> That would restrict all your hiring to the lowest wage markets.
The talent quality is the same.
Some of those reasons in the link are directly contradictory, some are nonsense, and others are inapplicable to other firms (But sure, they may well make sense for Gitlab.)
> A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
May be a priority for Gitlab, but that is not a priority for any firms that required people to relocate their butts to Silicon Valley, or that never supported remote work prior to Covid.
> Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.
Seriously? Do team members with more obligations, like children enrolled in private schools, ailing parents, or overleveraged mortgages also get the same amount of discretionary spending as their less-burdened coworkers? Isn't choosing which zip code to live in discretionary? And why does this even enter the picture, when, as you claim, your wages are set by market, rather than by COL? The market doesn't care about employee discretionary income. There's nothing fair about market wages, just like there's nothing fair about the weather. They just are.
> Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.
This is an incredibly employee-hostile reason. "We don't want to pay you too much, because imagine if you ever become unhappy." Good lord.
> 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.
This, however, is a fantastic reason. See my previous post on why it makes sense for a remote firm to not pay anyone NYC wages.
> If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions.
Why is this a goal of the firm? Scratch that - if that's a goal of the firm, that's fine. It's a weird goal, though. Companies typically don't go into business with the goal of attracting and retaining people in high-wage regions. They typically go into business to make a lot of money by solving problems for their customers. So, it's fine that this is a goal for Gitlab, but it certainly does not seem to be a goal of any company I've ever worked for, or am likely to work for.
You adjust wages up for employees hired in, say, non-NYC, who choose to move to NYC. How would doing so meet that goal? Is someone from Oklohoma who moved to NYC for a raise suddenly providing a diversity-of-skills-and-perspectives need that was unmet, prior to their geographic relocation? Are they now providing more value, that necessitates paying them more? If not, why was hiring in high-wage areas a goal in the first place?
Before I relocated to the Bay Area, I had never gone on call. Never diagnosed a system by only looking at graphs of metrics it emitted. Never ran experiments against tiny percentages of production traffic. Never had to maintain consistency while failing over between regional datacenters. Being here did make me a stronger engineer, because companies here are earlier adopters with tougher problems, and the scale to make solving those problems worthwhile, and people who have been studying them. Maybe someday these experiences will be evenly distributed among remote workers everywhere, but right now they're concentrated in the strongest labor markets.
The talent quality is the same.
Some of those reasons in the link are directly contradictory, some are nonsense, and others are inapplicable to other firms (But sure, they may well make sense for Gitlab.)
> A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.
May be a priority for Gitlab, but that is not a priority for any firms that required people to relocate their butts to Silicon Valley, or that never supported remote work prior to Covid.
> Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than ones in low-wage countries with the same role.
Seriously? Do team members with more obligations, like children enrolled in private schools, ailing parents, or overleveraged mortgages also get the same amount of discretionary spending as their less-burdened coworkers? Isn't choosing which zip code to live in discretionary? And why does this even enter the picture, when, as you claim, your wages are set by market, rather than by COL? The market doesn't care about employee discretionary income. There's nothing fair about market wages, just like there's nothing fair about the weather. They just are.
> Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and sticking around because of the compensation even when they are unhappy.
This is an incredibly employee-hostile reason. "We don't want to pay you too much, because imagine if you ever become unhappy." Good lord.
> 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.
This, however, is a fantastic reason. See my previous post on why it makes sense for a remote firm to not pay anyone NYC wages.
> If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to attract and retain people in high-wage regions.
Why is this a goal of the firm? Scratch that - if that's a goal of the firm, that's fine. It's a weird goal, though. Companies typically don't go into business with the goal of attracting and retaining people in high-wage regions. They typically go into business to make a lot of money by solving problems for their customers. So, it's fine that this is a goal for Gitlab, but it certainly does not seem to be a goal of any company I've ever worked for, or am likely to work for.
You adjust wages up for employees hired in, say, non-NYC, who choose to move to NYC. How would doing so meet that goal? Is someone from Oklohoma who moved to NYC for a raise suddenly providing a diversity-of-skills-and-perspectives need that was unmet, prior to their geographic relocation? Are they now providing more value, that necessitates paying them more? If not, why was hiring in high-wage areas a goal in the first place?