What's your policy on employees' side projects? Let's say I want to work on a side project and one day hope to turn it into a business (and get into YC), do you allow me to retain intellectual property for the side project which is of course unrelated to my gitlab work?
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
From the outside, the bar seems quite high, I remember coming across a tweet mentioning 20,000 applications over the past few months. Any other suggestions on how I can improve my chances? And how long does the hiring process take from my application to accepted/rejected? Thanks.
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.
For Engineering hires in the month of June we averaged ~65 days to move someone all the way through the interview process.
I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.
Hi, I live in Japan and I'm very interested in applying for a job at GitLab. It says on your website that you aren't currently hiring in Japan. Is the situation likely to change in the future? I found this link circulating on Twitter: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/... Does this mean that there will be 1-3 positions available in the near future? What can I do not to miss them?
> I am more than willing to set up some time to chat with you 1:1 if you have any more questions.
That's very kind of you to offer! Can I send over a few questions over email closer to the time I'll be applying? I don't see an email address in your profile, can you post your email id here? Thanks.
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 the build in CI/CD solution but the only way to trigger MR jobs from GitLab forks in Jenkins is this non maintained plugin which has been in alpha since we started two years ago https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin
So I wonder, what is the reason behind not investing into integrations with other CI systems like Jenkins which are hugely popular and used by so many people?
Hey there, PM for CI/CD here. Can you point me to an issue in either GitLab or the Jenkins Plugin repo that has more info specifically on what you're looking to do that isn't possible today? Or share specifically what you need here so I can make one? That other project seems to have a few different features and I'm not sure which use cases exactly are important for you.
In any case, we definitely want to make sure you have the right functionalities you need.
- Jenkins builds it and reports the status back to GitLab
- If it created a new job that job is removed after the MR gets merged.
It would be nice if, like the other plugin does it one could have it's own job for this MR with it's own history but I guess we could live also with a shared history if you could have the MR buld history in GitLab only.
update: I forgot to write that we use Jenkinsfile based pipelines, not sure if this is important.
I've interviewed with GitLab when I first changed my career into software engineering, a few years ago. It was a bad call in my opinion since I'm not as good as I thought back then.
However, is it a good idea to apply again since that was a long while ago and I've accumulated a considerable amount of experience compared to what I was?
And can you do your own independent security research when you're working for GitLab? What's GitLab's stance of this situation?
It'll be nice if you can post your/a recruiter's email ID here - I'd like to send over a couple more questions.
Thank you for your post and questions. We would welcome you to apply for a role at GitLab that looks interesting to you. Our guideline for security researchers is that if you are a GitLab employee, you would not be eligible for a bounty award through our public bug bounty program. Other than that, independent security research is fine, as long as it does not call out our customers in a negative manner. Here is our hiring page: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/
There are 28 States operating their own legal systems in the EU and each is free to pass (and does pass!) its own employment and business related legislation albeit within some boundaries of EU law. While I can’t answer this question, it’s not that big of a shock there might be legal issues.
The EU’s “Freedom of Movement” alone does not guarantee a business a right to employ individuals in all 28 States, even if it does greatly help in removing some barriers and permits you as an EU citizen to work In any of them. Any of these states can place additional legal burdens on Gitlab as the employer that it may not be able to meet in its current form, which is presumably what has happened.
Have you ever had to deal with employees that "work remotely" but don't get a lot done (perhaps because they're spending all day on HN)? How do you detect that & deal with it?
I don't think that working remotely is the main cause of this. There are people underperforming in many companies who work on-site.
I'll be the last person to say something about spending a lot of time on HN since I do so myself. In general we don't want to talk about how you spend your time but about your output. We measure results and not hours https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#measure-results-no...
The backend engineer position lists ruby experience as a Strict Requirement. The linked explanation makes sense when trying for fast growth. However, the text is about 3 years old now so my question is: Do you expect this policy to change in the near future?
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.
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 colleague in SF, because the benefit of working remotely while not taking a pay cut is already worth it. It's not for everyone though, so if you don't see working from home as a big enough benefit then that's valid.
Your local adjustments aren't competitive, though. I live in a low cost of living area, but I could easily make at least 50% more than what your salary calculator shows at any of a number of local companies. And, in practice, I work remotely for a Silicon Valley company and make even more than that (while still saving them money relative to SV rates).
That's fair, I had the same experience coming from a lower COL area, and when I was interviewing 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.
That's a great way of hiring people who aren't good enough to get a remote job at SF wages. The problem is that it cuts off the ability to hire the top of the market. I currently live in Boulder, Co, but I never even considered working for a business that wasn't in (and paying like) NY or SF.
For top talent you're not competing with the local crappy .NET consulting shop paying $60k a year, you're competing with every SV startup that's open to going remote for the right hires.
