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GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

forbes.com

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Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#121

Post by techbio »

wastedhours wrote: post #105
AmericanChopper wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it almost as much as the ‘soft lede’, where the author decides to spend a few paragraphs describing the weather and kind of jacket the subject of their article is wearing before they get to the point. Maybe it’s SEO, but it just gives me the impression that the author had a failed career as a novelist, and wants to waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses.

Or maybe that's their writing style and the story they're writing? I'm not usually dismissive, but honestly, people are free to write the article as they wish to, and we're free to read it or not. It always annoys me when people complain about recipe sites for example "I don't want to know what clothes you were wearing when you cooked it, just give me the measurements". > waste my time as an outlet for their creative…

If a writer is truly writing for themselves, they are the audience: why post it for the public? Otherwise the audience's IS the only judgement that matters.

In the case of this kind of soft/no lede, it comes off as narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness.

The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine that does not differentiate well between a key term hit above the fold or spread over the broad middle of an article.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#122

Post by trilila »

mynegation wrote: post #89
trilila wrote: post #19

Would be interesting to know if they discriminate pay, according to where the person works from. Edit: Further down the page I saw: "Why they pay based on where team members live". That's petty.

There is nothing petty about it. Everyone does it, but GitLab is just more transparent about it. It is up to you whether you accept the compensation level or not, GitLab is far from a monopoly on labour demand

I stand corrected. Also their pay is quite high for markets where I expected it to be significantly lower than SF.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#123

Post by dragonwriter »

hjk05 wrote: post #103
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having salaries based on location is fair It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher…

Salary is a market value. Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”

> Salary is a market value.

Were that true, global markets where the location of the seller is immaterial to the utility of the good or service sold and didn't create extra costs to get it to the buyer wouldn't have different rates based on the seller's location, by the Law of One Price.

> Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”

A more precise equivalent would be “there is no rational reason for the same buyer to be willing to pay more to purchase a Big Mac delivered from a neighboring higher CoL city as an identical one delivered with the same latency from a different neigboring community with a lower CoL.” Local prices for Big Macs between countries naturally vary precisely because Big Mac distribution isn't globalized the way remote labor is, and a Big Macs from a McDonald’s in Turkmenistan is not an equivalent substitute for one from a McDonald's next to Market Street for a buyer in Downtown SF.

Local wage policies for remote work are an effort by employers to present a rationalization to employees not to increase their wage demands to what the globalized market they are actually competing in will support. They will only be able to be maintained so long as remote work isn't widely offered and there isn't a meaningful competitive (on both sides) market; once there are enough competing buyers for any given kind of labor, competition for labor will see the best workers from low-CoL area consistently going to employers that aren't lowballing them.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#124

Post by emilycook »

dexterdog wrote: post #114
mynegation wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing petty about it. Everyone does it, but GitLab is just more transparent about it. It is up to you whether you accept the compensation level or not, GitLab is far from a monopoly on labour demand

How do they handle a hire that lives in SF so he has to be paid the max who then moves somewhere else to drop his own cost of living?

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#126

Post by vidarh »

the-dude wrote: post #111
sytse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do did not increase revenue by 10x in 2018. We more than doubled IACV (and hence revenue) in 2018.

The what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_air_control_actuator

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/#incremental-annual-...

Amazing amount of detail of how Gitlab operates is public.

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#127

Post by sandGorgon »

sytse wrote: post #68

GitLab the company exists because of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278 Ask me anything.

could you talk about your development model (people management). For example Basecamp recently wrote about its 6-week sprint mechanism.

What did you guys end up with ? im assuming you optimized it for your remote working style. Do you do daily standup video calls ? what works and what doesnt ?

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#128

Post by trilila »

lordfoom wrote: post #78
ThePadawan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI Gitlab quite readily publicize their salary calculator at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... .

Checked it out, and for my region their salary is barely competitive. Must say, I am disappointed by this approach from a company whose product I admire.

Curious, which region is it?

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#129

Post by dragonwriter »

ellius wrote: post #73
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having salaries based on location is fair It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher…

But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply. If there is a supply of workers willing to work at a lower price in areas outside of San Francisco, then it makes sense for a company to purchase their cheaper labor if it supplies the same value as the more expensive labor.

> But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply

If they were based on supply and demand, locality of seller would have no effect on the price buyers were willing to pay for goods that aren't location-sensitive, e.g., remote work, because it's not a location-bound market and goods would trade at the global market clearing price absent (inefficient) artificial market segmentation that is only possible (for buyers) when there is an effective monopsony for the particular good/service being purchased (since competition would exploit the underpriced segments buy buying up what they are selling at a price above what the attempted segmenter was offering.)

Re: GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

Nerevarine76 wrote: post #75
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having salaries based on location is fair It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher…

In reality it has nothing to do with fairness, it's a result of real market conditions. An employee in the middle of the country will accept a lower salary than someone in the bay area due to cost-of-living expenses. Same can be said for someone in another country. Is it 'fair' from a pure salary-to-value ratio? No. But economics isn't about 1-1 'fairness', it's about the allocation of scarce resources at a mutually-…

> In reality it has nothing to do with fairness

Well, yes, when I argued against the idea it was fair without also arguing against the clear fact that it occurs, I was rather clearly saying that the fact that it occurs has nothing to do with fairness.

> it's a result of real market conditions

Yes, specifically, the absence of robust competition for remote labor of the precise kinds Gitlab is buying is the “real market condition” that allows them to do this kind of segmentation.

Ironically, the more attention (and copycats) all-remote firms like Gitlab get, the less viable this cost-saving tactic will be, provided that they don't involve in illegal (in many jurisdictions) joint cooperation to limit wages of the type that, unfortunately, tech firms have engaged in in local markets in the past.

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