I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalized talent pool.
Edit: Didn't intend to make a scene or put anyone on blast here. Just thought the calculator was a little silly. Thanks for the responses gitlab staff.
If you have any more information you can share, it'd be great if you could send it to peopleops at gitlab.com.
Interestingly issues gets noticed here!, there was a posting yesterday about FB hiring issue.
I'm familiar with how compensation is determined at Mozilla, and we use something similar but with different inputs. GitLab seems to be using rents as their determiner with New York as a baseline, which means way underpaying people in most markets. If they adjusted those numbers by the average percentage of income applied to rent (I believe a readily available number) then the numbers might be more reasonable.
At Mozilla we have a smaller number of regions, I think it's each nation plus three tiers in the U.S.: Bay Area/New York, Chicago/Seattle (not sure what all is in this bucket), and the rest of the country. Then we get data from some company that provides us with market rates for different given titles. We target salaries at the top 25th percentile (not a 25% bump like GitLab).
So given a title, people's compensation is figured as somewhere between 0.8x and 1.2x that market rate, depending where you are in your career. Each level bump is about 1.2x the previous level. So typically you might enter a Senior Engineer role at maybe 0.85x the compensation, and as you grow into the role you get to 1.0, and as you are approaching the next level you get into the 1.1s.
I think it's a pretty fair process. Especially internationally you can't relate salaries to each other well given different labor laws and taxes. Assuming our input numbers are right, our compensation is by definition competitive across markets – though in practice all sorts of weird things can happen over an employment history, like when a person moves.
All that said, it's clear we get a better value from people in cheaper markets, even while those people in practice also get a better value in terms of compensation. So far that hasn't been met with any adjustment in compensation, but instead some acknowledgement of the dynamic during recruitment.
But yeah, the outcome, remoters from Cheaptown effectively subsidizing their coworkers from Glitter City is incredibly ugly. One should at least hope that the decisionmaking processes at the employer do not completely isolate the one deciding on a hire from the cost difference, so that flyover guy could at least enjoy an increased chance of getting the job.
You want your cake and to eat it too?
I appreciate the openness from GitLab on this matter though, they're pretty up-front about it so if you don't like it don't apply.
[0] When the word "cost of living" is mentioned but it's not reflected in the price for final users then you know you're about to get fucked.
And the listed salary for my geo is about 2/3 to 3/4 of my current base pay before any bonuses. The idea of the company sounds good, but the pay is a deal breaker for me. I wouldn't like feeling like I'm providing the company more value but because the person lives in San Francisco they get twice as much pay. Maybe that is me being petty?
Seems backwards to have such a large incentive to live somewhere more expensive.
A lead (maximum seniority), with high (maximum) experience, in Fayetteville, AR makes less than most junior developers (60k-68k)...
[1] I've found this calculator to be decently accurate http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
It seems obvious to me that they should be paying relatively more to people in cheap locations than expensive ones. That saves Gitlab money, biases their hiring to people in cheaper areas, incentivizes people to move to cheaper areas, helps cool down the overheated housing markets in expensive areas.
I can see drawbacks to paying a strict flat amount regardless of local cost of living; some adjustments probably make sense. But Gitlab seems to be doing the opposite. I don't get it.
For example, when I lived in England, the difference between rent for a room in a shared house outside city center and a 1 bedroom apartment in the city center was usually at most 100% (excluding the very top and very bottom of the ranges). Meanwhile in Lithuania, where I live at the moment, the difference is about 6 times. You can't capture this in a calculator with such broad coverage.
Approach by mozilla (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13881004) seems much more reasonable to me, to be honest.
Most likely, one of their founders is technically adept, there are a small number of other experienced people onboard because they incidentally live in areas where the compensation calculator doesn't screw them, and most others are riding on those coattails.
GitLab is really a sad story of lost potential. Most of the time, you can't fix these kinds of problems, because they start at the top and flow down (and you usually can't replace the top). A well-engineered GitLab alternative would be welcome.
What I see is an brilliantly managed company despite having a globally distributed team, which has a great pace of development, which is carving a nice market share in an extremely tough market (developers) and against a fierce competitor (Github), let alone the other multibillion company backed Bitbucket.
And their radical transparency, as you put it, is a fascinating thing in and of itself. If anything it makes me feel intimate with the company. Hard to put it in words, maybe because I was a rather early adopter but if you follow them closely it's a like you're there on their board with spectator mode on. That's some invaluable experience for HN crowd.