All that said, lots of reasons other than comp to take a position, and it seems to be working just fine for GitLab!
> The problem is that it cuts off the ability to hire the top of the market.
To be frank, I don't think the gap in skill between the top-top-top tier employees and those who are competitive candidates for non-SF salary remote positions is all that wide, nor do I think it's necessary for a company's success to only hire the absolute pinnacle of talent. We're also not competing in the same consumer market as many SV startups, so if a different remote company has a higher saturation of top-tier developers, I'm not sure why that affects us unless they're a competitor.
I do see this point though, and I'm sure Sid does as well, but the level of skill that the people I work with have vs the employees at my previous (local) company is incomparable. Everyone is very good at what they do, and are motivated to continue working here because of all of the other perks of working for a company like GitLab.
Not really, my motivation to accept a job at GitLab didn't come from how much I could make relative to everyone else in the company, it came from how I could be doing the same work I was doing for a local company but from home. Salaries aren't the only thing that make one company more appealing than another.
It's not about salary, its about fairness. This is the kind of thinking that leads to the pay gap between genders -- because women are willing to accept less pay for the same work because "it's good enough and I don't want to cause trouble". It might very well be good enough, but it certainly isn't fair. Trouble needs to be caused when unfairness is involved.
As a woman myself, I don't see this as a slippery-slope argument like you're implying. The gender pay gap is very complicated, and IMO not at all the same as a company saying "we want to offer salaries that compete with your local companies, and then also offer these other benefits like working from home" vs "we want anyone within the company to make the same amount regardless of where they live".
The gender pay gap is a whole separate matter that I'd prefer not to get into because, tbh, talking about it in tech-spheres that are still male-dominated is intimidating. I guess all I can say beyond this is that if you're ethically against these practices then I support you voicing that, and while I can offer differing opinions, I still think you're within your right to openly disagree.
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 company at all. But then, maybe a company like Gitlab wouldn’t be the right place for me, because I don’t share their salary philosophy.
> Why not compare with other remote companies, but with local ones?
Because there really aren't that many of them, and even fewer who aren't also using local rates.
> Living in a cheap area comes with drawbacks.
I agree, I live in a cheaper COL location. But, I was already living here, so I'm not sure how my salary at GitLab affects that. Local companies don't pay you more because of the drawbacks of living in a cheaper location. If I moved to a higher COL location then I would be compensated for that [1]. The mechanics are the same, I just get to do my job from home.
> I’d care a lot if I made a lot less than a colleague for the same type of work at the same company
This is, I think, the most important factor. I didn't decline my offer at GitLab in favor of staying at my previous company because I knew my salary would be the same as every other employee. I compromised on that front so I could work remotely for a company that I really felt like was a better fit for me.
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.
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?
We got 100,000 users of the open source distribution before we introduced a paid one.
In the first year that Dmitriy made the open source distribution (and I didn't even know it existed) 200 people contributed to GitLab and probably 10,000+ people used it.
could you talk about your development model (people management). For example Basecamp recently wrote about its 6-week sprint mechanism.
What did you guys end up with ? im assuming you optimized it for your remote working style.
Do you do daily standup video calls ? what works and what doesnt ?
I just don't get why their support always leaves our company hanging, is this a strategy to success?
We want to renew our license for a lower amount of people as last year and that seems to be a major issue, as we won't get responses from renewals@gitlab.com and our Technical Account Manager, after giving us directions that simply did not work stopped responding last week.
Friday our license will expire if we don't pony up for nearly twice the amount of seats than we actually need.
The last time I complained here someone bumped up our tickets but we still had to resolve the technical issue ourselves as the only option was to setup the instance differently, which an easy response from a support agent could have told us without a multi week delay.
I love the product, but have stopped recommending GitLab to anyone above a 10 people org for those reasons.
It was me who helped your tickets along last time, and I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble again. Someone should be in touch on your renewals issue soon.
If you're interested in the story; there's a bit of nuance here. Support actually falls under Engineering in GitLab, and licensing falls under Sales. That means that technical issues and upgrades/renewals fall under different teams.
The good news is that we're working hard in both areas to improve.
- We've significantly increased the headcount of the licensing team, this should mean faster responses on licensing queries in the near term future.
- We've formed a Fulfillment team who is hard at work automating away some of the manual process associated with renewals. (You can see their priorities here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/fulfillment/#-current-foc...)
Specifically from the Support side, we're discussing process improvements that will mean fewer languishing tickets like you've described. There are a few in flight, but the one I'm personally most excited about is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/issu....
You'll note, I did just write it up - so there's not much discussion there yet. If you're feeling up for it, we'd love to have your input. Feel free to leave a comment there if you have any colour that could help.
I hope next time we bump into each other on HN it'll be under happier circumstances.
