>> - You are a member of a(n [underrepresented](https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#definiti...)) group that is unsafe or in any way mistreated in your country.

The racial classification found in this document seems surreal for me (I'm from SW Europe). Seen from here, the US racial categories often seem absurd.

First off, there's hardly anyone other than europeans in East European countries. And I don't see why Gitlab engineers wouldn't be involved in the protests. They're probably well-educated and therefore statistically more likely to care about the political situation.

yeah.... a good friend of mine (dual citizen) who manages a large engineering team there for US startup was picked up randomly not at the protest shortly after they started, thrown in jail, denied access to consular services, his very good lawyers got his jail term taken down from 15 days to 12 days despite the guys who picked him up not showing for the hearing or testifying that he was in fact not at the protest when they picked him up. a couple weeks after they started rubber stamping everyone picked up for protests with 2 years regardless of actual involvement. this isn't even including the extreme random violence some people are subjected to and horrible general conditions. fuck everything about this attitude - belarus is just around the corner from civil war it's not cool at all.

In Belarus we’ve had employees arrested for literally being outside at the wrong time, even if it’s just to look at what’s going on from the front of their building. Things have calmed down somewhat since then, but they’ve also put in border controls so people can’t leave the country. You literally need to get smuggled over the border. Thankfully I hear that is not too difficult. The visa situation once you get to wherever you go isn’t awesome tho, since you’re still at the mercy of a large bureaucracy.

Belarus is currently considered one of the least safe places in Europe to be LGBTQ+. I'm not sure if they enacted the Russian-style "anti gay propaganda" law they spitballed a few years ago, but even without it, it's safe to say LGBTQ+ people in Belarus are "being mistreated".

In my experience tech workers in Eastern Europe are not significantly more progressive than other residents, but if Gitlab's company culture is at least somewhat progressive, it's likely that it attracts people in those countries who tend towards the progressive end of their respective countries' political spectrum. Given that Belarus has a very low bar for what the government considers a "political activist", it's reasonable to assume that some of these people might find themselves in trouble without having to go as far as donning black masks and tossing rocks at police officers.

It's also worth keeping in mind that software development is one of the professions easiest to get into as a marginalized person because you can teach yourself enough to get started and especially when freelancing it's possible to work without ever meeting the other person face-to-face. You'd be surprised how many programmers are queer, disabled or neurodivergent.

EDIT: QED?

I think having your life depend on your performance improvement either gives you strong motivation or ptsd. (probably both)

I'm not saying you're entirely wrong, as engineers are often very privileged positions in society and the people who suffer the most from dictatorship and civil wars are definitely not engineers, because any regime needs the engineers to collaborate with the powers that be and so treats them rather well (compared to the global population).

However, likening Trump's election with the civil war in Ukraine or dictatorship in Belarus is definitely disconnected from reality. Under Trump like before, and as in most pretend-democracies of the global north, cops have been a force of occupation of popular districts and have murdered a certain number of citizens. But in Ukraine, we're talking about an actual civil war with barricades in the city centers, with militias fighting off each other with kalashnikovs. In Belarus, we're talking about state police and intelligence services physically torturing activists to force confessions (whether true or not, who knows?).

Once again, i'm not saying such things don't exist in the global north or are perfect around here... Far from it. The power structures are very similar, but the level of repression is considerably higher. The dangers we face here are no match for what happens in BUR (Belarus-Ukraine-Russia).

See also: https://abc-belarus.org/?lang=en for information about anti-anarchist repression in Belarus, or https://pramen.io/en/ for wider political analysis

Written “cultures” are quite different from how the company actually acts.

Realistically, the upper limit of a salary is usually determined by the average value the employee will bring to the company because profit is derived from surplus value. This value may range from very direct (number of product produced per unit of time) or very indirect (making the rest of the team happy to increase their overall productivity and reduce employee turnover).

The lower limit is generally whatever the company can get away with. This has legal factors (e.g. minimum wage laws) as well as regional (e.g. "market rate", unemployment rates) but ultimately the candidate has to make the call what they can (or have no other choice but to) accept.

