Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#211

Post by seanhunter » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

zackify wrote: post #199

rdsubhas wrote: post #100

How do people whiteboard remotely? This is a big problem for many development teams. Sometimes you just want to open a blank whiteboard and scribble some boxes and brainstorm or troubleshoot some things. The whiteboard is an inseparable part of nearly every meeting. And no, remote "canvas" whiteboards don't work. They end up looking like this: https://cdn.drawception.com/images/panels/2015/3-3/jLndYAfNf... . Is there…

This is going to be downvoted.... but I have never whiteboarded in my 7 years of professional development. It’s just not how all of us brainstorm. Rather go try the code that I have ideas for, instead of talking back and forth. Most things I can be verbally told what they want and then I just go attempt it.

Yup you're not alone. After many years of developing and never using a whiteboard, my first attempt at a "whiteboard architecture talk" where I was forced to use a whiteboard was a 45min talk and I came out thinking it had gone quite well, looked back at the whiteboard and saw I had drawn a single box on it. Just one box with no label. I couldn't even remember what the box was supposed to signify.

Not everyone thinks visually. I'm also baffled when people ask for network layout diagrams or want to show me them. I just don't care about seeing that stuff in a diagram - it very seldom gives me information I feel I'm not getting somewhere else.

I've trained myself to do the whiteboard talk now because it seems to help some people. So if I'm communicating a design idea or whatever I'll often draw a diagram while I'm explaining it.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#212

Post by motohagiography » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

Regarding the principles:

>>

3. Writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations.

4. Written down processes over on-the-job training.

5. Public sharing of information over need-to-know access.

6. Opening up every document for editing by anyone over top-down control of documents.

7. Asynchronous communication over synchronous communication.

These remote work principles have the direct, or side effect of breaking organizations that are "moral mazes," and hyper political bureaucracies.

The reason organizations suck is because managers just talk instead of producing data, which is basically conspiring to steal value instead of creating it for the organization.

I see this today, where I make an email request, and the person follows up with a phone call, then misrepresents what was agreed to on the phone to others. At one site, I literally stopped answering my phone for anyone I didn't directly work for, because I knew those people were just using the verbal channel to create uncertainty about what was said and leverage the resulting confusion.

The WIFO rule solves a lot of org problems. (write it, or f-off).

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#213

Post by crispyporkbites » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

globular-toast wrote: post #156

sschueller wrote: post #3

I find it interesting how they achieve this and it also gives people in remote places the ability to work for such a company. What I don't agree with is the pay scale they use based on your location. If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same.

Yes, you should get paid the same. That's exactly what they are doing. Stop thinking about it in terms of cost to them and think about compensation to the employees. The cost to Gitlab of paying a competitive salary in London vs Berlin is going to be very different. But both developers will receive the same benefits relative to their location. Remember, you can't eat money, you can't drive money or live in money. Pay…

A mid-level dev on a local salary in India can afford to take taxis everywhere and have a live in cook/cleaner. I know mid-level developers in Ukraine who outright own their apartments (i.e. no mortgage). Mid-level developers in London are lucky if they can buy an hour from the city center.

So are people in SF, London and other locations are actually underpaid on the global market?

The answer is maybe, because those locations have other benefits too which are less tangible. Measuring quality of living is subjective, some of my Indian and Ukrainian friends will not consider moving to western europe or the US because their quality of life drops signficantly.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#214

Post by ghaff » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #182

ghaff wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools. Pick a remote whiteboard tool, give everyone relevant a big tablet (personally, I find something like an iPad is more intuitive than the Wacoms other than the Cintiq), norm using it (along with other collaborative docs), and you're probably in pretty good shape. Not really expensive compared to all the other costs you have.

> It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools. We absolutely are. I think I spent over a decade hoping for an extremely-low-latency pen-based note taking solution to show up to replace my use of pen and hardcover notebooks. If anything, I was romanticizing the notion of replacing a simple, inexpensive tool with expensive technology. We're pretty close to that now with the iPad Pros, but since…

I sometimes use my iPad Pro with Pencil for note taking and it works well. One advantage is that I can record and just write down key points; I can go to that point in the recording if I want what was literally said.

That said, I usually take typed notes (and maybe shoot a few photos with my phone). I can type faster and more legibly than I write and it's easier to turn these notes into a report/article/etc. (Of course, I can always record the whole thing too if I want.)

