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The Gitlab Team Handbook

about.gitlab.com

127 pointspella33 comments

I'm very much just a wannabe developer, not yet had a tech role anywhere, but have been coding and making stuff for a long time. One thing Gitlab is great at, besides being open stuff like this, is being extremely welcoming to oss contributors. I applied for a technical writer job there, and before I even heard back I started looking at doc issues and making MRs. Messed up a little the first time, and was immediately helped by some employees and given feedback and direction. I kept going for like a month and felt like part of the team for brief moments. Someone there even offered to video chat with me and go over some career advice. It was really nice, I got nominated that month as a contributor MVP. I was unfortunately screened out of the job at the first stage, but still very much appreciate how nice the people I was working with were.

Hey, I’m on the Community Relations team at GitLab. Thanks for your contributions and the kind words. I would love to connect and learn more about your experience contributing to GitLab. You can reach me at jcoghlan at gitlab com.

Thanks for sharing, really interesting to have open access to a company manual/guide like this...

The CEO shadow idea is fairly cool, GitLab itself is copying others with it, sort of, with their own take on it, and because of this open document I could share this with my own company, compete with justifications for the program...

Might have to look through this handbook later for more ideas to borrow!

(GitLab Team Member) I got a lot out of the CEO shadow program (https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/07/08/ceo-shadow-impressi...). So much in fact that it inspired me to create something similar for my role as an engineering director (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/sh...).

Related discussion on one of the sections: "Gitlab Handbook's HN Page"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003221 (3 months ago | 191 comments)

I work at a big public company that isn’t a tech company but is trying to do tech things. The Engineering Productivity metrics Gitlab publishes helped us build something similar and justified some pretty large and much needed actions due to the problems the metrics exposed. Really cool they publish stuff like this.

More and more I see non-tech companies doing tech things. I think the era of "tech eating the world" meaning "tech puts you out of business" is almost over. Lots of traditional companies got the memo and now have competent engineering leadership.

I'm not saying this is an end of "innovator's dilemma", just that the internet and having software engineers as a part of your org aren't it anymore.

" Lots of traditional companies" here in California and USA got the outsourcing memo, for the last two decades. Cheerful "it's getting better" does not pay bills for people who build things. Executive management coasting and stalling for years, while on-commission intermediaries are more than happy to bring hapless workers for low, low wages.

This is extremely generous of Gitlab to share.

They used to share the salary for every role but it’s gone private since. I’m guessing competitors were using it to put bid them.

That and the salaries were low which made me and other colleagues not even want to bother applying

My guess is that people didn't take kindly to their salary calculator showing how much more you could be making if you lived in SF. And for a company that claims "Hiring and working from all over the world", the list of countries from where they don't accept applicants was also not a good look.

Edit: Found a related HN thread discussing the change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24893211

> wing how much more you could be making if you lived in SF.

Are you sure it's "more" and not "less"? Cost of living in SF is horrendous.

Yes. On a salary of 120k in San Francisco, after taxes and 2500/month in rent, you are left with more than the median developer in Europe makes pre tax and pre rent. Many European cities have costs of living that are comparable - try renting in Dublin, London or Amsterdam.

No matter what way you swing it, you'll make far more in SF.

Skillwise those two may be equal, but the totality of the unit that makes up an employee is not equal. People bring connections, and become articulating surfaces of the organization. Someone local brings more to the table in that regard while someone overseas might not make it to the next monthly Catalina Wine Mixer.

But you only counted taxes and rent. There is a lot of other expenses in the "cost of living category": healthcare, childcare, education, transportation, and the largest of all -- mortgage.

I still doubt you can afford the same quality of living on $120k in SF than average salary in, say, Milan (€33k).

> and the largest of all -- mortgage.

I specifically called out housing as it's the biggest expense, but I labelled it as rent.

> $120k in SF than average salary in, say, Milan (€33k).

By your own admission, mortgage is the largest expense. Your monthly take home in SF after taxes and housing costs of $2500 is $3964. That's more than the gross, pre tax, pre housing cost of the Milan salary you named. Your take home pay _before_ housing is $1950/month in Milan. You're always going to have more money left over in SF.

> I still doubt you can afford the same quality of living.

There's a different between salary and quality of living. The quality of life in _any_ european city is a very difficult comparison to the QoL in a US city, and it's not a numeric comparison.

Makes sense. But my point is that "money left over" is meaningless, unless you spend them.

But if you're there to just save money to later move to somewhere cheaper -- sure, by all means.

They used to have terrible location weighting. I guess based on average tech sector salaries, but there aren’t tech jobs in my area so maybe they were picking up support call centre workers or something and it was a quarter of a reasonable tech salary, even for their highest tier. And this was the UK not anywhere more unusual.

There were also suspicious tiny pockets of higher compensation areas which made me think actually they just rigged it if they had to reach higher for an individual.

Transparent doesn’t mean fair or good.

Yeah, last I checked they paid under typical wages (already bad, by coastal standards) at local jobs in my area. Jobs that have much easier interviews. And many of them allow remote, too.

I didn't end up with a local employer (again—I have in the past), but I do have a remote job that pays more than local work. And it was easier to get than a GitLab job. So why even apply, unless they've significantly increased pay relative to other options?

Yup, my area, just outside the Seattle census area, had poor location weighting. Despite it being in the top 5 cities in the country for YOY home value increases over the last three years.

Location data is proprietary IP that GitLab doesn’t have the right to make publicly available. This is why it was made private.

If you’re applying for a job at GitLab, you’ll receive a password so you can calculate your salary.

Disclaimer: am gitlab employee.

> * Location data is proprietary IP that GitLab doesn’t have the right to make publicly available.*

I don't understand your point. If GitLab says "the salary for an employees in San Francisco is 120k", which part of that information is proprietary? It's not like they are saying "John Doe, who lives in 1600 Pennsylvania Av., makes 120k".

I think the OP might have meant to type PII (Personally Identifiable Information) not IP (Intellectual Property).

> It's not like they are saying "John Doe, who lives in 1600 Pennsylvania Av., makes 120k".

It would be trivial for someone to aggregate that data from additional public sources, e.g. find a list of employees on LinkedIn and use their listed Job Title to determine salary.

Companies do have some responsibility to keep their employee’s personal data private, and this seems like a reasonable balance.

But if you see that an employee in SF makes 120k, and an employee in Berlin makes 90k, for the same role, you can calculate the "location factor" they are using, and as this is proprietary (as per the previous comment), that data cannot be published

If it's anything like my company - we buy information on how the average salary and cost of living changes in different areas over time. That's the information that's proprietary.

No, it exposed how low their salary offerings were.

If you were a top engineer, had a family, wanted to maybe travel a bit, I don't understand why you would apply with them.

Clearly they were exploiting the "cost of labor" adjustment.

Every time they approached me I thought to myself "why does any engineer take an offer from them?"

Honestly wasn’t very difficult to outbid them based on salaries I’ve seen.

Do you know where they at least show the different roles e.g sd1 sd2 etc

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162199, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30003221

Thanks for sharing. I'd seen snippets of things out of GitLab, but in particular their section on remote work is a treasure trove of great ideas and practices.

The handbook has always been there and open. I don't get why people think it's a new thing.

Really intresting - will try to copy some ideas for my company.

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