Crucially, the surplus value only hinges on the value generated and the expenses of employing that person (mostly salary and benefits but cross-state and internationally there may be legal costs avoidable by hiring locally).

If you live in an area with a low cost of living and the company's upper limit is defined by the relative cost of living, they're going to extract a lot more surplus value from your labor than if you live in an area with a high cost of living but maintain the same personal cost of living because you manage to be extraordinarily frugal.

That you make a lot of money relative to your local peers does not mean the company isn't disproportionately extracting surplus value from you (or in other words: paying you in lower proportion to the value you generate than others). If everyone else in your neighborhood is paid a penny and you earn a dime that does not mean I'm not exploiting you when I pay the locals a dollar for the same generated value.

That GitLab only varies pay and not the cost of their software and services demonstrates that they understand this. The value their services provide depends entirely on the customer's market (which is btw why a lot of initial SaaS pricing is based on US startup culture where company expenses are measured as burn rates rather than profitability, even if it makes the services cost prohibitive in other markets).

Also of course geographically distributed employees will find it harder to unionize (even more so formally because of different jurisdictions and labor laws) or organize and are less likely to seriously develop solidarity in a way that could get in the way of making a profit.

There are arguments for the destructive impact of foreign companies paying above market rate but it's absurd to think companies that use geographical salary ranges do so out of concern for regional competitors.

If they employ enough people, the slippery slope is that every employee who wants to live in NL has a claim on help to do so, and so the company is no longer geo-neutral but ends up, like so many other companies, having the “talent” in a rich country and all the “fungibles” elsewhere.

But as others have pointed out, in real life NL would probably be happy to have up to 100% of their actual employees immigrate so it may be just well-intentioned virtue signaling.

Which is also a valid recruiting strategy!

Recommend to check the following handbook sections for a definition:

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#gitlabs-...

https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/inclusion/#definiti...

> Underrepresented Group This can be defined as a group whose percentage of the population in a given group is lower than their percentage of the population of country, community, organization or otherwise.

So basically they dictate policy based on population representation instead of what's actually coming through education. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

> I wouldn't be too thrilled having my career advancement sacrificed in the pursuit of 50/50 men/woman representation.

Your comment assumes that Gitlab can't find as many qualified women as they can men.

You've decided (knowing nothing about the women except their gender) that they are only being hired for those roles because of their gender.

Women haven't been too thrilled either about their career advancement being sacrificed because of workplace sexism.

You are free to not apply for a senior management at that business if you don’t like that policy.

Not to mention they're making women into a diversity token. Race/gender quotas lead nowhere good.

As someone who does not live in the US, that strikes me as an incredibly spoiled and American-centric perspective. You do realize that the US is not the only country with human rights issues, and that the domestic issues in the US pale in comparison to much of the world? Consider the domestic issues in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Huh. Not Syria? South Sudan? Venezuela? Honduras? Belarus?

150k+ starting salaries when the rest of the world never reaches that even for senior engineers.... right.

The US is the most privileged country on the planet, just look at the per capita CO2 emissions with their private AC and swimming pools, SUVs, etc.

> asylum applications to EU/EFTA/EEA countries because with asylum you have to work a shitty job for a while to prove you can integrate

Which countries are those? While the UK was an EU member, it required that asylum applicants not work, and I believe that's not an unusual restriction.

You're right. I didn't set out to "win an argument", just share my personal experience.

In terms of the limitations that applies to what I said, it is clear from context. And they are the majority; their voices will get heard anyway.

People think that Sweden is some kind of humanitarian utopia, while in reality there is more homophobia than people realize, and e.g. a relatively high-profile anti-Semitic case just recently...

Make of that what you will.

Okay, but why not any of the other 190+ countries? What's so special about that one?

that is 3 things: really cool, relying on a hack, and defeating the core purpose of markdown. bravo to all involved, especially the renderer

It's not that rare - Iraq, South Africa, Liberia.