GitLab – A $1B business where all employees work remotely • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by zippergz » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

stubish wrote: post #108

trilila wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I calculated the salary in the country I am right now, and pay is way above local pay - which is good. I earn more tho with a different company working remotely, but they don't discriminate based on location. Equal amount of effort, means equal amount of pay in their view. My take aways from the blog post: "if everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team…

One thing I notice with the calculator is it is a simple scaling factor. While this scales for an employee's cost of living, it also scales how much they can save. An employee on $200k in San Francisco spending 50% on their lifestyle and no kids can retire by 40 to a more economically sane region with similar facilities. A similar employee doing the same job in that more economically sane region for $100k spending th…

Yes, this is a common issue that I find is missed in conversations about cost of living and location (even outside of remote work). Yes, the cost of living in the Midwest of the US is much lower than the West Coast. However, I find that the lower pay there more than offsets the difference. First, because of the savings issue you mention, but also there are major things that cost approximately the same no matter where you live in the country. Cars, computers, vacations, often even medical procedures (certainly not cheaper in line with the pay difference), etc. Between being able to save less for retirement, and having large purchases (even if infrequent) consume a significantly higher portion of my income, I've never been able to make the math truly work out in terms of moving to a lower cost of living area and keeping a similar quality of life. For those who it works for, that's great, but it's not as simple as it's made out to be when you consider all of the factors.

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

#132

Post by sytse » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

mr_puzzled wrote: post #115

sytse wrote: post #68

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

What's your policy on employees' side projects? Let's say I want to work on a side project and one day hope to turn it into a business (and get into YC), do you allow me to retain intellectual property for the side project which is of course unrelated to my gitlab work?

You have to declare the project and get permission to ensure it doesn't conflict with GitLab.

I don't recall us ever denying permission.

I can't find the handbook link right now.

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

#133

Post by sytse » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

sandGorgon wrote: post #127

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 ?

We do month long sprints, GitLab ships on the 22nd https://about.gitlab.com/2018/11/21/why-gitlab-uses-a-monthl...

We do a daily company call and group conversation https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/

You can find more details on what works for us on https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/tips/

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

#134

Post by sytse » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #125

All they say about the actual 'remote work', is there's a webcam meeting every day.

You can find more details on https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/tips/

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

#135

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #82

nakodari wrote: post #5

The first half of the article doesn't even name the business. The name of the business, GitLab, is hidden in the second half of the article. This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization where they want to improve "Time on site" and other data by keeping the readers on the page as long as possible. It's frustrating. Google's algorithm needs to be updated to make it smarter othe…

>This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization Many readers don't realize that in 2010, Forbes drastically changed their website to include 1000s of freelance writers. This "contributor model" was put in place by Lewis DVorkin[1]. This is why the quality of articles on Forbes.com is very inconsistent. Other publisher websites have the same problem.[2] EDIT: add examples to trai…

The thing with “contributor” articles is there is no editorial oversight. They look at your record when they pick you, but after that you publish directly to Forbes.com. They might as well be blogs.

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

#136

Post by mr_puzzled » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #132

mr_puzzled wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your policy on employees' side projects? Let's say I want to work on a side project and one day hope to turn it into a business (and get into YC), do you allow me to retain intellectual property for the side project which is of course unrelated to my gitlab work?

You have to declare the project and get permission to ensure it doesn't conflict with GitLab. I don't recall us ever denying permission. I can't find the handbook link right now.

I am interested in working at Gitlab as a software engineer and will be applying approximately 6 months from now. Do you have specific suggestions on how I can improve my chances of landing a position? I had the following in mind :

- Start contributing non-trivial patches to the community edition

- showcase my skills through side projects which will be rails webapps

- brush up on my CS fundamentals for the interview

From the outside, the bar seems quite high, I remember coming across a tweet mentioning 20,000 applications over the past few months. Any other suggestions on how I can improve my chances? And how long does the hiring process take from my application to accepted/rejected? Thanks.

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

#137

Post by wasdfff » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

jtcruthers wrote: post #117

duckmysick wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the main discussion threads on the /r/movies surbeddit the easiest way of finding if there's a post credit scene. The info is in the original post, so there's no need to read comments with potential spoilers. http://aftercredits.com is a pretty good source as well, but I checked it out after your comment and surprisingly it doesn't show in the top search results for " post credit scene".

More and more of my google searches are being appended by "reddit". Someone's asked it before and it takes half a second to load/skip for it. It's sad, but effective

Pretty much all of my searches have that operator now. You used to type your keywords and relevant forums would come up on page 1, brimming with information from people who were knowledgable and eager to share what they know. I have no idea what these niche forums are going to be called, so I have to defer to reddit for my searches.

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

#138

Post by jeena » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #68

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

I was in the team where we decided what to use to serve git repos + to do peer reviews for a big German car manufacturer. We decided on GitLab because it had a normal fork-workflow but was open source and we wanted to divert some of the money into one of the open source projects. Now we have around 600 users in that project.

Most of the things work great but we have the problem that we want to use Jenkins instead of the build in CI/CD solution but the only way to trigger MR jobs from GitLab forks in Jenkins is this non maintained plugin which has been in alpha since we started two years ago https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin

So I wonder, what is the reason behind not investing into integrations with other CI systems like Jenkins which are hugely popular and used by so many people?

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

#139

Post by wastedhours » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

techbio wrote: post #121

wastedhours wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why post it for the public?

Why not?

> the only judgement that matters.

Not really - you can have multiple target audiences. I.e. you can write for yourself first, and others second - the piece being relevant, with different focuses, for different people. Which is what the majority of these pieces tend to be (if they're not purely SEO gaming)

> 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

What's the problem with any of that? Is everything in life to be optimised purely for efficiency of delivery?

> The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine

My point was rather that some people here would rather boil everything down to purely a list of facts, without any element of story or framing.

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

#140

Post by meowface » Mon, Jul 22, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

SenHeng wrote: post #21

carlsborg wrote: post #4

"After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020. He took the proceeds from his previous venture, doubled it in bitcoin, and began bootstrapping GitLab.com. Sid got the first few hundred signups through an article posted on Hacker News. Then together with his cofounder applied and got into Y Combinator. The race to…

> Ashton Kutcher The actor? Did he start becoming involved in the tech scene after working on the Jobs movie?

Here's him talking at an Airbnb conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6vTaiPl6tA (He confronts an Israel protester who comes up on stage at https://youtu.be/z6vTaiPl6tA?t=155.)

He seems like a pretty smart investor.