| I was just pointing out what the author of the statement
| wanted to say, wasn't really going to argue about the
| point.
|
| It's incredibly hard to budget for children though, you
| can't really foresee how much they will cost. One child
| eats little, one eats much, one is picky, one not, one
| likes soccer, the other one likes lego. Very hard to
| predict, except maybe year 1-2. But then one might be
| good with breastfeeding while the other might require
| formula and the cost of the first one is 0 while the
| second one could be very high
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| The other commenter is correct about my meaning, 2k/yr is
| rounding error for kid costs - at best it derays the
| increased cost of the "Family" health insurance plan.
|
| And I'm not saying it should be more, I was more saying
| it in jest to help deter comments like "but you get tax
| kickbacks!". I _do_ think that we should be doing more
| for children - free school lunches with no means testing,
| free childcare from birth instead of just when they enter
| the public school system, and so on - but the child tax
| credit is the most visible "kickback" so I made a joke
| about it to acknowledge it.
|
| My point here, more generally, is that companies
| shouldn't be trying to play this game with "fairness".
| Just call it what it is - capitalism and the invisible
| hand of the free markets. If people have problems with
| how that system allocates capital, then do something
| about it, but don't try to pretend any of its
| machinations have any relation to notions of justice or
| fairness.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Very true. I mean even on my "platinum" healthcare
| coverage, it covers the gap of the deductible (which I
| know isn't exactly the same thing). Or looked at another
| way, it pays for 2.75 weeks of daycare.
|
| (And I say this as someone not overly invested in that
| world - I have a 17 yo stepdaughter, and I am fortunate
| that in addition to my excellent healthcare, my company
| pays 100% of the premiums for my partner and kid, not
| just me).
| ctrw wrote:
| Women get paid 70% of what men do. So any woman who wants to
| be paid the same as a man has a poor understand of economics.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Debunked time and time again. The oft-quoted "70%" stat is
| referring to all men vs all women. Within the same job, the
| pay is much closer to 95%. Any difference is still worth
| understanding and closing, but there are plenty of pretty
| reasonable explanations for why a 5% pay disparity may
| exist between men and women.
| epylar wrote:
| If women have even roughly equal access to the same jobs,
| your point is a good one. If not, it is missing some
| nuance.
| scott_w wrote:
| It's fair to say both are. GP is strongly implying women
| get paid 70% for the same work (illegal in the UK at
| least) whereas P misses the subtlety that women don't
| have equal access to the job market. Compare the rates of
| women in software engineering vs childcare. Then compare
| the salaries.
| ctrw wrote:
| OK so you're fine with company policy being to pay women
| less than men?
| armada651 wrote:
| > The author has a poor understanding of economics.
|
| Because as we all know the laws of economics are fair and
| just. Truly a business man who strictly follows the laws of
| economics would always compensate people fairly for their
| value delivered to the company.
|
| In all seriousness, how does this make economic sense? The
| company is incentivizing that people move to areas with a
| high cost of living, but why exactly? What economic benefit
| does that bring to the company?
|
| The only reason that's ever been explained to me is that the
| cost of competing for talent is higher in those areas than
| others. However someone's location is a poor indicator for
| talent potential, so why would you compete in high cost
| areas?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _However someone 's location is a poor indicator for
| talent potential?_
|
| No it's not? If this were true, then economic hubs wouldn't
| exist. If someone is talented in field it's likely they
| will move to an economic hub that has jobs for their
| talents. If I wanted to open a trading firm I'd likely find
| the most capable candidates in Chicago, because thats where
| most of the jobs are today. There are certainly capable
| hires in Idaho, but how much time should a company spend
| looking for a needles in haystacks?
| ghaff wrote:
| My anecdotal observation is that CoL multipliers for HCoL
| areas don't actually compensate fully for living in those
| areas. I had an opportunity back in the 90s for a job in
| the Bay Area and passed in part because the higher offer
| would have been a quality of life downgrade at the time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The only reason that's ever been explained to me is that
| the cost of competing for talent is higher in those areas
| than others.
|
| You are looking for stability-based economics and wondering
| why your conclusions don't appear in reality. Well, it's
| because your economics are wrong.
|
| They pay more there exactly because there is larger
| competition. And they hire there because that's where their
| money come from and where they started hiring before going
| global. If they reseted their hiring choices and had to do
| all of them again now with the current company, they would
| be better off hiring at cheaper places and not having
| anybody on the more expensive ones, of course. But the
| sheer absurdity of that conditional should be enough reason
| for you to see it won't happen.
| rmk wrote:
| > In all seriousness, how does this make economic sense?
| The company is incentivizing that people move to areas with
| a high cost of living, but why exactly? What economic
| benefit does that bring to the company?
|
| It doesn't always bring an economic benefit to the company,
| which is why there are debates over companies calling
| employees back into the offices. That is almost always
| based on gut feeling and herd-mentality, than on any
| concrete data.