As always, if you'd like to discuss this more, feel free to email me directly at lyle[at]gitlab[dot]com.
Hi,
thanks for your response. I'd love to know if our problem is technical or not, as either we're misunderstanding the true-up licensing model or the user limit counting is faulty.
We're coming from a 30 Users License last year, with two true-up on-top of that.
Now we're down to 17 active users, so after our TAMs reply we bought a License with 19 Users. When trying to add the License we're getting an error that in the Last year 30 users have been active so we need to renew for this amount...
Not exactly the same scenario, but my little company (barely over 10 people) decided to splurge on GitLab Silver, and it was a royal pain for someone on GitLab's side to get in touch with us and take our money, even though we've already been a lower-tier customer for a while.
The UX isn't as polished as GitHub's, but I can live with it. The billing system, on the other hand, seems to be rather dreadful.
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 otherwise publishers are going to write such articles which will cause a loss of productivity of the readers. Not sure whom to blame here, I guess both Forbes and Google share the blame for this.
“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 relations firm, and he said he was paid $600 to attach his byline and post it at Forbes.com.”
That being said, Google absolutely encourages this behavior because Forbes is very often at the top of search results.
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.
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.
>This is an example of a publication optimizing blindly for Google Search Optimization
Many readers don't realize that in 2010, Forbes drastically changed their website to include 1000s of freelance writers. This "contributor model" was put in place by Lewis DVorkin[1].
This is why the quality of articles on Forbes.com is very inconsistent. Other publisher websites have the same problem.[2]
EDIT: add examples to train the eye to the differences:
In contrast, this Github article has "Contributor" as gray text next to author byline.
One can also go to the "forbes.com" main landing page and click "Editors' Picks" to see how articles from "Forbes Staff" and "Contributor" are mixed together.
The thing with “contributor” articles is there is no editorial oversight. They look at your record when they pick you, but after that you publish directly to Forbes.com. They might as well be blogs.
I noticed this when you google "name-of-movie post credit scene". Not a single result will instantly tell you if this movie has a scene after the credits. It will have a multiple paragraph review of the movie and your answer is hidden somewhere in there. All I want is a simple yes or no answer.
I found the main discussion threads on the /r/movies surbeddit the easiest way of finding if there's a post credit scene. The info is in the original post, so there's no need to read comments with potential spoilers.
http://aftercredits.com is a pretty good source as well, but I checked it out after your comment and surprisingly it doesn't show in the top search results for "<movie> post credit scene".
More and more of my google searches are being appended by "reddit". Someone's asked it before and it takes half a second to load/skip for it. It's sad, but effective
Pretty much all of my searches have that operator now. You used to type your keywords and relevant forums would come up on page 1, brimming with information from people who were knowledgable and eager to share what they know. I have no idea what these niche forums are going to be called, so I have to defer to reddit for my searches.
Damn I guess this is true about a lot of other very specific questions but are not too niche stuff as well (i.e. programming questions). An example is I was searching if a game had local multiplayer, and what would you know the result was exactly what you described - a paragraph long description of the game and the advantages of multiplayer and the answer hidden in it.
This reminds me of people telling their whole life story and how that rice pudding made them a better person when all I was looking for was the recipe.
The title of the article is "He Built...". The article is about Sijbrandij, not about GitLab.
The HN title has editorialized away from the main subject of the article, which it isn't supposed to do. You landed on the article with a false expectation set up by the HN submitter. Forbes isn't responsible for that.
Thanks for explaining why they are doing it. I too was confused why a publication like Forbes used such bad style of writing, it's because they are optimising for Googlebot not us. I was thinking of looking up his name on Wikipedia even to see which business is this.
Does "a publication like Forbes" even mean anything anymore? It's just a blogging platform these days, at least if you see the word "contributor". According to this there aren't even editors:
I wonder if that tactic actually retains people for longer. I just closed the tab after the first couple of paragraphs, googled his name, and found the information I wanted that way.
It seems to be intuitive that if one makes X harder to get via their platform, the user will work harder to get X, but that solution rarely seems to be true.
I hate it almost as much as the ‘soft lede’, where the author decides to spend a few paragraphs describing the weather and kind of jacket the subject of their article is wearing before they get to the point. Maybe it’s SEO, but it just gives me the impression that the author had a failed career as a novelist, and wants to waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses.
Or maybe that's their writing style and the story they're writing?
I'm not usually dismissive, but honestly, people are free to write the article as they wish to, and we're free to read it or not. It always annoys me when people complain about recipe sites for example "I don't want to know what clothes you were wearing when you cooked it, just give me the measurements".
> waste my time as an outlet for their creative writing impulses
What gives us the right to demand something from a writer that isn't what they were writing?
