GitLab Strategy
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
Their handbook is a fantastic resource for distributed companies (but also for non-distributed companies).
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
e.g. here is how they do CEO shadowing:
Are they profitable? If not, they aren't inspiring me
The goal is to go public by November 18, 2020. You can read all about it here: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/
We have an MR open to mention our long term profitability target for Q4FY25 here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...
It's better than GitHub in almost every way. And yet GitHub is more popular both in open-source and enterprise. And in enterprise we are usually left with unholy combination of GitHub and JIRA because GitHub project management is a joke and they haven't done anything useful in that space for years.
But for some reason pushing for anything other than GitHub is always an uphill battle. And the web interface GitHub offers isn't any good either; I can't use it without OctoTree (amazing stuff BTW, works with GH and GL! Kudos!). So what does GitHub really offer that makes it so popular? A friendly name? A cute OctoCat?
And GL leads the way and GH copies their features some years down the line and GL fights and GH is still more successful.
I think this is sad.
I keep hearing they've improved performance, and maybe they did, but that's also what I heard last time I tried it, so now I'm kind of reluctant to give it another try. Unlike before, now it doesn't just have to be "as fast", for me to switch to it, it has to be noticeably faster. Feature-wise it's easily on par already, but performance is also an important feature, and I don't think codebase being primarily in Ruby inspires a lot of confidence, especially if scale is growing. You're basically running it at 1/10-1/30th the speed it could run if a proper language were used.
No idea what gitlab.com is like, we picked gitlab because we could self-host.
There's also support for zero-downtime upgrades [1] but I haven't tried it yet.
[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/#upgrading-without-downtim...
I’d guess this was a consequence of a strategy decision that went against the plan (probably an expectation mismatch with users). I think the large part of the problem is the public GitLab instance is (was?) the beta environment, so a lot of issues popped up constantly while people were evaluating the options. In our group we are all volunteers, so when downtime impacts the little time we can dedicate (push code, review, deploy) it’s a fairly big deal.
Our python group (pyslackers.com) runs in the open as much as we can, so for us we went where the exposure and ease to be involved is (Github), even though from a raw feature perspective we liked what we had on GitLab when it worked.
Before I worked here, I was on a team that evaluated different devops tools, and I felt the same apprehension about the uptime. But we eventually chose gitlab, and the only real downtime we experienced was during the 2017 outage. And we liked having the option to switch to self-hosted if it became too much of an issue
The project boards are better than most others, the CI is phenomenal, and I have noticed the review process is being worked on.
Keep up the good work, we need options in the space!
1. They used to use Azure, so even though I know Azure is actually an awesome cloud platform, I get this mental image of "Microsoft MVPs" constructing gitlab using VBScript macros because I come from the M$ era.
2. the very public data loss that happened a few years ago, that sounded like a mess, gives the lasting impression that repos are not lasting if they are in gitlab.
3. I never knew gitlab didn't just look like bitbucket, which I hate. In fact, I never would have looked at all if I wasn't writing this response, so I guess to get me they would have to lead with "Nothing like bitbucket!!"
4. I've spent so much time in github, that anything even slightly different pisses me off.
5. The logo looks like firefox porygon edition. GitLab is such a cool name, it could have a better logo, like the word "Git" followed by a chemistry beaker / "potion" thing.
6. The only marketing that would ever work on me would be "has an interface identical to github, does all the things github does, plus these 30 other things". Most of their marketing leads with the "30 other things", so I click away before I bother to read it.
7. If GitLab or anyone tried to do something innovative like writing an extended version of git that adds comments and pull requests to the underlying CLI, and bakes them into the repo itself in some way so we can just stay in CLI world all day, I'd be absolutely onboard, but no one does that for some reason even though that would be a huge differentiator. A similar strategy worked for Heroku if you think about it.
8. Every single open source project I use or contribute to uses github. If GitLab were to, say, add a github integration that lets me work with all the github repos I care about, but using Gitlab's UI, I would be intrigued.
This does exist: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html#m...
