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GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

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Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#281

Post by amyjess »

vonmoltke wrote: post #102
bgxor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those salary modifiers are atrocious. Their range in my city for a senior, very experienced engineer is comparable to what most entry level jobs actually offer around here. I 100% think you are on the right track. The only people from my area that would take a GitLab salary just can't get a job elsewhere.

Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small. As it is, for me the calculator gives me roughly what I was making in Dallas, a bit less (at the top end) than I make now in New York, and a Lockheed entry-level salary if I were to move to Ft. Wor…

> Agreed. Based on their calculator, moving from Dallas to Ft. Worth is a 20% pay cut. That's ridiculous; Dallas and Ft. Worth are essentially a single market. If any difference at all is justified it should be pretty small.

That's... aggravating. You'd think their system would treat all locations in the same Core Based Statistical Area as the same. Better yet, treat all locations in the same Combined Statistical Area as the same; in fact, the definition of a CSA is a set of adjacent CBSAs with interconnected commuting patterns.

And the data is all freely available in machine-readable form from the Census Bureau's website [0], so there's no excuse to not use it.

In fact, just this past week, as a personal project, I've written a bunch of code to parse a whole ton of census data, combining CBSA/NECTA data, data from Summary File 1 (i.e. population, sorted by a number of demographics), and Gazetteer data (for land area, so I can calculate population density). Over the weekend, I'm going to take a stab at including data from the American Community Survey too.

[0] http://www.census.gov/population/metro/data/def.html

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#282

Post by codazoda »

zenlikethat wrote: post #11
deepaksurti wrote: post #4

>> 2:41 – GitLab values boring solutions: our product should be exceptional Exceptional products have exceptional UX. Gitlab IMHO has the worst UX of all git based products out there, I much rather take BitBucket over Gitlab. I tried using Gitlab, but no, I would much rather pay the 7$ to GH for my private repos. I sincerely hope they make an exceptional product. And 'should' better be 'must'!

I'm curious what you dislike about the UX. Personally I like the "feel" of the website generally (though it's not as polished as GitHub) and just find it to be slow, which I think they're working on improving.

I've only spent a few minutes there, having signed up just a moment ago. What jumps out at me about the UX is that source code does not seem to be front and center like it is in Github and Bitbucket. The README is all you see on the first page of a project and I had to hunt a few seconds before I noticed the "files" link.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#283

Post by [deleted] »

vonmoltke wrote: post #273
peterjmag wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.c…

> And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.

[deleted]

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#284

Post by mdekkers »

NadiaVat wrote: post #280
mdekkers wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied for a position at Gitlab a week ago, and didn't even get a response. Probably because I am too expensive, too old, and live in an area with strong labour laws and staff protection. It's a shame, because it would have been decent to at least get a "sorry, not interested" reply, but no response at all is just not cool. They write on their hiring page: Always leave feedback, this will help everyone to understa…

@mdekkers glad we saw your post. I tried searching for you in our ATS, but could not find any application under that name. Can you email me directly on jobs@gitlab.com? I'd really like to see what happened to your application and why we didn't respond.

Hey Nadia, thanks for reaching out. Sure, I will send it along.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#285

Post by ajmurmann »

konschubert wrote: post #184
snarf21 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it requires an active investment in over communication. Hopefully someday the tools will evolve to help reduce the need for this to be so manual. Bouncing an idea off of someone remote gets difficult. I feel bad for interrupting them and they feel annoyed at being interrupted. Culture also plays a big role in that as well.

I think what helps is to keep everybody in the team in a permanent video call during working hours. This requires suitable hardware and software (I would love to build a company producing these tools one day.), but also a considerable amount of discipline. A wordier version of my thoughts is here: https://www.konstantinschubert.com/2017/02/02/improving-remo...

I've tried this on a team that was mostly remote but on certain days located in there regional offices. It didn't really help with anything. The only conversations that took place were conversations that otherwise would have happened anyway but would have been initiated on chat and then taken to video. The only difference was that now someone walked up to an iPad and started asking loudly if the person they want to talk to is available.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#286

Post by cmatija »

krisdevelops wrote: post #278

write everything down where? and in what format?

Hi Kris,

We usually tend to add every single bit of information that we attain to our handbook[0].

Other than that, we try to over-communicate over issues, slack and email.

[0]https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#287

Post by scruple »

kartickv wrote: post #255
scruple wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I believe you must be. I'm referring to where the OP said that as a remote employee I feel out of the loop on a lot of things. So, I tell my manager that I'm missing important information about the projects I'm working on because people have these infrequent, but important, impromptu meetings and those details don't exist outside of those spoken words and their heads and his response is to tell me to come to the…

You ARE asking them to modify their behavior when you say that they should use Slack/email/whatever other tool for your benefit, or that they shouldn't have an impromptu chat around the water cooler because you're not around. Since you're in the minority, you can't demand the majority change their working style for you. It's up to you to fit in to how the majority works, say by showing up in the office. Or you'll mis…

I'm not for one second suggesting they don't talk to each other and have impromptu meetings. That is absolutely ridiculous. I'm just asking that important details from those discussions find their way to the rest of the team members. I don't think that's asking a lot.

And, going to the office, those conversations will only happen to include me if they happen (they're impromptu, somewhat random) and when I'm there for 1 or 2 days at a time. When I go back home and to my co-working space I'll continue missing things. That's the point.

If the project suffers as a result of all of this, which is what is actually starting to happen, then I suppose by what you're saying here I shouldn't actually care? Heaven forbid I ask _individual people_ to keep _the team_ in the loop about the thing we're all trying to _collectively_ build.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#288

Post by scruple »

mikekchar wrote: post #260
scruple wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this is absolutely correct in my experiences. I'll chime in, since I'm a remote employee at a company that is hybrid remote/on-site but with the vast majority of employees being on-site. Long story short: I actually started on-site but negotiated part-time remote. Then after about a year of that my spouse accepted a dream job offer on the other side of the state and so it was no question that we were moving. The…

I think there are a couple of challenges. You are right that it is hard for people to understand how easy it is to get out of the loop. On the other hand too, if you are in a team with people who are politically motivated, it's pretty easy for them to actively exclude you if they think you are danger to their goals. For me (being remote and even 9 time zones away), I've tried to scale back my own ambitions. It's hard…

That makes sense and it's good food for thought, thanks.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#289

Post by Perihelion »

vonmoltke wrote: post #273
peterjmag wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.c…

> And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.

Could you elaborate on this? I think DO has a right to hire however they want to but I'm curious about who they're auto-rejecting/why.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#290

Post by joncalhoun »

Perihelion wrote: post #73
bryanh wrote: post #58

160 employees remote is impressive and commendable. Zapier is fully remote as well (but half the size in employee count). I'd say "write everything down" is a great shortcut to the sorts of practices you need to cultivate. We've also noticed that over-communicating is critical but hard - it is surprising the things that are "yeah yeah, we know" to some but are "oh we're doing that?" to others. This is only natural -…

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything. Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was…

I suspect if you want to do a partially remote team the best way would be to make an entire team of remote employees and then treat that team like a satellite office. We know those work for most companies, so as long as the team can communicate well amongst themselves I don't think them being remote will ultimately be any different for the in office workers than if they all went to an office in a different city.
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