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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

#151

Post by tooop »

dragonwriter wrote: post #69
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$…

> Having salaries based on location is fair It's no more fair than paying based on lifestyle choices; if any employee in SF is providing labor worth $200k, then an employee in Bucharest providing the same labor is also worth $200k. The fact that the SF employee has higher expenses doesn't make their labor more valuable. Sure, they are paying more to live in a more desirable location, but that no more deserves higher…

The fact that employee in SF gets $200k doesn't mean that the labor is worth $200k in Bucharest. It is worth whatever somebody is ready to do the job for and what the company is ready to offer, in this case - SF it is $200k while in Bucharest it is $100k. If the employee is happy with $100k in Bucharest then the salary is fair.

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

#153

Post by digitalni »

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…

Why so serious? ;)

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

#154

Post by jacquesm »

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

> 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.)

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

#155

Post by sytse »

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 think contributing to GitLab itself would send the strongest signal of the three things mentioned.

Please note that this isn't required, we hire a lot of people who never contributed to GitLab before getting hired.

I've asked our recruiters to comment as well.

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

#156

Post by xiphias2 »

meowface wrote: post #146
xiphias2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's most interesting to me is remote + scale. There are many small remote companies that don't try to scale, as they prioritise just having a nice product that solves 1 relatively simple task very well, while having a comfortable life style for the employees. But so far there's no remote-first company on the stock market.

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.

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

#157

Post by umeshunni »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #59
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.

This post from GitLab has their official explanation of why they pay local rates: https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/

Thanks for sharing that. I had a look at their stock options page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/stock-options/ and think that it's very misleading.

> The reason we give stock options instead of straight stock is that you do not need to spend any money to purchase the stock at the date of grant and can decide to purchase the stock later as your options vest. In addition, we do not provide straight stock grants since this may subject you to immediate tax liabilities.

Having worked at pre-IPO companies before, both these statements are untrue

1. Most companies issue RSUs instead of straight up stock. No one makes you 'buy' your RSUs.

2. Every pre-IPO company has a double-trigger vest condition where you 'own' the stock only at IPO or acquisition and you only owe taxes then (and most companies auto-sell a portion at IPO to cover taxes).

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

#158

Post by sytse »

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…

We are investing continually to have integrations with tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, and JIRA.

I'm not sure why https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html apparently doesn't support forks and our CI people to comment here.

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

#159

Post by amsilprotag »

SilasX wrote: post #91
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbes is a trash publication, living on its historical reputation to vomit SEO spam all over the internet. A good recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/business/media/jeffrey-ep... “The article on the Forbes website was attributed to Drew Hendricks, a contributing writer. As The Times revealed in an article last week, he was not the author of the piece. Instead, it was delivered to him by a public relat…

Jeez! I never knew submarining had gotten that bad! I always assumed it was “PR firm gives you a bunch of quotes and research, possibly a narrative, and you write it from there.” I never thought it was as transparent as “here’s some money to say you wrote it”.

I was pretty sure "say you wrote it" was an example in the original essay. Though upon review, Graham writes "almost verbatim".

Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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

#160

Post by trilila »

ThePadawan wrote: post #149
trilila wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, which region is it?

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).

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