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GitLab Strategy

about.gitlab.com

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Re: GitLab Strategy

#41

Post by sonnyblarney »

jjeaff wrote: post #25
HHalvi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still puzzles me since most other remote companies of similar size and shapes offer much better compensation than Gitlab.

I can't speak for gitlab, but there is a strategy to not competing with higher salaries, even if you can afford it in some cases. You aren't necessarily losing the top talent because not all the top talent cares only about the money. And by not offering the highest salaries, you are naturally selecting for employees that care more about the culture and work/life balance than having the highest possible salaries. So i…

"you are naturally selecting for employees that care more about the culture and work/life balance than having the highest possible salaries"

This is not quite true.

You're 'selecting' for all of the things that come along with offering lower salaries, which usually means losing the best talent.

All things being equal, it's rational for even a 'good staffer' to go to Google (or whatever).

And of course, the company saves money by paying people less.

I'm doubtful that there's any correlation between 'lower pay and commitment' once you normalize for talent.

If this is true, they could equally pay people more and get the same or better results.

Corporations speak in their self interest, and other people's interests to the extent it serves their own. If a company is paying less, it's probably because they can get away with it for one reason or another.

Re: GitLab Strategy

#42

Post by emilycook »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26
GreaterFool wrote: post #19

I feel bad for GitLab. It's better than GitHub in almost every way. And yet GitHub is more popular both in open-source and enterprise. And in enterprise we are usually left with unholy combination of GitHub and JIRA because GitHub project management is a joke and they haven't done anything useful in that space for years. But for some reason pushing for anything other than GitHub is always an uphill battle. And the we…

I am not a GitLab user, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I've read more than a few comments here on HN that GitLab stability and performance is worse than GH. For a mission critical system like source control, stability and performance are more important than any other features.

GitLab employee, this is somewhat of a drawback to how transparent we are about our issues. I know this might seem like I'm just trying to PR spin it, but it's a real phenomenon. We post about any little problem we have, and 99% percent of our Issues are public, so it probably seems like we have a lot of downtime and problems because of how often we talk about them

Re: GitLab Strategy

#43

Post by kayhi »

jjeaff wrote: post #28
kayhi wrote: post #22

Why do people contribute to Gitlab and help a for profit company for free? I'm curious about what motivates you such as improving a tool that you use everyday or code quality?

It's a for profit company, but they still not only give away the source code, but offer a great deal of hosted functionality for free. So contributing helps the community whether your contribution also helps the company or not. Seems kind of like asking "Why would you give money to the Red Cross? They have employees that get paid a salary for running it." If it's a good cause and you benefit from it, I certainly woul…

Thanks for the response, I'm not in the open source community and didn't think of Gitlab and Red Cross as a similar concept.

Re: GitLab Strategy

#44

Post by simplyinfinity »

janee wrote: post #21
Truth2019 wrote: post #2

2020: It has been an amazing ride but all journeys come to an end. Joining the Google family will allow us to offer our customers much better experience while retaining our independence. We are developers at heart and this is why we want to give developers the source control tools they deserve!

Tbh Google would make a good fit considering the existing auto devops CI/CD integration with GCP. I guess MS will roll out something similar on Github + Azure sometime in the future.

Checkout azure pipelines + visual studio team services :)

Re: GitLab Strategy

#45

Post by sonnyblarney »

microtonal wrote: post #4
Truth2019 wrote: post #2

2020: It has been an amazing ride but all journeys come to an end. Joining the Google family will allow us to offer our customers much better experience while retaining our independence. We are developers at heart and this is why we want to give developers the source control tools they deserve!

Under Principles : Independence: since we took financing we need to have a liquidity event; to maintain independence we want to become a public company rather than be acquired. At any rate, even if it happens, GitLab CE is open source, which can't be said for some of their competition.

"to maintain independence we want to become a public company rather than be acquired"

I don't doubt this is their honest preference, but these are words, part of a communications strategy.

Since it's fairly clearly a business, they have 'a price', surely, moreover, the outside impetus may force their hand.