It might be cynical SEO stuff, or it might just be how they like to write - but there are a lot of commenters here that won't be happy until everything is just AI-produced bullet-points.
If a writer is truly writing for themselves, they are the audience: why post it for the public? Otherwise the audience's IS the only judgement that matters.
In the case of this kind of soft/no lede, it comes off as narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness.
The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine that does not differentiate well between a key term hit above the fold or spread over the broad middle of an article.
Not really - you can have multiple target audiences. I.e. you can write for yourself first, and others second - the piece being relevant, with different focuses, for different people. Which is what the majority of these pieces tend to be (if they're not purely SEO gaming)
> narcissistic and time-wasting, a side-effect of having no editor to determine what is good for the publication, and no cost to cost publish an unlimited stream-of-consciousness
What's the problem with any of that? Is everything in life to be optimised purely for efficiency of delivery?
> The AI isn't in the "bullet-points" but in the search engine
My point was rather that some people here would rather boil everything down to purely a list of facts, without any element of story or framing.
> What gives us the right to demand something from a writer that isn't what they were writing?
I’m not demanding anything, I’m just making a statement about my personal taste. If I click on an article, it’s because the headline interested me. If I start reading it to find the content is not at all related to that headline, I just feel annoyed and usually close the page.
I like it that way, it reads like a story and it IS a good story. Not everything in tech or HN has to be to the point and a collection of facts, some narrativity is ok
That's a little reductive, short form writings/storytellings do infact exist, and can also be wildly popular, Isaac Asimov's The Last Answer immediately comes to mind.
The first sentence for me is "Sid Sijbrandij knows a thing or two about building, scaling and even walking away from companies. His current venture, GitLab, is doing over $100 million in revenue and is valued at over $1 billion."
Forbes is really shit for a while now. They have become Ad spam heaven. Also a fun fact to share. We used to have an article on forbes linking back to our SAAS product which used to send us good traffic. Forbes funnily got into a similar business and guess what they did. They deleted the entire article lol. Granted they can do whatever they want with their articles but to me this was really shitty.
Yesterday I sent the BBC a complaint about exactly this kind of writing.
In this instance, the title is an outright lie, but the time on site writing-style you describe seems to be there in full swing as well, despite the BBC's revenue model.
I don't think this is a new trend that has anything to do with SEO. It's called "burying the lede" and has been done since the beginning of commercial journalism.
I'm not ok with the trend. I want information, not to have my time wasted. In this specific instance, though, the article is about a person, not actually about GitLab, and so I'm ok with it.
"After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020.
He took the proceeds from his previous venture, doubled it in bitcoin, and began bootstrapping GitLab.com.
Sid got the first few hundred signups through an article posted on Hacker News. Then together with his cofounder applied and got into Y Combinator. The race to demo day, where they would present in front of top tier investors, was on.
Compressing their three-month plan into just two weeks, the GitLab team had a highly successful demo day, landing Ashton Kutcher as an investor."
Wow, had no idea GitLab was close to an IPO. Is there a lesson about saturated markets and differentiation that can be learned from them? I'd be all ears
There's probably room for lots of them. There's always some unmet need that hasn't been addressed by the market, and everyone needs software these days!
I tried switching to Gitlab for my hobby projects over a year ago (before Github had free private repos), but recently, have decided to move back to Github, mostly for UX purposes. Not sure what it is about Gitlab's UI, but I find it more difficult to navigate and parse visually than Github's. I am a hobbbyist developer though and rarely work with other people.
Granted, Gitlab CI was awesome the one time I used it.
If you don't know who "he" is, the lead is buried under the fourth sub-heading:
> After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020.
I think remote roles are becoming a lot more accepted in tech. No time wasted on the commute, and companies can save costs of office spaces, etc.
I'm so optimistic about remote working for developers, it's even been a key feature in a job matching platform I've been working on: https://www.rocketship.dev/
I think it’s also the realization of a supply problem. A lot of companies around the world cannot compete on compensation with the larger tech companies in the Bay Area, and many people don’t want to move there, so it’s win-win.
What's hard is not building the business (not harder than building a local business), what's hard is leaving the preconceived notion of how to communicate with people, build trust and collaborate
Until you leave the preconceived notion of productivity = seats in desks and people chattering on the office (roll eyes) then "it is (going to be) hard"
Automattic is the name of the company. WordPress is the name of the product.
Anyway, what I like about GitLab and Automattic is they are agnostic-timezone remote company. You can live in any timezone to work in GitLab or Automattic.
Some remote companies only accept certain timezones.
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.
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.
There are way more requirements to run a company than simply being able to communicate by voice or video. There's a lot of infrastructure and overhead that's involved. Before Stripe, you might have to store credit cards, and then you might need physically colocated servers. Before G Suite and AWS and... I haven't started a startup myself, but I believe there are a lot of variables involved.
