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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

#261

Post by BlackFingolfin »

lallysingh wrote: post #163
vowelless wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what the objective quantification of UX is?

Clicks per task. Search time. User errors. For starts. Here's a start: http://measuringu.com/essential-metrics/

By trained or by untrained people? Domain specific experts, or newbies? .And why "clicks"? For many tasks, the way to get them done realy quick is with keys...

I had to do some IT support for a doctor's office many years ago, and (unrelated to what I was doing), had a chance to look at the system the front desk lady used to manage the patients, appointments etc. and it used a "clunky" old text based system (perhaps even DOS based?). TO me, it looked utterly bizarre and incomprehensible. But man, the front desk lady was lightning fast doing anything with it. Of course she trained on the system for years, and just entered keypressed rapidly that didn't make sense to me, but achieved the desired result... So, zero clicks, low search times, no (for me visible) user errors... so I guess they never should have switched, as this was the "objectively optimal" UI?

Personally, I don't think so. I.e. I think the UI could have been better, and easier to learn. But of course it's also important to see how usable it is once you do learn it... I was at that doctor's office again, not so long ago, this time as a patient... new lady (the old one retired, I assume), new system... flashy graphics... everything done with clicking, I don't even know if there still are shortcuts, the new lady certainly didn't seem to use any. And it did feel slower overall -- though this is of course a subjective evaluation only, with many years between the two observations. Plus it's somewhat unfair to compare somebody who trained a decade on a system with somebody who for all I know started a week ago... but I guess that's exactly my point here...

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

#262

Post by shasheene »

deepaksurti wrote: post #4

>> 2:41 – GitLab values boring solutions: our product should be exceptional Exceptional products have exceptional UX. Gitlab IMHO has the worst UX of all git based products out there, I much rather take BitBucket over Gitlab. I tried using Gitlab, but no, I would much rather pay the 7$ to GH for my private repos. I sincerely hope they make an exceptional product. And 'should' better be 'must'!

> Gitlab IMHO has the worst UX of all git based products out there

Remember that git-based products include Gerrit (a UX which I hear hate about, but frankly, I like a lot)

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

#263

Post by ceejay »

I think hindsight will reveal that the things that make a "distributed company" successful are really the same things that make a "localized company" successful. I think it's just that having all employees on-site probably makes it easier for companies to "fake it" and stumble into success through sheer grit and determination. Probably a lot of times even when they have less-than-adequate (but highly motivated) human resources.

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

#264

Post by VexXtreme »

krick wrote: post #168
sscarduzio wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No offense, but this works both ways. I mean, this is not a secret that there is this sort of people who feel that way, and if I can see that you are one of them — I wouldn't want you to be a part of the team. I mean it strongly: if I don't need you for some very specific kind of job, no way you are hired. Even if you are great professional (but replaceable) and a nice guy otherwise. I don't like myself this weird cu…

You are entitled to your sentiment, but calling people and their approach to life "toxic" is a good way to alienate them and dismiss what you have to say. There are many ways to run a business, and I've run teams that have shipped multi-million dollar software entirely remotely, with minimal face time and non-work related socializing.

There are plenty of companies that manage their work in a way that minimizes the human component and maximizes the technical utility of their engineers (judged on productive output alone), almost in a way that makes the human component and all it brings with it (unreliability, politicking, emotional outbursts, backstabbing, you name it) irrelevant. In fact, my ideal company reduces face time to close to zero, because that's the only reliable way to eliminate politicians, bad actors and people who try to game the system using social skills and emotional manipulation. A nice side effect of remote work is that it automatically creates that sort of environment, unless you go out of your way to change that (but then the remote work model is probably not for you).

>renders you to be a piece of quite primitive carbon-based technology.

The fact that you don't know how to manage engineers in an entirely meritocratic, non-political environment, says more about your management abilities than anything else.

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

#265

Post by pc86 »

mdekkers wrote: post #244
sotojuan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understa…

I don't think your local labor laws matter to Gitlab if they're based in your area.

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

#266

Post by tedmiston »

cookiecaper wrote: post #240
tedmiston wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what it is about small Midwestern cities but the calculator seems to dislike them. The calculated rates for Cincinnati are roughly half of market rate here. I understand the calculator will not be perfect in every city worldwide but it might be better to have no calculator as the current one is extremely discouraging even though I like GitLab.

It's based on rent. Each city is punished in proportion to how much cheaper its rent is than the rent in NYC. As NYC is one of the top 5 most expensive cities worldwide for real estate [0], any city marginally more reasonable is going to get pummeled. [0] http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/most-expensive-cities

Perhaps it's that there is lots of cheap housing in the suburbs here, and in the greater metro area but that is outside the city proper. But most of the tech / startup activity ie concentrated in one small gentrifying neighborhood where rent is much higher (+50–100%), so coincidentally people in tech aren't buying those houses because the commute is so far from the core.

I wonder if any of these indexes breaks down a city by zip code. A good analogy for here would be if you averaged all rent over the neighborhoods in Brooklyn then used that number for a bunch of candidates in Williamsburg.

It really penalizes living in a third- / fourth-tier startup hub, for example, vs either a first- / second-tier hub or a non-hub.

Taken from another perspective maybe it's an intentional filter on the candidate pool to specific cities or countries. That wouldn't seem to be consistent with most remote philosophies but it's something to consider.

Interestingly, Buffer's salary calculator is almost the opposite with a relatively small percentage difference between Nashville or Austin vs SF or NYC for instance.

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

#267

Post by pc86 »

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…

I won't quote it because I don't have the source in front of me but there is a quote elsewhere on this thread about Gitlab requiring that you tell them when you move so they can pay you less.

A) What's to stop me from getting hired in a 0.21 COL area and moving to San Francisco or Washington, DC? Are you going to fire me or pay me $20k a year because I moved?

B) My labor is not worth less and my work is not lower quality because I move to SE Asia or Eastern Europe. This is idiotic.

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

#268

Post by ddebernardy »

ceejay wrote: post #263

I think hindsight will reveal that the things that make a "distributed company" successful are really the same things that make a "localized company" successful. I think it's just that having all employees on-site probably makes it easier for companies to "fake it" and stumble into success through sheer grit and determination. Probably a lot of times even when they have less-than-adequate (but highly motivated) human…

When everyone is on site, there's enough implicit communication going on that you can get away with not documenting things in writing for a lot longer than in a remote team.

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

#269

Post by jaredklewis »

lallysingh wrote: post #163
vowelless wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain what the objective quantification of UX is?

Clicks per task. Search time. User errors. For starts. Here's a start: http://measuringu.com/essential-metrics/

Isn't his just moving the goal post? Now the subjectivity is choosing what metrics to measure.

Are 10 easy clicks worse than 2 hard clicks? Is a long, easy experience better than a short stressful one? And so on. Couldn't that vary by each person's preferences?

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

#270

Post by lallysingh »

BlackFingolfin wrote: post #261
lallysingh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicks per task. Search time. User errors. For starts. Here's a start: http://measuringu.com/essential-metrics/

By trained or by untrained people? Domain specific experts, or newbies? .And why "clicks"? For many tasks, the way to get them done realy quick is with keys... I had to do some IT support for a doctor's office many years ago, and (unrelated to what I was doing), had a chance to look at the system the front desk lady used to manage the patients, appointments etc. and it used a "clunky" old text based system (perhaps e…

I listed starting points. There's an entire science for this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_inter...

It sounds like you'd find it interesting.

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