16 ms·

GitLab raises $20M Series C round led by GV

214 points by sus_007 9y ago

elliotec 9y ago
“As for the funding itself, GitLab says that it plans to use it to add “new functionality for packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring software.” Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now?
- wulfmann 9y ago
  Is it common knowledge that they don't?
  - FBISurveillance 9y ago
    You can judge yourself, their Compensation Calculator is at the bottom of https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
    - bflesch 9y ago
      Wow, that really is a beautiful piece of software. I think the compensation it returns for Hamburg is very much on point and definitely fair.
      - tdb7893 9y ago
        It's a little low for Minnesota in the US, in my opinion. I could definitely get a little higher than that in the Twin Cities but I think being able to work remotely is a perk that people are willing to take a small pay cut for
        jobvandervoort 9y ago
        We also continuously iterate on the compensation calculator, often because of feedback from applicants and employees. Read about the ideas behind it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
        joshuamorton 9y ago
        While I won't comment on the raw salary numbers, I am curious about how long you feel it should take someone to graduate from "new to the position" to "learning the position"? Because it seems like if that time period is less than two years, you'll be underpaying your long term employees vs. a new hire of equivalent skill, which seems like a not good thing. Also your Experience Factor Worksheet is private, whether or not you care.
      - itake 9y ago
        as an American remote worker that interviewed there from Argentina, it was really frustrating for them to tell me they wanted to pay me $50k less because I choose to live in a cheaper city. Even though I was currently making market rate SF money. They had the budget for me if I lived in SF, but they stuck with their lowball offer.
        kuschku 9y ago
        It’s about fairness. Would it be fair if a SF hire had a lower wage (after expenses) than an argentinian hire? No. So Gitlab tries to optimize for every employee having the same disposable wage, no matter where they live. That’s why they have this system.
        itake 9y ago
        It is not a fair system. Thats like saying, "well, Frank bought a BMW and owns a house, so he gets to get paid more." They chose to live in an expensive city and have an expensive life style. If a hire lived with their parents in SF, does that mean they get paid less than their coworker that rents an apartment?
        kuschku 9y ago
        Fairness isn’t that simply defined. As is tought in any philosophy class in middle or high school, there’s multiple needs. Give everyone according to their needs? Everyone the same? Fairness isn’t that simple. Gitlab is trying to find a solution that is fair in their opinion, and if you disagree with that, you are free to choose a different employer.
        naturalgradient 9y ago
        This reminds me of a recruiter telling me 'people don't work here for the money, they work here for the opportunity, and it's more than enough to live on' when asking for market rate salary. Big tech company, you can probably guess which.
      - 112012123 9y ago
        Chicago is really low... the calculator returns ~$50k for a position that would pay 85 or 90 around here. I imagine they mostly target european employees? I know salaries tend to be much lower in the EU.
        icebraining 9y ago
        I think the issue is that they don't adjust for what the market is offering, they just take a standard NYC salary and adjust it depending on your city's rent. So if your city has a better market-salary:rent ratio than NYC, their salaries are not competitive. Conversely, they pay pretty well in Lisbon, since the rent is actually quite high compared to the pittance that software developers earn (which is why long commutes are common).
      - antjanus 9y ago
        Yeah, I think it depends on the area. I'm out in Denver and the compensation for an average senior developer seems to be on par with what some salary websites tell me but it's definitely way below what I currently get paid (and below what I've been paid for the past 3ish years).
    - wes-k 9y ago
      Gitlab is a remote company and yet location plays into salary. I get that they need to do this to be competitive but still a 1.263x multiplier for San Francisco vs my 0.466x for TN. Seems like the smart play is to briefly live in SF, secure the >2x salary and then move. Also, kudos on them for this calculator - very transparent!
      - chrissnell 9y ago
        Nope, they adjust your salary for cost-of-living if you move. It’s on their wiki.
        sschueller 9y ago
        But the calculator is based on rent not cost-of-living. For example rent may be 6% lower in Zürich than in Geneva but Groceries are more than 12% more expensive. [1] [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Switzerland&city1=Geneva&country2=Switzerland&city2=Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
        petepete 9y ago
        With the difference in salary between 'rest of England' and 'London' you could probably afford to rent a very modest one bedroom flat in London while living elsewhere and still earn more.
