This is detailed in their handbook [1], [2]. TL; DR: For the EU countries it's mostly legal/tax reasons.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines [2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/hiring-status/

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.

Source: 3.5 years at GitLab.

Thanks. So it's a growing/shrinking list, because there surely are a lot of even smaller countries that would be added if something applied.

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.

(edit: precedent, not precedence, if that wasn't obvious, sorry for the spam)

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.

Maybe they are too expensive. Austria has huge taxes for self-employed workers, especially if they are payed like engineers.

Romania definitely isn't too expensive :-)

Local employment laws.

They are totally not the same in EU, not to mention Latin America or Middle East.

Yes the Eu has directives about employment law which are implemented locally.