|
| However, companies have to recruit from labor markets, and
| as such, they are bound by its vicissitudes. Despite the
| pandemic scattering many software people all over the
| country, the vast majority of competent software developers
| with cutting-edge work experience are still to be found in
| the Bay Area. Therefore, it makes sense for the company to
| insist that other hires also live in the Bay Area.
| Perfectly understandable. If the company is able to compete
| effectively for talent in the remote market and able to
| make it work (timezones and cultural differences do matter,
| even if it were possible to recruit remote workers easily),
| then it would do it, sooner or later.
| k__ wrote:
| How come it's okay for a company to say they don't give me a
| raise for increased costs of living, but it's okay for a
| company to pay less, because I live in an area with lower
| costs of living?
| CalRobert wrote:
| Because ultimately you have less bargaining power?
|
| Besides, your alternative isn't making more money. It's not
| getting the job.
| blueboo wrote:
| If it's bargaining power, then it's a power dynamic that
| may merit being called out, just like gaps in pay by
| other characteristics.
|
| Some of those characteristics were given protection in
| law after enough noise was made.
| ianbutler wrote:
| Yeah this is an insane line of thought. You won't fix
| pay, you'll just see jobs stop existing by going this
| route. Market dynamics in labor are a good thing and you
| can change your location to benefit from them.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Of course pay is about bargaining power. How do you think
| a salary negotiation works? Why do you think a software
| engineer gets paid more than a nurse in most places?
| janpieterz wrote:
| Don't know why the company wouldn't give you a raise for
| increased cost of living? Plenty of companies will adjust
| pay based on location, including moving around. And plenty
| of companies adjust for inflation as well.
|
| Of course any adjustment in pay needs to fit budget, so the
| company and line manager would need to have the budget to
| afford to. And there's probably plenty of companies that
| won't have this as an option or won't adjust for inflation,
| but there's also plenty of examples that do.
| blueboo wrote:
| Approximate same work, approximate same cost of living,
| different salary.
|
| What's not to resent?
| trhway wrote:
| >But if I had instead lived in the Bay Area, I would've
| earned at least twice that amount, possibly even more.
|
| why wouldn't he come here then? (he could have easily come on
| L1, great visa, spouse can work too, straight path to GC)
| baner2020 wrote:
| I feel you have less empathy for a another worker and
| stressed that others are competing with you
|
| It's ok for enterprises to pay different prices/salaries in
| different locations yet individuals don't get to do the same
| is a flaw in how we are taught what we can ask for
|
| We are trapped in the matrix , need a red by pill
| sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
| Also the social safety net in NL covers a lot of things you
| have to pay for yourself in the USA.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Where a person lives is indicative of their culture. And their
| unwillingness to move shows deep ties to family and friends.
| There is a clear difference in mental/emotional makeup with
| those willing to relocate at the drop of a hat.
|
| Just because these traits are not protected by US law does not
| mean that they should not be valued. They are also traits of
| human diversity and discriminating based on those traits is
| still discrimination, just not discrimination against US-
| protected classes.
| cedws wrote:
| >I'd suggest the author thinks yet a bit more about this.
| "color of the skin", "gender", "location of living", I'm sure
| the author can figure out what differentiates the first two
| from the latter.
|
| I suppose what you're getting at is that you can't change your
| race or skin colour, but you can change your location. That
| isn't really the case if you're Ukrainian, or just from a
| country with a weak passport.
| siva7 wrote:
| I guess OP was wrong in that some people really can't figure
| out what differentiates the first two from the latter. You
| can change your location even from a country with a weak
| passport but it won't be easy (like it won't be easy to get
| accepted into a top-tier university), but you still can't
| change color of skin no matter how hard you try.
| pawelmurias wrote:
| You can change the color of your skin a little bit by
| controlling sun exposure.
| cedws wrote:
| Michael Jackson did it.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > the company usually needs to create a subsidiary in the
| country of the employee, get familiar with their judicial and
| tax system, then there's also the issue of time zones, travel
| cost to company meetings, etc.
|
| This is why women who want to get pregnant don't get hired in
| the USA (extra costs associated with postnatal (ETA: maternity)
| leave). And yet that's not okay. So your basic rule of thumb is
| not quite comprehensive.
| deng wrote:
| It's weird I have to say this, but from what I wrote it of
| course does NOT follow that ANYTHING that makes economic
| sense for a company cannot be discriminatory. That would be a
| dystopian rule straight out of an Ayn Rand novel.
| drubio wrote:
| Conflating the three is easy, because instead of paying for
| delivered value, the company is doing arbitrage on location (
| like it could do with gender, race or anything else)
|
| All companies will take advantage of maximizing their profit or
| reducing cost, but it's a slippery slope once a subjective
| metric to determine value is used.
|
| I for one live in a "low" CoL, but my AWS bill is just the same
| as a person in NY, SF or Geneva, should I also expect a
| discount because "my income is lower"? Or is it only fair to be
| billed equally, because the value all of us get is the.same ?