    - p0nce 9y ago
      For this local area, not only they would offer a good salary but also remote. Amazing transparency i'd say.
    - geofft 9y ago
      As a senior dev with 5-ish years of experience in NYC, GitLab's calculator for "Developer" is offering me a $144,106-$157,207 base pay, plus stock options (because they are options I'm giving them an expected value of 0; I could value them more accurately if they were public about shares outstanding but they aren't). If I max out the sliders and call myself a lead, that goes up to $183,408. https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ For comparison, Etsy gave me an offer earlier this year that was $185K, and came out literally in the week they had layoffs, and Google gave me an offer earlier this year that added up to about $215K (base + 15% bonus + RSUs which have an obvious nonzero cash value), with an expectation of year-over-year growth. (The actual job I accepted was higher than either of these.) I think GitLab's numbers make sense in several markets but not in NYC and probably not in SFBA either. To be fair to them, there's no good reason to pay someone market rates for those cities when they're hiring a remote workforce, but the fact remains that they're significantly under market and probably losing out on good candidates as a result.
      - muse900 9y ago
        Sorry but I think its wrong to compare Gitlab to Google, even Etsy tbh. Its obvious that Google can offer high salaries. Same with Etsy, while its nowhere near Googles level, I feel like Gitlab's cashflow is nowhere near Etsy's cashflow either. I checked for London and I can say that Gitlab seems to be giving out a low to average salary at best. Which is not bad considering that you can be working remotely from your home etc etc, and get maybe more shares in a startup like Gitlab. But ye all and all I feel the OP is a bit right that since they got a better funding they should be looking at accumulating their salaries to go up for their devs that have been getting bellow market rates.
        geofft 9y ago
        Yeah, I don't expect GitLab to reach Google salaries, but I do think that the data point is useful for knowing how much they are below Google. (Note also that this was an unnegotiated offer; I tried negotiating, evidently not very well, and only got Google to budge about $5K. I'd imagine the legendary Google offers are the ones you get if you are in a position to get Google into a bidding war for you with another comparably-profitable company, and I certainly don't think those can be called "market rate".) I do expect them to reach Etsy - they had been facing serious investor pressure at that point and laid off a lot of people in a lot of departments including the CEO and CTO, and had not reported a profit for several quarters (they reported one this year after the layoffs). They laid off their summer interns two weeks before the summer, leaving the poor college kids scrambling to find another internship. That's not a company with enough cashflow to make significantly-higher-than-market offers. And yeah, the comment above (as I read it) was in comparison to GitLab raising a significant funding round.
    - JCharante 9y ago
      Interesting how they consider Puerto Rico to be a country of its own instead of an area under the US.
    - akarambir 9y ago
      For India, they have just two areas: Mumbai and Anywhere else. I am living in Gurgaon(near New Delhi) and it is as expensive as Mumbai in terms of renting an apartment. So Mumbai(0.227) and elsewhere(0.103) is not fair. I guess they don't have much data for elsewhere. I appreciate them being transparent about this. But the calculator suggested salary was too low for me to consider applying :(
- meddlepal 9y ago
  What does this comment even mean? If their employees do not like the compensation package they should negotiate better or leave. Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary? Negotiate if you want better comp. Nobody in this industry is a McDonald's/Walmart wage slave. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to work for GitLab.
