This is a big problem for many development teams. Sometimes you just want to open a blank whiteboard and scribble some boxes and brainstorm or troubleshoot some things. The whiteboard is an inseparable part of nearly every meeting.
I have not experienced this as a big problem for teams. There are many ways to collaborate, iterate, capture, and communicate ideas other than whiteboards, and people naturally find and adapt such methods based on their remote culture.
In fact, whiteboards, imo, are not particular good for this as they require everyone to be present in one place at one time to participate, you can add links, you can't capture side comments, there is no edit history, etc...
We use Google Docs heavily to capture rough ideas, blast them out, get comments and input, and iterate. If we decided that we would benefit from the input of someone that we did not anticipate, it's trivial to send them a link and ask them to comment when they have a chance. Those docs often get thrown away after they served their purpose, in the same way that a whiteboard gets erased.
I actually found remote whiteboards to work quite well when used with a proper pen tablet (like a Wacom Intous). Downside of that is of course increased cost, as equipping everyone with one of those isn't that cheap. It also takes some time to get used to using those, but for permanent remote situations this is about as close as you will get to in-person whiteboards.
A less sophisticated variant that works well for a lot of cases is draw.io (personal preference; other diagramming tools might work just as well). It doesn't give you real-time collaboration of the same board and also no freeform drawing, but a lot of the things you want to articulate in meetings are diagrams anyway. Whenever you want to articulate an idea, you just open the page, and screenshare that.
It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools. Pick a remote whiteboard tool, give everyone relevant a big tablet (personally, I find something like an iPad is more intuitive than the Wacoms other than the Cintiq), norm using it (along with other collaborative docs), and you're probably in pretty good shape. Not really expensive compared to all the other costs you have.
> It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools.
We absolutely are. I think I spent over a decade hoping for an extremely-low-latency pen-based note taking solution to show up to replace my use of pen and hardcover notebooks. If anything, I was romanticizing the notion of replacing a simple, inexpensive tool with expensive technology.
We're pretty close to that now with the iPad Pros, but since I've been remote for several years now, I've given up on that idea of a stylus based tablet solution altogether. These days, my preference is to use a live-conversion Markdown editor. If I was still in the Apple ecosystem, I guess I'd pay for a Bear subscription, but I'm on Windows, so I've made do with Dropbox Paper (I didn't expect to like it, but it's been surprisingly good for my use case).
I sometimes use my iPad Pro with Pencil for note taking and it works well. One advantage is that I can record and just write down key points; I can go to that point in the recording if I want what was literally said.
That said, I usually take typed notes (and maybe shoot a few photos with my phone). I can type faster and more legibly than I write and it's easier to turn these notes into a report/article/etc. (Of course, I can always record the whole thing too if I want.)
Bear looks interesting. I haven't looked at my options for a while.
For line drawing, tablets seemed weird for my brain. I'd rotate the tablet to draw comfortably, but a straight line is different because my monitor didn't rotate. But if you look online, people clearly get used to things like this with enough practice.
Cintiqs, iPads, and other tablets don't require this adaptation, though. I've also been kind of amazed how well people can write using mice when forced to (from watching MOOC classes).
>Downside of that is of course increased cost, as equipping everyone with one of those isn't that cheap
I bought a Huion drawing tablet (H610) which was relatively cheap and works well enough for most cases. No screen on the tablet itself, but you quickly get used to drawing while looking at the screen (there is a sort of halo surrounding where the pointer should be, so you're not using it blind). I can see it working quite nicely for whiteboarding.
This is going to be downvoted.... but I have never whiteboarded in my 7 years of professional development. It’s just not how all of us brainstorm.
Rather go try the code that I have ideas for, instead of talking back and forth. Most things I can be verbally told what they want and then I just go attempt it.
Yup you're not alone. After many years of developing and never using a whiteboard, my first attempt at a "whiteboard architecture talk" where I was forced to use a whiteboard was a 45min talk and I came out thinking it had gone quite well, looked back at the whiteboard and saw I had drawn a single box on it. Just one box with no label. I couldn't even remember what the box was supposed to signify.
Not everyone thinks visually. I'm also baffled when people ask for network layout diagrams or want to show me them. I just don't care about seeing that stuff in a diagram - it very seldom gives me information I feel I'm not getting somewhere else.
I've trained myself to do the whiteboard talk now because it seems to help some people. So if I'm communicating a design idea or whatever I'll often draw a diagram while I'm explaining it.
I've seen a pretty big uptick in new Twiddla [1] accounts in the last few weeks, and a bunch of mails from teachers and schools who want to start using it.
I market it to teachers for use as a remote classroom, so it's nice to be able to help out a bit. Though I'm a bit conflicted about marketing it too much right at the moment. The last thing I want to do is profit from the current situation.
Marketing your product that helps people be more productive in an unfortunate situation is not unethical or taking advantage of anyone. Every business needs a catalyst for people to realize you are solving a genuine problem for them. Embrace your established position with a functional product and solution and become a market leader by solving the current problem of the day better than anyone else! Good luck!
We tend to use Google Docs to scribble notes during a meeting. We’ve gotten good at using indentation to represent tree structures. It has less flexibility than a whiteboard but it doesn’t run out of space, is always achieved, easy to read, and most importantly everyone in the meeting can contribute at the same time.
Use a Wacom tablet or iPad with a stylus. Drawing with a mouse or trackpad is the problem. We use Zoom's whiteboard feature, but any online canvas could work. The Zoom option is interesting for us because we have the interactive boards in our office so remoties and in-office people can draw on the same thing.
We generally don't as far as I know. Most communication happens async anyway due to the timezone differences. When I do need to diagram things I tend to create Mermaid graphs in issue comments, but beyond that I never really felt it was necessary.
Whiteboards are absolutely indispensable for communicating ideas quickly in a small group of people. It's effectively just a bigger (and easier to erase) version of grabbing a scrap of paper to scribble something down when explaining or describing something to someone else.
I'm honestly more surprised that this isn't a universally known concept on HN. Scribbling on scraps of paper is something most people in western countries have done since pre-school.
I've been on a team with a super productive whiteboard user, who made ideas more clear by the ability to draw diagrams. I have also been on a team with a unproductive coworker whose whiteboard drawings were confusing, took lots of time to draw, and were generally unhelpful.
Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.
I'd actually prefer less whiteboarding to people spending a bit more of their own time on their ideas. Think about it and research it for a few days before calling a meeting.
If three people have 1/3rd of the knowledge needed to solve the problem (for example, a front end designer, a back-end designer from team 1, and a back-end designer from team 2), the total time expended is shorter if the three people research their part for 2 hours and then get together for an hour than one person writing based on faulty assumptions and having to go back to the drawing board anyway.