These kinds of apps and services, and video conferencing, were all around 10 years ago, but everything's been improved and consolidated enough that now a 100% remote company can actually go toe-to-toe with one that isn't. 10 years isn't that long ago in the scheme of the global market economy. Technological progress takes time. VR was available 10 years ago, but it's still not really "ready for primetime". Remote working solutions, for all aspects of work, are now ready for primetime.
>After starting and selling app store Appappeal, Sid turned open-source software GitLab into a fast-growing venture that is on its way to an IPO in 2020.
Can you confirm if GitLab increased revenue 10x in 2018? A previous profile stated the revenue was $10M in 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2019/07/21/he...) and this article says it is now $100M. This is a phenomenal achievement, but the valuation ought to be more than $1B at that trajectory.
I don't blame gitlab for playing the game. It does sort of matter if you care about the central organizing principle of our society (capitalism). Companies are meant to do more than simply reinforce the market dominance of a single market winner.
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 not do this. I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live). Unfortunately I couldn't apply to Gitlab last time I was in the market for work because their salaries are both lower in general and lowered even further due to geo adjustment.
I'm fully a fan and believer of remote work, but you need to pay your employees just like any other top tier company would. It's actually even more important as you really want the best people for remote work since they need to be excellent communicators and more self-directed than in-house employees.
> I work remote and get a fair market rate (for the value I add, not based on where I live)
Unfortunately there are two misconceptions here: 1) that companies pay based on added value and not on replacement cost, & 2) that "a fair market rate" does not vary with location, when in reality different locations have different labor markets.
The reason SV companies pay so much is because their candidates expect it, and part of why they expect it is the high cost of living in the area. A company that pays less than average will get worse/fewer candidates, thus a local labor market. For a remote company, paying an SV employee the same rate as a midwest employee is to effectively compensate the latter much higher, and what's fair about that?
Companies pay what you can negotiate with them. This is based on value add, and alternatives on both sides of the table. If you can pitch the value you create, you can get paid accordingly.
It's very hard to quantify the marginal business value given by a single employee, especially if they're just starting in the position.
Economics is driven by scarcity - supply and demand. Companies have no financial incentive to pay us any more than it would take to hire a replacement. They're in the business of making profit, which necessarily means paying people less than the business value they add, and if a company wants to be very profitable, the only way is to pay substantially less than the value received.
So even if you pitch based on value add, you're really just signaling that you have top skills which are in short supply, and they'd better pay you more or else some other company will. They have no obligation or incentive to pay commensurate with value add, only to pay just enough to keep getting the value add.
It's a startup. I actually find it to be the case that early stage companies are more willing to do remote work. In part because it's a way for them to broaden their options.
Of course, but I think a large part of the incentive for startups to do that is so they can hire high-quality engineers who aren't in SF, so that they don't have to deal with the crazy cost of living expenses when paying salaries, and of course their own costs for living in SF and renting/owning office space there.
So I think I would expect most early-stage remote startups to pay salaries which account for an employee's cost of living (rather than paying a full SF salary whether you live in SF or Montana). But maybe I'm wrong.
I work for ConvertKit. We’re fully remote and have public, standardized salaries regardless of where you live in the world. Pay is based on title. If you want more pay you need a new title and if you know someone’s title you know their pay. Not all employees share their title because it’s personal but it’s also not a secret.
It’s way more fair than what Gitlab does IMO.
Also our financials are public. We’re bootstrapped and profitable with no outside investment so saying standardized salaries hurt the company is a lazy cop out at best. https://convertkit.baremetrics.com/
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 program with 4% match. We get a $1000 "Paid" Paid time off bonus once a year. GitLab is a "Unicorn" but they've cheated their employees to get there. A billion dollar company can't pay people the same based on their role? Sounds like SV venture sharks speaking under the guise of remote work.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Our work is pretty intense so we offer 3 weeks 'on' 1 week 'off' as standard + 23 days of paid leave / year for salaried employees. Sick days are dependent on local conditions but in practice we have yet to encounter anything where this would matter, at a larger scale this will no doubt become more of an issue but it is an insurable risk for us so we will simply do whatever the law says we should do for a particular location and insure against the rest.
Most remote working colleagues have chosen to be freelancers though we do offer the option for them to become salaried employees. This is not always in the interest of the person so we do caution them against this, and for one person where putting them on the payroll from NL would be hard a local subsidiary was created which employs them.
Remote workers definitely add a layer of complexity with respect to employment law. But I've found that it is well worth it given the quality and diversity of the people we encounter.
Interesting, I calculated the salary in the country I am right now, and pay is way above local pay - which is good. I earn more tho with a different company working remotely, but they don't discriminate based on location. Equal amount of effort, means equal amount of pay in their view.