Are we even talking about the same company?!
So what if a smart experienced developer (their CTO) is able to get good prices on what he/she wants done through remote work? The point you're making is negativity for no reason without evidence on how it's not working, i.e. what's wrong with their product.
Just to throw my example in, they would want to pay me at least 20% less than what I currently make -- and I'm already a 100% remote employee working for a financially stable startup. What they offer is simply not even close to market value -- yet they claim it is. In this case it's the D.C. area.
As I get older, I'm not really that interested in putting up with the BS. So if I work in an environment without the BS, or if I have a boss who is willing to shield me from the BS, I'm very happy to pay for it.
Actually, there are tons of things I'll pay for. Remote working on a team that knows how to do it and respects remote workers? That's a big discount. A work process that allows me to work effectively in a different timezone or with flexible hours? Another discount. Guarantee that the work I'm doing will be released with a free software license? HUGE discount (really, huge). Working with interesting and talented people? Yep, discount. No inventions agreement? DISCOUNT.
You get the picture. Hell, I'll do a fair amount of work for free if you tick all the boxes. I'm nowhere near alone in this.
Edit: grammar... :-P
Top end salaries will still be discounted, naturally, because the costs in high cost areas are real. But not every scales like housing.
Living in Seattle, WA, the salary range I used topped out at ~$120k. However, 30 miles south in Tacoma it tops out at at ~$80k. Moving to Dallas would move the top of the range to ~$105k (Hot Market Adjustment?! but not Seattle?!).
Values I used (I rounded the salary up too): * Lead * Above Average Experience * United States * Dallas, Seattle and Tacoma.
I'm looking to move to the Dallas area (from Tacoma) and my rent will likely end up being less in Dallas (at least 20%).
One thing that I thought was strange was the quiz/test at the end of each interview. I get that you want to make sure that the candidate has an adequate skill level, but I have a lot of open-source projects (hosted in GL), and I am (one of many people) horrible at live quizzes. Mostly because of nerves, being in an interview is stressful enough. The fact that I had to take a 30-45min quiz instead of going over my own code is not ideal. I just don't believe in standardized testing being a good measure to someone's ability. But, I really thought they were nice about it, and I wish them luck.
Nobody should be paid as low as 50-60k per annum when they expect people to perform same as someone paid 90-120k. Here are some of the links where I raised this point as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13549948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957
This link suggests their average salaries to be 115k but their calculator is just for people who they'd like to scam into paying below par.
BTW Our compensation principles can be found at https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
Edit: and yeah, I've read a lot about your company including that link. I understand your approach, it just excludes me.
Anyway I've looked at my homecity in Ukraine and salaries proposed are around 80-90th percentile (~$50k for senior developer).
The thing is there's no reason for a person to hold onto Gitlab. Once you get some remote experience there're a lot of companies who provide EU/US salaries even if you happen to live in Eastern Europe.
I applied to Gitlab, but then I noticed the calculator. London is below market rate. In Warsaw is half what Google pays.
Edits: typos, wrote from phone.
Still, good luck to them :-)
Some people (say, big companies) think exactly the opposite because they are after an on-prem solution, and for that Gitlab kicks Github's ass.
Can't we be realistic about companies instead of getting wild eyed? You don't have any reservations about recent events?
I haven't seen them promoting that hard as you describe.
I wrote my comment of the pure satisfaction with their services and my use case. So stop being ignorant and be civilized and at least argument what you say. What happened to them month ago was an accident that could happen to many others, but the difference was that they were 100% open about it, with others you may won't even know shit is happening.
Nobody forces you to use anything.
Edit: And now you edit and delete 90% of comment, nice.
"What about Mattermost, how is this different?
Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience.
Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication."
It's one of the few reasons why I am still using Github :( .
I would prefer if Gitlab CI was a separate product but there probably isn't a lot of benefit for Gitlab to do that. If you want to have Gitlab CI job results displayed in your Github branches you could try this test service:
Isn't there a "but sadly I don't love its CI" missing from the middle of this? Why is Travis the problem?
TravisCI for instance, is easily replaced in all of my projects with Gitlab's integrated CI.
I agree that we should have some status on CI as well, made an issue [1].
[0]: http://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/ci
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/1360
As other point out, you should be able to use GitLab CI instead of Travis, they configure very similarly. That said, I'd welcome them integrating fully with us as well.
