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

forbes.com

211–220 of 239 posts

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

#212
We really, really wanted to use and like Gitlab but after a few months trial found the UX very poor in comparison to the main competitor.

The icon heavy interface and general layout decisions made things hard/cumbersone to find, any plans to invest in an improved UX for the web UI?

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

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fo…

I am interested in working in GitLab. Do you have some foreign engineers staying in Japan? I want to stay in japan with proper visa if necessary.

As far as I recall from their website. Japan is one of the countries they do not hire in due to what I presume to be legal reasons.

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

#214
post #138
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…

Why would you want to use Jenkins? Genuinely curious.

Jenkins has been nothing short of the devil for me.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fo…

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

That's very kind of you to offer! Can I send over a few questions over email closer to the time I'll be applying? I don't see an email address in your profile, can you post your email id here? Thanks.

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

#216

I just don't get why their support always leaves our company hanging, is this a strategy to success? We want to renew our license for a lower amount of people as last year and that seems to be a major issue, as we won't get responses from renewals@gitlab.com and our Technical Account Manager, after giving us directions that simply did not work stopped responding last week. Friday our license will expire if we don't p…

Hi @Roritharr - Support Manager here.

It was me who helped your tickets along last time, and I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble again. Someone should be in touch on your renewals issue soon.

If you're interested in the story; there's a bit of nuance here. Support actually falls under Engineering in GitLab, and licensing falls under Sales. That means that technical issues and upgrades/renewals fall under different teams.

The good news is that we're working hard in both areas to improve. - We've significantly increased the headcount of the licensing team, this should mean faster responses on licensing queries in the near term future. - We've formed a Fulfillment team who is hard at work automating away some of the manual process associated with renewals. (You can see their priorities here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/fulfillment/#-current-foc...)

Specifically from the Support side, we're discussing process improvements that will mean fewer languishing tickets like you've described. There are a few in flight, but the one I'm personally most excited about is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issu....

You'll note, I did just write it up - so there's not much discussion there yet. If you're feeling up for it, we'd love to have your input. Feel free to leave a comment there if you have any colour that could help.

I hope next time we bump into each other on HN it'll be under happier circumstances.

As always, if you'd like to discuss this more, feel free to email me directly at lyle[at]gitlab[dot]com.

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

#217

I just don't get why their support always leaves our company hanging, is this a strategy to success? We want to renew our license for a lower amount of people as last year and that seems to be a major issue, as we won't get responses from renewals@gitlab.com and our Technical Account Manager, after giving us directions that simply did not work stopped responding last week. Friday our license will expire if we don't p…

Not exactly the same scenario, but my little company (barely over 10 people) decided to splurge on GitLab Silver, and it was a royal pain for someone on GitLab's side to get in touch with us and take our money, even though we've already been a lower-tier customer for a while.

The UX isn't as polished as GitHub's, but I can live with it. The billing system, on the other hand, seems to be rather dreadful.

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

#218

I just don't get why their support always leaves our company hanging, is this a strategy to success? We want to renew our license for a lower amount of people as last year and that seems to be a major issue, as we won't get responses from renewals@gitlab.com and our Technical Account Manager, after giving us directions that simply did not work stopped responding last week. Friday our license will expire if we don't p…

Hi @Roritharr - Support Manager here. It was me who helped your tickets along last time, and I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble again. Someone should be in touch on your renewals issue soon. If you're interested in the story; there's a bit of nuance here. Support actually falls under Engineering in GitLab, and licensing falls under Sales. That means that technical issues and upgrades/renewals fall under dif…

Hi, thanks for your response. I'd love to know if our problem is technical or not, as either we're misunderstanding the true-up licensing model or the user limit counting is faulty.

We're coming from a 30 Users License last year, with two true-up on-top of that.

Now we're down to 17 active users, so after our TAMs reply we bought a License with 19 Users. When trying to add the License we're getting an error that in the Last year 30 users have been active so we need to renew for this amount...

Is this a bug?

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

#219
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone does it We don't. Obviously we're not at the scale of Gitlab but we do not care whether you live in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, NL, Canada, the United States or any other place. (But those are the places that our colleagues are in, and there are more on the way.)

So what kind of vacation/sick days plan does your company offer globally?

Our work is pretty intense so we offer 3 weeks 'on' 1 week 'off' as standard + 23 days of paid leave / year for salaried employees. Sick days are dependent on local conditions but in practice we have yet to encounter anything where this would matter, at a larger scale this will no doubt become more of an issue but it is an insurable risk for us so we will simply do whatever the law says we should do for a particular location and insure against the rest.

Most remote working colleagues have chosen to be freelancers though we do offer the option for them to become salaried employees. This is not always in the interest of the person so we do caution them against this, and for one person where putting them on the payroll from NL would be hard a local subsidiary was created which employs them.

Remote workers definitely add a layer of complexity with respect to employment law. But I've found that it is well worth it given the quality and diversity of the people we encounter.

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

#220
post #138
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…

Hey there, PM for CI/CD here. Can you point me to an issue in either GitLab or the Jenkins Plugin repo that has more info specifically on what you're looking to do that isn't possible today? Or share specifically what you need here so I can make one? That other project seems to have a few different features and I'm not sure which use cases exactly are important for you.

In any case, we definitely want to make sure you have the right functionalities you need.

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