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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

#241

Post by marktangotango »

taude wrote: post #203
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…

In reading all these responses about the low GitLab pay calculator, does anyone have any good tips on how to underpay and still hire talent. It's pretty incredible to me.

Hire entry level and train them. Have a kick ass culture so they want to stay. Preposterous I know. I've seen it once. In reality, job hoppers are the minority I've found.

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

#242

Post by cookiecaper »

ultimatejs wrote: post #197
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…

Um ok. What's actually wrong with the product? Why is it not "well-engineered"? All the things you said could be true, yet their product is amazing. I haven't used it, but I like what I'm seeing. So what if a smart experienced developer (their CTO) is able to get good prices on what he/she wants done through remote work? The point you're making is negativity for no reason without evidence on how it's not working, i.e…

It doesn't take much investigation to start seeing problems, or to see major lapses in engineering from both a concrete (e.g., bugs) and a process (e.g., data loss) perspective. The data loss event that made it clear that GitLab a) never tested its backups b) didn't have a real monitoring/alarming system to inform its employees when things broke c) did not have processes enforcing clear separation between production environments and d) did not know how to configure a PostgreSQL cluster, among many other basic flaws, is just one recent example. The postmortem for that event included the accidental disclosure of a serious DoS exploit, itself the symptom of poor engineering practice (hard-deleting all content flagged as spam, making it impossible to redeem erroneously targeted content; a user could maliciously trigger such deletes with minor effort), which was live on the site until a couple of hours after that disclosure was discussed on HN. As I understand the ticket explaining this, the entire spam cleanup system was shut off until they could teach it not to hard delete anymore. Many other junior-level mistakes are regularly discovered and discussed, both on their bug tracker and elsewhere.

Other than that, GitLab is a beast to install and navigate and it requires a lot of resources. Rails is slow. The UI is weird (frequently end up not finding the repo I want due to the way the "trending" tab works). There are other issues. I'm not a GitLab contributor so I don't really have more technical detail, I just use it sometimes.

It seems like you're just assuming they're a great company with a well-engineered product because you like the corporate image they project.

I don't know of anything about them that makes either themselves or their product "amazing". It is somewhat usable, which is good; I'm not trying to besmirch the earnest efforts of people to make something that works, and indeed there are some uses for something like GitLab. That doesn't mean that GitLab is "amazing" or that their product is flawless or even good.

The most exciting thing about GitLab to me is remotely distributed teams, which I usually love seeing, but I think they've gone about it all wrong.

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

#243

Post by barrkel »

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…

The trouble with this kind of calculator is that it fails to take into account the global opportunities that the higher end of the talent distribution has. Salaries to retain highly skilled people in cheap locations don't have as large a discount; not only does the salary need to compete against other employers in the area, it also needs to compete against moving to a better market.

Top end salaries will still be discounted, naturally, because the costs in high cost areas are real. But not every scales like housing.

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

#244

Post by cookiecaper »

yuhong wrote: post #127
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…

Are there evidence that the founders are not willing to learn or something like that.

Just the fact that they've been around a long time now, and are still like they are.

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

#245

Post by taude »

marktangotango wrote: post #241
taude wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reading all these responses about the low GitLab pay calculator, does anyone have any good tips on how to underpay and still hire talent. It's pretty incredible to me.

Hire entry level and train them. Have a kick ass culture so they want to stay. Preposterous I know. I've seen it once. In reality, job hoppers are the minority I've found.

Is a lot of their workforce remote? Because I imagine that would influence the lack of job-hopping.

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

#246

Post by megablast »

kilroy123 wrote: post #112
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'm also turned off by remote companies that do the same. I work remote and moved to a very low-cost area. That doesn't mean I want a massive pay cut.

What is the advantage to the company in hiring remote workers then?

You want your cake and to eat it too?

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

#247

Post by nico »

Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com).

However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering).

Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV).

Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.

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

#248

Post by fbuilesv »

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…

Using the GitLab calculator: If you are a developer in Medellín you are paid 3x less than if you are living in the Bay Area. If you are a customer in Medellín you pay the same as a customer in the Bay Area. In this case, "cost of living"[0] only applies to employees and not customers, which in my opinion says a lot about how much the company values their staff.

I appreciate the openness from GitLab on this matter though, they're pretty up-front about it so if you don't like it don't apply.

[0] When the word "cost of living" is mentioned but it's not reflected in the price for final users then you know you're about to get fucked.

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

#249

Post by sytse »

nico wrote: post #247

Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com). However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team c…

Hi Nico, I'm sorry that you suffered our unreliability this week. We do try to update @gitlabstatus for everything that we see happening, no matter how small. We're determined to make GitLab.com a reliable platform, but we realize we still have a long way to go.

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

#250

Post by YorickPeterse »

nico wrote: post #247

Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com). However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team c…

    > However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of
    > them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. 
    > For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our
    > whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying
    > builds and deployment jobs.
Do you happen to have some examples of these problems? I recall there are some known problems with CI runners getting stuck, but I'm wondering if you were running into other problems as well.
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