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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

#141

Post by crpatino »

bgaluszka wrote: post #130
overcast wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You prefer just being handed a pile of code, rather than documentation on how to use it? please.

In case where I work for a given company and it's internal tool, always.

Imagine this scenario.

You work on product A. Your VP of very important things declares that every product should use library L. Library L has been designed to incestously interact with product D and makes a bunch of assumptions about what the "working environment" should be.

Teams B and C have already made the transition, so L made some kludgy APIs to make B and C interaction possible, though it is maintained with low priority because everybody knows D is the money maker. Both B and C have a bunch of assumptions in common that A does not share, and they both had to compromise and emulate D environment to some exent.

You are given L binaries, a few toy examples of how to use the most basic functionality in L, and access to B codebase. L codebase does not use the same source control system, so you don't even know where to begin looking for their code.

Please keep in mind that your manager does not expect you to learn all the inner workings of L. Your priority task is to use L to support some new feature in A. You still have a number of other tasks to accomplish in A that are not related to L, and some of those might raise in priority with little or no notice.

Do you still think it is a good idea to just browse L code, without knowing how large (or well writen) it is?

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

#142

Post by gukov »

Kiro wrote: post #39

Given the complete backlash I'm seeing on HN it seems like transparency actually hurt you. Very sad.

It's the business-as-usual attitude and acting as if nothing happened right after a catastrophic event that riles people up.

Transparency is fine. Eventually moving on is fine. But right now people are interested only in one topic when it comes to Gitlab.

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

#143

Post by lallysingh »

mi100hael wrote: post #116
mschuster91 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's pretty bad, but the list of contenders in "worst UI" is quite large.

It feels like they took some Photoshop files from a designer and gave it to their dev team and said "make this, I don't want to hear any complaints."

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

#144

Post by hashnsalt »

lallysingh wrote: post #140
kminehart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty subjective obviously. I think the GitLab interface is pretty good, especially compared to GitHubs. I can't speak for BitBucket since I've only used it once, but I do remember having a hard time finding my way around it.

UX is objectively measured. I don't know why people think it's subjective.

If UX was fully objectively measured, wouldn't Gitlab, Github, and Bitbucket all look and feel the same?

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

#145

Post by johansch »

I mean, really: after figuring out after the fact that five out of five backups were malfunctioning - go here to read our secret to managing 160 employees remotely?

Nah... no thank you. I think I will get my management advice from a company that is not totally broken. I don't care how transparent you are, or how remote-worker friendly you are, if you can't do the basics right. You are in the data storage business! Shut down the company and refund the money to the investors.

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

#146

Post by vowelless »

lallysingh wrote: post #140
kminehart wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty subjective obviously. I think the GitLab interface is pretty good, especially compared to GitHubs. I can't speak for BitBucket since I've only used it once, but I do remember having a hard time finding my way around it.

UX is objectively measured. I don't know why people think it's subjective.

Could you explain what the objective quantification of UX is?

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

#147

Post by mathattack »

lbotos wrote: post #139
akavel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more precisely what do you mean by that? Are you trying to say that companies with >150 people are somehow incorrect?

He means that a company is comprised of many smaller orgs: Development / Marketing / Support / Sales And even then you can have smaller teams: APAC Sales / EMEA Sales / US Sales So no "org" should be that big.

Yes - that's my point. And most startups act as one org (like 3 year olds chasing a soccer ball) and if they haven't subdivided by 150, that's when they need to.

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

#148

Post by neom »

lbotos wrote: post #139
akavel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more precisely what do you mean by that? Are you trying to say that companies with >150 people are somehow incorrect?

He means that a company is comprised of many smaller orgs: Development / Marketing / Support / Sales And even then you can have smaller teams: APAC Sales / EMEA Sales / US Sales So no "org" should be that big.

That's exactly what I meant. Thanks for clarifying for me sir or madame. :)

PS: we should hang out sometime! I see you live in BK.

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

#149

Post by lallysingh »

dandersh wrote: post #126
bgaluszka wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Instead of being able to quickly peruse docs to see if a method existed and what it took/returned, I would be directed to dig through source code to see if it exists and what it did. This is basic API doc work. This meant something that should have been fairly quick took significantly longer. Then there were times when I did dig through to understand why something worked. When I pointed out that something should be d…

Exactly. You can write it down once or have people figure it out independently many times over. Documentation saves engineering time.

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

#150

Post by johansch »

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.

https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of-the-y-...
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