For those who haven't been following along, Gitlab's compensation policy is pretty much intentionally designed to not pay people to live in SF. It's a somewhat reasonable strategy for an all remote company. But they seem to have some pretty ambitious plans that may not be compatible with operating a physical plant.
I would point you to some very ambitious feature proposals on their issue tracker, but I can't for obvious reasons. I think GitLab is at a cross roads and this setback might be the eye opener they need. Moving forward, they really need to re-evaluate how they develop and evolve GitLab. For both online and Enterprise.
This idea of releasing early and on the 22nd works very well for low hanging fruits problems, but not for the more ambitious plans they have. If they understood the complexity for some of the more ambitious plans, they would know they are looking at, at least a year of R&D to create an MVP.
I think it makes sense to keep doing the release on the 22nd, but they also need to start building out teams that can focus on solving more complex problems that can take months or possibly a year to see fruition. Git hosting has reached a point, where differentiating factors can be easily copied and duplicated, so you are going to need something more substantive, to set yourself apart from the rest. And this is where I think Microsoft may have the upper hand in the future.
Judging by their about team[1] page, they are currently short an Infrastructure Director. When you read their job listings, even for DBAs and SREs, it' all "scale up and improve performance." Very little "improve uptime, fight outages." One assumes it's upper management approving the job descriptions, so the missing emphasis on uptime, and redundancy probably pervades the culture. And again, judging by the team profile, they've hired very few DBA / SRE experts, and instead appear to have assigned Ruby developers to the tasks.
Perhaps they simply have to bet the farm on scaling much larger to sustain the entire firm, which is troubling for enterprise customers, and for teams like mine running a private instance of the open source product. Should probably review the changelog podcast interview[2] with the CEO and see if any quotes have new meaning after today.
[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/team/ [2]: https://changelog.com/podcast/103
What do you mean? They pay people in SF much more than in other cities because the high cost of living. I'd consider working for Gitlab if I would live in SF, living in Berlin it's not an option.