  - chrissnell 9y ago
    GitLab has an exclusively remote workforce that is globally distributed. They put their compensation guidelines up on their wiki for the world to see and readily acknowledge that they adjust salaries for cost-of-living. It’s not a huge problem for them, I suppose, because they are willing to hire workers in lower-cost areas where tech jobs at well-known companies are relatively scarce. Personally, this goes against my hiring philosophy and as a remote manager at another company, I insist on remote salaries for my team that match Bay Area salaries. I make up the difference by getting pick-of-the-litter hires that I wouldn’t have a chance of getting if I was going up against the Facebook/Google/Netflixes for a local SFBA hire. I don’t know if GitLab employees have much recourse individually or collectively. It will probably take a market change to get them to adjust. I have no beef with them and would have considered them more seriously during my last move—such a rad product!—-but their comp is close to $100K less than what I can get working remote for many other SFBA startups.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      That's a good thing though, paying with regards to market rate - it's what SF has to do, given how cost of living there is exorbitant and even with the high wages there unaffordable.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary? This is pretty rude given that you're the one who's not knowledgeable here. GitLab is extremely public about salary - if you go any job application page they'll tell you what the pay bands are. There is very limited room for negotiation, on purpose. I agree that nobody is forced to work for GitLab. I completely skipped them over in my last job hunt because their pay bands were much lower than anything else I could find, even though I would have enjoyed the job. I have a friend who did the same. I think that's unfortunate for GitLab / the world and wish they would raise their pay so they can attract candidates who are getting higher offers elsewhere, so they can build a better service. This is a very different sort of complaint from wage slavery, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.
- bflesch 9y ago
  What sources is this argument based on? Don't they have a mainly remote team?
- NicoJuicy 9y ago
  GitLab is Europe + remote. But i don't know what you're talking about. Some clarification would be nice
- earlybike 9y ago
  > Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now? This is a defamatory statement and surprisingly not done anonymously. So, maybe you present us the full story, otherwise it's hard to believe that all employees of Gitlab are underpaid and that one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > This is a defamatory statement Why is it defamatory? > one person like you knows salaries of all employees there. Their salaries are public.
- manigandham 9y ago
  If people are willing to work for them, then they are in fact paying the "market rate" - a meaningless term in itself. Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else. Let them decide for themselves.
  - geofft 9y ago
    > Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else. That's certainly true. But as a GitLab user, I want to make sure they're hiring the best candidates to work on the product. Is that an unreasonable thing to want?
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Ok but that's a different topic. I also think you want the best product, regardless of how that's done. Asking for the best candidates is a rather indirect way to get there and I'm sure they understand their business better than anyone here.
      - geofft 9y ago
        I think they understand their business well, but I'm not sure if they understand market salaries well, given that our culture is notoriously opaque about salaries and one would hope that senior leadership at GitLab is not in the habit of applying to individual-contributor jobs at other companies to get a sense of what offers look like. That means that hearing people complain about their pay bands is probably one of the only good ways for them to get information about whether they're significantly below market or not - as I mentioned in another comment, I just didn't bother applying to GitLab because they were so far below what I could get elsewhere, so they have no information from their normal HR process that I even exist, let alone what a competitive salary for me would be. Once they have that information, then yes, I trust them to make decisions that are good for their business (I wanted to work there, after all!), but I still think that it's appropriate for users to express opinions if we think they're making poor decisions.
        9y ago
- yesimahuman 9y ago
  If their salaries are too low, then they should struggle to hire and it'd be their own damn fault. The calculator salaries are lower for my area than what I see, so they should fail to hire here if they are truly that low.
- relaunched 9y ago
  Full disclosure, my wife is a gitLabber. Gitlab is uncomfortably transparent with how they compensate their employees. Given their remote policy and openness regarding compensation, no one is surprised with their pay and everyone can take it or leave it, which you can view https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... If you are a developer / professional living in a rural area and don't want to move or have a commute, I'm certain you'd find gitLab both lucrative and a fun place to work.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluelu 9y ago
    If they were consequent about paying less or more depending on where you live, they would also charge their customers less or more depending on where they live.
    - relaunched 9y ago
      I'd imagine, like most companies, they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver. While the argument you're making is sound, I'd challenge you to think of it this way: gitLab wants the best talent, no matter where they live. If they happen to live in a high cost area, vs someone that lives in a low cost area, both uniquely qualified, would it make sense to make sure two qualified candidates get approximately the same buying power's worth of compensation? Companies already adjust base pay based on your location, Google, for example. It also takes a bit of the good versus bad negotiator penalty out of the equation, which provides a level of fairness that doesn't exist in most companies.
