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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

#311

Post by sqldba »

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…

I sit in a very small half dozen person team in an office and still need to fight non-stop to be told what's going on.

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

#312

Post by bogomipz »

peterjmag wrote: post #201
farslan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do it here are DigitalOcean and it's just awesome. We have people in NYC HQ and remote all over the world (for example I'm working from Turkey). The key is not only over communication, also to care about your remote employees, let them feel like they're really a part of the company, bring them to the HQ, not per year, multiple times, etc.. There are many things but so far DigitalOcean is one of the best companies…

Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.c…

I applied to Digital Ocean and the recruiter before even speaking to me sent me a link to an online test that tested exclusively for knowledge of how to automate things using Chef. Nowhere is Chef mentioned on my CV as I have not worked with that config management tool, although I have with worked with others Puppet/Ansible. Needless to say I deleted the email. Talk about ridiculous. What a massive fail.

This was the second such miserable experience I had with D.O. I assumed that my first bad experience may have been due to a lack of maturity at the time with the interview process and so applied again a couple years later. Wow, was I was wrong.

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

#313

Post by sokoloff »

kartickv wrote: post #310
scruple wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scruple's boss should have told him that right at the interview stage, before a job offer is made. Well, this is awkward. I don't think you even read my original post. I literally said that I transitioned from on-site to part-time remote to full-time remote. I've been with this company for many years, it's gone exceptionally well until very recently. > Maybe say that he expects scruple to turn up in the office for…

> I literally said that I transitioned Sorry for getting that detail wrong. I re-read your original post to make sure I didn't miss anything else. Since you now say that you agreed ahead of time that you had no obligation to turn up in the office (that information wasn't there in the original post), I now agree with you that your manager was wrong. (This is something I've seen happen over and over again with managers…

Speaking as a manager here, what am I supposed to do when a valuable on-site employee approaches me and asks if they can transition to full-time remote?

If I say yes, I get skewered later when people on both sides aren't adapting to the new situation.

If I say no, them I'm a do-nothing windbag who can't feel like anything is getting done unless I can physically see the people typing and clicking.

If remote work is the minority situation, you're going to see challenges. Even if it's the norm, there are decisions that are time-sensitive and you're going to sometimes be dropped (same as if you were on PTO that week; you're just more exposed to it as a remote worker in a predominantly co-located team).

I have teams all around the world; even with that, we still bother to move desks to put squads all together in the same location. If you agree with the latter practice, I think you have to give some nod that co-location matters, even if only a little bit.

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

#314

Post by kartickv »

sokoloff wrote: post #313
kartickv wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I literally said that I transitioned Sorry for getting that detail wrong. I re-read your original post to make sure I didn't miss anything else. Since you now say that you agreed ahead of time that you had no obligation to turn up in the office (that information wasn't there in the original post), I now agree with you that your manager was wrong. (This is something I've seen happen over and over again with managers…

Speaking as a manager here, what am I supposed to do when a valuable on-site employee approaches me and asks if they can transition to full-time remote? If I say yes, I get skewered later when people on both sides aren't adapting to the new situation. If I say no, them I'm a do-nothing windbag who can't feel like anything is getting done unless I can physically see the people typing and clicking. If remote work is th…

Why not do as I suggested above, which is to answer "Can I work remotely?" with "You can do anything you want as long as it doesn't hurt your work."

That way, you're setting clear expectations ahead of time.

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

minhajuddin wrote: post #251
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…

There was some previous discussion about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302906 . I too had to turn down their offer of $2000 USD per month for a Senior position after the second round. This issue keeps coming up in posts about Gitlab and there doesn't seem to be any progress. I love the Gitlab product and what they have done to Git hosting. But, their salary structure is really screwed up.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by passiveincomelg »

nojvek wrote: post #225
ghaff wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal

If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".

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

#317

Post by ernstvn »

amyjess wrote: post #281
vonmoltke wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Wor…

> Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Are…

amyjess, thanks for pointing out the CBSA; I'll admit I had not seen it before. When we set out to develop the calculator we wanted it to work globally, and focused on that. This will be a helpful way to improve it specifically in the US, so I'm adding it to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/organization/issues/24

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

#318

Post by joe563323 »

nnq wrote: post #253
joe563323 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hybrid remote/on-site method should only be used as a migration path for the remote-first method from on-site, else it does not work well.

WHY?! What parent poster describes above seems like "heaven" to me. Some people can be "true nomads", others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home, everybody can be happy and find "what works for him/her". I hate both working in-office full-time AND working fully remote . But a mix sounds awesome, I always feel energized when working one day from one place, another day from another, and I also enjoy hav…

> others can spend 50% time in office, 50% working from home

What this really mean is 50 % teams in a company are remote and 50 % are onsite. Remote working is binary.

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

#319

Post by joe563323 »

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?

> I don't see why your manager missed the point.

Dev's are missing the point of manager. Manager becomes obsolete when the communication channel is just some software medium to share text.

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

#320

Post by zenlikethat »

sytse wrote: post #127
eknkc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can change that on your personal prefs to show the file list by default, with Readme on bottom: http://c.ekin.io/3z1V2v3P041b git push speed is fine on our own ce installation but gitlab.com is beyond shitty.

We're considering changing the default so people don't have to find the setting https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26834

I'd +1 this as default behavior. I want to see the source code!
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