My take aways from the blog post:
"if everyone is paid the same role-based salary, the company would not be able to hire as many team members" - obviously cheaper labour means more resources.
"If everyone is paid a standard salary, those who live in high-income areas would have less discretionary income when compared to their counterparts in lower-income communities." - that is the choice of those living in high income areas, and I don't see why those who make the financially sensible choice of living in a more affordable area should be penalised.
However, and this is quite important, given how high salaries at Gitlab are (based on the calculator), I see no issue with this kind of discrimination. I assumed the gap might be bigger. At the end of they day it has to be a win win situation. I will refrain from criticising this "issue" from now on as I don't see any ill intention in it. Keep up the good work!
One thing I notice with the calculator is it is a simple scaling factor. While this scales for an employee's cost of living, it also scales how much they can save.
An employee on $200k in San Francisco spending 50% on their lifestyle and no kids can retire by 40 to a more economically sane region with similar facilities. A similar employee doing the same job in that more economically sane region for $100k spending that same 50% is working until they are 50.
Which ends up meaning that in the cheaper regions you are only recruiting from the pool of people unable to move to wealthier regions with higher pay (which granted is a high proportion due to family).
Yes, this is a common issue that I find is missed in conversations about cost of living and location (even outside of remote work). Yes, the cost of living in the Midwest of the US is much lower than the West Coast. However, I find that the lower pay there more than offsets the difference. First, because of the savings issue you mention, but also there are major things that cost approximately the same no matter where you live in the country. Cars, computers, vacations, often even medical procedures (certainly not cheaper in line with the pay difference), etc. Between being able to save less for retirement, and having large purchases (even if infrequent) consume a significantly higher portion of my income, I've never been able to make the math truly work out in terms of moving to a lower cost of living area and keeping a similar quality of life. For those who it works for, that's great, but it's not as simple as it's made out to be when you consider all of the factors.
I can not name the company, also I am not technically an employee - I do remote contracting for them, but it is likely to be long term. I found them through my network, but I am getting emails with offers for UK recruiters on an (almost) weekly basis - so there is remote work out there. It requires a different mindset tho, and what helped me, is that I managed remote teams before - thus I kind of understand what the other side expects.
Thank you for publishing this! I work for a small fintech company and I find it really hard to get good data on what salaries should be outside of one-off anecdotes. I also agree that you should pay local rates. I looked at the non-SF California rate and found it to be more than reasonable.
Checked it out, and for my region their salary is barely competitive. Must say, I am disappointed by this approach from a company whose product I admire.
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).
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).
I used the Salarium [0] for base comparison (unfortunately, the actual calculator is only available in German/French/Italian).
As an example calculation, [1] are the statistics for a 30 y.o. university graduate in the Zurich area. At 13 monthly salaries, the median yearly base compensation works out as 110k to 150k CHF.
I'm assuming that at 30, that person might have around 5 years of work experience, so that would land them around 150k using the Gitlab calculator as well. So a bit above median for Swiss citizens, not so much above median for expats.
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$ in SF.
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 pay from a remote employer than an employee paying more to live in a bigger house, or to consume more expensive designer drugs outside of work hours.
In reality it has nothing to do with fairness, it's a result of real market conditions. An employee in the middle of the country will accept a lower salary than someone in the bay area due to cost-of-living expenses. Same can be said for someone in another country.
Is it 'fair' from a pure salary-to-value ratio? No. But economics isn't about 1-1 'fairness', it's about the allocation of scarce resources at a mutually-agreed upon price, or wage in this case. This is partly why comparing salaries is stupid, especially across locations.
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 market condition” that allows them to do this kind of segmentation.
Ironically, the more attention (and copycats) all-remote firms like Gitlab get, the less viable this cost-saving tactic will be, provided that they don't involve in illegal (in many jurisdictions) joint cooperation to limit wages of the type that, unfortunately, tech firms have engaged in in local markets in the past.
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.
Well, it's both cost saving and fairness, I think. It just seems like common sense to me. If one employee by default has to subtract something like $4000 from their monthly income to cover living expenses, and another has to subtract something like $700, then the employee who subtracts less is taking home way more money if they're getting the same salary. The other employee is being punished for where they live.
But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply. If there is a supply of workers willing to work at a lower price in areas outside of San Francisco, then it makes sense for a company to purchase their cheaper labor if it supplies the same value as the more expensive labor.
> But prices aren't based on fairness, they are based on demand and supply
If they were based on supply and demand, locality of seller would have no effect on the price buyers were willing to pay for goods that aren't location-sensitive, e.g., remote work, because it's not a location-bound market and goods would trade at the global market clearing price absent (inefficient) artificial market segmentation that is only possible (for buyers) when there is an effective monopsony for the particular good/service being purchased (since competition would exploit the underpriced segments buy buying up what they are selling at a price above what the attempted segmenter was offering.)