The way to interact between the two without this sort of functionality would be if both agreeded in some sort of federation access. I don't see GitHub allowing that anytime soon, as that would reduce their lock-in effect.
We have an epic for Distributed Merge Requests: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/260 and an issue to discuss ideas about Federated GitLab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/6468
You aren't necessarily losing the top talent because not all the top talent cares only about the money. And by not offering the highest salaries, you are naturally selecting for employees that care more about the culture and work/life balance than having the highest possible salaries.
So if you do hiring right, you are more likely to get employees that stick around rather than jump ship for the first offer of a 10% pay raise.
This is not quite true.
You're 'selecting' for all of the things that come along with offering lower salaries, which usually means losing the best talent.
All things being equal, it's rational for even a 'good staffer' to go to Google (or whatever).
And of course, the company saves money by paying people less.
I'm doubtful that there's any correlation between 'lower pay and commitment' once you normalize for talent.
If this is true, they could equally pay people more and get the same or better results.
Corporations speak in their self interest, and other people's interests to the extent it serves their own. If a company is paying less, it's probably because they can get away with it for one reason or another.
If you mean we pay local rates please see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/
I worked in both Vietnam and Bay Area. The salary difference is ~10x. In Bay Area, I easily save $100K or more per year (earning >~$300K a year). Even earning a top local rates in Vietnam would have a hard time accumulating $100K in savings. I could go back to Vietnam now and earn like $5K USD a month top.
Living in a country with lower cost of living often means lower quality of school, safety, health, and etc.
If I work remotely for gitlab, I'd immediately move to Bay Area or maybe Seattle to increase my savings.
But, well, it saves gitlab money. So, it makes sense for Gitlab to make this decision. It's not good for employees though.
If so, isn't it still good for the employees?
I think Gitlab aims to pay top rates on the local market if I'm not wrong.
What I'm saying is that, even with the top rate in Vietnam, it's still small compared to being an average engineer in Bay Area in terms of saving performance.
In other words, the opinion will vary from person to person.
Of any tech company, GitLab seems like the most ripe for a conversion to an ESOP, which is often accompanied by a liquidity event for early investors. GitLab seem to be already operating as an employee-centered business, so from the outside looking in, conversion to an ESOP might be quite compatible with their existing culture.
EDIT: When you convert to an ESOP, you often work with an investment bank (such as https://www.awcfund.com/). As I understand, the investment bank provides a loan to a new tax-exempt foundation, which uses the cash to buy the stock from early investors; this foundation then repays the investment bank from revenue. These sorts of investors specialize in ESOP deals and they see the foundation which owns them money as less risky investments since ESOPs can grow faster than similar public for-profit companies since: (a) they are employee owned, and (b) because of the ESOP's tax-exempt status.
It's quite the engineering feat that they reached the current scale with the same codebase! I believe maintaining one shared codebase will be expensive in the long run: locally you want simplicity, SaaS you want scalability, micro-services and all that.
This allows us to scale GitLab.com and with our Unix packages and Charts it is still easy to install.
I'm curious about what motivates you such as improving a tool that you use everyday or code quality?
So contributing helps the community whether your contribution also helps the company or not.
Seems kind of like asking "Why would you give money to the Red Cross? They have employees that get paid a salary for running it."
If it's a good cause and you benefit from it, I certainly wouldn't avoid supporting it simply because someone else might profit indirectly from my contribution.
Nice try, but that's called dogfooding.
[citation needed]
Independence: since we took financing we need to have a liquidity event; to maintain independence we want to become a public company rather than be acquired.
At any rate, even if it happens, GitLab CE is open source, which can't be said for some of their competition.
All of the 'everyone can do this' language in their communications, is just that, communications, it has a cognitive resonance with words such as 'equality' which appeal to some (well, all of us in a way) - but it's marketing.
The are what they are because it works for those involved, and also makes them money. Many boring business without fancy communications provide immense surpluses to the world.
I don't doubt this is their honest preference, but these are words, part of a communications strategy.
Since it's fairly clearly a business, they have 'a price', surely, moreover, the outside impetus may force their hand.
I guess MS will roll out something similar on Github + Azure sometime in the future.