The larger the organization, the less one person can hold the entirety of the solution in their head.
Yeah I can think of several times when I or someone else came prepared to a remote meeting with a PowerPoint. Of course that took more work, but the product would often be reused and shared long after the meeting. Not only that, a higher quality work conveys the idea much better.
I don't know. A whiteboard alone isn't a solution.
I think it depends on the communication skills of the team.
Anyone who plays some form of "Win, Lose or Draw" or "Pictionary" will quickly realize that most people aren't as good at visual communication as they think they are.
Myself, I've been in too many whiteboarding sessions where the whiteboarder either spent too much time trying to "live bake" their idea on the whiteboard or simply produced an incoherent mess.
I think it depends on what you want to accomplish with the whiteboard.
If you just want to capture a list of ideas, google docs will let people collaboratively edit a document or you could just have one person share their screen and capture verbal ideas.
If you want to diagram things, pen and paper + a camera can be just as effective if not more effective than a whiteboard. Often it's better to have the whole team do a sketching exercise and share their results which isn't really effective on a single whiteboard.
More importantly, whiteboards are never going to be effective for remote organizations for the same reason hallway conversations / voice chat aren't effective. It builds knowledge silos as only the people who were there understand the context of the whiteboard even if you photograph it.
Indispensable for who? Perhaps designers? As an engineer I spent 5 years working remote and this has never been an issue. We just never needed—or even considered—drawing things.
Even now that I’m not remote all we use the whiteboard for is bulleted lists which easily can be done with notion or google docs
I'm a software developer and I always find that grabbing a whiteboard and drawing diagrams or other such information is very useful when trying to agree on a solution (or even agree on the problem). I work remotely and very rarely see the rest of my team in person, so the clear benefit (to me at least) of in-person whiteboarding in those situations is very stark.
Yes, you could probably accomplish the same thing by writing up a proposal spec document (which you'll need to do eventually) but the downside of doing that during the drafting stage is that it lengthens the feedback loop and not everyone will read such a document thoroughly and leave a thorough review. In-person whiteboarding is usually much faster and everyone in the room is almost always on the same page.
I knew that existed as a physical product but I never knew it was available as digital-only too. My non-gsuite personal account seems to be able to use it just fine for free.
No.
Whiteboard is not essential.
It is NOT inseparable form teamwork.
That is just one possible tool.
Maybe the only way you know perhaps?
If you must use it because that's the only way you know for collaboration then look around for better ones than the ones you know. There are physical ones connected to net (practically a huge touchscreen on legs), or there is this novel concept called tablets, those usually come with online connection too, spectacular, eh?!
Alternatively you may use the traditional whiteboards to brainstorm about remote whiteboards. ; )
Get some kind of device with a stylus (drawing tablet, iPad, Surface, etc) and use that to whiteboard. I think remote canvas whiteboards do work, you just need the proper tools to use them.
After watching a lot of MOOC courses, people get a lot better writing with a mouse with practice. I think a much better solution is a Wacom or a tablet. I just dusted off an old Wacom for my wife to scribble personal notes now that she's working from home. For awhile she's been using an iPad in meetings.
I've often pushed for having a personal white board just do dump out my own ideas for both personal and group settings. For lectures, we've just pointed a camera at the whiteboard. This is problematic because many whiteboards are shiny and you have to get most web cameras pretty far away to frame the whole thing. I've seen some experimental software that will detect markers and composite it over the image (for when people stand in front of the whiteboard--another common issue) or just increase the contrast of the writing.
I think it's a mix of new tools and new software instead of just new software using the same mouse+keyboard+Internet.
A better tool would be something like mxGraph, which allows for UML/Architecture diagramming in an easier way. (https://jgraph.github.io/mxgraph/)
Hackerrank (I work here) has included this in the remote/pair programming service. You can run it by going to https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair and clicking "Start session", and sharing with the ther user.
Obviously this is cost prohibited, and not collaborative - but historically I've used an iPad, QuickTime to capture the screen of the iPad, and then share the screen of my laptop.
The way you're thinking about solving the problem is by applying the same local office solution in a different context of a virtual remote environment, which seems like the logical way to go but is not very useful in practice.
With 15 years of career in web development, I've never really seen or thought about using a whiteboard in a meeting. I don't know if it would help but I've managed to get by this far without it.
The Meeting Owl Pro will be getting whiteboard functionality soon where it will be able to recognize when someone is writing on the whiteboard in the meeting room and will focus on that.
https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl
Looking forward, I think that a VR app like Google's Tilt Brush would be the best medium for this (perhaps, until we have something like the Star Trek Holodeck). But I don't think that Google or anyone else has released a multiplayer version yet.
We as a small business use IPad Pros and Google Jam Board. It’s honestly fantastic. Quick to jump into, export, and share. Especially for those moments where you only need the whiteboard for 30 seconds to get a point across
I use an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, and then use Explain Everything on it. Desktop users can use the "text" tools, and everyone else with a better set up can use the pencil tools.
3. Writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations.
4. Written down processes over on-the-job training.
5. Public sharing of information over need-to-know access.
6. Opening up every document for editing by anyone over top-down control of documents.
7. Asynchronous communication over synchronous communication.
These remote work principles have the direct, or side effect of breaking organizations that are "moral mazes," and hyper political bureaucracies.
The reason organizations suck is because managers just talk instead of producing data, which is basically conspiring to steal value instead of creating it for the organization.
I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others. At one site, I literally stopped answering my phone for anyone I didn't directly work for, because I knew those people were just using the verbal channel to create uncertainty about what was said and leverage the resulting confusion.
The WIFO rule solves a lot of org problems. (write it, or f-off).
> I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others.
I know this misses your point, but both at work and outside I've gotten into the practice of emailing immediately after a phone call with a summary of the phone call. It's kind of a lawyerly thing to do, but it's a contemporaneous documentation of the phone call you can point to later.
So much this. I left my last employer because of just this. A 'fat waist' of middle-management that delivered no value and created nothing but inertia. Major incidents were a shambles of managers demanding updates over a conference call while engineers couldn't communicate effectively. Ugh
I appreciate they have a whole section on disadvantages, but this stands out to me: "All-remote companies should consider meetings as a last resort, instead relying on asynchronous collaboration tools[...]"
To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. That can be fine for some things. But there's all sorts of work where I really value live discussion.
I know that some remote-first companies tend to group related work by timezone, so that teams can be both distributed and low latency. I take it Gitlab isn't one of those?
> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration.
This is not an implication by all means.
