GitLab’s compensation structure is known to spark controversy.

Aricka Flowers writes on the GitLab blog to give an update on their latest iteration on salaries.

Our compensation calculator is a regular hot topic on places like Hacker News – pretty much any thread about GitLab has a comment about us paying local rates. As with everything GitLab does, we continue to iterate on our compensation model, and implemented a number of changes at the start of 2019. In addition to adjusting the salaries of backend developers, which were raised considerably so that we are “at or above market,” according to GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, the location factor was also revised to better reflect the respective areas covered.

But first, let’s take a step back to see how we got to here…

The part about standard pay eating away at production and personnel was pretty interesting to me. In the end, this is a world problem, not a business problem. Too much pressure gets put on businesses to solve problems they just can’t solve.