|
| Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is
| delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he
| be paid any less ? Why ?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > because instead of paying for delivered value,
|
| This argument falls apart when you consider that some
| projects have zero or negative value. Developers who work on
| these projects still get paid and we obviously don't have to
| write a check when we make a mistake that costs the company
| money. Nobody actually likes "delivered value" compensation
| except under hypothetical circumstances where they imagine it
| can only increase their pay.
|
| The hiring market is a market. Supply and demand drives
| compensation.
|
| Delivered value isn't one of those forces driving supply and
| demand. It sets the maximum an employer can pay someone and
| still get an ROI, but that's it.
|
| > Turn the tables, if a dev in India, Romania or Mexico is
| delivering the same value as one in the US or UK should (s)he
| be paid any less ? Why ?
|
| Because it's a job market and you're bidding for candidates
| against their other options.
|
| If you're house shopping and you find an identical 3 bed,
| 3000 sq. ft. house in all of those markets, would you expect
| to bid the same for it? Of course not.
|
| The sooner we accept the realities of job markets and supply
| and demand, the sooner this all makes sense.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > This argument falls apart when you consider that some
| projects have zero or negative value.
|
| ...Then why is the company running that project?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Are you really asking why companies take risks on new
| projects that might not work out? Or expecting that
| companies can perfectly predict which projects will
| succeed?
|
| Look at it this way: What if the developers were only
| paid _after_ the product broke even and starts
| "delivering value". You think you're going to get a lot
| of developers signing up to work on a new project that
| might only pay them if they stick with it for a few years
| and it succeeds due to reasons that include things out of
| their control (like sales cycles, market moves, etc.)?
| topaz0 wrote:
| Replace "delivered value" with "expected delivered value"
| and the argument goes through mutatis mutandis. Of course
| there are uncertainties in the value of unrealized work,
| but the company is paying because they think the expected
| value of the work is higher than what they are paying in
| wages.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| So if the developer makes a mistake that lowers the
| delivered value, who pays? E.g. slower than promised
| development, things that were promised don't work at all
| or cost more for less results, etc.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Are you really asking why companies take risks on new
| projects that might not work out? Or expecting that
| companies can perfectly predict which projects will
| succeed?
|
| Uncertainty is fine; is mean that if the _expected_
| value[0] is below zero it 's a terrible idea to do it.
|
| > Look at it this way: What if the developers were only
| paid after the product broke even and starts "delivering
| value". You think you're going to get a lot of developers
| signing up to work on a new project that might only pay
| them if they stick with it for a few years and it
| succeeds due to reasons that include things out of their
| control (like sales cycles, market moves, etc.)?
|
| Empirically yes; what you've described is close enough
| startup employees with low cash and high stock payments.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value
| adolph wrote:
| > This argument falls apart when you consider that some
| projects have zero or negative value.
|
| Null hypothesis would be that on average the null/negative
| value projects would be evenly distributed.
| angarg12 wrote:
| I've worked in 5 different countries in my life, and one lesson
| you learn quickly is that it's impossible to compare salaries
| between locations at face value.
|
| For example, now I live in the US and although my salary is
| about twice what it was in England, my lifestyle remains about
| the same, worse in some aspects, and better in others. I'm
| almost certain OP lifestyle would have taken a hit living in
| Bay Area, even with a higher comp.
|
| And this is simply comparing income, not accounting for many
| other variables (social benefits, taxes, culture...). In fact
| I'll probably take a big hit in comp to move back to Europe so
| that I can live a more comfortable lifestyle.
| verst wrote:
| I agree completely. This is what I always tell my family in
| Europe: Sure, my salary on the US West Coast may be high, but
| the lifestyle this affords me (while being reasonably future
| oriented in preparing for retirement, family planning etc) is
| almost certainly worse. (Not to mention cultural differences
| in attitudes towards work.) You can't assess salaries as
| someone who would temporarily work somewhere else and then
| export that money back to their home country. You have to
| view the salaries in the context of someone who will spend
| their life there.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's also just very situation-dependent. I live in at least
| the periphery of a HCoL East Coast urban area but I have a
| paid-off house, don't have kid-related expenses, and don't
| eat out a lot (especially expensively) in the local area. I
| do travel a fair bit but those costs would be similar no
| matter where I lived. So, for me, I don't _really_ live in
| an HCoL area to the same degree as if I were renting in the
| city and going out on the town all the time or were paying
| for childcare.
| arwhatever wrote:
| HN post from a few years back that really stuck with me
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777745 "What Armenians
| should know about life in America (2014)"
|
| I think you have to get the actual content from the Wayback
| Machine now.
|
| Gist was that many Armenian families tended to be miffed at
| the amount of financial assistance their relatives who had
| moved to America tended to send back, particularly upon
| learning of their apparently high salary amounts.
|
| Article then goes on to describe how American society tends
| to nickel-and-dime its members to death from every direction.
|
| More broadly, the article was a fascinating outsider's look
| at our culture and lifestyle.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| Wayback link to post: https://web.archive.org/web/202004162
| 33116/https://likewise....
