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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

#181

Post by bryanh »

bravura wrote: post #172
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 -…

What tools do you (Zapier, Gitlab, etc.) use for internal documentation? We have found that many wikis don't have good "related pages" functionality, i.e. they are hard to browse.

I believe we've settled on Quip - we used to be Hackpad. I think Dropbox Paper would be quite nice too (but was too nascent when we were searching ~6 months ago).

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

#182

Post by sytse »

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.

You can view how we're spread around the world on https://about.gitlab.com/team/

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

#183

Post by sytse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #119
sotojuan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We indeed try to track local market wages. From https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

"In developing the compensation formula above, we looked at the compensation of our team members which had been set in the past (without the formula), and found out that there was a statistically significant correlation between compensation and the factors that are now in the formula. We purposefully chose to look for correlations with metrics that are probably causal and definitely relevant in people's lives (the rent!). This also has the advantage of letting us work with data that is readily available publicly, as opposed to trying to scour the web for market compensation rates for all roles in all locations. Perhaps surprisingly, there was a stronger correlation between compensation and rent index than with the more general cost of living index available through Numbeo (or the cost of living with rent index, for that matter); and so we moved ahead with the Rent Index."

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

#184

Post by konschubert »

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 think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

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

#185

Post by ghaff »

scruple wrote: post #177
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…

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site. Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. The…

>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips!

I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach.

Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.

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

#187

Post by sytse »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #48

Wow. You all in the comments must be a bunch of perfect people, huh? Good grief. Also, nice cameo by the office cat.

Thanks, but the critics are right. This is not a good time to be promoting ourselves. We should be working on our postmortem and figure out how to improve our service. We're actually doing that, this video was recorded before the outage. But impressions count.

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

#188

Post by sytse »

Kiro wrote: post #39

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

We're still committed to transparency even if it means taking a few lumps now and then, it's better in the long run and it's baked into everything we do.

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

#189

Post by sytse »

Cofike wrote: post #35

Judging by the number of joke and low hanging responses on this thread I think they should have held this article for a little longer.

I think we earned a reality check. Have such a promotional video go out after the outage was out of touch on our part. We were aware it would be posted and didn't ask to hold it.

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

#190

Post by douche »

konschubert wrote: post #184
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 think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

That sounds just awful. Maybe I'm spoiled, but even when I'm at work, I go in my office and close the door when I actually have work to do. Trying to work in that kind of a panopticon style environment sounds nerve-wracking.
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