Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

venturebeat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 333 posts

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

#271

Post by j_koreth »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #134
kstenerud wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cross platform GUI git client that doesn't suck!

This is a pretty great idea. For what I often deal with, the GitHub desktop client is okay (though obviously tied to GitHub), but then I was sad to also realize they don't offer it on Linux. (Maybe they assume Linux nerds don't need GUIs?) I tried Tower when it was in beta for Windows, but the cost is too steep to justify it for me. But it seemed to be a lot more full featured than the GitHub client which isn't good…

Have you tried smartgit?

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

#272

Post by hisham_hm »

paulddraper wrote: post #263
sashagitlab wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Matt, I am the recruiter at GL, I've reviewed your case, and I wanted to follow up personally. I'd like to address your concern and explain our process. Since the time of your interview, we have changed the process of discussing compensation within the first 15 minutes of a conversation to the end of a phone call. We understand it's uncomfortable and sometimes awkward to talk pay when you've just met someone. Hope…

I don't understand. Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?

Because not all jobs are remote, so local jobs make up for a considerable amount of the job pool. For this reason, it's easier to get another job at your current location, so that's the competition the employer is faced with. If you live in an expensive area they're not paying you more to help you, they're paying you more to be more competitive with other companies in your area.

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

#273

Post by segmondy »

hisham_hm wrote: post #272
paulddraper wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?

Because not all jobs are remote, so local jobs make up for a considerable amount of the job pool. For this reason, it's easier to get another job at your current location, so that's the competition the employer is faced with. If you live in an expensive area they're not paying you more to help you, they're paying you more to be more competitive with other companies in your area.

This line of argument is ridiculous. Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?

What if you hire a great remote developer who lives in San-Jose, then she moves to Kentucky 6 months later, and their contribution is still the same. Why should their pay be adjusted?

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

#274

Post by sytse »

nico wrote: post #253
sytse wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you. I'm still a big fan of Gitlab and the vision you guys have. You've built an amazing organization and you'll definitely keep doing great things. Look forward to using your platform again in the future :)

Thanks Nico, glad to hear that you'll give us another chance.

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

#275

Post by sytse »

heliostatic wrote: post #270
sytse wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to second this, we should never ask people to agree to something below the calculator. But of course the applicant and the interviewer might disagree about the appropriate title and experience factor for a candidate. We have to decline 200 applicants a week at GitLab. We realize that interviewing is very stressful. We send a survey afterwards to get a net promoter score. The current average is 4.2 out of 5 for…

If you're actually calculating an NPS, the non-respondents should be considered detractors for a more accurate rating. Happy to talk more if you're interested (have done a lot of this as a user researcher).

Cool! Thanks for the offer for help. Can you maybe reach out to joan@gitlab.com?

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

#276

Post by fatal510 »

segmondy wrote: post #273
hisham_hm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not all jobs are remote, so local jobs make up for a considerable amount of the job pool. For this reason, it's easier to get another job at your current location, so that's the competition the employer is faced with. If you live in an expensive area they're not paying you more to help you, they're paying you more to be more competitive with other companies in your area.

This line of argument is ridiculous. Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York? What if you hire a great remote developer who lives in San-Jose, then she moves to Kentucky 6 months later, and their contribution is still the same. Why should their pay be adjusted?

Because a huge factor of pay is cost of living. The only reason people in San Jose are getting paid so much is because they are in San Jose and could not survive otherwise.

> Are software companies pricing their computer programs based on location? Do folks in Ohio get to pay less than folks in New York?

Yes?

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

#277

Post by paulddraper »

hisham_hm wrote: post #272
paulddraper wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Why does Location matter? Does it matter if have 10 kids, or a lease on a Porsche, or 2 alimonies, or live in a McMansion, or my kid has cancer? Are those factors relevant? What makes Location special?

Because not all jobs are remote, so local jobs make up for a considerable amount of the job pool. For this reason, it's easier to get another job at your current location, so that's the competition the employer is faced with. If you live in an expensive area they're not paying you more to help you, they're paying you more to be more competitive with other companies in your area.

