I sent you a more detailed email, but basically it is preposterous to assume a "very experienced" senior engineer in ANY part of the United States is going to be happy with making $65K.
Exactly this. A very experienced engineer who is capable of working remote will likely be pretty intelligent. They'll realize a company is attempting to steal the surplus they created by living a low-cost lifestyle. I don't really understand why a company feels they have any claim to this.
Remote employees who are good at being remote have some very good options at this point of their career. Why the heck would they take less money simply because they had the foresight to move to a low cost of living location? Half the (stellar) people seeking remote work have built their entire lives around this fact - and have made very conscious decisions regarding their career and lifestyle.
Obviously it's working out for Gitlab, but I can't imagine any of my senior remote talent finding this acceptable in any way. I guess I could see it working for a couple years "converting" an engineer who is super excited to move into remote work vs. on-site. But beyond that, this policy seems extremely dangerous to me.
This is precisely what turned me off applying for a job at Gitlab after initially being hugely enthusiastic. My family and I moved away from London to the city we grew up in to save some money, partly because I knew I could work remote for the same sort of money I had been making while paying considerably less on rent and living expenses. The cost of living adjustments Gitlab do would mean entirely negating that benefit.
I'm not really sure what the justification for CoL adjustments is, beyond "we can get away with it". Apparently I'm worth paying $120,000 working from home in London, but if I move 70 miles south I'm worth half that. Not only does it make little sense logically, there's no way cost of living here is less than half that in London, so its not even calculated correctly.
