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GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

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Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#231

Post by slackersc »

sytse wrote: post #60
LyndsySimon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a new project recently, and put it on Gitlab instead of GitHub. I'm very pleased so far, and have been finding reasons to justify encouraging others to move projects there as well.

I'm very glad to hear that. What are the reasons that you think will encourage others?

I recently setup a small personal project on Gitlab as well. I've been very impressed. I was able to setup a private repo, with a CI setup that builds my code and runs my tests every time i push a commit.. all on their servers. For free.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#232

Post by mkopinsky »

sytse wrote: post #158
fnord123 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idea: put the performance plots from tickets on https://arewefastyet.gitlab.com Mozilla does this to great effect: http://www.arewefastyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/ http://www.arewewebyet.org/

Great idea! We've just forwarded http://arewefastyet.gitlab.com/ to http://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/fleet-overview This doesn't show all the graphs we need to show like 99th percentile request latency but that will come when we add Unicorn support to Prometheus.

FYI if I visit the new subdomain over HTTPS I get a cert error.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#233

Post by erlend_sh »

This is pretty weird to me:

> What about Mattermost, how is this different?

> Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience.

> Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication.

Surely GitLab would be better off investing fully into a single chat-platform? The road to making Gitter good for internal team communication is not particularly long or windy.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#234

Post by ghostly_s »

graton wrote: post #159
webo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior Backend Engineer shows 85-95k in Chicago, which is below average. It shows 45-55k for Fayetteville -- most junior guys/gals start around 75k in Fayetteville at mediocre companies.

Yeah, similar for me. In my geo it shows ~87-98K, but if I moved to San Francisco it is ~173-189K. Which seems foolish. They should incentivize people to move to the lower costs geos, not penalize them. And the listed salary for my geo is about 2/3 to 3/4 of my current base pay before any bonuses. The idea of the company sounds good, but the pay is a deal breaker for me. I wouldn't like feeling like I'm providing the…

They're not trying to incentivize people to move to SF; they're trying to maintain a competitive hold on the market of talent which is already there, as the realities of our current climate are that many of the highest-talent candidates are to be found in that pool.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#235

Post by sytse »

mkopinsky wrote: post #232
sytse wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea! We've just forwarded http://arewefastyet.gitlab.com/ to http://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/fleet-overview This doesn't show all the graphs we need to show like 99th percentile request latency but that will come when we add Unicorn support to Prometheus.

FYI if I visit the new subdomain over HTTPS I get a cert error.

It only works on http I'm afraid.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#236

Post by sytse »

homakov wrote: post #226
sytse wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Egor, we rely on team members telling the truth about where they live and when they move. In SF we sometimes meet up so that would be slightly harder to pull off. But all of our physical get togethers are optional so you can probably keep this going for a while.

It was a general question to all companies, because geosalary seems to be popular. Always wondered how it works, and how it can be abused. Also: we, digital nomads, don't have any base. I honestly have no answer to "where do you live"

We had one person before that didn't have a base. He was registered in Estonia as a digital citizen and company. We opted to use that. But we'll look at this on a case by case basis.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#237

Post by majormajor »

ghostly_s wrote: post #234
graton wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, similar for me. In my geo it shows ~87-98K, but if I moved to San Francisco it is ~173-189K. Which seems foolish. They should incentivize people to move to the lower costs geos, not penalize them. And the listed salary for my geo is about 2/3 to 3/4 of my current base pay before any bonuses. The idea of the company sounds good, but the pay is a deal breaker for me. I wouldn't like feeling like I'm providing the…

They're not trying to incentivize people to move to SF; they're trying to maintain a competitive hold on the market of talent which is already there, as the realities of our current climate are that many of the highest-talent candidates are to be found in that pool.

If they're ok with people working remotely, they'd do much better to pay everyone as if they lived in a very expensive area, and attract all the people who don't want to give up a lot of the flexibility of a large paycheck but would love to be able to save even more of it by living somewhere cheaper.

(Their calculator also seems somewhat bonkers (on the extremely low side) compared to the local market where I live. It seems based on a somewhat-arbitrary, quick-and-dirty-wild-guess estimate formula vs what real, on-the-ground competitor companies in those areas are paying.)

EDIT: there seems to be a small trend emerging where every company I've seen with fully-public payscales/pay calculators wildly comes in below what I'm currently making, and what I've heard from local competitors. And I'm not in SF. Wonder if there's some causality there, though it's still just a handful.

Also it's amusing to get a downvote for offering up the info that Gitlab would want me to take a pretty substantial ~30% haircut in base pay based on where I live. What would be attractive to me would be "we'll give you 80% of your current take-home, but you get to live wherever you want," but this is basically the opposite.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#238

Post by sytse »

yuhong wrote: post #166
dragonwriter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think even public companies often disclose the prices though, "Even public companies"? Public companies are required to report a lot of financial information publicly that non-public companies are neither required to report nor in the habit of reporting.

The point is there probably won't be much problem in disclosing this info and they will likely have to do so after they IPO anyway.

'Whether or not there a separate disclosure about a specific transaction (including its price and form of consideration) depends on the size of the acquisition relative to the size of the company and whether the acquisition is "material." Accounting rules define "materiality" in an intentionally broad way. From FASB Statement of Concepts #2:

The omission or misstatement of an item in a financial report is material if, in the light of surrounding circumstances, the magnitude of the item is such that it is probable that the judgment of a reasonable person relying upon the report would have been changed or influenced by the inclusion or correction of the item.

In practice, a company's auditors will set a materiality threshold based on a company's revenue, assets, and net income. Thus, big companies can make small acquisitions without disclosing much.'

from https://www.quora.com/For-a-public-company-when-does-the-siz...

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#239

Post by cookiecaper »

utku_karatas2 wrote: post #192
cookiecaper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really able to attract much talent. Look through the LinkedIn of some of the GitLab people. A lot of them are very junior (this is the first "real job" for one guy I looked up), and they, rather clearly, have an amateur leadership team, as exhibited by their recent spectacular failures, their underwhelming commentary on remote team management, their naive idealistic implementation of "radical transparency…

That's one hell of a pessimistic view if I've ever seen one. What I see is an brilliantly managed company despite having a globally distributed team, which has a great pace of development, which is carving a nice market share in an extremely tough market (developers) and against a fierce competitor (Github), let alone the other multibillion company backed Bitbucket. And their radical transparency, as you put it, is a…

Is the company "brilliantly managed" because they still exist? What is an example of this management brilliance? At this point, all the company has proven is that it is able to convince investors to give it money. I see a bloated company with over 100 underpaid junior-level engineers putting out subpar software.

The radical transparency may be a fun experiment and it may provide a lot of interesting data to parse, but it's not a good way to run a real company. It screams of impractical idealism. A lot of companies are bad, but GitLab wants to make sure that you know they're bad from a distance. In theory this is all great and nice. In practice, it hurts the company in both commerce and recruiting.

Re: GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

#240

Post by ianbicking »

hamandcheese wrote: post #110

Somewhat off topic, but I was once very interested in working for GitLab. According to their compensation calculator, though, I'd be making less than half what I make now (also working remotely). They ding me for living in a comparatively low cost area. I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalize…

I feel a little bad contributing to such a very off-topic thread, but...

I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable.

At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab).

So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s.

I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves.

All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.

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