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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

#201

Post by Androider »

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.

It's interesting that a lot of people in this thread seem to assume that the end-goal of remote working becoming mainstream and some inherent sense of fairness is that everyone ends up being paid SF wages in the end. But basic economic theory says that if remote working becomes the new standard, you should expect the salaries between high and low COL to average out. So somewhere between SF and an Asian sweatshop... let's say a Berlin developer salary. That's not great for the SF developers, and also why SF is one of the last places I would expect remote work take off.

Companies that want to hire remotely rarely publish wages online for this exact reason. They get called out for being "cheap" and "I can make X times more in SF". Yes, but most companies in the world are not looking for and can not compete for SF developers with the FAANGS in the first place. When the company is not in the Bay Area, them posting a non-SF salary is not trying to screw you over, hiring you was never on the table. Unfortunately they cannot say simply that in the job ad without calling down an epic shitstorm.

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

#202

Post by Androider »

khamoud wrote: post #176
emilycook wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ConvertKit is an absolute rocketship of a bootstrapped company. What Nathan as done is nothing short of amazing, I'm saying that having followed your story for years. But that amazing MRR curve is the bootstrapped equivalent of a unicorn, which is what allows you to have those nice things. Taking them for granted or lamenting why other companies simply don't do the same is entirely unrealistic.

Look at any of the other companies on the Baremetrics open startups page https://baremetrics.com/open-startups (save maybe Buffer). Should Baremetrics itself hire a SF developer, blowing 25%+ of their annual ARR on it? They've been around for years, and are doing pretty well. Of course they should not, that would be crazy, and it has nothing to do with the company being cheap. They should keep hiring for reasonable salaries in anywhere-but-SF.

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

#203

Post by khamoud »

Androider wrote: post #202
khamoud wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

ConvertKit is an absolute rocketship of a bootstrapped company. What Nathan as done is nothing short of amazing, I'm saying that having followed your story for years. But that amazing MRR curve is the bootstrapped equivalent of a unicorn, which is what allows you to have those nice things. Taking them for granted or lamenting why other companies simply don't do the same is entirely unrealistic. Look at any of the oth…

I do not take ConvertKit for granted. Every point I made is pointed directly at GitLab. GitLab isn't open or bootstrapped. I have nothing but respect for every company on the open startups page of Baremetrics, including and especially Baremetrics themselves.

I have worked for a few startups and I've been laid off from a couple of them. I would never believe a bootstrapped company could do what we're doing but we do and I'm lucky enough to be a part of it. We aren't unique either. Basecamp has been doing this for a lot longer than ConvertKit has.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp/

Bootstrapped companies face many challenges that VC backed companies don't. GitLab isn't bootstrapped. I lament that companies with all this money don't treat their employees better when they definitely can afford it. If they say they can't then they are probably wasting money. @emilycook said in a comment below

> ...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.

So, they have the money to pay more but they are simply choosing not to.

The CEO of a VC backed company I worked for got a 40% pay raise immediately after a 60% workforce layoff. He was already the highest paid person in the company.

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

#204

Post by conductr »

WA wrote: post #187
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…

Why not compare with other remote companies, but with local ones? Furthermore, I’d care a lot if I made a lot less than a colleague for the same type of work at the same company. Living in a cheap area comes with drawbacks. It might be a good choice for some, but a necessity for others (maybe they have relatives to take care of). I don’t really see how my choice of location should affect my payment in a remote compan…

Really you’re not right for them because you don’t share their remote philosophy. Their comp structure is designed to filter for employees who value remote over all else. Kind of makes sense for a 100% remote company to do that. People who are wanting SF rates in Thailand aren’t really motivated by remote, it’s a perk, but geo arbitrage is the real motivation.

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

#205

Post by SilasX »

amsilprotag wrote: post #159
SilasX wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was the "paying you cash to say you wrote it" that was shocking. Graham's model in the submarine piece was that the PR agencies only "pay" you in the sense of doing your work for you, which is a kind of compensation, but not as distasteful as directly buying the writer's authorship with cash.

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

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

meowface wrote: post #141
dragonwriter wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In reality it has nothing to do with fairness Well, yes, when I argued against the idea it was fair without also arguing against the clear fact that it occurs, I was rather clearly saying that the fact that it occurs has nothing to do with fairness. > it's a result of real market conditions Yes, specifically, the absence of robust competition for remote labor of the precise kinds Gitlab is buying is the “real marke…

Starting a remote company is a cost-saving tactic, and the ability to often not have to pay SF salaries can be a motivating factor, especially in the early stages of the company.

Sure, if you make a cost-optimization rather than fairness argument for Gitlab’s policy—that it's simply a way of paying every employee the minimum they can get away with—I won’t argue against that.

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

#207

Post by dragonwriter »

tooop wrote: post #151
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The fact that the purchaser pays $200k for it means that the labor is worth $200k to that purchaser. Assuming that what they get doesn't vary based on the seller's location, the only reason to offer less for identical labor from Bucharest is because they think they aren't competing with other buyers who are likewise location-insensitive, so that the Law of One Price doesn't apply, and they can optimize their cost with market segmentation.

That's obviously what is going on. Trying to sell it with a dishonest narrative about some inherent fairness of scaling compensation to local cost of living is B.S. Local cost of living is just assumed to be a reasonable approximate proxy for what competing bidders, most of whom are presumed to be local and thus location-sensitive rather than remote and thus location-insensitive, are likely to offer. There's no ethical rationale in operation, just cost optimization.

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

#208

Post by thiefmeister »

spestorich wrote: post #163
mr_puzzled wrote: post #136

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 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.

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

#209

Post by malandrew »

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.

What happens if someone starts working remotely in a high cost of living area and moves? Do you cut their salary when they move or do they get to keep their original salary?

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

#210

Post by kathrou »

malandrew wrote: post #209
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.

What happens if someone starts working remotely in a high cost of living area and moves? Do you cut their salary when they move or do they get to keep their original salary?

Salary is adjusted: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
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