Low-skilled not very well incentivized junior team (let's call it so in absence of better terms) needs more/most "in-person collaboration". Team of experts to whom the goals and the overall vision have been conveyed, who knows how to put it to practice, will give the shortest latency in async flows.
Don't take it as a personal attack, but people valuing high live discussions, are frequently those on the receiving end of it.
That's one thing that can happen, but it's not the only thing.
What you're describing is a push model. Somebody on high creates a vision and assigns goals. Workers are just seen turning that into outputs. It's a common way to work, especially in "known problem/known solution" projects, but it has its flaws. See Cutler on "feature factories", for example. Or Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany".
But what if the solution or perhaps the problem is unknown? Push systems don't work. Instead, I favor cross-functional teams that pursue outcomes (as opposed to outputs). In that context, the vision is a living thing, created collaboratively, as is the plan. Problems are explored, and solutions discovered. The speed at which a team can learn and test solutions is limited by communications latency.
And of course experts aren't born that way. Even if you're in a "known problem/known solution" space, sustainable companies need to find ways to turn novices into experts. Again, that's about learning, which does not work well in high-latency environments.
> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration.
First, it's high latency, not extremely high latency.
Second, it has huge advantages:
1.) While latency (in terms of how quickly you finish task) will increase, your bandwidth will increase too. Everyone get more done.
2.) With asynchronous communication, you are not interrupted by communication, you can do it in bulk.
In case there is something urgent, you always can do a call, or synchronous chat.
> 1.) While latency (in terms of how quickly you finish task) will increase, your bandwidth will increase too
It has to increase to make up for the round trips you can't afford: you try to communicate more information in one batch. Whether this is good or bad really depends. On one hand, I think it just forces communication to be better, on the other hand you might waste time communicating things that you'd immediately find to be unnecessary if you were interacting live with the other party.
It sounds like you're focused on maximizing output. I'm more interested in maximizing outcome.
As to high vs extremely high, I'm not sure arguing over relative terms is useful. But just so it's clear what I mean:
If I'm working in a team room with colleagues, my average latency between request and response is, say 15 seconds. But in globally distributed remote work situations, a much longer lag is not uncommon. E.g., when I was working with European colleagues, it was typical to get a response the next working day. That's about 5000 times longer, which seems pretty extreme to me.
> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. That can be fine for some things. But there's all sorts of work where I really value live discussion.
But even when you work in the same building you still have to find a time slot that fits for a meeting. Of course, you can also drop by the other's office and hope to find them ready for a chat, but there's no guarantee.
And for remote companies I imagine that people actually have more time slots open for (video)chats, because people don't have to allocate extra time to travel between meeting rooms.
Of course, the dynamics of a live discussion are somewhat different from a digital discussion. But I think the availability/latency issue is a misconception.
> But even when you work in the same building you still have to find a time slot that fits for a meeting.
That is definitely not the only way to work. A cross-functional team sitting together and focused on outcomes can be much more organic than that. Think of the writer's room for a show, for example. That can sound weird, but Devin's "Artful Making" does a good job explaining the parallels between knowledge work and how theater/TV/movie people work.
> I know that some remote-first companies tend to group related work by timezone, so that teams can be both distributed and low latency. I take it Gitlab isn't one of those?
Probably depends on the team, individuals being able to self-organize and their experience. While some companies may see timezone distributed teams as disadvantage, I believe it is an opportunity to have a continuity of work and getting things done faster than if you had a single 6-8h time slot.
Having experienced a manager with a "sun-never-sets-on-my-empire" fixation, I'm skeptical. In theory, you can get 3 shifts in where there was one before. But this isn't a factory. For knowledge work, there's a big problem with handoffs.
If somebody is going to pick up coding right where I left off, I need to transfer a lot of state from my head to theirs. At best, this takes a lot of time. But what's more likely is that things get In software our true enemy isn't time, it's error. It takes seconds to create a bug, but often takes hours or days to remove it. It takes minutes to misunderstand the purpose of a feature, but days or weeks to rework the code to match actual need.
I think if we want to get more people at the coalface, the right solution isn't working in shifts. (If it were, we would already be working in shifts without regard to timezone, just like factories do.) Instead, it's to increase collaboration, which requires much more synchronous communication. E.g., techniques like collective code ownership, pair programming, frequent pair rotation, cross-functional teams, small units of work, continuous delivery, and very frequent releases (daily or more often).
Since very few people work like that, I think it's reasonable to assume that faster results are not in fact a priority for most businesses. So the "distributed timezones are an advantage" to me sounds like an after-the-fact justification, not an actual solution to a problem.
With async communication it’s hard to know if everyone got it. If you’re in some kind of synchronous meeting, everyone knows what everyone knows, and it’s usually more clear if people are confused or come from very different POVs, or don’t have the time, attention or other resources they need to get things done. Async communication often feels like shouting into a void, hoping that the right people saw it in time and prioritized it appropriately.
> If you’re in some kind of synchronous meeting, everyone knows what everyone knows,
I feel like while that's generally true, it depends. Not only because you might underestimate my ability to sleep with my eyes open. I've seen quite a few projects where in-person meetings were either badly planned, went overboard in terms of frequency / number of participants, or people were simply inattentive for other reasons. There's lots of scenarios where communication devolves to the point of asynchronous communication despite meeting face to face. Quite a few meeting forms type up notes or minutes for a reason. Many meetings in my experience are just superfluous "I felt like talking" scenarios, which is fine but it certainly does not make for a great communication strategy.
I'd say it depends on who would meet, for many groups other forms of communication like e-mail/IRC/slack work just fine for a majority of issues without introducing much friction. But sure, for others it might break down completely.
Amen. I've had meetings where 15 people showed up, and everyone walked out with 15 different recollections as to what was done. At least one of those 15 isn't going to read the meeting notes that get emailed out after the fact, so we're going to have to rehash the same shit in a week or two.
You don't have to "hope". You can just ask them to read and reply appropriately (even if it's just with an "ok" or equivalent). Initially you might have to prod them explicitly, but people adjust rapidly and start acknowledging on their own.
Just my opinion, but based on running remote and semi-remote teams since 2008 ... fully or mostly remote engineering teams are a competitive advantage, so, by definition, organizations that choose not to adapt to this reality will have a hard time competing.
Organizations can have a personal preference for co-located work, but, I think the marketplace will select those organizations out. I think this will unfold over single digit number of years.
From what I have observed, most of the resistance to remote work is really driven from the top; by less adaptable leaders.
I think if things flip and remote becomes the primary, and co-location becomes rare we'll also see some companies that are able to use co-location as a competitive advantage.