|
| Things they mentioned as being different from Armenian
| life:
|
| * You pay federal taxes and state taxes to a myriad of
| different agencies with different limits or starting points
| on all of them. Property taxes, vehicle registration taxes,
| sales taxes, etc.
|
| * The US is more focused on being procedurally fair (you
| have rights that must be ennumerated to you upon being
| arrested, etc) but not on being just (he mentions child
| neglect for latchkey kids, mandatory sentencing, a woman
| accused of kidnapping for trying to take her child away
| from his abusive father with a custody agreement)
|
| * Poor federal safety net
|
| * Suburban housing and little mixed-use zoning leads to
| required cars, homogeneity of America, lack of walkable
| anything
|
| * Individualism (not knowing all your neighbors; he
| mentions that in Armenia if you had a test for a tumor
| multiple friends would take off work to weep in the waiting
| room with you; the idea of being an automaton in your
| company rather than a human with emotions)
| boo-ga-ga wrote:
| I think author gets many things wrong.
|
| As for location, the motivation is stated here, and in my
| opinion, it really makes sense:
| https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensat...
| Imagine they would pay Bay Area salaries everywhere including
| Philippines or Ukraine. People there would be in "golden
| handcuffs" and burn out instead of changing job when it's time
| to go. This would produce terrible results for both the company
| and people. And of course, if they chose to pay some kind of
| world-median salaries, then they wouldn't hire people in
| California or London at all.
|
| There are other controversial things said about product
| managers being unneeded, and that the company shouldn't have
| more than 100 developer for a product.
|
| I think it's pretty clear that the author is a great autonomous
| engineer who would be happy and very successful in a
| (relatively) small startup. Maybe if not for the tax rule
| changes waiting, he would have left the company earlier, and
| would write a happy article about his experience there.
|
| This gets us back to the location-based rates again by the
| way:). Imagine how difficult it would be for the author to
| leave the company if in addition to stocks, he would have had
| $300k compensation in Amsterdam.
| chrsig wrote:
| > People there would be in "golden handcuffs" and burn out
| instead of changing job when it's time to go
|
| Good ol' "we can't pay you that much, because what if we
| wanted to stop paying you that much. It'd be bad for you if
| we handed you this pile of money, you might hurt yourself.
| We're helping you by keeping it to ourselves, trust us."
| cmaggiulli wrote:
| I think there's at least something true hidden in the post
| you're responding to. While I don't necessarily think it's
| a strong enough point to base salary decisions on, nor do I
| think it's the actual reasoning behind GitLabs policy, I
| can for sure see how being overly paid for a job that
| you've grown to hate produces poor results for the company
| and possibly the employee
| boo-ga-ga wrote:
| They actually do not hide the main reason and state it
| first: "If we start paying everyone the highest wage our
| compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire
| fewer people, and we would get less results." That's why I
| like their approach and communication. As a Ukrainian, I
| would be happy to work for CA salary here, but I do
| understand that a good local market rate is enough for me
| if the job is great.
|
| EDIT: and one more thing to add here: as an employer, you
| usually prefer to hire people whose motivation is not only
| money. You want to work with people who like the job and
| their colleagues. The current market practice is to pay
| local rates. Thus any company that pays much more, has to
| address the challenge of filtering out people with
| "incorrect" motivation.
| imiric wrote:
| > Imagine they would pay Bay Area salaries everywhere
| including Philippines or Ukraine. People there would be in
| "golden handcuffs" and burn out instead of changing job when
| it's time to go.
|
| You're saying that as if companies retaining employees is a
| bad thing. Stock options are already a form of widely used
| "golden handcuffs". If people want to keep working somewhere,
| compensation should only be one decisive factor among many
| others.
|
| > And of course, if they chose to pay some kind of world-
| median salaries, then they wouldn't hire people in California
| or London at all.
|
| Why not? People in London or California would have to compete
| by the same criteria as people in Ukraine or the Philippines.
| This is only a good thing, as it opens up the talent pool to
| a global market.
|
| The point of fair compensation is not about giving everyone
| the _same_ salary. It's about removing the location aspect
| from affecting compensation, and making it more of a merit-
| based system.
|
| Especially for a remote-first company like Gitlab, where
| people are free to work from anywhere. It's ridiculous that
| employees are encouraged to live in countries with high
| compensation just to take advantage of this system, and are
| penalized for working from countries they actually want to
| live in.
|
| Not to mention that it makes the lifestyle of a digital nomad
| much more complicated. What if I want to live 3 months in
| London, and 3 months in the Philippines? That kind of
| lifestyle would involve messy contractual changes and salary
| adjustments.
|
| This system makes no sense, and is a remnant of traditional
| corporate structures. Of course companies love it, because
| they can get the same quality workforce by hiring
| internationally for much cheaper. Offshoring is an old
| corporate tactic, and needs to be abolished. It's shameful
| and hypocritical that remote-first companies like Gitlab
| still cling to it.
