pritianka

Hah, I love the "GitLab Mature Edition" idea!

From what I have heard from users and customers, the self-hosted folks are indeed super duper happy. The nice thing about the self-hosted option is that regardless of how open an employer company maybe about sending data places, devs can try out the product. That's led to our super awesome enterprise adoption to some degree (IMHO).

Agree. It's about consistency over time (and now across companies and products with the adoption) vs perfect.

Hi there! I hear what you are saying especially if you are considering recommending the full single application. As our maturity model shares, we are better at some stages than others. So I would share parts of the product that really work for you all the time and let people experience for themselves.

Hi there! Just wanted to add my two cents here. Just like you choose to use SCM and workflow review, we have a lot of other users and customers utilizing different permutations and combinations of the various stages. Over time, various stages all move toward maturity, some faster than others. I know this is a different model than most software companies and it has its downsides. But the net positive is that we are able to provide an increasingly unified experience for DevOps. Note that at other companies the same thing happens except they market different stages as separate "products". They gain on the marketing but lose on the ultimate user benefit (again, IMHO).

What an awesome compliment for our team. Thank you!

I've been on both sides of the spectrum. At first, I couldn't ever imagine working remote. I was an office rat, spent a lot of time at my desk and then socializing with coworkers at happy hours and such. It was a super fun life. When I got the job offer at GitLab, I was super excited about the opportunity and took it in spite of it being remote.

Fast forward to a year later, my perspective has changed. It took me about 3-4 months to adjust but slowly I hit my stride. Today, I can confidently say that I am a lot more productive working all-remote. I don't have to travel or change rooms for meetings, I am fully connected to folks via Slack and Zoom and GitLab issues, and I am working in the comfiest clothes :p. So 8 hours of work in all-remote is equivalent to probably 10 hours in an office.

Socially, I do co-working calls with people, hang out in the slack channels (#dad_jokes and #dog being two favorites), and Zoom as I need to. I never feel left out. I have to say though, I would probably not enjoy being remote when others are in an office because then there is a clear hierarchy of social interactions then.

I work at GitLab and I completely agree with this! Choices for users and our industry is moving forward embracing the single application philosophy.

Glad you appreciate the GitLab experience! I agree with you that loving the product is what it is about. I am happy everyone gets free repos across the board now (whether at GitLab, GitHub, or BitBucket) since repos are basically commoditized at this point. In my opinion (shaped by our CEO Sid's perspective), all roads lead to compute.

To clarify, we are not getting into the cloud play at all. We support multi-cloud deployments of any kind now including serverless. So you can use the GitLab UI to plan, build, deploy, manage serverless apps/functions with the rest of your code. Knative helps us deploy to any cloud.

Hehe, I agree. Sadly, IMO the term has taken over and so we’re stuck with it because of the quick recognition people have to serverless ...

Yes, sorry about that! Thanks for fixing, dsumenkovic :-)

Hi folks - appreciate the discussion here. Our ceo put down his thoughts in the GitLab handbook about our policy to pay local rates - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c.... Do check it out. Doesn’t mean the calculator is perfect but speaks to the universal comp vs localized.

No problem at all and glad you find the candor useful. It is one of our company values to be transparent :-).

I also hear you in your concern. There is a flip side perspective to what you are saying as well where someone might be forced to uproot from their home which happens to be in a more expensive area because they would save so much elsewhere. But regardless of the specific arguments, what I have truly learned here in this thread is that we should continue the conversation in the community. I am going to sync up with the people ops org and suggest that we share our rationale in more detail in the near future and/or also incorporate the good points that were raised.

I do think it is amazing that GitLab brings these conversations to the fore because opacity has been the norm for way too long around comp and we need to change that as an industry and community.

"Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc."

I, personally, did not know about the way we treat intl comp on the calculator because I do not work in people ops. I found it useful new information.

Also, the live stream will be released on Youtube right after it's done.

Yeah, just use your personal!

Thanks for the balanced viewpoint! Appreciate you sticking with us :-)

+1000

This article by Frederic over at Techcrunch has an interview with Sid, our CEO at GitLab. It should answer a lot of people's questions in the comments below. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/

Thanks for asking. One of our big goals is to address the awareness-gap about the GitLab offering.

So instead of a version control system that lets people try out different integrations, GitLab provides an opinionated (yet flexible with key integrations and the option to opt out of anything you don't want) way to run the entire software development and deployment lifecycle. You can start with planning your issues, then you create the code (usually in your editor of choice but there's a web IDE that makes quick fixes much faster in GitLab), then you store your code with our version control. Using the GitLab CI you can set up automated jobs that include all kinds of tests (we provide the Auto DevOps pipeline for a set of best practices to automatically do tests and security scans and also provide Prometheus metrics without you having to do a thing). Then comes the CD part, followed by monitoring via Prometheus and tracing with Jaeger. You can deploy the code to k8s clusters directly on GitLab making k8s a lot more accessible to developers and then run it on any cloud. Our GKE integration is pretty dope. I personally am working on bringing similar serverless functionality to the product soon as well. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I covered the main aspects from my perspective. You can learn more here - https://about.gitlab.com/features/

That's probably usually true but as an SF resident, I can tell you the schools, utilities, and public services aren't what I would call world class here :p. Wish this was more like New York that way hehe.

This is really useful information. Thanks for sharing. I will put this in front of our CCO, Barbie.

I'm sorry to hear that. We value iteration over perfection and so that can be jarring sometimes. I am surprised to hear about the CI experience though. Did you try the Auto DevOps pipeline or just CI generally? Would love to help out if you are open. Twitter.com/pritianka DM me!

Yay! Thanks for sharing the positive experience. We know .com performance is something we need to improve and as mentioned in the comment above, are working super hard to get there.

Also, as Sid has publicly stated (not that that's special, we state everything publicly lol) our goal is IPO 2020, not a Series D. We are on the way!

There'll be more about what made the VCs invest in the live stream tomorrow (10 AM PT / 1pm ET / 5pm UTC). You can register at https://about.gitlab.com/webcast/whats-next-for-gitlab/ but the tl;dr is that the VCs have been following GitLab's progress and metrics for a while now and it was not a kneejerk reaction (even though I get that the timing might make it feel like that).

+1 to the "I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on." I've been super impressed working with Sid that his eye is always on the prize and he pushes us to work towards making our users and customers happy rather than go after any vanity metrics. It's ironic but this is novel in the valley now :p.

We actually spoke to this topic in our Series C announcement last year. If we pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more expensive areas. By making it about the cost of living, we make sure everyone is taken care of based on living needs. That said, we have an awesome chief culture officer who is leading efforts to make sure our comp calculator is fair and encourages people to apply.