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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

#161

Post by tooop »

lordfoom wrote: post #70
tooop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if somebody in SF was employed remotely by a company in a poorer country? Should the person in SF be paid less because employees in originating country have lower salaries?. Having salaries based on location is fair, the same job that pays 120k$ in SF pays 70k$ in my country and that makes me in top 2% earners in the country. I could argue that i actually get more with 70k$ in my country than somebody with 120k$…

>Should the person in SF be paid less because employees in originating country have lower salaries? So in your view it's fine to pay different amounts of money for the same work?

Yes it is and it happens all the time because of salary negotiations. The same thing applies to location based salaries - nobody will want to work if the offered money is not adequate. If company X from poorer country Y wanted to open an office in SF they simply wouldn't be able to find anyone that is willing to work for the same amount of money that is offered for country Y employees.

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

#162

Post by sunaurus »

sytse wrote: post #68

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

Are you guys planning on ever removing the "location factor" from your compensation calculations? That's the only thing that's preventing me from applying - apparently I'm only worth 0.4x as much as a "SF Benchmark" developer to you guys right now, because I choose to live in a cheaper part of the world.

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

#163

Post by spestorich »

mr_puzzled wrote: post #136
sytse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am one of the recruiting managers here at GitLab. I would agree with @sytse that contributing to GitLab would be the strongest signal.

While we do keep the bar quite high from a technical perspective, we also do so as it relates to our values. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ With us going through this current hyper-growth phase we have to make sure that everyone who comes into GitLab aligns with these.

For Engineering hires in the month of June we averaged ~65 days to move someone all the way through the interview process.

I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.

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

#164

Post by ThePadawan »

trilila wrote: post #160
ThePadawan wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second the curiosity. As a second data point, last time I checked (I want to say >18 months ago), compensation for my area (Switzerland, urban) was also very low (around the 20th percentile). Now, it is closer to the median.

I suppose at this stage we should also ask about the parameters - role, level, experience factor, country and area. Looking at Switzerland on payscale.com, for ruby devs, gitlab's compensation seems above average. Might be looking at it the wrong way, or it might be that payscale.com is horribly wrong (wouldn't be surprised).

I used the Salarium [0] for base comparison (unfortunately, the actual calculator is only available in German/French/Italian).

As an example calculation, [1] are the statistics for a 30 y.o. university graduate in the Zurich area. At 13 monthly salaries, the median yearly base compensation works out as 110k to 150k CHF.

I'm assuming that at 30, that person might have around 5 years of work experience, so that would land them around 150k using the Gitlab calculator as well. So a bit above median for Swiss citizens, not so much above median for expats.

[0] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [1] https://www.gate.bfs.admin.ch/salarium/public/index.html#/ca...

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

#165

Post by khamoud »

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 work for ConvertKit. We’re fully remote and have public, standardized salaries regardless of where you live in the world. Pay is based on title. If you want more pay you need a new title and if you know someone’s title you know their pay. Not all employees share their title because it’s personal but it’s also not a secret.

It’s way more fair than what Gitlab does IMO.

Also our financials are public. We’re bootstrapped and profitable with no outside investment so saying standardized salaries hurt the company is a lazy cop out at best. https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/

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

#166

Post by ellius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #129
ellius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That may very well happen over time. Non-Bay workers may bid down the price of coding labor, and remote workers from disparate markets will bid against each other, and eventually some "global market clearing price" may be established. Economic theory doesn't operate instantaneously, though. It manifests over time as individual actors bid and negotiate. Remote work is relatively new and its substitutability is being figured out. In the meantime companies may exploit the inefficiencies (and so might workers).

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

#167

Post by emilycook »

sunaurus wrote: post #162
sytse wrote: post #68

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

Are you guys planning on ever removing the "location factor" from your compensation calculations? That's the only thing that's preventing me from applying - apparently I'm only worth 0.4x as much as a "SF Benchmark" developer to you guys right now, because I choose to live in a cheaper part of the world.

The best response to this that I can give is a link to our blog post about this, where we break down why we pay local rates:https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

So disclaimer, I work for GitLab. But the draw to working here isn't the possibility of making an SF salary, it's to work remotely for the same salary as working for a local company. I don't really care if I'm making less than a colleague in SF, because the benefit of working remotely while not taking a pay cut is already worth it. It's not for everyone though, so if you don't see working from home as a big enough benefit then that's valid.

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

#168

Post by trilila »

ThePadawan wrote: post #164
trilila wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose at this stage we should also ask about the parameters - role, level, experience factor, country and area. Looking at Switzerland on payscale.com, for ruby devs, gitlab's compensation seems above average. Might be looking at it the wrong way, or it might be that payscale.com is horribly wrong (wouldn't be surprised).

I used the Salarium [0] for base comparison (unfortunately, the actual calculator is only available in German/French/Italian). As an example calculation, [1] are the statistics for a 30 y.o. university graduate in the Zurich area. At 13 monthly salaries, the median yearly base compensation works out as 110k to 150k CHF. I'm assuming that at 30, that person might have around 5 years of work experience, so that would l…

Gotcha, makes sense.

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

#169

Post by subsaharancoder »

tobib wrote: post #148
systemtest wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed this when you google "name-of-movie post credit scene". Not a single result will instantly tell you if this movie has a scene after the credits. It will have a multiple paragraph review of the movie and your answer is hidden somewhere in there. All I want is a simple yes or no answer.

This reminds me of people telling their whole life story and how that rice pudding made them a better person when all I was looking for was the recipe.

There's a chrome extension that surfaces the recipe immediately the page loads so you don't have to wade through a thousand pictures, pre-loaded videos and useless content https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

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

#170

Post by emilycook »

khamoud wrote: post #165
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

I work for ConvertKit. We’re fully remote and have public, standardized salaries regardless of where you live in the world. Pay is based on title. If you want more pay you need a new title and if you know someone’s title you know their pay. Not all employees share their title because it’s personal but it’s also not a secret. It’s way more fair than what Gitlab does IMO. Also our financials are public. We’re bootstrap…

Do you expect to scale up, and if so will you continue with this model? I took a look at your team page and you have 48 members, whereas GitLab is almost at 800.
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