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        > they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver. So do I, that's why I don't work for a company that says "well you life in a low-cost area, so you need to charge us less". Their policy is transparent, and it is take-it-or-leave-it. I think the salary gripes you're hearing from many commenters is that they are leaving it, when they'd very much like to work for Gitlab, as it's a company I personally like. However, what they're doing will either get them developers in the most highly-paid areas (where their salaries are actually competitive) or lower-paid developers that are actually not the best their local market has to offer (because the best developers are already employed elsewhere for higher pay). So, in essence, what they're doing is limiting their top-tier prospects to people who live in high-cost areas. As another commenter said at some point, living in the Valley has such high cost because there are benefits to it. Developers in SF can find a job more or less the minute they walk out of the door of one company, and that's something that's expensive. I don't have the same luxury, and Gitlab says "well, since you aren't paying for the privilege of job liquidity, we'll give you a lot less money".
methyl 9y ago
Does the new round going to help with reliability problems? I use GitHub ~90% of time and I can't recall any downtime, while for GitLab it's very often to see it being unavailable. I find the service great but it's really frustrating to see it being down so often.
- nik736 9y ago
  You don't remember any downtime with GitHub? Lol.
  - samblr 9y ago
    .. recently github has been awfully slow
- earlybike 9y ago
  I stopped using Github for private repos for three years. I get them for free from Bitbucket and Gitlab. So, I think the actual contender to Gitlab is Bitbucket and not Github. However, Bitbucket feels a bit more organized and mature (the UI). What I also like: Bitbucket has the real Trello integrated which is great. I still like Gitlab, it's always good to have competition.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    what does this comment have to do with parent comment about site reliability/uptime ?
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    How is Github not the main contender just because of private repo pricing? GitHub is the Goliath here. Also none of this has anything to do with up or down time.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      > GitHub is the Goliath here For open source projects, but it appears to me that the enterprise projects are more BitBucket. This is just my experience, but I can't see how GitHub even competes with Enterprise Support that comes from BitBucket.
deleted 9y ago
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estsauver 9y ago
What I'm most surprised by in this thread is the toxicness. As of right now there are only two threads that I can see, one that is slamming Gitlab's salaries and one that is slamming their reliability. Gitlab is building something nearly completely in the open, and doing it quite well in my opinion. They're the best open source reference for how to ship on premises software I've seen, and I frequently refer people to them as an example. You may not like their compensation structure, but they have certainly been quite transparent. If we want to see more companies build around open source and bring transparency, a small touch of forgiveness is probably worthwhile. I'm a little disappointed in the HN community. (I'm not affiliated with gitlab other than being a customer.)
- koolba 9y ago
  > What I'm most surprised by in this thread is the toxicness. As of right now there are only two threads that I can see, one that is slamming Gitlab's salaries and one that is slamming their reliability. After many year on the internet, it's not that surprising. It's best summed up as, "Haters gonna hate.". The jabs at the cloud offerring's reliability are valid. That includes both uptime and the horrendous data loss event they had earlier this year. I don't recall anything major after though not knowing about internals, can't tell if they learned from it or have just gotten lucky. As a CE user I love GitLab. It does what it says on the tin and for the most part I don't have to think about it. The UI changes every other release are bit haphazard but not enough for me to truly care. I've always thought that slamming their open comp policy is hilarious. They're one of the most open companies about how they handle comp and the result is they get insulted for it. I'm not saying I agree with the formulas (in particular the non-NYC COLA adjustments are out of whack) or the general approach, but to say they're worse than the voodoo guesswork that goes into figuring out how much a company is going to pay you is disingenuous. Especially if it's after a number of interviews only to find out they're going to low ball you. At least in GitLab's case I know, at the current comp levels, I'd never work there or even interview there. And that's beyond fair for the worker. Plus it seems to be working fine because they've got a bunch of people that are happy to work there.
  - matteeyah 9y ago
deckar01 9y ago
> WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is joining the company’s board. I suspect this has more to do with Akismet than WordPress. They are using Akismet to filter spam issues, but it seems to have a problem with false positives after making edits.
- mattl 9y ago
  More likely Matt knows a lot about running a free software business, which is what GitLab is for the most part.