As for other projects - the most important one for me was clubhouse.io (Gitlab Issues is great but just not as good as clubhouse.io)
However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering).
Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV).
Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.
> However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of
> them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account.
> For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our
> whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying
> builds and deployment jobs.
Jobs getting stuck might not seem like a big deal, but when every dev on the team needs to manually check every 5 minutes to make sure things are running and retrying everything, while clients are waiting on a hotfix, bugfix or a new feature that we promised we would ship by a certain deadline, then the issue becomes critical.
Cloud anything just seems like begging for this kind of problem.
Keeping even just one server secure and up to date is no small task. Additionally, in this particular case, given Gitlab pushes changes pretty often, we wanted to have access to the latest stuff without having to update the self-hosted instance every time (with the added risk of screwing up in the process). I guess there's a trade off for everything.
The Gitlab folks really know how to do it. It is of course the rational approach to it, but still, that's a bold move.
Not all of it. version.gitlab.com is one of GitLab's closed source IPs.
More details can be found on the developer site: https://developer.gitter.im/docs/faye-endpoint
We also have an open-source IRC bridge: https://github.com/gitterHQ/irc-bridge
Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaA...
Here's a blog post on differences with Mattermost and Slack: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...
(edit: typo)
Looking forward to updates, thanks!
I'm currently in the processor of migrating an OSQA site to AskBot, which seems currently maintained.
But seriously - people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter - especially after https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w...
Look at the number of people begging Discord to take money from them - https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-...
gitter always had search working - discord just got it recently.
Do you know of any enterprises using Gitter?
Isn't that just Slack?
I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.
Also I'm salty that most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools which are both things I've leaned on heavily when working with communities. That's probably a rant for another day, but it's related to why I really dislike using some of these things.
This might just be my perception, but it seems like most people I come across in this field were on IRC at some point.Not trying to be snarky. Maybe it was a typo, but non-English speakers might not immediately get from that to the correct word.
Link to the live post: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
This is good though because mattermost is open-source only on paper. They refuse to integrate important features even when people contribute code (to protect their commercial version).
Third, people see GitLab as GitHub competitor. But really it competes with Atlassian.
First, we love GitLab. While we'd be flattered with an offer to join them, Mattermost has its own mission and motivation (https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-so...)
Second, regarding community contributions, we have an open and transparent process for proposing, discussing and vetting contributions before a pull request is made (https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/contribution-guide.htm...).
When people don't follow the guidelines, and when they work hard to contribute something before engaging with the broader community--especially when it totally works but can't be officially accepted--we feel terrible.
Recent example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/5718 Previous related example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/2718
You can follow the links there to go into detailed, heated discussions around this in our own Mattermost instance.
In our manifesto, we lay out the purpose of the open source Mattermost Team Edition, and about the commercial Enterprise Edition (https://www.mattermost.org/manifesto/), and--at least in my mind--our decisions are based on scope (What purpose does X serve? Where should it belong, if at all)?
Our contribution guidelines are in our docs, they're in our developer docs, they're displayed to contributors before they can submit a merge request, and yet with the size of our community, we still have mistakes and awkward threads.
I hope we can do better here. If anyone would like to discuss, you're welcome to join our community server: https://pre-release.mattermost.com/
Third, yes, agree, GitLab is certainly competing with Atlassian, and winning a lot.
I've been helping some early coders in the FreeCodeCamp Gitter and have been impressed with the quality of the app for a company with little capital. They have done a lot with short resources.
It would be better in my opinion for small Slack communities to transition to Gitter since Slack has said they do not plan to support large scale free communities in the long term.
edit; typo
By tapping into those conversations, they'll probably be better able to identify GitHub pain points and provide subtle hints and nudges, for Gitter users to consider GitLab.com
> What about Mattermost, how is this different?
> Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience.
> Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication.
Surely GitLab would be better off investing fully into a single chat-platform? The road to making Gitter good for internal team communication is not particularly long or windy.
When I firsted started as a developer, I don't know how people do thing in real production. I don't know how real company build real software.
Nowsaday, with all open source thing from real company that acquire/shutdown I can finally learn a lots from them.
Recently Stajoy open source everything, now Gitter is next. I'm sure I will learn a lot by consume the real code that run on production.
Thank you Gitlab/Gitter.
The goal seems to be to have the code open sourced by this June, with all history included.
Stack details here: https://stackshare.io/gitter/gitter