Like you, I would like to add my 2 cent, which I hope will be taken positively, as I would like to see them provide healthy competition for GitHub for years to come.
Since GitLab is so transparent about everything, from their marketing/sales/feature proposals/technical issues/etc., they make it glaringly obvious, from time to time, that they lack very fundamental core skills, to do things right/well. In my opinion, they really need to focus on recruiting top talent, with domain expertise.
They (GitLab) need to convince those that would work for Microsoft or GitHub, to work for GitLab. With their current hiring strategy, they are getting capable employees, but they are not getting employees that can help solidify their place online (gitlab.com) and in Enterprise. The fact that they were so nonchalant about running bare metal and talking about implementing features, that they have no basic understanding of, clearly shows the need for better technical guidance.
They really should focus on creating jobs that pays $200,000+ a year, regardless of living location, to attract the best talent from around the world. Getting 3-6 top talent, that can help steer the company in the right direction, can make all the difference in the long run.
GitLab right now, is building a great company to help address low hanging fruit problems, but not a team that can truly compete with GitHub, Atlassian, and Microsoft in the long run. Once the low hanging fruit problems have been addressed, people are going to expect more from Git hosting and this is where Atlassian, GitHub, Microsoft and others that have top talent/domain expertise, will have the advantage.
Let this setback be a vicious reminder that you truly get what you pay for and that it's not too late to build a better team for the future.
> They really should focus on creating jobs that pays $200,000+ a year, regardless of living location
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.
> 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.
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.
> Gitlab's compensation policy is pretty much intentionally designed to not pay people to live in SF.
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.
Look, I love GitLab. Gitlab was there for me when both my son and I got cancer, and they were more than fair with me when I needed to get healthy and planned to return to work. I have nothing but high praises for Sid and the Ops team.
With that said, I'll agree that the salary realities for GitLab employees are far below the base salary that was expected for a senior level DevOps person. I've got about 10 years experience in the space, and the salary was around $60K less than what I had been making at my previous job. I took the Job at GitLab because I believe in the product, believe in the team, and believe in what Gitlab could become...
With that said, starting from Day 1, we were limited by an Azure infrastructure that didn't want to give us Disk iops, legacy code and build processes that made automation difficult at times, and a culture that proclaimed openness, but, didn't really seem to be that open. Some of the moves that they've made (Openshift, rolling their own infrastructure, etc) have been moves in the right direction, but, they still haven't solved the underlying stability issues -- and these are issues that are a marathon, not a sprint. They've been saying that the performance, stability, and reliability of gitlab.com is a priority -- and it has been since 2014 -- but, adding complexity of the application isn't helping: if I were engineering management, I'd take two or three releases and just focus on .com. Rewrite code. Focus on pages that return in longer than 4 seconds and rewrite them. When you've got all of that, work on getting that down to three seconds. Make gitlab so that you can run it on a small DO droplet for a team of one or two people. Include LE support out of the box. Work on getting rid of the omnibus insanity. Caching should be a first class citizen in the Gitlab ecosystem.
I still believe in Gitlab. I still believe in the Leadership team. Hell, if Sid came to me today and said, "Hey, we really need your technical expertise here, could you help us out," I'd do so in a heartbeat -- because I want to see GitLab succeed (because we need to have quality open source alternatives to Jira, SourceForge Enterprise Edition, and others).
Not trying to be combative, but, "You truly get what you pay for" seems a little vindictive here -- the one thing that I wish they would have done was be open with the salary from the beginning -- but, Sid made it very clear that the offer that he would give me was going to be "considerably less" than what I was making.
> They really should focus on creating jobs that pays $200,000+ a year, regardless of living location, to attract the best talent from around the world. Getting 3-6 top talent, that can help steer the company in the right direction, can make all the difference in the long run.
SIGN ME UP! That would be a freaking great opportunity!!
Yup - top talent is already making more. Gitlab needs to recruit with purpose (this is what we're doing and why), environment (remote first, transparency, etc), and pay (we can match 70% of what you'd get at XYZ Company). Right now, it feels like they're capped at 30-50% of what someone could make at a big org, which is just a drop in salary most people would never take, regardless of the company values/purpose.
One alternate idea would be to hire consultants on a temporary basis. You may not be able to pay $250k a year, but you could pay a one time $40k fee to review the architecture and come up with prioritized strategy for disaster recovery and scalability.