Re: GitLab Strategy

#46

Post by emilycook »

tosh wrote: post #3

Inspiring how open Gitlab is in how they run things. Their handbook is a fantastic resource for distributed companies (but also for non-distributed companies). https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ e.g. here is how they do CEO shadowing: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/

GitLab employee, thank you for your kind words, and I also couldn't agree more! We're currently all at our company-wide conference [1], and legit every single employee is passionate about transparency (and also very happy to work here). Definitely not something I've experienced at the other companies I've worked for.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/contribute/

Re: GitLab Strategy

#47

Post by sonnyblarney »

bdcravens wrote: post #18
marcinzm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I can tell 5 out of 7 board seats are owned by VCs and it's very unlikely the founders retain majority shares given their 5 rounds of funding. So I doubt it's their call to make in any way.

I can promise you they are already in talks with at least one large company. You know those phones started ringing when Microsoft bought Github. I'm not ready to believe that Goldman Sachs is now a principles over profit kind of company.

If one takes GitLab's communication entirely at face value, one might consider there is some kind of 'principled' thing going on here, but I suggest that 'it's just a business' and that GitLab isn't some shiny example of much, other than a well run entity.

All of the 'everyone can do this' language in their communications, is just that, communications, it has a cognitive resonance with words such as 'equality' which appeal to some (well, all of us in a way) - but it's marketing.

The are what they are because it works for those involved, and also makes them money. Many boring business without fancy communications provide immense surpluses to the world.

Re: GitLab Strategy

#48

Post by ergocoder »

sytse wrote: post #35
autotune wrote: post #5

Funnily enough paying their employees somewhat competitive market rate still isn’t on there.

What rate do you think is off? For example our rate for an intermediate developer in San Francisco is $160k a year and options. See https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-en... If you mean we pay local rates please see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

As a person from a third world country, I don't think paying local rates makes sense for an employee.

I worked in both Vietnam and Bay Area. The salary difference is ~10x. In Bay Area, I easily save $100K or more per year (earning >~$300K a year). Even earning a top local rates in Vietnam would have a hard time accumulating $100K in savings. I could go back to Vietnam now and earn like $5K USD a month top.

Living in a country with lower cost of living often means lower quality of school, safety, health, and etc.

If I work remotely for gitlab, I'd immediately move to Bay Area or maybe Seattle to increase my savings.

But, well, it saves gitlab money. So, it makes sense for Gitlab to make this decision. It's not good for employees though.

Re: GitLab Strategy

#49

Post by planetburgess »

ergocoder wrote: post #48
sytse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rate do you think is off? For example our rate for an intermediate developer in San Francisco is $160k a year and options. See https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-en... If you mean we pay local rates please see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

As a person from a third world country, I don't think paying local rates makes sense for an employee. I worked in both Vietnam and Bay Area. The salary difference is ~10x. In Bay Area, I easily save $100K or more per year (earning >~$300K a year). Even earning a top local rates in Vietnam would have a hard time accumulating $100K in savings. I could go back to Vietnam now and earn like $5K USD a month top. Living in…

Is working for Gitlab remotely in Vietnam on a localised salary as good or better than most local job opportunities?

If so, isn't it still good for the employees?

Re: GitLab Strategy

#50

Post by 1123581321 »

ergocoder wrote: post #48
sytse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rate do you think is off? For example our rate for an intermediate developer in San Francisco is $160k a year and options. See https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-en... If you mean we pay local rates please see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

As a person from a third world country, I don't think paying local rates makes sense for an employee. I worked in both Vietnam and Bay Area. The salary difference is ~10x. In Bay Area, I easily save $100K or more per year (earning >~$300K a year). Even earning a top local rates in Vietnam would have a hard time accumulating $100K in savings. I could go back to Vietnam now and earn like $5K USD a month top. Living in…

Your situation sounds different than that of GitLab employees. GitLab would pay you $190-200k in SF and $90-100k in Vietnam.
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