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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

#111

Post by dboreham »

cookiecaper wrote: post #65
pc86 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, same here. If I max out the possible compensation by setting lead w/ a lot of experience, it's roughly 60% of what I make now (as a non-lead with a lot of experience). The kicker is that I'm employed remotely by by a company based in a city whose CoL hit is even larger than the one I currently live in. The NYC range they give is plausible for me as someone who lives in a place that is much cheaper than NYC, but…

My wife is a compensation consultant and we have discussed this phenomenon a few times. She says that for some jobs "there is a national market" and comparisons to local salaries is therefore invalid.

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

#112

Post by dandersh »

The most frustrating thing about working remote was the complete lack of documentation around anything -- meetings, requirements, internal frameworks/libraries, etc. Good for them for emphasizing documentation.

I lost track of the amount of times I was told to "look at the source code" when asking about documentation for the internal framework.

Also fun was being assigned a feature and having it's functionality explained over the phone, with any subsequent follow-up being met with "Didn't we already talk about this"?

I never would have thought that a remote based team would have the worst documentation out of anywhere I've worked, but that's exactly what happened.

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

#113

Post by pedroms »

eknkc wrote: post #99
dublinben wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is something that has been on our minds for a while, and we must do it better. We created an issue for a smart project dashboard that aims to provide a better solution, it would be great to have your input there: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/27112

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

#114

Post by pedroms »

bpicolo wrote: post #21
zenlikethat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personally, not a fan of how a readme-less repository just has an entirely useless main page. I much prefer having the file view a'la github on that page. That's the main UX complaint for me. Still use gitlab bunches. Main complaint overall is the incredibly sluggish git push speed.

Speed is one of our main priorities for GitLab this year. We've started Gitaly, a project dedicated to that: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly

We expect it to become a standard component of GitLab in Q1 2017 and to reach full scope in Q3 2017.

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

#115

Post by dragonwriter »

ernstvn wrote: post #89
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.

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

My local city, but the data isn't so much mine as data that the US government shares.

Sacramento, CA. Mean Salary (per latest BLS data) [0] for Software Developer, Applications: $107,540; for Web Developer: $78,050

Sacramento, CA Gitlab locality pay index: 0.39+0.25=0.51

Vs.

New York City, same BLS figures [1]: $108,770/$81,430

NYC Gitlab locality pay index: 1.00+0.25=1.25

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (BLS): 0.989/0.958

Sac/NYC Salary Ratio (Gitlab): 0.512

Fundamentally, the rent index based methodology you are using is, I would guess, giving you below market pay almost everywhere that isn't NYC or San Francisco, assuming that you've hit the market wage for the skills you are targeting in your NYC baseline.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_40900.htm#15-0000

[1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_35620.htm#15-0000

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

#116

Post by mi100hael »

mschuster91 wrote: post #96
amyjess wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> The individual UIs are not that bad.

I've still gotta disagree. Jira's UI is horribly inconsistent and haphazard. Some actions are buttons, some are links, some are hidden until you mouse over, everything feels like it was just tacked on wherever there was (or really wasn't) free space. It's probably the worst UI in a modern, commercial web application that I've encountered.

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

#117

Post by bgaluszka »

dandersh wrote: post #112

The most frustrating thing about working remote was the complete lack of documentation around anything -- meetings, requirements, internal frameworks/libraries, etc. Good for them for emphasizing documentation. I lost track of the amount of times I was told to "look at the source code" when asking about documentation for the internal framework. Also fun was being assigned a feature and having it's functionality expla…

> I lost track of the amount of times I was told to "look at the source code" when asking about documentation for the internal framework.

Can you elaborate on this one? This is my preferred way.

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

#118

Post by nedsma »

Glad that Gitlab is pushing the remote working boundaries even further. Yes, document everything, write easy to understand code, offer your remote coworkers to call you whenever they need help, leave feedback, praise work as if they're local. It all matters and even more when remotely.

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

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

sotojuan wrote: post #82
pc86 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more likely set up based on an untested (and easily falsified) conjecture about the relationship between local residential rent prices and local market wages in the industry.

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

#120

Post by neom »

mathattack wrote: post #109
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

If your orgs are hitting 150 people, you're organizing your company incorrectly.
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