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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

#241

Post by rimantas »

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 -…

MySQL AB was about 400 before being bought by Sun and it was said that about 70% were remote so that gives about 280 persons. I was impressed how well organized that work was.

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

#242

Post by scruple »

kartickv wrote: post #237
scruple wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see why your manager missed the point. If the "vast majority" of employees are onsite, then it seems reasonable to expect the few who aren't to come visit, or otherwise change their working style, rather than the majority to change their working practices for the few. Particularly if it's the same state in the same country and not, say, a 20-hour flight from Bangalore to San Francisco. Am I missing something?

Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the office more often. To do what, exactly? This is strikes me as missing the forest for the trees.

The fact is, this entire team is all on Slack and we all have email and we all use zoom. We have internal Wiki's for documentation. We have JIRA. And on and on. The point is, there are plenty of established avenues available for people to dissiminate this sort of information but it doesn't happen. I don't think that I'm asking them to modify their behavior by asking that they include their team members or to remember that they exist when they have those impromptu meetings.

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

#243

Post by scruple »

ghaff wrote: post #185
scruple wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.

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

#244

Post by mdekkers »

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.

I applied for a position at Gitlab a week ago, and didn't even get a response. Probably because I am too expensive, too old, and live in an area with strong labour laws and staff protection. It's a shame, because it would have been decent to at least get a "sorry, not interested" reply, but no response at all is just not cool. They write on their hiring page: Always leave feedback, this will help everyone to understand what happened and how you came to your decision.

Nice to "write everything down"

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

#245

Post by emj »

ghaff wrote: post #219
cookiecaper wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be contrarian here and say that I actually hate that most remote companies make frequent on-site travel part of the job and pretend like it's a perk. Travel, including on-site visits and "group retreats", are not perks for me. I have a family and a life where I'm at and part of the reason I like to be remote is because it allows me to be productive with minimal impact on other things (e.g., don't have to waste 2…

It is contrarian. As someone who has worked remotely to a significant degree for quite a while, I also find face to face get togethers (whether in an office or elsewhere) incredibly valuable. You're welcome to your own preferences of course but, as someone on a largely remote team, I consider regular get-togethers in various forms pretty much essential.

Could we quantify this a bit more? A largely remote team for me is a 3-7 person teams, all but project lead are remote. The regular get together are 4-8 hours every month plus some annual dinners. The remote distance is just 20km - 500km

I think our face time is abit excessive but it's ok, even nice, but that's because it fits into my workday and family life, and it's always paid travel time.

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

#247

Post by winteriscoming »

More than knowing how they manage remote employees, at this point, with more than a week since the data loss incident, I would be genuinely curious to know if their backups are now functional and what plan they have put in place or planning to, to verify backups work.

Furthermore, I won't be surprised if they have seen more concentrated spam attack, after the news of this data loss surfaced.

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

#248

Post by jon-wood »

phil21 wrote: post #199
bgxor wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is precisely what turned me off applying for a job at Gitlab after initially being hugely enthusiastic. My family and I moved away from London to the city we grew up in to save some money, partly because I knew I could work remote for the same sort of money I had been making while paying considerably less on rent and living expenses. The cost of living adjustments Gitlab do would mean entirely negating that benefit.

I'm not really sure what the justification for CoL adjustments is, beyond "we can get away with it". Apparently I'm worth paying $120,000 working from home in London, but if I move 70 miles south I'm worth half that. Not only does it make little sense logically, there's no way cost of living here is less than half that in London, so its not even calculated correctly.

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

#249

Post by jon-wood »

geofft wrote: post #38
detaro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "trigger" of the failure (accidentally deleting the wrong database) is bad luck that happens, but the lack of preparedness for it isn't. If I understood the document right even if the regular backups would have worked, they only happened every 24 hours (same as the staging replicas they recovered from, except one was manually created out of schedule that day). Maybe being fully remote helps to let stuff like this…

What's the best-practice approach for taking backups that are significantly more frequent than every 24 hours, but also robust to things like an rm -rf or a DELETE FROM table;? Something like continuous data protection seems like it would be far too much data for an active database server, no? (Or are we just saying that they should have been taking backups every 15 minutes or hour or so?)

One job I worked in had a slave set up with 30 minutes if replication lag intentionally applied to reduce the impact of someone accidentally nuking a table.

Then as someone else mentioned you can stream your replication log to storage elsewhere giving you the ability to do point in time restores.

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

#250

Post by rwmj »

Perihelion wrote: post #73
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 -…

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…

Red Hat has 10000 employees, a large proportion being remote (including me - about half of all developers work remotely). I can assure you that remote workers at Red Hat are not out of the loop on anything.

The thing is that even if I went into the local office, I would still be "working remotely", because the development teams are distributed all around the world. Therefore everything has to be done on mailing lists, IRC, bug trackers and occasional conference calls.

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