But I agree that remote (and the practices it encourages) are currently a competitive advantage.
I don't think you're wrong here. Remote itself does unlock advantages that aren't accessible to colocated companies (e.g. hiring anywhere), but one of the primary things that remote-practices unlock are surrounding communication.
Organizations approaching remote have a helpful speedbump that encourages them to take an intentional look at the way they disseminate information. Being fully remote is an accountability structure that helps ensure that everyone is following those practices.
There's nothing that would prevent a well-run colocated company from capturing those particular advantages, but such a company would probably slowly drift remote as companies like Buffer (and GitLab!) have as they grow and look for new talent.
Other HN members have pointed out previously, that it looks like a landing page where you need to leave your e-mail address. You don't. You can download the PDF from here directly.
Why do you have it as a PDF hidden behind a call-to-action reminiscent of a sign-up though? Turn it into a website, that'll make it a lot more accessible - assuming getting people to read it is the goal, of course.
Simple cost/result calculation. Creating a PDF + simple web page was something our designer can do easily. Developing a whole website around would have been much more expensive.
I always used to hated remote work. Nothing like in person, face to face conversations to get things done. Due to coronovirus, for the past few days have been working remotely. Its surprising that things are going smoothly. I feel, its mostly due to that fact that everyones remote right now. But I'm guessing, there has to be an inflection point in the team, where this is achievable. Not sure, what it is though.
Scrum burndowns should not be related to time spent at all. That’s not an actual agile technique, that’s your company not trusting you and not understanding how software works. Story points that are meant to represent unknowns and complexity, not hours, used for estimation and burndowns are one solution to this
At Gitlab we try to reduce the scope of tickets so that they all ship in the same sprint.
We measure efficiency by measuring the MR rate, the number of merge requests in a month devided by the number of engineers. To game the number you have to split work up in smaller Parts which helps cycle time, coordination, predictability, and quality, for example smaller changes are easier to review.
One issue I heard coming up recently is bandwidth many companies have to support remote access is not capable of dealing with a majority doing so. Then there are those using by license VPN solutions having insufficient simultaneous access.
I am used to the web ex approach for collaboration but again this is limited by bandwidth issues. if anything hopefully this shows people how many meetings are just unnecessary
I think that what's key here, especially during the current crisis, is to support businesses as much as we can to switch to WFH in the best possible way, with a simple process, and by helping them to stay engaged, hopefully without the need to make them all jump into real-time video calls many times through the day and lose focus.
At our company [1], we've been receiving an incredible amount of inbound. People really need tools that don't get in the way —we're a video-first async comm platform— and I'm happy our team is being able to help these companies switching to WFH.
The team and I are happy to help anyone with setting a basic process of communication for companies moving to WFH during these weeks. Just write to me at jp@standups.io and we'll be happy to jump in a call and see how we can help.
Do any companies think they will keep doing remote after COVID?
I have delayed sleep phase disorder (sleep-in late; fixed by camping / sunlight) and live in a van in (roughly) CO, so the perfect job for me is working remote with a team in San Francisco. I currently work in-office with a fairly major start-up.
I see so many people making the point that they have some syndrome and so they need x, y, z in a job. Valid, I'm sure, personally well-considered, true and everything, but still, indicative of a person who's problems are more important to them than the ones the company is hiring for.
So, funny thing. My problems are more important to me than the ones the company is hiring for. Especially given that solving my problems makes me more productive for the company.
Seems rational unless I'm actually trying to do the 'selling myself / interview' part.
We've received a ton of questions on how to manage teams remotely this week as well. We decided to make our eBook on "Managing Remote Teams" free, to help ease the transition for teams moving to WFH.
This 60+ pages book is the result of months of research and interviews with successful remote companies (it’s usually a part of our paid product). We collected tips on pretty much everything, from onboarding to communication best-practices, to tools you should consider.
Gitlab's remote manifesto speaks to me in so many ways. I'd also love to work for Gitlab anyway. But, alas, I don't know Ruby on Rails and I think it's too late for me to gain the proficiency that I'd require for my expected salary from Gitlab. Are there any fully remote companies doing Python?
If you know Python you can easily learn Ruby. Not hard to do that transition. Although not similar they share the same idiomatic programming principles drawn from languages like Perl. Also, Ruby was inspired by Python:
"I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn't like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knew Python then. But I didn't like it, because I didn't think it was a true object-oriented language – OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn't find one. So I decided to make it." - Matasamoto.
Yes, almost everyone does this. It's just opaque in most cases. I will say that, assuming they follow their adjustments literally, you do have some odd situations. Your ideal strategy to maximize comp vs. cost of living is to live in a state where the comp for the whole state is set by a relatively high CoL city but to live in a lower cost area in that state. (At least that was the case last time I looked.)
[ADDED: Although it looks as if they've made their calculator more granular so that high CoL city doesn't carry over to other areas as much.]
I totally understand why a company won't hire from Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Crimea – exposure to US sanctions threatens to cause severe negative repercussions.
But, why single out France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Sweden and Austria out of EU member states? What problems do they have which other EU member states lack?
Similarly, if Argentina and Brazil are a problem, what about Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, etc?
Likewise, why would UAE be a problem, but not Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, Jordan, etc?
Must be related to employee rights, either something highly specific that is a dealbreaker to them (what would Austria have that Germany has not?) or it's a growing list based on precedence, likely full of permanently encoded biases depending on whoever was the initial candidate.
It's mostly related to employment entity complexity vs. organizational demand for that location.
To operate legally as a business in most of those countries on that list adds complexity that leadership has deemed "not yet". Doesn't mean forever, just means, not yet. I've seen countries come and go off of the list.
In Argentina, same pay for the same job is a constitutional right. If they hire someone here they would get a lawsuit asking for Silicon Valley payment.
UAE has weird bans on many VOIP solutions, also VPNs are in a bit grey area - I guess that would make remote work too problematic with the tools they use internaly.
I ran into this while doing work for several companies in Oman, their state telecom provider is in a monopoly position for voice calls, and the VOIP ban is to push business to them.
They had some pretty ridiculous workarounds, like using teamviewer for its voice chat function.
When you sell physical stuff worldwide, nobody will be surprised if you won’t ship to some select countries because of local safety regulations, bad postal services or other local difficulties. When you hire people, these local difficulties increase tenfold, and I can totally understand why GitLab does not hire everywhere.
You may also notice that in most “first world” countries they hire through a proxy (listed in the same file), and it seems like in “no hire” countries they just couldn’t find a proxy yet.