  - relaunched 9y ago
    This is interesting because the two companies are very similar, with Automaticc being a few steps ahead in several areas: distributed workforce, developer first, size / stage of the company. It helps to have someone who has solved the very problems you'll be facing.
    - pibefision 9y ago
      25% of the webs runs on Wordpress, which is more than a few steps ahead, in my opinion.
      - hellojason 9y ago
        Recent stats now suggest just under 29% of the web (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/al...).
__s 9y ago
On wages: the lowest pay they offer in London Ontario is higher than my current salary, & I've been given a 10k raise over the course of the past two years. Figured I'd mention seeing people going as far as getting into the topic of minimum wage. Slippery slope (as an aside, totally for hire)
- wtflmaohnisdumb 9y ago
  Canadians are criminally underpaid. I made significantly more than many full-time employees (I'd wager the majority) on more than half of my internships. Adjusted for rent and cost of living. I do love London, Ontario though. Beautiful place even if it's too homogenous and quiet outside of around Western university.
pathseeker 9y ago
Good, a company that cares about open source to dethrone Github.
- baldfat 9y ago
  I don't see how GitHub will ever be dethroned due to the mind share and market share of Open Source projects. It is a simple process to move to GitLab BUT all the developer tools for many projects relies on GitHub. When I get a package in Racket or R they normally come from github automatically.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    10 years ago: > I don't see how SourceForge will ever be dethroned due to the mind share and market share of Open Source projects.
    - baldfat 9y ago
      That was due to SourceForge and how they decided not to develop their project and destroy the user experience.
      - eecc 9y ago
        you never know what may happen to GH, they're private property after all. Options help in keeping all actors sober and sane
      - dbbk 9y ago
        There is absolutely nothing stopping history repeating itself with GitHub.
  - y4mi 9y ago
    i've recently come across quite a few repositories with the header 'this is a read only clone, go here (gitlab) for the real repository'
  - urda 9y ago
keepper 9y ago
Hopefully now they will realize that they should run on a colo rather than be wholly on the cloud... and hire for that expertise (their previous attempt to do so was a bit amateurish, which is understandable ). Nothing blows money faster than unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth when you're not charging for it... And before you down vote me, realize that github, their main competitor, runs on a colo for this very same reason. No matter how much revenue you get from paid accounts, and selling on-prem installs, the free service popularity which fuels the paid revenue will outpace it for the forseable future. Trying to reign in those cost, isn't a bad ( or hard ) thing.
- hackbinary 9y ago
  Could you clarify what you mean by the difference between colo vs on-prem? We run their on-prem in our colo, and it works great for us.
  - SteveNuts 9y ago
    He's talking about where GitLab should run their services from. He meant GitLab should purchase hardware and move into a colo rather than run off of cloud services.
  - joeblubaugh 9y ago
    I believe he means that the "SaaS option" is run in the cloud by GitLab itself, which is probably very expensive given that the nature of the service is both storage and network-intensive. If GitLab operated their own datacenter(s) it could be considerably less expensive.
  - citruspi 9y ago
    I think keepper meant that GitLab.com (the hosted service) should colo instead of running in the cloud[0]. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t...
  - zaidf 9y ago
    Colocated hosting refers to a kind of hosting where Gitlab puts their own hardware inside of a data center. They primarily pay the data center for physical space (also called rackspace), bandwidth and power but they don't pay for the the server itself since the physical hardware belongs to you. Dedicated hosting is similar to colocated hosting with the only difference being the physical server is rented to you by the data center. This is different from cloud hosting because unlike cloud hosting, with dedicated servers you are the only customer using the physical server that is located in the data center. An off-shoot of dedicated hosting is a VPS (virtual private server.) VPS can be seen as a mix of cloud and dedicated in that the physical server's resources are split between x customers but each customer has their own virtual machine with root access.
odiroot 9y ago
Really happy for GitLab. They are definitely more than just another Github clone. As I don't need to maintain an installation myself I don't mind it having some issues. From the end user perspective it's doing its job.
nathan_f77 9y ago
> GitLab says that it plans to use it to add “new functionality for packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring software.” I can't wait for GitLab to offer hosting. They already do such a good job with their CI containers. It will be amazing when I can host my code, run my tests, and deploy my app all on the same service.