|
| <hr>
|
| Taking a look at the article you linked, it's quite clear:
|
| > If we start paying everyone the highest wage our
| compensation costs would increase greatly, we can hire fewer
| people, and we would get less results.
|
| Translation: it would cost us more to hire quality people
| everywhere, and we'd rather hire them cheaply.
|
| > A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since
| it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically
| diverse team.
|
| Thinly veiled diversity claim. The same thing happens with
| the current system, where people are encouraged to
| concentrate in higher-wage regions. Removing this only gives
| them the freedom to live anywhere.
|
| > Team members in high-wage regions having much less
| discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the
| same role.
|
| So? Since when is a company concerned about how much
| "discretionary income" employees have? Your only job is to
| compensate people fairly for the role based on their
| abilities.
|
| > Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs
| and sticking around because of the compensation even when
| they are unhappy, we believe that it is healthy for the
| company when unhappy people leave.
|
| Addressed above. This is BS, since you already give them
| golden handcuffs in the form of stocks, perks, benefits, etc.
| Compensation shouldn't be the only "handcuff".
|
| > If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be
| able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions, we
| want the largest pool to recruit from as practical.
|
| Again, entirely backwards. It's not about paying everyone the
| "lowest" or "highest" wage. It's about paying everyone fairly
| for the role and their experience/merit. You don't need to
| choose either Bay Area salaries or Ukraine salaries, but come
| up with your own compensation structure.
|
| Buffer has been doing this for a long time now, and they have
| cost-of-living location bands, but have removed two of the
| lowest ones in 2022[1]. I would go a step further and leave
| only the highest band for people who want to live in the most
| expensive regions in the world. But then again, since you've
| made yourself more attractive for world-class talent, it's
| likely that you won't have a large concentration of people
| living in these places anyway. So there's your diversity.
|
| And even if you remove the entire concept of location bands,
| and people in these expensive regions get paid less than
| other opportunities in their region, they'd likely still want
| to work for you because you give them much more than just a
| fair salary, right?
|
| All I read are excuses the company made up to avoid just
| saying: we want to hire talented people and pay them less. At
| least have the decency to be honest about it.
|
| [1]: https://buffer.com/resources/location-independent-
| salaries/
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, it's also complicated for tax and labor law reasons.
| Being officially a digital nomad is probably already
| problematic for, especially large, companies that can't
| really look the other way even if salary adjustments aren't
| part of the equation.
| imiric wrote:
| That's true, but a digital nomad could choose to work as
| an independent contractor, where tax burdens are mostly
| on them. They can choose to manage their finances in one
| country, while living in another. Or work as part of an
| umbrella company, which simplifies legal aspects for
| their clients.
|
| I agree that it's a somewhat complicated issue, but there
| are solutions to it if the company wanted to solve it.
| Besides, these cases are rare and not many people will
| choose to live this way, so it's not the most pressing
| matter in this discussion.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure, a company can hire you as a contractor although
| that probably comes with downsides from
| benefit/stability/etc. perspectives. It's probably how
| you have to do things though if you really want to be a
| digital nomad.
| boo-ga-ga wrote:
| You actually quoted that they are very open about their
| main reason for paying local rates: they want to be
| competitive as a business, and if for the same amount of
| money they can hire more good employees, there is no reason
| not to do this:).
|
| > Your only job is to compensate people fairly for the role
| based on their abilities
|
| So it's about definition of fairness. You think it should
| be some universal measure regardless of location, they
| think it is a good market rate. And job markets in each
| country even after COVID are still different, that's why a
| "fair" amount differs across locations.
|
| One more important consideration here is local laws
| regarding taxation and employment. People in EU get less
| than in the US, but generally it is much more difficult and
| expensive to fire them as an example. Would it be fair if a
| person with employment-at-will contract who can be fired
| tomorrow with zero severance and has 14 days of vacation
| had the same salary as the person who has 30 days of paid
| vacation and minimum severance or notice period of 6
| months?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > But somehow it's OK to pay a person less based on their
| location?
|
| At the end of the day, it winds up being a choice between
|
| - Pay someone based on their location - People in lower COL
| areas complain, but are (in theory) being paid an amount with
| the same buying power as someone in a higher COL area (being
| paid me) [1]
|
| - Pay the same regardless of location - People lower COL areas
| are making more buying power, but people in higher COL won't
| even work for you; because it's not realistic to pay the higher
| COL amount to everyone [2]
|
| There's no solution that makes everyone happy.
|
| [1] Not really true, since it doesn't account for a lot of
| factors; such as retirement savings, etc.
|
| [2] Not strictly true but, if you pay the higher COL amount to
| everyone, then you can hire fewer people for the same amount of
| money.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I guess the question is, do you need people in high-COL areas
| to work for you? There's no shortage of developers in Arizona
| / Europe / Canada / etc, so why would companies like Gitlab
| spend so much money on bay-area devs? A corporation could
| save a lot of money by only hiring developers elsewhere who
| deliver similar work. And cutting labor costs does seem to be
| the operating mode that a lot of software companies are in at
| the moment.