GitLab has made a big deal about working remotely; I thought that's what they did. https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/08/the-remote-manifesto/

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

#278

Post by anilgulecha »

ernstvn wrote: post #213
aldarn wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this really addresses the issue? Personally I actually would appreciate the upfront salary discussion as it could potentially save a lot of wasted time. It seems to me the issue is more there was a difference in expectations between what the candidate perceived was their situation and what the recruiter believed. This is of course not uncommon, however from the sounds of it the candidate was not given an…

Just to be clear: the calculator takes Level, Experience, and Location into account. If the candidate and recruiter arrive at different numbers while typing into the calculator, then there is apparently miscommunication about one or more of those factors. But being asked to agree to something that is lower than what comes out of the calculator is just not something we do at GitLab. If it came across that way then som…

Your calculator would probably need to be updated? I just tried it out and the difference between the locations Mumbai and Bangalore, the latter is close to 2.5x less than Mumbai (0.08 vs 0.20).

Your data-source for this is very clearly wrong.. any income/cost-of-living report for India will show that the cost of living is the same for these 2 cities.

Just FYI.

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

#279

Post by developer2 »

sashagitlab wrote: post #171
matthewvincent wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an interesting interview with one of their recruiters in which within the first 5 minutes I was asked to agree to compensation below what their calculator (which was a part of the job posting) indicated was their pay scale for my location and that position. I was told my resume wouldn't be passed to an engineering lead until I had (in writing) agreed to the lower salary range. Liiike why even... Edit: Didn't in…

Hi Matt, I am the recruiter at GL, I've reviewed your case, and I wanted to follow up personally. I'd like to address your concern and explain our process. Since the time of your interview, we have changed the process of discussing compensation within the first 15 minutes of a conversation to the end of a phone call. We understand it's uncomfortable and sometimes awkward to talk pay when you've just met someone. Hope…

Holy crap, you've just done your company - or if you are an external recruiter, your client - a huge disservice by posting this reply. You've done nothing to assuage future candidates' concerns. You've merely confirmed that your compensation offers, and likely the entire hiring process, is driven by undesirable corporate metrics. This makes GitLab sounds seem like a company that only knows how to regurgitate HR 101 tactics. No thanks.

GitLab, diversify/improve your recruitment strategy. Why you only have "the recruiter", aka a single person heading your recruitment, rather than a group of competent personnel, is concerning. Your public image is of a medium-sized company which is already established, not a tiny startup outfit wherein all hires rely on a sole (apparently inadequate) person vetting each potential employee.

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

#280

Post by mos_basik »

Perihelion wrote: post #255
lol768 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally the fragmentation of these random chat services does little to make me want to get involved in project chat discussions. I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.

Totally agree with this. Having to join 10+ Slack-like groups to collaborate on open source projects is unrealistic for me. As a result, I don't frequent some projects' chats and stick to bug trackers/mailing lists -- as a result of that I miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes with contributing to open source. I've missed out on a few conversations where decisions were made too. Being in multiple groups on…

>most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools

This is what pushed me away from using Slack with a group of gamers I admin for. I can understand Slack's desire to stick to the workplace and how that leads to "if you need to /ignore a co-worker your company has problems implementing /ignore in Slack can't fix." And I can understand Mattermost wanting to become the opensource/on-prem analog of that. But it really falls apart when you try to use that kind of system with users that don't know you, aren't on your payroll or have issues with rules - like open source developers, or gamers.

My group eventually switched to Discord for, among other things, its amazing ACL-style permissions system, frictionless inviting and unlimited history (iirc, getting history with the first tier of paid Slack would have cost us ~11k USD/year?). It's not perfect - I really hope their bot API gets some love, and of course the ability to host your own server would be nice (though I understand some of the catch-22's there) - but I like it a LOT and I keep encountering new groups of people with Discord servers where I can just idle using one client. This is MUCH more IRC-like experience than I ever got with Slack (for instance, switching between or getting/setting notification alert levels on several different servers is much more ergonomic on Discord than on Slack).

I've not used Gitter a whole lot - just a couple of times when I had a question for some project that had one - but my impression is that it leans more towards "chat with strangers about $topic" (like Discord) and less towards "chat with colleagues about work" (like Slack). In that respect, I'd lay a small amount of money that Gitter does have an /ignore command, among other tools that you miss from IRC.

Post reply on HN