That may very well happen over time. Non-Bay workers may bid down the price of coding labor, and remote workers from disparate markets will bid against each other, and eventually some "global market clearing price" may be established. Economic theory doesn't operate instantaneously, though. It manifests over time as individual actors bid and negotiate. Remote work is relatively new and its substitutability is being figured out. In the meantime companies may exploit the inefficiencies (and so might workers).
Salary is a market value. Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”
Were that true, global markets where the location of the seller is immaterial to the utility of the good or service sold and didn't create extra costs to get it to the buyer wouldn't have different rates based on the seller's location, by the Law of One Price.
> Your arguments read like “if a BigMac costs half a Dollar in a developing country then the BigMac is inherently worth half a dollar and should cost the same in the US”
A more precise equivalent would be “there is no rational reason for the same buyer to be willing to pay more to purchase a Big Mac delivered from a neighboring higher CoL city as an identical one delivered with the same latency from a different neigboring community with a lower CoL.” Local prices for Big Macs between countries naturally vary precisely because Big Mac distribution isn't globalized the way remote labor is, and a Big Macs from a McDonald’s in Turkmenistan is not an equivalent substitute for one from a McDonald's next to Market Street for a buyer in
Downtown SF.
Local wage policies for remote work are an effort by employers to present a rationalization to employees not to increase their wage demands to what the globalized market they are actually competing in will support. They will only be able to be maintained so long as remote work isn't widely offered and there isn't a meaningful competitive (on both sides) market; once there are enough competing buyers for any given kind of labor, competition for labor will see the best workers from low-CoL area consistently going to employers that aren't lowballing them.
To be honest, Gitlab is paying way above the market rate in Bucharest, while the cost of living in Bucharest is significantly lower than that of SF. Oddly enough their pay rate is close to that of London for a Tech Lead, and that's a lot of money in a city like Bucharest. Even if pay is half of SF, Bucharest's cost of living if a few times less, so it really is great.
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.
They should price their service the same. Charge less in ares in the US with a lower cost of living as the wages/revenue will be less for developers/businesses in those areas.
Yes it is and it happens all the time because of salary negotiations. The same thing applies to location based salaries - nobody will want to work if the offered money is not adequate. If company X from poorer country Y wanted to open an office in SF they simply wouldn't be able to find anyone that is willing to work for the same amount of money that is offered for country Y employees.
Why would it not be? It's a mutual transaction. If an developer in kansas is willing to accept less than the bay area worker, whose living expenses are twice as much, who is anyone to say that's not allowed? If you forced them to be paid the same then one of them will not be working for you even if they want to; either because you can't afford to hire them both or the bay area engineer can't live on the salary.
I didn't say it's not allowed. I think it's poor business practice, and poor for society, incentivizing devs to stay in expensive areas instead of moving out to cheaper remote areas.
>If you forced them to be paid the same then one of them will not be working for you even if they want to; either because you can't afford to hire them both or the bay area engineer can't live on the salary.
That is speculation and I speculate you are wrong.
It's not speculation, it's economics. If you have to pay a higher wage the number of available jobs decrease. It's supply and demand. There's not an infinite amount of money in a company's budget.
It's also not a company's job to incentivize where it's employees live.
I understand where you're coming from but there's nothing inherently wrong with paying different wages for the same work if it's a consensual agreement. If one worker is satisfied with his salary, and is being paid well for his area, the only reason to complain about a worker in a costlier area being paid more is envy/jealousy.
Not unless there's an incredibly strong link between having children and having strong alternative employment prospects. Which I don't have data on but doubt, and if I had to take a guess would assume actually works the other way. That the childless have more options.
There is an incredibly strong link between having children and alternative employment prospects. People with kids in school have complicated scheduling needs and can't easily relocate, unless they homeschool all their kids.
This is a bad argument, because there are many other remote employers.
I do not live in a low CoL area because I'm from here and never left, nor did I move here to save money. I moved here because I was able to keep a high paying career, and live somewhere I wanted to live.
And yet, a lot of remote companies pay differently based on location. I'm also not quite sure why the choice of location should be factored in but family planning not.
Paying the same, regardless of location, would maybe motivate some people to move away from crowded areas, one of the big chances remote work offers.
I think the standard argument is not that they're paying according to need, they're paying according to market norms.
Thing is, in high cost of living areas the living cost is extremely pegged to job opportunities, it's almost tautological. Where there are more job opportunities, you have to pay people more to stop them working for competitors. A confounding factor is a hypothesised (not sure if backed by data) trend of talent concentration - that is, areas with lots of job opportunities attract most of the most talented people, driving salaries up further.