Why would they try to recruit from Microsoft? Most of the software engineers at Microsoft are not focused on developing scalable web services architectures. And the ones that do have built up all of their expertise with Microsoft technologies (.net running on Windows server talking to mssql).
>Microsoft and others that have top talent/domain expertise, will have the advantage.
Again, Microsoft isn't even in this same field (git hosting) or if they are, are effectively irrelevant due to little market/mindshare. Are you an employee there or something?
> Most of the software engineers at Microsoft are not focused on developing scalable web services architectures.
Uh, MS literally runs Azure, which may not be the biggest IAAS offering, but is certainly vastly larger and more complex than Gitlab. There are certainly numerous engineers at MS who would have experience relevant to Gitlab (though perhaps not with their particular tech stack). It may not be most of the engineers there, but in a company with literally tens of thousands of engineers, there are few things that will be true of most of them.
> Microsoft isn't even in this same field (git hosting)
How is what they're hosting at all relevant to the problem at hand? This could have happened regardless of what the end product was - it's a database issue. In fact, the git infrastructure was explicitly not involved in this issue - it was only their DB-backed features that had data loss.
Additionally, Microsoft is in the business of git hosting, if only tangentially. TFS supports git, and has since 2013: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mvpawardprogram/2013/11/13/... Your objection is both unkind and factually incorrect. The "mindshare" comment is a bit silly - even though they may not be as active on forums like HN, developers working on MS technologies are still one of the largest groups in programming (as a non-MS developer looking for work in the Pacific Northwest, this is something I'm constantly reminded of). I doubt your estimate of Microsoft's real mindshare is anything close to accurate.
> Are you an employee there or something?
This accusation is eminently not in the spirit of HN, and Microsoft was hardly the only company he mentioned. Whatever your personal vendetta against them, it's absurd to think that Microsoft is not one of the top pools of talent in tech - they're a huge company with a vast variety of offerings and divisions.
I'm not sure if you read my post correctly, but I never mentioned poaching from Microsoft. I said compete for programmers that would choose to work for Microsoft. I'm also not sure if you understand what Microsoft does. It's a very diverse company with R&D spending that rivals some small nations.
> Microsoft isn't even in this same field (git hosting
Microsoft understands Enterprise and it's quite obvious they want to be a major provider for Git hosting. It will be foolish to believe Microsoft is not focused on owning the Git mindshare in Enterprise.
> Are you an employee there or something
No. Just somebody that understands this problem space.
One of the main drivers of revenue for Microsoft is Office 365, with 23.1 million subscribers[0]. Along with Azure, MS runs some of the largest web services around. Most developers at MS don't necessarily work on these products, but to say that all the devs working on them use a simple .NET stack + SQL Server is discrediting a lot of work that they do.
Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft in the Office division and opinions are my own
Hey there, honest question incoming. Any chances of you chaps making Word a better documentation tool in the future? Edit history storing formatting and data changes on the same tree is making it impossible to use Word for anything serious. This really comes to light once you start working at an MS tech company on documentation, where it is obvious that you should use MS products for work. Some tech writers I know just end up using separate technology branches for their group efforts, since neither Sharepoint nor Word is a professional tool for this job.
Since GitLab is so transparent about everything, from their marketing/sales/feature proposals/technical issues/etc., they make it glaringly obvious, from time to time, that they lack very fundamental core skills, to do things right/well. In my opinion, they really need to focus on recruiting top talent, with domain expertise.
They (GitLab) need to convince those that would work for Microsoft or GitHub, to work for GitLab. With their current hiring strategy, they are getting capable employees, but they are not getting employees that can help solidify their place online (gitlab.com) and in Enterprise. The fact that they were so nonchalant about running bare metal and talking about implementing features, that they have no basic understanding of, clearly shows the need for better technical guidance.
They really should focus on creating jobs that pays $200,000+ a year, regardless of living location, to attract the best talent from around the world. Getting 3-6 top talent, that can help steer the company in the right direction, can make all the difference in the long run.
GitLab right now, is building a great company to help address low hanging fruit problems, but not a team that can truly compete with GitHub, Atlassian, and Microsoft in the long run. Once the low hanging fruit problems have been addressed, people are going to expect more from Git hosting and this is where Atlassian, GitHub, Microsoft and others that have top talent/domain expertise, will have the advantage.
Let this setback be a vicious reminder that you truly get what you pay for and that it's not too late to build a better team for the future.