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GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#81

Post by Spooky23 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #71
Spooky23 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are human problems. Doctors used to bitch about shit like this, because they felt it was beneath them to follow checklists. As a result people have had limbs removed and life threatening, unnecessary surgery. Guess what? The insurance companies demand checklists and controls to prevent fuckups. There is an easy solution to dealing with people who refuse to read things. (Hint: It doesn't involve recording hours…

Yeah, I'm not disagreeing with checklists and SOPs. I'll edit my post to make sure that's clear as it's absolutely not what I'm trying to say at all. Quite the contrary: I'm trying to say that to the fullest extent possible, those SOPs should be integrated into the process so that skipping them isn't an option. Well-run open-source projects have given us good examples of how this works. The goal is to marry the SOP a…

Well I guess I must concede that we violently agree! :)

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#82

Post by sotojuan »

pc86 wrote: post #47
cookiecaper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note that this does not mean a highly educated workforce, which may actually be a contraindication). GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living (both of which may modify the base downward; my C…

Just ran my numbers and got about 55% of my current salary assuming a lead position (what I have now, which I would probably not get with them) and "a lot of experience" which I'm on the fence about and they would probably disagree with. Getting rid of the COL deduction by selecting NYC as my location actually makes it reasonable so something tells me not pinning the US salary floor to 1.0 is saving them money and si…

It's probably set up to attract cheap Eastern European devs.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#84

Post by Perihelion »

sotojuan wrote: post #79
Perihelion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything. Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was…

It works at our company because the only remote guy is the only one in his "domain" (iOS). He probably doesn't care about the frontend watercooler chat and anything important about the backend will be mentioned in standup.

That definitely helps. I find there are other little cultural things you miss like inside jokes/shenanigans. They're not work-related but they're related to work and can make you feel like part of the team.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#85

Post by [deleted] »

sotojuan wrote: post #79
Perihelion wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything. Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was…

It works at our company because the only remote guy is the only one in his "domain" (iOS). He probably doesn't care about the frontend watercooler chat and anything important about the backend will be mentioned in standup.

[deleted]

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#86

Post by dragonwriter »

cookiecaper wrote: post #8
manojlds wrote: post #2

After the mess up, I don't really like seeing these posts about Gitlab. Maybe this is their problem after all.

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note that this does not mean a highly educated workforce, which may actually be a contraindication). GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living (both of which may modify the base downward; my C…

> GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living

Their base is off of NYC, apparently, and they adjust based on location; from what I infer from that, if they are really middling for NYC, their modifiers are all wrong for the way market wages actually vary by location; in Sacramento, the adjusted range is below public sector pay for similar roles (salary alone, not considering benefits, etc.), much less private sector pay.

The thing is, their basic methodology is arguably somewhat sensible, but they could (at least in the US) use BLS numbers for job categories by location to get modifiers that actually reflect local markets and keep their pay consistent with respect to local markets. By choosing an index that evidently is a poor proxy for variations in market pay, they end up with pay that doesn't make sense.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#87

Post by ernstvn »

cookiecaper wrote: post #8
manojlds wrote: post #2

After the mess up, I don't really like seeing these posts about Gitlab. Maybe this is their problem after all.

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note that this does not mean a highly educated workforce, which may actually be a contraindication). GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living (both of which may modify the base downward; my C…

It's definitely not our intent to pay below market in any location. If our calculator shows a large negative adjustment from your current compensation, please send me an email (ernst@gitlab.com) so I can review the data. We don't promise to make overnight changes to the calculator, since changes need to be robust and simple (i.e. no cherry picking city by city numbers), but we do gather data and make edits as we learn.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#88

Post by compuguy »

bryanh wrote: post #58

160 employees remote is impressive and commendable. Zapier is fully remote as well (but half the size in employee count). I'd say "write everything down" is a great shortcut to the sorts of practices you need to cultivate. We've also noticed that over-communicating is critical but hard - it is surprising the things that are "yeah yeah, we know" to some but are "oh we're doing that?" to others. This is only natural -…

I've been in that situation (the only remote person on a team). With poor use of internal communication tools, it can be almost downright depressing.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#89

Post by ernstvn »

bgxor wrote: post #43
cookiecaper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem has more to do with their recruiting. To be a successful distributed company, you need a disciplined and highly experienced workforce (note that this does not mean a highly educated workforce, which may actually be a contraindication). GitLab offers a middling base salary for a role and applies modifiers for experience and city-based cost-of-living (both of which may modify the base downward; my C…

Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here. I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.

Would love to get more input from you to make sure the calculator reaches its goal of providing fair market compensation in your location. Can you please send me an email to let me know your city and whatever further data you are willing to share? ernst@gitlab.com

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#90

Post by amyjess »

deepaksurti wrote: post #4

>> 2:41 – GitLab values boring solutions: our product should be exceptional Exceptional products have exceptional UX. Gitlab IMHO has the worst UX of all git based products out there, I much rather take BitBucket over Gitlab. I tried using Gitlab, but no, I would much rather pay the 7$ to GH for my private repos. I sincerely hope they make an exceptional product. And 'should' better be 'must'!

GitLab may not be as good as some others in the space, but I've never seen a repo UI that actively repulses me nearly as much as BitBucket's. Even SourceForge doesn't put me off like that.

Honestly, all Atlassian products have terrible UI. JIRA is just as bad.

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