All that's to say, if Gitlab want to hire someone living in such an area, the market dictates they must pay more in order to attract that person over a local competitor (for jobs). It's not due to the person needing the money more for a higher cost of living, at all.
What is never factored in is the feeling of resentment people get for doing the same or better work for less pay. While companies can rationalize these pay scales and maybe even require them to be sustainable, loyalty and engagement suffers noticeably.
Assuming I'm currently ignorant of the remote employment market, where would I go to find data or job listings that would give me a sense of what competitive rates are for remote engineers?
I'm not sure there's a great canonical and generalized source of this information.
Anecdotally, 7 years ago, remote, at a bootstrapped 15 person company, I made ~10% more than the absolute max Gitlab would pay me right now. The difference is wildly worse now.
If your boss asks you to work overtime or on the weekends, explaining that you need to bring the kids to soccer is a more convincing argument than explaining that your WoW guild is depending on you for a raid.
Having kids is hard but may make things easier at the office.
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.
They mention San Francisco rents, but they fail to mention all the advantages of living in San Francisco. Awesome for the folks in San Fran to have their lifestyle's subsidized.
AND then they spread some FUD with "Remote companies using a standard pay structure are reportedly running into problems with their compensation plans" - nice and vague and ominous. Doesn't even mention what issues they're running into, just "issues".
AND then they end with the weak they " hope location band salaray gaps will continue to narrow", as if they genuinely wish they could pay more, but their hands are tied.
I think gitlab is a great project, but that is some grade A bullshit.
One of the benefits of working remotely is that we can escape our local markets' pay scales. Working from anywhere shouldn't negatively affect one's value.
> 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).
This has always bothered me about GitLab and has prevented me from applying for a job there. I want to work remotely so I can move around a lot, both for long-term travel and to check out different places to live. I don't have a home. If I'm hired from NYC and then I move to rural Montana, that's none of their business. So long as I have reliable Internet wherever I am, and can work the hours I need (I'm happy to adjust my work schedule to Eastern Time from anywhere in the world, for example), then I should be paid based on my work. Is GitLab going to pay for my rental homes and airfare as I wander around the world? Are they going to adjust my pay every time I move? Are they going to pay me more because I spend a year in an RV and fuel is expensive? Are they going to adjust my pay for rent in the Cayman Islands even though food and electricity are the primary expenses there, rather than rent?
The whole thing smacks of socialism as well, and reminds me of the line from some Ayn Rand novel (not endorsing her): "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Do they also plan to pay their employees based on their medical expenses and how many kids they have?
Let's say Gitlab hired you in rural Montana with a salary appropriate for that location. If you then decide to move to NYC, would it be fair for you to retain the same pay ?
> This has always bothered me about GitLab and has prevented me from applying for a job there.
That seems exceedingly silly to me. If they offer you pay you're happy with, what does it matter to you? As for your concerns about moving, then that would be a logical thing to ask about, just like discussing your remote working needs would be important with any other prospective employers. As it stands, fully remote employment opportunities are rare enough that it'd seem bothering to actually clarify details would be worthwhile if they otherwise seem like they might be a good fit.
> The whole thing smacks of socialism as well, and reminds me of the line from some Ayn Rand novel (not endorsing her): "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Do they also plan to pay their employees based on their medical expenses and how many kids they have?
This, to me, is ridiculous. It smacks of a private company optimizing pay for what they can get away with in different locations, rather than paying based on the most expensive area they want to be able to hire in. The missing piece that distinguishes what they do from socialism is that there is no indication that Gitlab aims to pay out as much as possible of their revenue after other costs to employees vs. building shareholder value. As far as I'm aware Gitlab is not a workers coop.
The line was incidentally popularized by Karl Marx "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875), and variations of it in the socialist community and elsewhere long preceded the Critique. Arguably it originates in the Bible (Acts 4:32-35; describing the community of Christians in Jerusalem), but then early Christianity was in many ways a "proto-socialism" (and e.g. in Europe, things like public healthcare in most countries have come about thanks to interplay between Christian democrats and socialists, not due to socialists alone; Germany, in fact, got its first insurance system as Bismarck appealed to Christian morality to get support for a system designed to kill of support for the socialist groups he at the same time outlawed).
Ayn Rand borrowed it explicitly for one of her attacks on socialism, but missed the mark badly in that Marx in the Critique itself points out that "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby," or in other words, according to Marx a company in a capitalist economy can not successfully act as a socialist company - doing so is impossible because it needs to interact with and compete with capitalist companies on capitalist terms, which means the ability to optimize salaries and employment to minimize cost for example. So Ayn Rand concocted a scenario that Marx would have agreed with her was doomed to failure.
Ask me anything.