
Ask HN: How do you approach salaries for distributed/remote teams? - bushido
As I spend time across tech companies, I find myself questioning the efficacy of different salary strategies.<p>A few that I&#x27;ve seen in the wild:
a. Pay top dollar (probably confined to FAANG and the well funded&#x2F;profitable)
b. Aim for the market rate for the geographic area the employee is located in
c. Come up with a band and leave it for prospective employees to negotiate (read: most people are terrible at negotiating their own salaries)
d. Know what they can afford, regardless of location, and pay the higher of the candidates expectations or the budget<p>I personally find myself having an issue with b and c most of the time. It might be utopian, but I like people I work with and those who work for me to make the most they can.<p>As for myself, I have lived in very expensive cities and relatively cheaper ones. What remains consistent is my saving&#x2F;investment rate, I have an absolute minimum ($) and a relative ideal (%), and adjust my standard to achieve this.<p>It seems logical that some cities might have a premium attached to the salary (SF and London come to mind). But is discounting acceptable?<p>Think two engineers providing equal value to the company, one working remotely in Toronto and another in Bucharest.<p>How do you navigate salaries?<p>context:
Besides advocating for employee salaries at companies I&#x27;ve been affiliated with, I see myself taking a more active role in this area in the near future for some time to come.<p>This is my attempt to hear from peers and to better establish my foundational principle on this topic.
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verdverm
I'm all about paying above market rates, you get what you pay for and it's not
a linear scale, probably more like an activation function.

There is an interesting idea that seems to be working well. That is salary
transparency. Everyone in the company knows how much everyone else makes. It
instantly removes gender / race / negotiation skills as a difference maker.
Geography seems like it would benefit, and that some amount of cost of living
adjustment ought to be incorporated, though perhaps how you do this encourages
behavior in some direction.

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baristaGeek
There are no right or wrong answers to this. It can be pro-rated for the cost
of living, pro-rated to the cost of market (GitLab approach) or just a
standard rate that's below SF market.

You can pay $60k to a senior engineer in an emerging economy and he/she will
be super happy about it because that is way above market in his/her country.
Regardless of which method you used to get to that number.

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bushido
Thanks for that, led me to discover Gitlab's compensation page!

Gitlab's documentation on this topic is fantastic:
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-
rewards/compensation...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-
rewards/compensation/)

Admittedly, I hadn't considered the golden handcuff angle which seems very
relevant!

~~~
khannavid
It's not as well-documented as Gitlab but you can check Buffer too:

[https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-
architect-2/average/](https://buffer.com/salary/senior-data-
architect-2/average/)

I think the most thoughtful/fair approach is to use more than one factor:
role, years of experience, costs of living (having kids? big or small city?
etc.) and loyalty (how many years in our company?) are the most important
factors that come to my mind...