Ouch, even within Australia they have large discrepancies between capital cities. One of the reasons why remote work appealed to me, was that I was hoping to escape the unfair wage difference between cities. The fact GitLab maintains it despite not having to pay for real estate in the city you work from is totally unreasonable. Same work, same pay. I'll never apply for them.
Is it unreasonable for a random Indian company not to pay the same wages as one in SF (assuming the work is the same)? What about if both companies are consultancies doing projects for Gitlab? If differences in those cases are fine, why is there a sudden change if the employees of the above companies start working for Gitlab directly rather than through a proxy?
But I think that if GitLab is able to pay somebody in the US one wage for work, and they hire somebody equally qualified in Australia that will be producing the same work, they should be paid the same. Well, it's up to GitLab to decide what they're paid, they shouldn't be forced to pay them the same, but I wouldn't work for a company that didn't.
I'm also surprised GitLab are away to get away with it with all the fuss made recently about discrimination. Is this a form of geographical discrimination in terms of unequal pay?
I'm not sure anyone here is a big advocate for off-shoring as a cost savings measure, and I don't see anyone in this thread defending it as a practice.
They can set their salaries however they want I guess - none of my business. And it must work for them if they're hiring the people they want.
But I looked at GitLab's compensation recently when I was switching job, and even when I maxed every thing out (not saying I'm that good) the pay for the UK was terrible - completely unworkable for a professional software engineer on the global market. I think they had the UK as having lower cost of living than places like the Czech Republic. I know for a fact that cost of living in the UK is not lower than in the Czech Republic. But worse than that they had these little islands of reported higher cost of living. Individual cities like Bristol. I suspect someone influential lived there and wanted to be paid more and they managed to get a special case.
I think I earned more as an intern while a university student with another company, than GitLab's top-tier engineer salary.
The location factor applies to anyone living within commutable distance or 1.75hours / 1hr 45 mins. So someone living in central Brighton would be in the London location factor.
I hate to break it to you guys, but the reason Shitsville, TN has has a higher multiplier is not because someone at Gitlab is terribly confused about the relative cost of living in Shitsville, TN vs Paris and London.
Google does the same thing, they just aren’t this transparent about it. In fact every company I’ve worked for has a COL multiplier in their comp plan. It’s odd seeing everyone bandwagon on this about Gitlab as if it’s an uncommon practice.
> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same.
This chain seems to have lots of excuses for not paying same salary for same value added, but I think it is about the same as the thing with sweat equity being somehow less valuable than cash equity.
Only real reason they f#ck you is because they can.
Salaries are in large part determined by local factors: cost of rent, food, gas/public transport, tax rates, etc. There is no "universal" salary for a particular position. Developers in San Francisco are not paid 3x of those in Des Moines because their skills are 3x better. Their salaries are higher because living in SF is more expensive. If the cost of living in SF were lower, the salaries would be lower, too.
If anything, pushing for a worldwide universal salary would likely lower earnings of the top X%, simply because most of the world isn't as expensive as SF/NYC/London.
Software companies like Gitlab don't address a local market. They target a global market, which is the same no matter where you're based and no matter where your employees live.
If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much.
Let the employees benefit from their cheaper location rather than taking that away from them. Otherwise where is the incentive to declutter cities?
> If you can afford to pay San Francisco developers a given salary, you can afford to pay Des Moines employees as much.
That’s not really true. There are companies with a few employees in expensive locations and many in low income regions. If you switched everyone to the same salary you’d bankrupt the company. I certain don’t assume to know what Gitlab’s financials look like.
What if a company is paying above market rates for all their employees in their chosen locations? As a thought experiment, assume each of those people was the most suitable employee in their field. You’d pay them what they wanted in order to make it work. What if one of those people had a special situation with say dependants? Would you pay them a little more to relive that so they could work for you effectively?
> That’s not really true. There are companies with a few employees in expensive locations and many in low income regions. If you switched everyone to the same salary you’d bankrupt the company. I certain don’t assume to know what Gitlab’s financials look like.
There's a slight of hand going on here, where you at first assume all employees are fungible, to mention it's not possible for some firms to pay all employees the same.
But then you ignore that, before someone is hired, when they're merely a potential-hire, they _are_ (basically) fungible with all the other potential-hires. If you can afford the most expensive one, you can afford the cheaper one.
No one suggested paying everyone the same huge amount. But if you are paying Huge Amount X, that can go anywhere.
But that is the reason why San Francisco has higher pays, there is a huge competition between employers. In practice what you propose is not to hire in expensive places.
Which is what many companies do in practice. Say there's a company that's not in the Bay Area and has some potentially remote openings. As a Bay Area resident, go in demanding a FAANG in-person salary and most of them will laugh at you unless you're someone very unique who they need.
I mean, I strongly encourage all people who, when presented with the option of getting a very good deal on an expensive and valuable thing, to take it.
In equilibrium, you'd expect someone's programming skillset not to massively drop in value because they moved slightly far away in essentially the same legal jurisdiction. Until we reach that equilibrium, there is money waiting to be collected by firms who hire American engineers to work remotely.
In my understanding when you move away from hot-spots like San Francisco it is not your skill that loses value, but you that lose power in asking for an higher salary.
Also it is not that devs in SF are especially good; I would guess that the distribution of skill is power law (specifically the number of devs in the global n-th percentile as a function of the total number of devs in the hiring pool) and it might be argued that the competitions is counterbalancing any positive effect of that.
In the end it is a position of which job market do you want to be in.
Are the employees in San Francisco required to be there? If so, yes they should get San Francisco wages. However for people who can work anywhere it should be the same wages - if you want to live in San Francisco don't work for us we will hire the cheaper people in Des Monies who are just as good. If they can't hire people in Des Moises cheaper that means they are not paying enough
I am making a more fundamental point, which is that the current developer salaries (in general, worldwide) would not be as high if the cost of living were not high in the specific places where software companies congregate. These high salaries would otherwise not exist, because they are not based on an objective skills or supply-based metric. It is not as if SF developers are 3x more skilled than Des Moines ones. Clearly the assumption that salaries should factor in the cost of living is a factor.
In a lot of ways, this extremely high baseline benefits everyone else in the industry, even if they don't directly work in SF/NYC/etc. The salaries of Des Moines developers are probably higher than they would otherwise be, as compared to other professions.
And while it's nice to think that companies should pay people the maximum amount of money that they can afford, this is unfortunately not a rational economic move and it will collapse the moment any financial difficulties come into play.
> because they are not based on an objective skills or supply-based metric
Then you have to ask why do these clusters exist - with high skills, high salaries and high costs?
In my view, that's because there is value created by proximity.
It is more productive to have people co-located in the same office.