- jazoom 9y ago
  GitLab is amazing but I wouldn't host with them until they fix their frequent downtime issues.
brianllamar 9y ago
congrats to GitLab they seem to be taking the right chances in the right places. I am hopeful this tangentially helps grow the Vuejs community as well. https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-21-why-gitlab-chose-vue-js/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-...
ssully 9y ago
I wish Gitlab all the success in the world. My team utilized Gitlabs on premise offerings and it's always been a good experience to use. They are adding new features at a modest pace and their support people have always been helpful. I really need to try them out for my personal projects but I haven't had the chance.
kecoco0207 9y ago
There are currently possible ways for the public to access and invest in the private start-up companies like GitLab and GitHub. For example, EquityZen is a platform that lets people to invest in private pre-IPO: https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comments&utm_campaign=investor https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comm...
sytse 9y ago
We also announced today where we'll take GitLab in the future with complete DevOps, for more information please see the live event recording or slides https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million-to-complete-devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million...
- sinaa 9y ago
  Really happy for GitLab and wish you guys all the best (and luck). We've been using Gitlab for all our company's development, however, one major issue that is pushing us to switch over to GitHub is the fact that GitLab goes down almost every other day (or sometimes every day) due to deployments. Although during this often the site remains available, when CI is not executed or triggers are not performed, it is still extremely disruptive. I really hope that you prioritise having disruption-free deployments.
  - sytse 9y ago
    Thanks for your comment. Self hosted GitLab has been very reliable but GitLab.com's availability has been far below par. It is our nr. 1 focus to improve this. Deployments should not cause disruptions. Over the last few months we solved the speed of GitLab.com. Availability is next.
    - lucideer 9y ago
      Firstly, I'm really happy to see Gitlab growing and desperately want to see it succeed. We need an open-source alternative, and the organisational transparency within the company is also wonderful. However... > we solved the speed of GitLab.com I'm currently browsing a repo tree and each page is taking 5+ seconds to load (I am literally browsing HN while waiting for pages to open). This is a common experience. Please please don't get complacent. Not yet.
      - sytse 9y ago
        Thanks, I wanted to indicate our primary focus moved from the speed to the availability. But you're very right that there is still much to improve. We're not happy until every page is fast. Specifically about the repo tree page load: 1. I'll share this comment with our VP of Eng 2. We're working on Gitaly to make git calls faster. 3. We're working on a multifile editor to make browsing faster. BTW Here is a graph of how some of the other pages improved https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ztha1av8t0fcau/Screenshot%202017-10-10%2008.59.11.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ztha1av8t0fcau/Screenshot%202017-...
fro0116 9y ago
It feels to me like GitLab might be shooting themselves in the foot by spreading their resources too thin, too quickly. They have the very grand ambition to take over the entire devops toolchain from source control to deployment, and some parts of the toolchain can certainly benefit from the tight vertical integration that GitLab provides, and when everything just works the product does end up providing a very streamlined user experience. However, this also means that their monolithic toolchain has to be able to out-compete best-of-class specialized tools in every part of the chain, and every part of the chain where they fail to do so could end up as a potential dealbreaker for a large subset of their user base. I've used GitLab.com for a few projects, and in general I've found the various aspects of their product sorely lacking in terms of overall polish, performance, and capability compared to excellent specialized products like GitHub for VCS, CircleCI for CI/CD, and Pivotal Tracker for project tracking/planning, etc. Also, the fact that they're trying to take over the entire toolchain means that just about everybody else in the devops space sees them as a direct competitor, so until they grow to become an 80-pound gorrila that nobody can ignore in at least 1 part of the toolchain, very few other companies building devops tooling will willingly integrate with their product, which makes them even less attractive for users with specific/more advanced needs that their product alone can't meet. With all that said, I really appreciate their dedication to open-source and am personally rooting for their success, but I can't help but shake the feeling that they're fighting a losing battle. DevOps tooling is simply too diverse, complex, and opinionated a field for any 1 company to dominate from end-to-end. Focusing resources to become the best tool for the job in 1 area and using that leverage to foster an open-ecosystem around that product seems like a much more viable long term strategy (though that could certainly prove to be difficult if you're trying to become the best tool for VCS, due to how entrenched GitHub is in terms of developer mindshare).