| danenania wrote:
| A lot of talented people tend to concentrate in the hcol
| areas because it gives them the most optionality (plus many
| other benefits, of course, for people who can afford them).
|
| If you're hiring for some specific niches or need very
| senior people, removing candidates in hcol tech centers
| from your search pool could make it a lot harder to hire.
| Like imagine saying you want to hire a great US political
| lobbyist but you can't hire anyone who lives in DC. It
| would be tough right? The dynamics in tech aren't as
| dramatic but there's still some of that effect.
|
| I'm not saying an alternative strategy couldn't work, but
| there are good reasons companies want to be able to hire in
| hcol markets.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I mean sure, if you're hiring people for skills that you
| _can 't_ find elsewhere, then of course you pay them
| more. But not specifically because of where they
| currently live.
| rmk wrote:
| Yeah, his statement makes about as much sense as the
| expectation that all people must be charged the same for
| something all over the world. i.e., 50c-equivalent hamburger
| in, say, South Africa should have the same price in San
| Francisco. Ain't gonna happen because economic realities do not
| bow to idealism, however well-intentioned.
| shutupnerd0000 wrote:
| This topic is as tired and cliche on this forum as "single page
| apps vs progressive enhancement"
| skc wrote:
| Also interesting that he publishes his new projects on github.
| christkv wrote:
| I never had a problem with location causing differences in pay.
| However that it extends to options grants always seemed to me as
| utterly incomprehensible. Why should you living in the Bay Area
| mean you get a massively bigger lottery ticket than somebody in
| Europe or India.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "Location based salaries are discriminatory"
|
| You have to understand companies will pay you the minimum
| possible to get you to join/stay.
| y2hhcmxlcw wrote:
| I can truly relate to poor management. I'm unsure though if the
| author is referring at times to poor engineering/HR managers, or
| poor product managers. At my company they call the latter Product
| Owners but it's the same thing I believe. I deal so often with
| both being terrible. I've had terrible Engineering Managers, who
| simply don't understand the tech, and in the worst case they
| think they do but don't. Add in some office politics and they can
| make life truly unbearable. Same for Product Managers but it's a
| whole other array of chaos. I've had a tough time with poor
| managers, and so I can really relate to that aspect of this.
|
| What I wonder though reading between the lines is if Gitlab has
| reached a point where they suffer from poor Product
| Managers/Product Owners. I see that in later stage startups and
| especially large orgs. One would hope Gitlab, by nature of its
| product space, would never suffer from that, so if they are
| that's disheartening. I'm unsure what at this point would really
| differentiate Gitlab from Github unless it's devex, and to have
| good devex they'd need engineering centric product vision, I hope
| Gitlab is not losing that by hiring an army of "Business
| Analysts" or MBA's. On the positive, in some respects I like
| hearing that HN comments drive the vision at Gitlab :)
| Waterluvian wrote:
| The paid by location argument is a challenge for me. On one hand
| I really like meritocracy. Be paid what the job is worth. Or
| rather, what the market bears. But then the tone changes the
| moment the market expands internationally. Lots of people ready
| to do the job for far less.
|
| Sometimes I sense a hypocrisy. A demand for things to be fair...
| but only within this artificially delineated geography.
|
| On the other hand, nothing will make it not feel freakishly weird
| when HR needs to "approve" you, a 100% remote worker, moving
| somewhere, as a mechanism for cutting your salary.
| languagehacker wrote:
| Lots to disagree about here, but I'd prefer to treat the moral of
| this story as, not all the same people will thrive in a small
| company after it's hit a growth inflection point. This is okay!
| Without some of those folks who are willing to go broad and wear
| a lot of hats, companies can't get to where they need to be to
| start growing in the first place.
|
| The responsibility of leadership and managers in this situation
| involves creating venues where early, impactful employees can be
| adequately rewarded without becoming impediments to their
| personal growth or the growth trajectory of the company. Imagine
| how much less burnout the author would have felt if the stock
| situation didn't keep him locked into the company far beyond when
| he didn't feel welcome.
|
| I've worked at enough places where early contributors white-
| knuckled their way through changing values until the first
| possible liquidity event, or just left a big financial upside on
| the table because they couldn't make the numbers and their sanity
| work at the same time. These "growing pains" result in burnout,
| poor quality and communication from individuals we've previously
| trusted as veterans, and a tumultuous culture with conflict
| between the old guard and new layers of management.
|
| I believe we can minimize the friction on both sides by
| significantly increasing the exercise period for stock options,
| prioritizing hiring growth in duplicative roles for individuals
| showing early signs of culture clash and disengagement, and
| empathetic coaching that names the problem (terminal burnout) and
| includes resources for teams or companies that better fit that
| person's disposition.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > No matter how you try to spin this, it's by all accounts an act
| of discrimination to pay one person less than another purely
| based on where they live. Think about it: if a company pays a
| person less because of the color of their skin or their gender,
| the company would be in big trouble. But somehow it's OK to pay a
| person less based on their location?
