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.

> my salary was around €120 000 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.

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

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!

Not seeing too many international career opportunities here, sadly.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Besides, your alternative isn't making more money. It's not getting the job.

Some of those characteristics were given protection in law after enough noise was made.

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.

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

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.

Can I ask which country?

Usually what I see is that remote jobs will offer a slight higher wage than the going rate in lower cost of living areas. That way you’re in a situation where moving to a higher cost of living area and making a more regionally average salary isn’t all that attractive.

> When you do exactly the same job in the same company, same department, same team, with the same output — then definitely it's discrimination.

But that’s my point as well: if you’re in San Francisco paying $5,000 a month in rent for an apartment and your coworker in Cambodia is also getting an SF salary living in a mansion with servants because your company is location blind that’s also a form of inequity.

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.

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.

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

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.

(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).

It’s kind of like parking. If employees don’t pay for parking then an employer is subsidizing car driving over other options.

What’s not to resent?

why wouldn't he come here then? (he could have easily come on L1, great visa, spouse can work too, straight path to GC)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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."

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.

That would be absurd.

But what if they paid Philippines or Ukraine salaries everywhere instead? They wouldn't hire Bay-area engineers. Okay. And maybe the offshore has too much language/timezone friction. Okay. So choose a different price point, whatever is the cheapest to get engineers who match your condition, regardless of what their steet address is.

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.

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/

> 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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/1747599350438437364

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.

If you're remote, IDK why you would want to pay that premium.

There are plenty of levers to pull that are not salary, and not based on geography.

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.

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".

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.

A senior dev got paid the same, be it in South Korea, Brazil, Romania or New York City.

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...

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 ?

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.

Yes, and when you are hiring remote, the market is "everywhere."

No need to divide that market up by people living in a city, people owning a sports car, people with large amount of medical debts, etc.

Null hypothesis would be that on average the null/negative value projects would be evenly distributed.

...Then why is the company running that project?

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.)?

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

Here's your mistake. Companies have never and will never pay for delivered value. They pay the least they can to get an acceptable candidate. The difference is important, and the mentality that companies are paying for delivered value rather than the minimum acceptable amount leads to these mistaken conclusions often.

As for why? Because their goal is to maximize profit of course. Why pay more when less will do? The overseas dev should be paid less because their opportunity costs are much lower, so they accept a lower wage.

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.

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.

Okay, so you'll pay more for those niches or seniority. At whatever price is competitive with the market as a whole.

You don't need to include location. I'm sure people who drive fancy cars need more money too, but I'm not gonna pay more for that.

Exactly.

Compare it to something else, like paying people more if they own a sports car.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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...

That's not true of California and Ohio in general.

Interesting perspective, I don’t think I agree though.

No, it isn't. And you are trying to tie racial issues to pay issues via correlative methods, instead of causative.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

Big organisations are stable, mostly due to the often frustrating inertia and lack of risk taking coupled with their existing, mature revenue streams.

* 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.

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 :)

Respectfully, in your post you literally say you got a new manager who PIPed you for being hard to work with. The whole tone of the article feels like rehashing old disagreements.

> I didn't get along well with this manager, The resulting conflict lead to a "performance enablement plan", a procedure meant to get things back on track before the need for a "performance improvement plan" (PIP). A PIP is meant to be used as a last attempt at improving the relationship between an employee, their work, and their employer.

Not getting along with someone doesn't imply or mean that a person is difficult to manage. Instead, it means there's simply friction between two people.

In this specific case, the main source of friction was that my messed up working hours resulted in me performing tasks later than expected (though still within any deadlines), though I recall those time frames not being well specified to begin with (i.e. it was more of an implicit assumption that X would be done by hour Y).

I believe I was also a little late for a meeting because I'd overslept. That's not good, but it certainly isn't a case of "Wow this person is so difficult", instead more of a case of "This person needs to get his schedule back together".

Either way, you seem to be interpreting the story in a way different from what's written down. I doubt I can change that, so I'm going to leave it at this comment.

changes bring some adjustment uncertainty, and sometimes it goes well, things get better, sometimes it gets worse. with enough time you'll draw a short stick. it sucks.

Because colleagues have told me so, and the annual employee reviews were positive as well. In fact, outside the PEP the only actionable/to-improve feedback I got was essentially "Sometimes you can be a little harsh/blunt", which is vastly different from "this person is difficult to work with".

Words to live by.

sorry, this seems ... too vague for me to understand what's going on, and how it connects to their greed.

are they trying to 'scale up' this project? why aren't they keeping you? replace you how? in what capacity? are you currently wearing too many hats according to them? can you please give some details?

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.

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.

GitLab is fully remote. Everyone works remote, including leadership.

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).

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

no, of course, there's a lot of value in providing escalation/descalation/rehoming processes, and dedicated ways for org-wide feedback on people's and projects' impact, but people are not just three orthonormal roles on top of each other in a trenchcoat, if there's not clear hierarchy then - as others pointed out - the informal chaos takes over (because it's the human default)

- 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

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.

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

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.

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.

So what is his job then?

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.

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.

> 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...

That's why I love HN so much: a helpful answer with a source to boot!

This description helped me put words on the type of people I enjoy working with

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-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39333921

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

You make this sound like some kind of pipe dream. I don't know what companies you've been at, but for a lot of large corporations today it's completely normal to store all your data in the cloud, from documents at O365 to bespoke SaaS services like gitlab or book-keeping or whatever -- and the ones that don't do it for whatever reasons usually do something very similar, just internally via self-hosting.

If every single employee needs to back up their unique snowflake workstation, then something is fundamentally wrong with how data is handled in the first place.

> your most cautious employees will backup their device in order not to lose their work

The reason employees do this in the first place is because they don't trust the company to ensure the data doesn't disappear. That's the problem right there. I've seen it many times and it's always in chaotic companies filled with shadow IT, which of course are the most vulnerable companies for the same reason.

BTW the setup you describe with data being replicated in various places without specific coherence is exactly a situation of “there something fundamentally wrong”, and I've yet to see a company where there's a whole-PC backup job running in the background that gives the ability for the IT to give you a clone of your computer on demand in case of loss/failure (and I'm saying a clone of the computer: from the post-it to-do lists, your keybindings/ preferences in software, your bash aliases and small helper scripts, to the customized toolchain you spent three days setting up on five years back and don't remember how to install). Not everyone uses their computer as a mere PowerPoint consumption device…

I suppose companies using Mac could do that because that's exactly what time capsule allows you to do but idk if that's easy to deploy company-wide.

Anyway, none of what you said justifies to block workers from using their own device (they can and will use the cloud tools you mention with no issue from their computer), and invoking IP protection reasons is just security theater.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also, companies have no control over corporate IP that land on an employee-controlled PC anyway.

(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.)

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.

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.