- sytse 9y ago
  We are very afraid of spreading ourselves too thin too. Recently we've been encouraged by how GitLab CI is doing, it is winning developers gitlab-ci-is-the-most-popular-next-generation-ci-system and industry analysts over https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous-integration-forrester-wave/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous... I think what makes GitLab different is that more than 1800 people contributed to it to increase the depth. Our team members are focussed on increasing the breath. From https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ "We realize our competitors have started earlier and have more capital. Because we started later we need a more compelling product that covers the complete scope, that is integrated out of the box, and that is cloud native. Because we have less capital, we need to build that as a community. Therefore it is important to share and ship our vision for the product. The people that have the most knowledge have to prioritize breadth over depth since only they can add new functionality. Making the functionality more comprehensive requires less coordination than making the initial minimal feature. Shipping functionality that is incomplete to expand the scope sometimes goes against our instincts. However leading the way is needed to allow others to see our path and contribute. With others contributing, we'll iterate faster to improve and polish functionality over time. So when in doubt, the rule of thumb is breadth over depth, so everyone can contribute."

214 points by sus_007 9y ago

“As for the funding itself, GitLab says that it plans to use it to add “new functionality for packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring software.” Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now?

wulfmann 9y ago
Is it common knowledge that they don't?
- FBISurveillance 9y ago
  You can judge yourself, their Compensation Calculator is at the bottom of https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/
  - bflesch 9y ago
    Wow, that really is a beautiful piece of software. I think the compensation it returns for Hamburg is very much on point and definitely fair.
    - tdb7893 9y ago
      It's a little low for Minnesota in the US, in my opinion. I could definitely get a little higher than that in the Twin Cities but I think being able to work remotely is a perk that people are willing to take a small pay cut for
      - jobvandervoort 9y ago
        We also continuously iterate on the compensation calculator, often because of feedback from applicants and employees. Read about the ideas behind it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
        joshuamorton 9y ago
        While I won't comment on the raw salary numbers, I am curious about how long you feel it should take someone to graduate from "new to the position" to "learning the position"? Because it seems like if that time period is less than two years, you'll be underpaying your long term employees vs. a new hire of equivalent skill, which seems like a not good thing. Also your Experience Factor Worksheet is private, whether or not you care.
    - itake 9y ago
      as an American remote worker that interviewed there from Argentina, it was really frustrating for them to tell me they wanted to pay me $50k less because I choose to live in a cheaper city. Even though I was currently making market rate SF money. They had the budget for me if I lived in SF, but they stuck with their lowball offer.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        It’s about fairness. Would it be fair if a SF hire had a lower wage (after expenses) than an argentinian hire? No. So Gitlab tries to optimize for every employee having the same disposable wage, no matter where they live. That’s why they have this system.
        itake 9y ago
        It is not a fair system. Thats like saying, "well, Frank bought a BMW and owns a house, so he gets to get paid more." They chose to live in an expensive city and have an expensive life style. If a hire lived with their parents in SF, does that mean they get paid less than their coworker that rents an apartment?
        kuschku 9y ago
        Fairness isn’t that simply defined. As is tought in any philosophy class in middle or high school, there’s multiple needs. Give everyone according to their needs? Everyone the same? Fairness isn’t that simple. Gitlab is trying to find a solution that is fair in their opinion, and if you disagree with that, you are free to choose a different employer.
        naturalgradient 9y ago
        This reminds me of a recruiter telling me 'people don't work here for the money, they work here for the opportunity, and it's more than enough to live on' when asking for market rate salary. Big tech company, you can probably guess which.