|
| Yes, yes it absolutely is. My favorite example is a train
| conductor in the deepest netherworld of Saxony and a train
| conductor in Munich.
|
| Both perform the absolutely same work, both in complexity and
| time, and yet with the usual "everyone gets paid the same"
| collective agreement, either the train conductor in Munich can't
| even rent a 1br apartment, or the train conductor in Munich
| barely scrapes by while his colleague in Saxony lives in a
| mansion.
|
| Wage schedules in _any_ multihomed organization have to be CoL
| based, there 's no way around that.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| > A SaaS and self-hosting don't go well together
|
| About two months ago, I was commenting on my struggles working at
| a place that offered cloud and self-hosted solutions where it was
| not going well. I was mostly convinced that the problem was
| organizational, but thinking more about it, it's more complicated
| than that.
|
| To be clear, I don't think it's impossible to do both. If your
| application is very simple and self contained, then of course; we
| use such services every day in a variety of environments.
| However, you have to design the software from the ground up for
| simplicity, and to carefully dogfood your self-hosted experience
| via your cloud offering to ensure both models are aligned. And of
| course, complex system architecture is a significant obstacle;
| assuming your customers are going to wrangle dozens of
| microservices, multiple database and distributed caches, etc. is
| not reasonable for most organizations.
|
| So, if you strictly and carefully design your product to be self-
| hosted-first, I think these two models can coexist... up to a
| point. If you're fortunate enough that your cloud offering
| becomes huge, you might reach a point where the simplicity of
| self-hosted-first becomes a restriction that turns into a
| liability. At that point, you can simply make a decision: who
| butters your bread? That sucks for your customers who lose in
| that decision.
|
| If I select self hosted, it's often because I am concerned about
| lack of agency, control, and partitioning, or I need to flatten
| my costs, or I have an external requirement that is incompatible
| with the cloud offering. Is it not a risk, then, to hitch my
| wagon to a company that offers both, and at some point may make a
| decision to rescind or water down their self-hosted solution? If
| it's closed-source or open-core, then I would say so. From that
| perspective, I think it would be better to go with a vendor that
| just picks a lane, and avoid those that use watered down self-
| hosted to funnel customers into more expensive cloud offerings
| (in other words, open-core model is a big red flag for me). I
| suppose this is maybe getting into whether you should rely on
| proprietary software whatsoever for vital parts of your business,
| but let's not get into that. Like I said, I think the question is
| complicated.
| hankchinaski wrote:
| >Location based salaries are discriminatory
|
| While I understand the feeling, I would be pressed to say that
| this is purely driven by market dynamics. Companies that hire in
| a certain market have no incentive to overpay compared to the
| local market rates.
|
| Software engineering has now become commoditised. This holds true
| for remote companies. Wages are a function of local supply/demand
| and labour costs in that location.
|
| If you want to follow the same logic, you would expect to pay a
| coffee $10 in Brazil as you would pay in NYC. Following the same
| logic a coffee shop in Rio de Janeiro would say "location based
| pricing is discriminatory".
|
| Markets don't work that way
| rwmj wrote:
| _> I think the idea of product managers needs to go in favour of
| giving team leads more power and having them interact more with
| users. To me, that 's ultimately what a "product manager" should
| do: help build the product at a technical level, but also act as
| a liaison between the team and its users._
|
| Yes! In my experience product managers bring very little to the
| table, and the most enlightening discussions I have are when I'm
| allowed to talk directly to customers. Very often I find out
| about pain points with software (often ones which are easily and
| quickly fixed) by talking to customers, which I'd never heard of
| before through product management.
| mastax wrote:
| > That's not an exaggeration by the way: the only service running
| at the time was a New Relic trial account that only allowed
| monitoring of one, maybe two servers out of the (I think) total
| of 15-20 servers we had at the time.
|
| I don't feel so bad about my monitoring setup now.
| zzzeek wrote:
| "Many of the performance problems solved during my first few
| years at GitLab were N+1 query problems."
|
| "Other frameworks have learned from this over the years and
| provide better alternatives. The usual approach is that instead
| of being able to arbitrarily query associated data, you have to
| pass in the data ahead of time. The benefit here is that if you
| were to forget passing the data in, you'd run into some sort of
| error rather than the code querying the data for you on a per-row
| basis, introducing performance problems along the way."
|
| can someone...translate this for me into human? If I want to
| query for some data I have to ....first pass the data in? Where
| did I get the data? I can't parse this paragraph at all.
| Rubyists....
| d_k_f wrote:
| They're likely taking about being able to query for additional
| data from the view layer. Rails makes this very easy since you
| often simply pass along query results to the view, which are
| "database connected" ActiveRecord instances. This way you can
| easily build the infamous "iterate over Posts and show their
| Users" N+1 example.
|
| According to them, other frameworks require you to fetch all
| required data before passing it to the view layer, thus
| preventing this issue from coming up on the first place.
