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

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

#171

Post by napoleond »

emilycook wrote: post #167
sunaurus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collea…

Your local adjustments aren't competitive, though. I live in a low cost of living area, but I could easily make at least 50% more than what your salary calculator shows at any of a number of local companies. And, in practice, I work remotely for a Silicon Valley company and make even more than that (while still saving them money relative to SV rates).

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

#172

Post by meowface »

xiphias2 wrote: post #156
meowface wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only recently become possible to run a remote-first company in an effective and cheap way. Give it time.

What do you mean? Video conferencing was already easy to do 10 years ago. Looking back to the history of GitLab you are right that it just took 8 years to scale the company to this size, but I hope that others are already coming.

There are way more requirements to run a company than simply being able to communicate by voice or video. There's a lot of infrastructure and overhead that's involved. Before Stripe, you might have to store credit cards, and then you might need physically colocated servers. Before G Suite and AWS and... I haven't started a startup myself, but I believe there are a lot of variables involved.

These kinds of apps and services, and video conferencing, were all around 10 years ago, but everything's been improved and consolidated enough that now a 100% remote company can actually go toe-to-toe with one that isn't. 10 years isn't that long ago in the scheme of the global market economy. Technological progress takes time. VR was available 10 years ago, but it's still not really "ready for primetime". Remote working solutions, for all aspects of work, are now ready for primetime.

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

#173

Post by coldpie »

wasdfff wrote: post #137
jtcruthers wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The reddit keyword is very useful, and so is just "forum". That keyword tends to pop up on forums, so it's useful for finding those niche forums.

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

#174

Post by colinmhayes »

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

Demand markets dominated by a single firm are monopsonies, not monopolies.

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

#175

Post by malvosenior »

meowface wrote: post #147
malvosenior wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone does not do this. I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live). Unfortunately I couldn't apply to Gitlab last time I was in the market for work because their salaries are both lower in general and lowered even further due to geo adjustment. I'm fully a fan and believer of remote work, but you need to pay your employees just like any other top tier company would. I…

Out of curiosity, how long has your company been in existence for? This seems like something a more established company could do more easily.

It's a startup. I actually find it to be the case that early stage companies are more willing to do remote work. In part because it's a way for them to broaden their options.

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

#176

Post by khamoud »

emilycook wrote: post #170
khamoud wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We do plan on scaling to $100,000,000 in ARR. We are planning on keeping this model. We have actually purposely limited how many people we hire to fewer than 50. I'm curious what GitLabs ARR is. I know GitLab raised nearly $170MM whereas ConvertKit has raised $0. 52% of the profit is distributed twice a year to employees at our company retreats. We're on track to hit $20MM ARR by the end of this year. We have a 401k program with 4% match. We get a $1000 "Paid" Paid time off bonus once a year. GitLab is a "Unicorn" but they've cheated their employees to get there. A billion dollar company can't pay people the same based on their role? Sounds like SV venture sharks speaking under the guise of remote work.

https://convertkit.com/mission https://convertkit.com/careers

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

#177

Post by emilycook »

napoleond wrote: post #171
emilycook wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collea…

Your local adjustments aren't competitive, though. I live in a low cost of living area, but I could easily make at least 50% more than what your salary calculator shows at any of a number of local companies. And, in practice, I work remotely for a Silicon Valley company and make even more than that (while still saving them money relative to SV rates).

That's fair, I had the same experience coming from a lower COL area, and when I was interviewing I was able to negotiate for a higher salary and they adjusted. If GitLab wants you badly enough then they'll do what every company does and try and make themselves competitive. You just have less leverage to negotiate in general because you're competing with international talent vs local talent.

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

#178

Post by emilycook »

jeena wrote: post #138
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…

In the meantime before someone from CI jumps in, here's the issue that has some more information relevant to your question: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/58301

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

#179

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

Yesterday I sent the BBC a complaint about exactly this kind of writing.

In this instance, the title is an outright lie, but the time on site writing-style you describe seems to be there in full swing as well, despite the BBC's revenue model.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771

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

#180

Post by jedberg »

emilycook wrote: post #167
sunaurus wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 collea…

It doesn't bother you that one of your colleagues in SF doing the exact same work as you gets paid double to also work from home?
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