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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

#101

Post by dkersten »

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.

I personally like the Bitbucket UI. Except the useless overview page. The rest of the UI is great IMHO.

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

#102

Post by vonmoltke »

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.

Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Worth.

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

#103

Post by garaetjjte »

zenlikethat wrote: post #11
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'!

I'm curious what you dislike about the UX. Personally I like the "feel" of the website generally (though it's not as polished as GitHub) and just find it to be slow, which I think they're working on improving.

Gitlab only have mobile site. I want desktop version.

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

#104

Post by pedroms »

zenlikethat wrote: post #11
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'!

I'm curious what you dislike about the UX. Personally I like the "feel" of the website generally (though it's not as polished as GitHub) and just find it to be slow, which I think they're working on improving.

You are right, GitLab doesn't have a polished UX. Improving that is one of our main objectives for the next two months: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ux/strategy/

If you are curious about what we're doing, take a look at the issues under UI Polish: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...

Or feel free to point out any particular concerns here or through the issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

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

#106

Post by cookiecaper »

ernstvn wrote: post #87
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…

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 lear…

The philosophy is flawed. Good people don't make average-for-their-area salaries.

Depending on which of the 5-6 applicable job titles listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics's Occupational Employment Statistics [0] one chooses to apply, my salary is between 40% and 120% higher than the "average mean wage" (itself an inflated statistic) in my area.

This is true not just of myself but of all the good candidates I've hired. Good people don't work for average rates, especially not good people who are capable of doing remote work.

GitLab is doing itself a big disservice by targeting the "average" local wage.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

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

#107

Post by rqebmm »

Perihelion wrote: post #73
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 -…

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…

MY company does hybrid remote/on-site, and one of the best ways to mitigate issues with off-site communication is part-time work from home. Since on-site workers spend some of their time as remote workers, everyone has a good idea of what's required to empower remote developers.

It's not always roses and rainbows, but it definitely helps.

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

#108

Post by emondi »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #91
snarf21 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not talking about this case specifically, but it could be that remote working makes defining reponsibilities harder and that could lead to not making sure that there are proper backup/restoring procedures in place.

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

#109

Post by mathattack »

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 -…

"Write everything down" is very important for any org hitting 150 people. It's when an organization hits Dunbar's #. [0] It's even tougher when you pass it and everyone is remote.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

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

#110

Post by aedocw »

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 don't understand why hearing some effective management practices for a distributed team would not be welcome here at any time. Their recent mistake dealt with a specific technical process and some failures around it. That incident in no way invalidates the entire company.

As a remote worker myself, I'm always keen to hear about how teams make it work. I'm also a huge advocate for distributed teams (and nobody having a commute), so personally I'm really glad this link was shared today.

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