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GitLab Direction

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Re: GitLab Direction

#81

Post by DouweM »

ILikeConemowk wrote: post #76
DouweM wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

For sure; you can reach me at [first_name]@gitlab.com!

Re: GitLab Direction

#82

Post by TheRealPomax »

whitepoplar wrote: post #24
WhyDoPeople wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what specifically you mean by "surpass Github"? I mean this with no snarky intention. I'm just wondering what tasks Gitlab doesn't perform as well as Github for you; unless you were referring to the social awareness that Github has.

I mean surpass GitHub in both usage and revenue.

Revenue? GitHub has been operating at a loss right up to the moment that MS bought them for over a thousand times what they had to start making annually to not run a loss.

Re: GitLab Direction

#83

Post by manigandham »

tyldum wrote: post #73
brandonwamboldt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You pay 200 employees but don't want to spend $19/user/month on software for a company hub? That's not really a small company, and this seems like a budgeting problem if money is that tight.

You can also try running multiple installations with a separate dev-only instance with more features. Also have you tried contacting Gitlab to negotiate? A few emails can go a long way.

Re: GitLab Direction

#85

Post by DouweM »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #68
DouweM wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi there, glad to hear that you enjoy working at GitLab! My impression was just based on some things I've been hearing about compensation, and a couple of negative comments and articles. I think the best way to explain it is that GitLab sounds like a more traditional place to work. Similar to companies in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's very unlikely that I would accept a job in one of these…

I'll leave the subject of compensation to the threads dedicated to it, but 'software engineers [...] are treated more like "code monkeys" who report to their managers and don't have any self-direction' absolutely does not apply to GitLab. Have you had a chance to check out our values (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/) or our section on making decisions (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#making-decisio...)? What you're describing is pretty much the opposite of how we actually work :)

Re: GitLab Direction

#86

Post by sametmax »

whitepoplar wrote: post #2

GitLab is like the average kid in class that everybody makes fun of for constantly asking questions, but the joke's on them because "a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." While GitLab may have warts, I feel that they're very earnestly working to make the product better, bit by bit, day by day, and will one day surpass GitHub.

> I feel that they're very earnestly working to make the product better, bit by bit, day by day, and will one day surpass GitHub.

It's assuming github doesn't do that as well.

As a paying github using, I can see they are improving my life a little bit more everyday.

Like, lately, they introduced automatic security checks on python project dependencies.

I'm glad gitlab exist. I feel safer, knowing I have a place to migrate to if MS screw up with gitup and no commercial replacement lives up to the task.

But github is certainly not playing to loose.

Re: GitLab Direction

#87

Post by matteeyah »

kasparsklavins wrote: post #30
WhyDoPeople wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, what specifically you mean by "surpass Github"? I mean this with no snarky intention. I'm just wondering what tasks Gitlab doesn't perform as well as Github for you; unless you were referring to the social awareness that Github has.

Performance and stability? Still yet to have a day where I havent had a 500 error on gitlab cloud.

Thanks for bringing this up.

We're actively working on making sure GitLab.com is ready for mission-critical workloads. You can see a list of ongoing efforts in [1].

However, we're not quite there yet. At the moment, for mission-critical workloads we recommend self-hosting.

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...

Re: GitLab Direction

#88

Post by DouweM »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #68
DouweM wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hi there, glad to hear that you enjoy working at GitLab! My impression was just based on some things I've been hearing about compensation, and a couple of negative comments and articles. I think the best way to explain it is that GitLab sounds like a more traditional place to work. Similar to companies in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's very unlikely that I would accept a job in one of these…

I also feel like you're painting companies outside Silicon Valley with a pretty broad brush.

There's nothing about a healthy engineering culture that makes it unique to Silicon Valley, and there are many, many companies in those regions you mention that would take significant issue with that generalization.

If you want to optimize for annual salary, Silicon Valley is probably the place to be, but if you want to optimize for happiness (however a developer may define that for themselves), it's just one of many potential places to go, and if you want to optimize for work/life balance, it's probably not even in the top 10.

Re: GitLab Direction

#89

Post by matteeyah »

Nokinside wrote: post #78
akerl_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just a small addition - GitLab EE is source-visible and proprietary licensed. Everyone can browse the source code over at [1]

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee

Re: GitLab Direction

#90

Post by quadrangle »

tempaccount777 wrote: post #32
sytse wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

On the "Open Source" issue, they seem to be trying to keep a careful balance. They're doing the ideal thing and fully freeing a decent amount of stuff. But they have VC investors, so they have to pay them off with an exit sometime. And that fact on its own is the compromising thing that means they won't likely do just-enough to keep their own sustainable funding. They need to get profit not just pay all the team well.

I'd like to see them at least become a Benefit Corp or similar to trust more that they won't end up selling out in some worse way that goes against the Open Source values they largely but incompletely embrace.

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