One of my major pain points with GitLab was its API. The lack of coherent API design ultimately made me lose hope in the product. For example I think it still lacks an ability to create threads on MRs. Until recently it wasn't possible to approve any MRs either, for 10+ versions of the product and 4+ versions of the api, but adding emoji was... The disjointed API made it nearly impossible to create quality tooling on top of GitLab, ultimately forcing us away from the product. It left a poor taste in my mouth, with a sense that there was no rhyme or reason to the direction of the platform, unfortunately.
GitLab Direction
71–80 of 137 posts
Re: GitLab Direction
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: Working for GitLab since March. Several countries are on hiring stop currently, mainly those that you have listed. This is due to administrative reasons, as people from those countries work as contractors, as we have no entities there. In Europe we currently have an entity in NL, BE, UK and DE. Furthermore we have an Indian, Chinese and of course US entity.
The page specifies that even contractors from these countries are excluded.
@aissen this is a temporary roadblock for us. As we scale, we are working on a better payroll solution in these locations. We are hoping to remove some of these roadblocks in future entirely. We have already moved a few successfully, like Australia and Canada.
Re: GitLab Direction
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have some questions to ask of you. 1. Why does gitlab have so many tiers? It would be better if you guys could repackage the features into fewer categories. 2. Why is the Gitlab UI so ugly? IMO, bitbucket and github are leaps and bounds ahead of you guys when it comes to design. 3. Can we get a dark mode for us night owls? 4. Finally, the morality question, You guys proudly associate yourselves with open-source and…
1. They only have four tiers (four equivalent tiers for hosted and on-premise technically). This is quite reasonable, as they need to provide flexibility for their customers. They are quite clear about which tiers provide which features. 2. This is purely subjective. I quite like the design, both more than GitHub and Bitbucket. They do have a UX team, and they conduct regular user tests. They've also made a lot of im…
When my company subscribed there was only a community and enterprise tier.
Now this has become the starter edition and I feel we are losing a lot of value.
We are 200 employees, but only 10 developers using the advanced features. We really want to make GitLab our hub (GitOps and all), however the the cost of going beyond starter edition is mind blowing (x5).
So if we are to embrace GitLab further we must abandon the idea of letting the whole company use GitLab freely and limit it to devs only.
Being small doesn't mean that we are not in need if advanced features, we just have a smaller scale.
Also as our initial tier was the top tier, and now is the bottom one, I fear GitLab will fence off future functionality with even more tiers at random.
Further, the tiers creates some artificial barriers where we several times feel the some of the new features we receive are just barely functioning and are just there to entice you to upgrade to the next tier.
We are all in all very happy with GitLab, however we are no longer pushing it as a central hub for the company.
Re: GitLab Direction
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate about the salaries for remote workers? I'm a frontend developer in southern Europe and I'd love to work for Gitlab because I love the product.
I don't have any first-hand experience, and I'm sure there are exceptions. I've heard that GitLab will pay around $80k for a remote software engineer in a country with a low cost-of-living. That engineer could be earning $150k-$250k at a different company (e.g. Basecamp, GitHub, etc.) I realize that $80k is a lot of money for Europe/UK/Asia/South America/rest of the US. But if you're a top engineer, you could double…
This is really interesting. I live in Czech away from Prague and made a joke on local dev meetup that "I will not work for 22k". Answer was "everyone here wishes to work for 22k".
I don't think anyone I know here makes anything close to 100k even in Prague.
I should investigate this bit more to get closer to SF salaries if possible.
Re: GitLab Direction
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any first-hand experience, and I'm sure there are exceptions. I've heard that GitLab will pay around $80k for a remote software engineer in a country with a low cost-of-living. That engineer could be earning $150k-$250k at a different company (e.g. Basecamp, GitHub, etc.) I realize that $80k is a lot of money for Europe/UK/Asia/South America/rest of the US. But if you're a top engineer, you could double…
They have a calculator [0] The same job, with the same experience is paid less than half what it is in SF in the UK. That's not really very enticing. https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/...