Also if you live in a major university town, or high tech area then that accelerates the exchange of ideas, particularly outside peoples direct areas of interest. This makes for better networked, more creative employees.
Co-location of companies also increases the chances of collaborations and deals.
The context here is an all-remote company though. As such they have rejected the advantages of proximity. They should be searching out the great but cheap people who want to live elsewhere.
But if those great people have any sense they will be working for a company that recognizes and rewards their skills and not simply offers a rate based on the area of the world they are in.
ie great people don't want to be competing on cost for work, unless they can capture some of the value of their greatness.
eg price for work completed rather than by the hour - so if they finish it in the half the time then they keep that value.
On the other hand, people currently average skill or below ( half... ) are more likely to be better off being paid by the hour.
So if you take a pure economic view, and everyone was behaving rationally, then a cost based hourly recruitment model gets you average and below workers.
ie you get what you pay for at equilibrium.
Of course what they are hoping is to exploit not being at equilibrium - countries with relatively high skills and low costs.
However they are going to be competing with companies based in those lower cost countries ( eg India ), who have both the low cost environment advantage and the ability to recruit locally and better select and retain employees.
My experience of working with even locally based companies that compete on price is high staff churn ( as the good ones find better employment ) - which really damages productivity.
TBH, if I were running an all-remote company, I'm not sure how hard I would try in general to match comp with big Silicon Valley employers. It's actually not clear to me that GitLab really does either. The pay scales for other popular cities are only about 10-20% below SF.
The phenomenon where of Googles/Facebooks/etc. offering mostly very attractive comp in spite of Bay Area CoL is actually relatively recent. Going back a couple of decades I looked at some employment options in Silicon Valley and the comp uplift wouldn't have covered the higher CoL relative to Massachusetts. And the companies freely acknowledged this.
We are addressing a global market too at TransferWise and London developer salaries are way different than Budapest salaries. We are also not a remote company... until next week :)
It's reversed. Living in SF is more expensive _because_ the salaries are higher but space is scarce. Salaries are higher because of concentration of high-tech companies which make a lot of money and are not neccessarily pressed to hire cheap. If they were, they'd move these jobs to India anyways.
People come attracted by good jobs, but it turns out it is hard to find a place to live with a good commute. The demand drives prices high.
> Salaries are in large part determined by local factors
Salaries should be a function of value produced amortized across the convenience and reliability of a predictable salary for the employee. Where I am sitting has no bearing whatsoever on the value produced and it is the primary thing that prevents me from pursing a job at gitlab.
Also this argument ignores the side benefits having an enormous salary offers you. (e.g. X% into your pension is a bigger number)
> If anything, pushing for a worldwide universal salary would likely lower earnings of the top X%
If you're refusing to pursue a job at Gitlab because it would pay less then the market rate where you live then the issue isn't that their salaries vary geographically but just that they don't pay enough in your area. If you you object even though they pay higher than your local market rate then you have a weird aversion to money that I don't see a reason for anyone else to care about.
I currently live in a major city but have plans to move to a lower cost rural area. If I did that while I was working at Gitlab they would slash my salary and reap my cost saving, do you think I would be generating less value for them in exchange?
There are two answers to this. One is "No, but prices aren't determined by 'value'. Having air to breathe is very valuable, but it's free! You've got to consider supply as well as demand." The other is "Yes. Previously you were the most efficient source of code per dollar they could get (on the margin). Now you aren't."
> Salaries should be a function of value produced amortized across the convenience and reliability of a predictable salary for the employee
Salaries should be the equilibrium price where an employers willingness to offer a salary meets an employees willingness to accept one. The only surprising thing about their scale is that they’re willing to hire people in high cost-of-living locations at all.
There are lots of things, but one valuable thing is to build strong social connections [1] and trust [2] with your remote colleagues. For example by regularly getting the team together on video calls to discuss topics unrelated to work. And sharing a meal at the same time. Small things that make a surprisingly big difference.
> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same?
Why is that? I don’t necessarily disagree with your statement. But why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford less food and healthcare just because they live in a place with higher prices and higher taxes?
Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule?
Why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford less food, less healthcare, less living space and fewer gadgets for themselves just because they have a bigger family and more kids to support? ;)
Generally what you do with your money should not be a business of your employer.
> Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule?
You're silently assuming the quality of life in developing countries is the same as in other countries and the only thing they differ with is the level of prices or taxes. This is generally not true.
Why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford [less food, less healthcare, less living space and fewer gadgets] for themselves just because they have a [smaller family and fewer kids to support]?
Generally what [your employer does] with [your employer's] money should not be [your] business.
Indeed. There are two views of employee compensation - you can have people that you compensate as a share of value added/profit share (this is very common for sales:its easy to record who sells what;selling more means more revenue - giving a share of that revenue to the seller aligns goals. In theory, and for commodities; in software you also get sales people that overpromise and lead to developers working themselves into an early grave, never having a hope of satisfying any customers..) - and you can have "wage slaves": people you pay wages to for a share of their time.
In the latter case, from a strictly economic standpoint, you'd prefer workers to pay you (eg us prison labour...).
In a strictly value-add/profit share the more value a worker produce, the higher the compensation and the higher the company revenue.
Now software business (knowledgewwork) is typically somewhere on the scale between these two.
I'd personally say that given gitlab's product and business - they would probably be better off leaning a bit more towards the latter - allow a great softare engineer in rural UK or eastern Europe get (locally) silly rich;and allow those that feel like it to move to less crowded locations without docking their compensation. As long as they only get a share of generated added value, this should be a win-win.
Games aren’t sold for the same price regardless of where they were produced? Sure they do. They sell for different prices in different places they’re sold, but where they were produced has little impact on the price in each location.
The fact that I make X here while pay is 4X in SF is the only proof needed to show job markets and pay levels are local.
If a SF company wants to hire me remotely, I'll take the job at 1.5X, so they won't pay more than that. The simple reason is this: If I don't want the job at 1.5X the local pay, I my neighbor does, and he's every bit as good an engineer as I am. When they do hire me at 1.5X my current pay, they have bought my skill at the local market rate.
You make a good point: as an employee you are not the product, you are part of a team — and the team is just one ingredient in the manufacturing of a product. An important ingredient, but not the whole story nonetheless.
Taking that further: as a human you are also part of the physical community that you live in. A developer in a small town might help out the local library, whereas a developer in a big city might organize tech meet-ups to help their peers.
I'm not saying one situation is better than the other, but I can imagine not just different price points, but also different valuations for equal skill depending on location.
>Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country
Absolutely. I am living in an Eastern European country, and yes, the local market would absolutely need people with western income: all the restaurants, local services, and the local economy would benefit from this. With practices like Gitlab, our local market would be locked into this shitty state it is in right now. Basically they lock us into not being able to export our only product for a good price: we export our 'knowledge' for cheap.
But I think if all-remote will be a thing, this will be unsustainable. People will fight these immoral practices with 'cheating': what stops me pretending to be living in a western country (even renting a cheap flat there), but staying most of the year in my country? Will they examine my nationality or citizienship? Pretty scary stuff, but I might apply for a western-country citizienship then. If they fuck with us, we will fight.
Ok, lets say we live in the same street, work in the same office, do the same work and we both provide exactly the same value to the company.
Lets say your mother has given you her old car to drive and you just pay insurance and gas.
Lets say I bought a Ferrari Roma.
What you are saying is that you'd find it unfair if I were paid 'as little' as you, because I have to deal with the expenses of paying off my Ferrari. I'll take that deal.
pay your local in-house employees based on what suburb they live in, workers who live in expensive areas should be paid more because it costs them more
>Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule?
Yes, actually. Well, tax havens shouldn't be legal in the first place, but getting people with good salaries into poorer countries is good, because they pay taxes there.
Of course, the vast majority of people would actually not go to poor countries, they would simply leave cities. Which is also something that should definitely be incentivized.
> Well, tax havens shouldn't be legal in the first place
Why not? Why can’t each country decide for themselves how much tax they want people and corporations within their jurisdiction to pay? Shouldn’t be legal in what jurisdiction? Why should any other country get any say with how a different country conducts its taxes?
That assumes that all money is of equal value. Which on one level it is, but on another level, the relative purchasing power in different geographic areas is a real thing. Normalising based on that means that in effect you're paying people for the same relative quality of life, rather than same absolute value, which can be very different relatively.
The average global relative purchasing power is already reflected in the currency exchange rates.
But generally there is no such thing as a "single" purchasing power. Some local goods may be cheaper in developing countries, but some others can be more expensive. If you don't know exactly what an employee is spending their money on, you can't really tell the purchasing power of their money. A big family with more kids may spend more money on local goods, transportation and housing, but a single person may want to just save-up 80% of their salary for a new Tesla, which costs just the same everywhere. Therefore adjusting the payouts to the local prices level will always be unfair to someone.
If one could get a Tesla at a 70% discount just because they live in a developing country, then the story would be different. But they can't.
Currencies are too broad though; as has been stated, cost of living in SF is a multiple of that elsewhere, and that's just in the EU. It's similar in the Netherlands (where Gitlab is from), where living in the urban western cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, Utrecht) is unaffordable for the vast majority of people, but that's where all the tech companies decide to settle because that's also where a lot of the tech people have moved to. Somehow. The fact that a lot of people live in run-down overpriced housing or shared student living spaces seems to be ignored there.
I for one would love to be encouraged to move further out to the countryside. That's the long-term plan anyway.
They pay people less not because of "relative purchasing power" or because they want them to have the "same relative quality of life" or some such sentimental nonsense but because they can get away with it.
The cost of life is totally irrelevant, the alternative options someone has in he market-place based on their location are. Did you look at those numbers at all?
I wonder how this works. If someone could work remotely for GitLab, they could also do another remote job for another global player, so local prices don't matter that much. Maybe this strategy can work now when there are only a few remote jobs to choose from. But I guess the coronavirus will accelerate growth of remote jobs when more companies see remote has some benefits.
This is absolutely the case. About a year ago I was looking for new work and, having previously enjoyed managing a GitLab installation, was very keen to interview with them.
It felt like it would be a perfect fit, based on our shared cultural values regarding remote work, transparency, open source and other technology choices.
After seeing the calculator, I decided not to interview at all, and had another remote job a few days later with more pay than I had in Boston and New York. I live in Bangkok, Thailand.
As someone who lives in South Africa, it's quite frustrating to travel when you realise your money isn't worth shit in most developed countries. It financially restricts where you can go for how long and how often. Many imported things, like cars or computers, are actually more expensive here than in the States. Food, housing and other costs of living might be cheaper. It makes somewhere like Cape Town a great place for people with first world savings/income to holiday/retire. In a global economy someone earning local rates don't have the same kind of options.
> What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same.
I've studied the system a while ago when considering to apply there and found some areas with comparatively low cost of living while having a large conversion factor. People only complain about conversion factors if they are low but there are also higher ones. If you are ready to move, you can still make lots of money (the priority for this part of my career).
With Gitlab I could stay inside europe with the european healthcare system while not worrying about US visas, working remotely and asynchronously (an improved version of just "remotely"). That puts Gitlab well above other companies in my home country of Germany.
The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people. If the system allows me to be employed, I'm very happy for it, even if I make less than my colleauges in SF.
> The Gitlab response to this system is that it allows them to employ more people.
Sytse is a good person but I'd never trust any company to hire more people than it absolutely must. I used to think no company will spend more in employee compensation than it must but i recently learned that board members get paid so together with runaway executive pay clearly I was wrong about that.
As an Eastern Europian such practices really sadden me.
Cannot this be hacked though? Could I somehow apply from a rich country and then spend 360 of 365 days in a year in a poor country?
Even if you pull this off, you'd be in a situation where the company that hires you (outside the US they mostly use 3rd party employment providers) and/or you are committing tax fraud in a way or another.
In many cases, you'd be working without a work visa. Of course, many people do it and get off with it. But there are occasional crackdowns. [1] Perhaps more to the point, as the sibling comment asks, "Whose promise?" GitLab explicitly requires you to obtain permission from your manager before moving elsewhere for an extended period. [2]
Would it even made a sense to hire you then? When local employee costs the same? One of reasons to hire remotely is to optimize cost of conducting business. Without it a lot of these positions wouldn't exist in the first place.
That's another valid reason, but it doesn't allow to dismiss factor of cost of employee entirely.
Company, I work for, has office in capital city, and offices in smaller cities. Talent pool of capital city would easily accommodate us. Other offices exist because it's cheaper to hire there. If cost would be the same, they would simply cease to exist. Cost difference in means of the building is less than 5% of overall monthly budget, so, while helping it's not deciding factor.
Yes, you should get paid the same. That's exactly what they are doing. Stop thinking about it in terms of cost to them and think about compensation to the employees. The cost to Gitlab of paying a competitive salary in London vs Berlin is going to be very different. But both developers will receive the same benefits relative to their location. Remember, you can't eat money, you can't drive money or live in money. Paying people the same dollar amount means the actual lifestyle of employees doing the same job will be vastly different.
