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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

#191

Post by sytse »

wheelerwj wrote: post #24
geofft wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This" being remote work? Also, I'm a little surprised by the anti-GitLab sentiment on this thread. I thought the consensus was that they had bad luck but didn't do anything particularly more wrong than anyone else? (I may have missed some more analysis of the cause of the failure.)

Look, everyone is supportive of gitlab and how they recovered. but to come out boasting after being down for that long is a hard sell.

I totally agree that we should not be boasting but figuring out how to improve our service.

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

#192

Post by sytse »

scrollaway wrote: post #36
cjbprime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, seems a little tone-deaf to publish a puff piece about GitLab at the moment.

Why? It's not a puff piece boasting about their backup plans, they're talking about their remote work strategy. What's tone-deaf is the vitriol some people are spilling in this thread.

Thanks, I really appreciate that! But to be honest I don't think it's vitriol so much as that people rightly expect better from us.

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

#193

Post by dragonwriter »

sytse wrote: post #183
dragonwriter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The immediate problem with the method of developing your formula that is described is that it assumed that the pay of your staff before you had a systematic formula already accurately reflected prevailing market wages in the locality of every employee.

And, for US locations, BLS data is readily available publicly. While that may not have been a suitable source for a worldwide formula, it would have at least been a suitable reality check on the validity of the formula you came up with to see if it reasonably approximated the variations in market rates within the US.

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

#194

Post by douche »

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…

To be fair, this happens in dysfunctional organizations that are all on-site, too. There's no good excuse for being that disorganized, but it happens all too often.

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

#195

Post by sytse »

gukov wrote: post #138
cjbprime wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, seems a little tone-deaf to publish a puff piece about GitLab at the moment.

Marketing 101. Flood negative with positive.

That was not our intention. This piece was recorded before the outage. We should asked to delay publication until after the postmortem was published. That would be the marketing 101 lesson, first show you corrected your mistake instead of talking about something else.

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

#196

Post by yuhong »

gravypod wrote: post #186

I can't wait for a remote-work company that has a policy like this to get into some kind of legal troubles that warrents subpoenas. This is a prosecutors gold mine. I feel bad for the defense lawers already.

I am taking issues like admission of wrongdoing in settlements seriously now.

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

#198

Post by ghaff »

edblarney wrote: post #100
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…

I think they are screwing this up. By offering people medicore, local salaries, they are losing a massive opportunity to clean up on the great talent in remote areas. Why would someone want to live in a low-end city (assuming they are mobile) - when they could live the same 'quality of life' in a much cooler place? Assuming a degree of mobility - the whole point of living in a 2cnd tier place is that you can save a l…

Even talking about "Boston" as a single thing is tough. There's Boston/Cambridge urban folks and there are people who live an hour west or an hour north. That's an enormous difference in terms of housing prices. And even that is an oversimplification. School districts and other factors make a huge difference within that same one hour radius.

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

#199

Post by phil21 »

bgxor wrote: post #162
ernstvn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I sent you a more detailed email, but basically it is preposterous to assume a "very experienced" senior engineer in ANY part of the United States is going to be happy with making $65K.

Exactly this. A very experienced engineer who is capable of working remote will likely be pretty intelligent. They'll realize a company is attempting to steal the surplus they created by living a low-cost lifestyle. I don't really understand why a company feels they have any claim to this.

Remote employees who are good at being remote have some very good options at this point of their career. Why the heck would they take less money simply because they had the foresight to move to a low cost of living location? Half the (stellar) people seeking remote work have built their entire lives around this fact - and have made very conscious decisions regarding their career and lifestyle.

Obviously it's working out for Gitlab, but I can't imagine any of my senior remote talent finding this acceptable in any way. I guess I could see it working for a couple years "converting" an engineer who is super excited to move into remote work vs. on-site. But beyond that, this policy seems extremely dangerous to me.

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

#200

Post by NPegasus »

cookiecaper wrote: post #8
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 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…

That salary calculator is just hilarious. A lead developer in SF gets $203,000 and doing the exact same work in Tucson gets $65,000. Yeah, I'm sure good developers in Tucson are just lining up to be insulted like that.

The sad part is the amount of effort they put into all those policies and calculations. The amount of executives' time that must have gone into creating that circle-jerk handbook caused my portfolio to lose 5% just thinking about it. Clearly this is a company run by first-timer 20-something geeks.

News flash, the point of your company is not to try to figure out the best way to run a company. If you're so interested in the operations of companies, take a management course or go into management consulting. If I were an investor in GitLab I would force them to hire an experienced CEO that would focus on the business and keep the kids from being distracted by their remote-distributed-only-fully-transparent-handbook-stored-in-rcs-public-merge-requests-welcome utopian wet daydreams.

In case anyone from GitLab is reading this and is sure that I'm completely missing the point, please enlighten me as to the point. Do you think you're going to be the next IBM? Are you trying to make this a 50 year company? Fancy yourselves as the harbingers of a revolution in how people work? You're a short-term company destined to not exist in 10 years regardless of success or failure. In 5 years when the executives have all moved on they will look back and wonder why they spent so much time on the meta of running a business instead of just running the business.

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