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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

#91

Post by mynameisvlad »

snarf21 wrote: post #16
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.

Scale is freaking hard. It is absurd to say they figured out the secret after a 7 layer failure on disaster recovery, even more so when one of the main reasons for source control is to have disaster recovery and the ability to rebuild old source.

Wat?

How is their remote working practices at all related to the database disaster?

For that matter, how are either of those related to source control and rebuilding from old source? What would rebuilding source help with when you just deleted your production DB?

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

#92

Post by sotojuan »

Perihelion wrote: post #84
sotojuan wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the importance of that varies from person to person... I don't dislike inside jokes but also don't care if I miss them—I'm just there to do my best work.

That said, I completely understand why someone would feel differently.

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

#93

Post by e40 »

snarf21 wrote: post #53
Philipp__ wrote: post #45

Everybody is prone to making a mistake! As long as you learn something from it, so that it never happens again, it's ok. And I really don't get why people give them bad rep for this post. I mean it's obvious why it's posted and we all know what happened week ago, but consider their size and scale, it's not easy to manage so many people remotely.

"...but consider their size and scale, it's not easy to manage so many people remotely." This is very true but the title of the post is "GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down". That is the backlash, don't say you've figured out the secret then make a near catastrophic mistake.

I don't see how their remote structure has anything to do with their mistake with backups, etc talked about here lately.

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

#94

Post by compuguy »

pc86 wrote: post #50
bgxor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes more sense for me to get a PO box in Washington DC and drive there to get my paycheck. Hell, it's probably cheaper to "rent" a single room out of someone's house just to have them forward the mail.

Agreed, the Washington DC and the Fairfax, VA modifier should be the same. Otherwise your not going to be competitive in the Washington DC area as a whole.

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

#95

Post by Paul-ish »

This is interesting, as I interned at Mozilla, and they have a large number of remote employees. There was only one person (other than me) on my team in my location. Mozilla also records a lot of things, but the intent is more to publish that stuff publicly, in the spirit of openness towards the community. For example, all my team meetings had public notes. I wouldn't be surprised if this tendency to record everything for the sake of the community also has positive benefits inside Mozilla.

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

#96

Post by mschuster91 »

amyjess wrote: post #90
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.

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

The individual UIs are not that bad. The problem is that people tend to use not only e.g. JIRA, but also Confluence, or more. And then the (massive) differences between their products in UX appear.

As a sysadmin, there's one thing that really annoys me: all that Atlassian stuff is written in Java (which means: on every problem one has to dig through pages after pages of Java stacktraces), and it eats resources like nothing else. GitLab got better in the recent versions, but it also had its fair share of interesting problems with memory leaks.

Oh, and both don't support MySQL (Atlassian does, but very limited) - which is bad if nearly everything else is MySQL and you already have a MySQL DBA.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by dang »

the-dude wrote: post #83
the-dude wrote: post #77

I have the impression this is being moved off the frontpage in an accelerated manner ...

And it is back up, from place 22 to 12 again.

Sometimes software and moderators do the same thing, which doubles the effect. When we notice that, we turn off the moderation and just rely on the software. That's why this one fell and then went back up.

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

#99

Post by eknkc »

dublinben wrote: post #55
bpicolo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is kind of a bizarre thing to be tucked away in settings =| Noted, though

Where else would you put it?

I think it should be the default setting. Even make it not configurable. Why would anyone want to see just Readme or just Files view when it's possible to have them both?

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

#100

Post by edblarney »

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…

I think they are screwing this up.

By offering people medicore, local salaries, they are losing a massive opportunity to clean up on the great talent in remote areas.

Why would someone want to live in a low-end city (assuming they are mobile) - when they could live the same 'quality of life' in a much cooler place?

Assuming a degree of mobility - the whole point of living in a 2cnd tier place is that you can save a lot of money, which makes up for the '2cnd tierendess' of the place.

Montreal is 1/2 Boston. There are a good batch of great devs in Montreal. I could double my salary and move to Boston? I'd probably just do that. And still save more.

If they paid a 20% premium over other Montrealers, they'd be able to attract the best talent - and still save a lot of money over Boston/SF/NYC.

Paying 'regular market wages' for remote localities is not a winning proposition - it doesn't take advantage of the fact they are great startup, reasonably well financed etc..

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