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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

#151

Post by SpaceDingus9000 »

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 worked at a place with remote and onsite employees, and I think two of major reasons it worked is because we had a habit of documenting all designs and projects in a wiki, and used Skype at all of our meetings (while sending an invite out before hand to anyone tangentially related so they could sit in if they felt the need to). The wiki would inevitably get out of date, but it usually gave you a good big picture and the edit history let you know who to track down for questions.

All of the development teams were also on Slack, and many people tended to have those quick side conversations online instead of in person, so there was a public searchable record and you could jump in more easily.

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

#152

Post by overcast »

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…

No one makes a salary calculator that robust without intent. I think paying twice as much, and cutting your work force in half would do you a greater service, than playing around with these cost of living calculators.

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

#153

Post by overcast »

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.

At best this is nonsensical, at worst, you're trolling all of us.

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

#154

Post by ghaff »

snarf21 wrote: post #80
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…

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual. Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often.

To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good for some things though a lot of people I work with don't use them. I've yet to see anything that remotely compares to being together in a conference room for high bandwidth interactions.

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

#155

Post by imsofuture »

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…

Remote employees' market is the entire world though, that's the part you're not taking into account. Your competition is the other NYC or Boston or SFO or wherever companies that are willing to hire me and pay me a generally competitive rate (very roughly 80-100% of SF pay, in my experience). Sure, you don't have to compete with a GoogFaceAzon offer, but you do have to compete with the companies similar to yours that do pay a more globally competitive rate.

There's a very important difference between: "SFO is very expensive so we have to pay people who live there more" and "we can pay people who don't live in SFO less"

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

#156

Post by purerandomness »

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…

You seem to work at a horrible place, with abrasive characters.

It begins with the fact that the company's code needs documentation. I'm a big proponent of Robert C. Martin's "Clean Code" and the idea that code should read like prose - by reading the code, its purpose and ideas should come across naturally.

It ends with people asking "Didn't we already talk about this?".

Is this your first job? Don't let yourself get treated like this.

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

#157

Post by mjevans »

ghaff wrote: post #154
snarf21 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual. Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often. To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good fo…

Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).

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

#158

Post by problems »

sscarduzio wrote: post #122
Perihelion wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

God, who cares of this work jokes shit? They're never funny, it's always the boss that makes them and everyone laughs way too much. FFS, We're not friends, we don't have to be, and it's OK! I like what I do, take pride on it and everything, but at the end of the day, my private life (where I get to choose my friends) is OUTSIDE work hours. And I'm committed to close the laptop as soon as I'm done. I guess this kind o…

I think most people have a better office experience than you. I have to be comfortable actually expressing the situation I'm dealing with when I run into troubles, be that cursing about some code or explaining why something will take longer or shorter than expected to my boss. I feel much more comfortable in a less "sterile" work environment in that way. If I'm in a work environment that's too sterile I'll feel like every error I make, every little delay detracts from my value as an employee, and that's immensely stressful to me.

That said, no one here puts in extra hours to "show off their commitment", everyone shows up when they want and dumps at 8 hours later. I've stayed late when I was buried in debugging once or twice and got told to go home by numerous colleagues. Just things like that, telling you to put it down is a positive influence sometimes. I came in the next day and solved the issue that I had spent 3 hours on the previous day in about 20 minutes.

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

#159

Post by ghaff »

dorfsmay wrote: post #49
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…

FWIW, I have seen one example of hiring a remote junior person and it worked really well, BUT there was a conscious effort to do mentoring properly, and the guy running it was a mentoring guru/nut.

I've worked mostly from home for a long time now through a few different jobs. (Always relatively nearby an office where I had a space but I haven't been in a job where I went in regularly for 15 years or so.) I'm mostly happy with the tradeoffs and would be fine with going 100% remote.

That said, acknowledging that a lot of things are different from when I was starting out, I can't imagine walking into my first tech industry product management job as a remote worker.

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

#160

Post by ghaff »

mjevans wrote: post #157
ghaff wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a developer but just last week I was visiting one of our locations where a lot of the people I work with are actually located. I was down there for a specific meeting but I bumped into enough people and had serendipitous conversations with them that I left saying to myself that I should really go down there more often. To your other point, communication tools are still pretty limited. IM/Slack/IRC are good fo…

Or you need to get everyone hanging out in a group chatter environment (Like IRC).

Unfortunately, while most/all of the tech folks hang out on IRC, it's much less used by a lot of the marketing/business people I deal with. I should use it more routinely myself but the fact is that it's not that widely used by some groups.
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