I don't know how they came to that calculator. But it seems that someone in Ethiopia would earn $20k more than someone in the Netherlands (outside of Amsterdam)
Re: GitLab Direction
#76A few years ago I really wanted to join GitHub as a software engineer. I was living in San Francisco and visited their office for some events, and I thought it would be an awesome place to work. I tried reaching out to a few people who worked there, but I could never get my foot in the door. There were a lot of things I would have loved to build at GitHub, and they were all the same things that GitLab is doing now. I…
Hey Nathan, I'm very curious about what you mean by "I also don't think they have a very good company culture". I've been at GitLab since early 2015 (employee #10), and the culture is one of the major reasons why I joined, and stayed. :) Would you mind elaborating? For anyone else reading along, our Handbook ( https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ ) covers our culture (and every other aspect of working here) very well.
Hello DouweM, I've been considering joining gitlab for a while! I have a couple of questions about how you guys make remote work run smoothly, can I reach out to you?
Thanks!
Re: GitLab Direction
#77A few years ago I really wanted to join GitHub as a software engineer. I was living in San Francisco and visited their office for some events, and I thought it would be an awesome place to work. I tried reaching out to a few people who worked there, but I could never get my foot in the door. There were a lot of things I would have loved to build at GitHub, and they were all the same things that GitLab is doing now. I…
>a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. Can you elaborate on that? Because ripping off and competing against original developers is what open source specially allows. That's one of it's benefits of open source. If someone can improve and and do cheaper, they should do it. I don't see any moral implications. Software business service business not manufacturing business. (at least 99%).…
GitHub isn't open-source, so while you're correct about what open source licenses allow, that's not really tangible to the complaint that they ripped off GitHub.
Re: GitLab Direction
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
>a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. Can you elaborate on that? Because ripping off and competing against original developers is what open source specially allows. That's one of it's benefits of open source. If someone can improve and and do cheaper, they should do it. I don't see any moral implications. Software business service business not manufacturing business. (at least 99%).…
GitHub isn't open-source, so while you're correct about what open source licenses allow, that's not really tangible to the complaint that they ripped off GitHub.
I see. It seems you are right. Github is closed source, Gitlab CE is open source, Gitlab EE is closed source.
Reframing the question:
Isn't ripping of and competing with the implementation of an idea is just normal business. Or is there something like gentleman rule where you should not copy business ideas as fast as you can?
Re: GitLab Direction
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! Incremental progress in the form of iteration is one of our core values https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#iteration
I have some questions to ask of you. 1. Why does gitlab have so many tiers? It would be better if you guys could repackage the features into fewer categories. 2. Why is the Gitlab UI so ugly? IMO, bitbucket and github are leaps and bounds ahead of you guys when it comes to design. 3. Can we get a dark mode for us night owls? 4. Finally, the morality question, You guys proudly associate yourselves with open-source and…
All businesses need to make money, otherwise they stop being a business. That doesn't mean all companies are the same.
Re: GitLab Direction
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the nr. 1 performance/ux/bugfix you would like to see? BTW This month we shipped 35 performance improvements https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=... and there were 141 bugs closed in the release of this month https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues?scope=all&utf8...
I don't know about the performance and bugfix issues, but based on my experience with gitlab.com, I don't think it has a good UX design. You see, there are many many best practices in the UX world, just like those in the programming world. And seems to me, GitLab is not following many of them. For example, the width of the content area. I've once read an article that trying to dig into that topic, and one opinion tha…
Hi there!
Thanks so much for the feedback, the UX team here at GitLab is always looking for ways to improve the user experience. It looks like someone else in this thread mentioned that you can choose between a fluid and fixed layout depending upon your preference. Some prefer a fixed width and others hate wasted screen space. We try our best to accommodate everyone.
Given that, we agree that this can be improved. We have an issue here discussing page-width, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/design.gitlab.com/issues/47. As you can see, in many cases we have decided that we should reduce the width in order to improve readability. I will add a link to your comment in the issue as further data on our user's preferences.
Also, we opened an issue with your suggestions for the project list page. Feel free to jump in and add any more thoughts you have there, feedback is always welcome. Here is a link: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/49504
Keep the suggestions coming!