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| In Rails, you can write something like this:
| Project.limit(10).each do |project|
| project.members.count end
|
| Here `project.members` returns some sort of query object that
| produces a query along the lines of this:
| [...] FROM members WHERE members.project_id = X [...]
|
| In other words, you can just query associated data on a per-
| project basis, without needing to pass any additional
| arguments.
|
| The problem this results in is that in the above code you'd run
| a COUNT query for _each_ project. Instead what you'd want is a
| single COUNT that groups data per project, such that you can
| then pass that data along with the `each` call. This setup
| would only require 2 queries, instead of 20.
|
| To eager load data in Rails you have to explicitly opt-in,
| resulting in something like this:
| Project.includes(:members).limit(10).each do |project|
| project.members.count end
|
| The problem here is that an opt-in mechanism is too easy to
| forget (as is evident by how common these N+1 query problems
| are), and even if you include it there are certain cases where
| you still end up running extra queries for each row.
|
| The solution here is to separate querying from the row instance
| types, e.g. a "Project" type can't query data itself and
| instead requires it to be passed in. This makes it much more
| difficult to create N+1 query problems.
| samlambert wrote:
| This post is interesting overall. But saying the org needs to
| care about scalability and then not understanding sharding is an
| interesting vibe.
| dalyons wrote:
| I think the author understands sharding very well. And the
| operational complexities of it and thus why it should be a last
| resort.
| samlambert wrote:
| 1. it's not as complex as stated. 2. sharding scales read
| heavy workloads just as well as write heavy.
| dalyons wrote:
| ok lets look at it. Start with the absolute best case for
| sharding - a perfectly segregated data model, say either by
| user or customer id. No shared data, no joins between
| tenents. Some relatively straightforward framework code to
| redirect queries between N shards. cool. Operationally now
| you need N database clusters (at least a primary and a
| replica per cluster). You need to manage and monitor all
| those, figure cluster local and shard promotion schemes,
| figure shard based backups and restores. Probably figure
| out shard rebalancing. None of it rocket science, but a lot
| to get right, test and maintain.
|
| Now do all that operational stuff in a way that works with
| on prem installs (gitlabs primary customer type).
|
| And then add in the fact that practically noones data model
| is that cleanly shardable, so add support for cross shard
| joins, and global tables.
|
| Its pretty easy to see how a couple of read replicas (that
| are near zero cost operationally if you're using a cloud
| db) are a VASTLY simpler solution.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| > Or as the Dutch saying goes: "Lekker gewerkt, pik!" (good luck
| translating that).
|
| Google Translate says this just means "Nice work, dude!" Out of
| curiosity, is there some culturally-specific subtext which is
| missing from that translation?
| sdwvit wrote:
| Probably the company grew, and standards grew as well. It is
| difficult to do layoffs / fire people based on perf in
| Netherlands, so it seems that's why it was only hinted for the
| person to leave. I am with the company on this one. Business is
| business, and it's both manager's and employee's responsibility
| to grow and keep up with the demands. Learn from errors and move
| on.
| kiitos wrote:
| Reads like a fairly junior IC.
| baner2020 wrote:
| The flaw in the argument is the assumption that Directors were
| more adept than Individual contributors. Most dev shops have this
| problem as folks further away from the IC work , the least they
| can anticipate the problems
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Economically, if the Amsterdam developer is providing the same
| value as the bay area developer - you should probably pay the
| them the same. While it's true that the local market for
| Amsterdam developers is set lower, you're building a global
| company and competing with other global companies. Sure you can
| get a discount now on Amsterdam developers but eventually a
| competitor will offer them something closer to their value or
| they will leave to do their own thing.
|
| I think we'll see the strongest companies pay location-agnostic
| prices for talent. Ultimately, it's about value delivered. If I'm
| Gitlab with a likely large encumbered ruby codebase and I want to
| sell to large enterprises that care about performance and
| reliability, I'm probably gonna pay this person more than 120k
| EUR a year. Most engineers who care about performance, type-
| safety, and reliability have no interest in Ruby so the market
| rate of that skillset is definitely higher. Is it bay-area
| 500k/year high? I dunno, but I imagine that the strongest
| companies who want top-talent will probably need to tie their
| comp to value delivered rather than location or they'll lose
| their talent to the companies that do.
| redwood wrote:
| Or you should hire twice as many of them
| siliconc0w wrote:
| If you pay people according to value you get happy value-
| generating employees. If you pay people the minimum of what
| you can get them for- you get the minimum - unhappy, less
| productive employees that eventually leave your company.
|
| There is no free lunch. Just because they aren't the type of
| person to get counteroffers or move to the bay area doesn't
| mean they don't recognize their value or won't feel taken
| advantage of.
| belter wrote:
| Can somebody help me out here? I went to the GitLab pricing page:
| https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
|
| Where do I select my location so as to get my location based
| price?
| depereo wrote:
| Like with any other business, you talk to the sales team and
| come to an agreeable middle ground.
|
| We don't pay 'list' for gitlab SaaS.
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