Bear looks interesting. I haven't looked at my options for a while.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#215

Post by throwaway3157 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

rdsubhas wrote: post #100

How do people whiteboard remotely? This is a big problem for many development teams. Sometimes you just want to open a blank whiteboard and scribble some boxes and brainstorm or troubleshoot some things. The whiteboard is an inseparable part of nearly every meeting. And no, remote "canvas" whiteboards don't work. They end up looking like this: https://cdn.drawception.com/images/panels/2015/3-3/jLndYAfNf... . Is there…

I've used Draw.io over screenshare successfully, when needed

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#216

Post by e12e » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

hackerbabz wrote: post #7

rizz0 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have the same skills, you should be paid the same? Why is that? I don’t necessarily disagree with your statement. But why would it be fair for someone of equal skill to be able to afford less food and healthcare just because they live in a place with higher prices and higher taxes? Should everybody be incentivized to relocate to a developing country or tax haven because of the internet and your equality rule…

Because when I work I produce a product for my employer. My employer sells that product at the same price regardless of where it was produced.

Indeed. There are two views of employee compensation - you can have people that you compensate as a share of value added/profit share (this is very common for sales:its easy to record who sells what;selling more means more revenue - giving a share of that revenue to the seller aligns goals. In theory, and for commodities; in software you also get sales people that overpromise and lead to developers working themselves into an early grave, never having a hope of satisfying any customers..) - and you can have "wage slaves": people you pay wages to for a share of their time.

In the latter case, from a strictly economic standpoint, you'd prefer workers to pay you (eg us prison labour...).

In a strictly value-add/profit share the more value a worker produce, the higher the compensation and the higher the company revenue.

Now software business (knowledgewwork) is typically somewhere on the scale between these two.

I'd personally say that given gitlab's product and business - they would probably be better off leaning a bit more towards the latter - allow a great softare engineer in rural UK or eastern Europe get (locally) silly rich;and allow those that feel like it to move to less crowded locations without docking their compensation. As long as they only get a share of generated added value, this should be a win-win.

But I am not the owner of gitlab.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#217

Post by nhumrich » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

minipci1321 wrote: post #28

wpietri wrote: post #2

I appreciate they have a whole section on disadvantages, but this stands out to me: "All-remote companies should consider meetings as a last resort, instead relying on asynchronous collaboration tools[...]" To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. That can be fine for some things. But there's all sorts of work where I really value live discussion.…

> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. This is not an implication by all means. Low-skilled not very well incentivized junior team (let's call it so in absence of better terms) needs more/most "in-person collaboration". Team of experts to whom the goals and the overall vision have been conveyed, who knows how to put it to practice, will give th…

If that were true, why does every director/principal/VP/ceo spend almost the entire week in meetings?

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#218

Post by scruple » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

nhumrich wrote: post #217

minipci1321 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration. This is not an implication by all means. Low-skilled not very well incentivized junior team (let's call it so in absence of better terms) needs more/most "in-person collaboration". Team of experts to whom the goals and the overall vision have been conveyed, who knows how to put it to practice, will give th…

If that were true, why does every director/principal/VP/ceo spend almost the entire week in meetings?

The cynical take is that this is a rhetorical question.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#219

Post by yuters » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

rdsubhas wrote: post #100

How do people whiteboard remotely? This is a big problem for many development teams. Sometimes you just want to open a blank whiteboard and scribble some boxes and brainstorm or troubleshoot some things. The whiteboard is an inseparable part of nearly every meeting. And no, remote "canvas" whiteboards don't work. They end up looking like this: https://cdn.drawception.com/images/panels/2015/3-3/jLndYAfNf... . Is there…

The way you're thinking about solving the problem is by applying the same local office solution in a different context of a virtual remote environment, which seems like the logical way to go but is not very useful in practice.

With 15 years of career in web development, I've never really seen or thought about using a whiteboard in a meeting. I don't know if it would help but I've managed to get by this far without it.

Re: Gitlab's Guide to All-Remote

#220

Post by sturza » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

mosselman wrote: post #53

sturza wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we apply the same thinking to other industries, the prices of goods would skyrocket.

Why would they? This issue here is, I think, that employees _at Gitlab_ aren't paid the same for the same work depending on where they live. The issue isn't that in general developers are paid depending on where they live.

If you would increase the price of goods and also the salaries of everybody doing the same work - that would lead to you buying the same amount of stuff or less for more money.