I feel a little bad contributing to such a very off-topic thread, but...
I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable.
At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab).
So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s.
I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves.
All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.
I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable.
At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab).
So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s.
I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves.
All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.