A mid-level dev on a local salary in India can afford to take taxis everywhere and have a live in cook/cleaner. I know mid-level developers in Ukraine who outright own their apartments (i.e. no mortgage). Mid-level developers in London are lucky if they can buy an hour from the city center.
So are people in SF, London and other locations are actually underpaid on the global market?
The answer is maybe, because those locations have other benefits too which are less tangible. Measuring quality of living is subjective, some of my Indian and Ukrainian friends will not consider moving to western europe or the US because their quality of life drops signficantly.
It's a market, and if I'm sitting in india working for an SF company, then the SF company needs to compete for my skills mostly with other companies in india, because local employment is still the norm.
Once remote employment is so widespread that an SF company hiring someone in india actually competes for their competence with every company in the world - then that will change.
Does McDonald's burger flipper gets paid same everywhere in the world? Or for any other local service or product do these people will pay Silicon valley prices? Otherwise it would just mean software people do think of themselves as a superior species that earthly rules of economics must not apply to them.
Gitlabs wants to hire people from everywhere. If they don’t pay people enough, they won’t be able to compete for those employees. If they pay everyone SF rates, they will have far less engineers than their competitors and will overpay unnecessarily.
Paying the same will be unfair to those living in an expensive location, finding the means of living while others retain more for the same amount of job.
Could you explain to me how it is unfair for people who choose to live in expensive places that people who don't choose that lifestyle get paid exactly the same amount for the same work?
It's cute, you really think it is a choice to move to an expensive place for a high paying job?
Believe me, you have no choice, you MUST move there! Then work hard to hang on otherwise you are f*d, paying a lot just for your bare existence!
Also some are born there perhaps, all human connections tie them there...?
So the people who are living the life in the developing world are the ones who should take they pay hit because you want to socialise with hipsters?
Also, why must you move 'there'? I understand that my life is more expensive where I live than it is in the developing world, but I get a in return for living here. I wouldn't find it fair if a remote colleague made less money than I do just because of them living somewhere else.
It also works (and is similarly disgusting) in a single country where the salary discrepancy is large.
I live in Poland, where the gap between IT and non-IT is staggering. Teaching programming easily nets me 5 times as much money as a regular public school teacher would get. Same goes for regular development work: developer salaries here are 4-6x the average salary. Are we making that much of a bigger impact on society?
Any time I visit a hairdresser, a car mechanic or anyone from the services sector and I wonder why things are expensive, I compare their hourly rates to mine. The hairdresser may be getting something like 20% of the money I'd make in that time – and they have to support the salon for some of that as well (also, they're just someone else's employee, so they get maybe half of that in the end). No longer does it seem expensive at all, and it goes for any service I can imagine.
Make these people better compensated... and I'd no longer be rich. We'd all be pretty much the same. Perhaps that's where the fear you see in some other comments here stemming from – "but this will lower the salaries for the top X%!". Yes. We'd have to admit that we're not special in terms of our contribution to society – just lucky enough to be in a booming industry. Or perhaps a growing bubble.
And sure – my work has the potential to produce a lot of value. I recently wrote software that will (indirectly) enable a large warehouse operator to essentially fire their entire workforce and replace them with robots. Last I checked, the individuals currently in that workforce make something like $5 an hour, and the business owner is proud enough to put that on their job ads. When the automation machine is finished, these people will be unemployed. How will they be making their living? Nobody in the process cares. So how has my work improved the society? In the end I'll still be stuffing myself with delivery sushi and roaring a big car on the highway – thanks to the growing supply of more and more cheap labour.
I've now digressed very far from the original discussion. But being aware of this is an endless source of frustration for me, and every discussion about "what is fair compensation" awakens it :|
If you feel you're being paid unfairly in contrast to others, move to a high tax, high income country like any in Scandinavia where everyone makes a decent income and everything is more expensive that your software engineer salary won't seem so high anymore.
But be careful what you wish for as now you'll be able to afford much less. Nice house in a family friendly neighborhood like back in Poland? Forget about it!
There's no fair. There's supply, demand and people trying to make their ends meet in between. You are just the same hired worker as everyone else, and if your bosses found a way to get your work for less money, they would gladly do it - it's just they can't. People with other professions are not paid less because of you, they are paid less because of capitalists, who get much more money than you and maintain this system. It's capitalists who should feel sorry for these people, not you.
Do you really feel "rich" as a hired employee? Eating sushi and owning a car is "rich" for you?
Relatively rich, yes. I don't think any other kind of rich exists – there's always a bigger fish :) Were we on a different website with a different audience we may be having this conversation about private jets – or a dinner at a restaurant. Perhaps "rich" was the poor choice of the word (no pun intended), but I think the meaning is preserved.
And yes, you're right: it's not because of me, I'm just a bigger cog in the same machine, and similarly exploited, just for a bigger share. It is because of the capitalists – but I believe that's what the discussion is about here. Gitlab deciding that it's not worth it to them to pay everyone equally (or according to their value) because it's “not worth it” for them – they won't be able to keep as much to themselves. Their arguments for it[1] are as weak as it gets: they literally say that they don't want to pay people better because they'd rather acquire more companies – that surely makes the underpaid employees feel better.
There are many definitions. I think the most useful and wide-spread one – even among non-economists – is from the OECD: you are rich if your household equivalised disposable income is ≥150% of the median of the country.
If you want to find out whether you meet the criterium, then try to find some newspaper articles on the Web about the poverty line or poverty gap that embed JS calculators. Otherwise see http://enwp.org/Equivalisation if you want to crunch the numbers yourself.
This issue here is, I think, that employees _at Gitlab_ aren't paid the same for the same work depending on where they live. The issue isn't that in general developers are paid depending on where they live.
If you would increase the price of goods and also the salaries of everybody doing the same work - that would lead to you buying the same amount of stuff or less for more money.
Or just work for Basecamp, which locks all of their salaries at the San Francisco avg even though everyone works remotely and they are based in the Midwest.
Probably has something to do with how few people they employ.
So you're saying everyone at Gitlab should have their wages slashed? I wonder how good their company would run if they couldn't afford employees in all major tech hubs.
Not only that. Director of compliance resigns because she needs to explain why she advices to walk off from non compliant contracts. Yeah, and in the spirit of true openness her coment about that is deleted.
This is a big problem for many development teams. Sometimes you just want to open a blank whiteboard and scribble some boxes and brainstorm or troubleshoot some things. The whiteboard is an inseparable part of nearly every meeting.
And no, remote "canvas" whiteboards don't work. They end up looking like this: https://cdn.drawception.com/images/panels/2015/3-3/jLndYAfNf.... Is there anything good that really solves this problem?