    - 112012123 9y ago
      Chicago is really low... the calculator returns ~$50k for a position that would pay 85 or 90 around here. I imagine they mostly target european employees? I know salaries tend to be much lower in the EU.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I think the issue is that they don't adjust for what the market is offering, they just take a standard NYC salary and adjust it depending on your city's rent. So if your city has a better market-salary:rent ratio than NYC, their salaries are not competitive. Conversely, they pay pretty well in Lisbon, since the rent is actually quite high compared to the pittance that software developers earn (which is why long commutes are common).
    - antjanus 9y ago
      Yeah, I think it depends on the area. I'm out in Denver and the compensation for an average senior developer seems to be on par with what some salary websites tell me but it's definitely way below what I currently get paid (and below what I've been paid for the past 3ish years).
  - wes-k 9y ago
    Gitlab is a remote company and yet location plays into salary. I get that they need to do this to be competitive but still a 1.263x multiplier for San Francisco vs my 0.466x for TN. Seems like the smart play is to briefly live in SF, secure the >2x salary and then move. Also, kudos on them for this calculator - very transparent!
    - chrissnell 9y ago
      Nope, they adjust your salary for cost-of-living if you move. It’s on their wiki.
      - sschueller 9y ago
        But the calculator is based on rent not cost-of-living. For example rent may be 6% lower in Zürich than in Geneva but Groceries are more than 12% more expensive. [1] [1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Switzerland&city1=Geneva&country2=Switzerland&city2=Zurich https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
      - petepete 9y ago
        With the difference in salary between 'rest of England' and 'London' you could probably afford to rent a very modest one bedroom flat in London while living elsewhere and still earn more.
  - p0nce 9y ago
    For this local area, not only they would offer a good salary but also remote. Amazing transparency i'd say.
  - geofft 9y ago
    As a senior dev with 5-ish years of experience in NYC, GitLab's calculator for "Developer" is offering me a $144,106-$157,207 base pay, plus stock options (because they are options I'm giving them an expected value of 0; I could value them more accurately if they were public about shares outstanding but they aren't). If I max out the sliders and call myself a lead, that goes up to $183,408. https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/developer/ For comparison, Etsy gave me an offer earlier this year that was $185K, and came out literally in the week they had layoffs, and Google gave me an offer earlier this year that added up to about $215K (base + 15% bonus + RSUs which have an obvious nonzero cash value), with an expectation of year-over-year growth. (The actual job I accepted was higher than either of these.) I think GitLab's numbers make sense in several markets but not in NYC and probably not in SFBA either. To be fair to them, there's no good reason to pay someone market rates for those cities when they're hiring a remote workforce, but the fact remains that they're significantly under market and probably losing out on good candidates as a result.
    - muse900 9y ago
      Sorry but I think its wrong to compare Gitlab to Google, even Etsy tbh. Its obvious that Google can offer high salaries. Same with Etsy, while its nowhere near Googles level, I feel like Gitlab's cashflow is nowhere near Etsy's cashflow either. I checked for London and I can say that Gitlab seems to be giving out a low to average salary at best. Which is not bad considering that you can be working remotely from your home etc etc, and get maybe more shares in a startup like Gitlab. But ye all and all I feel the OP is a bit right that since they got a better funding they should be looking at accumulating their salaries to go up for their devs that have been getting bellow market rates.
      - geofft 9y ago
        Yeah, I don't expect GitLab to reach Google salaries, but I do think that the data point is useful for knowing how much they are below Google. (Note also that this was an unnegotiated offer; I tried negotiating, evidently not very well, and only got Google to budge about $5K. I'd imagine the legendary Google offers are the ones you get if you are in a position to get Google into a bidding war for you with another comparably-profitable company, and I certainly don't think those can be called "market rate".) I do expect them to reach Etsy - they had been facing serious investor pressure at that point and laid off a lot of people in a lot of departments including the CEO and CTO, and had not reported a profit for several quarters (they reported one this year after the layoffs). They laid off their summer interns two weeks before the summer, leaving the poor college kids scrambling to find another internship. That's not a company with enough cashflow to make significantly-higher-than-market offers. And yeah, the comment above (as I read it) was in comparison to GitLab raising a significant funding round.
  - JCharante 9y ago
    Interesting how they consider Puerto Rico to be a country of its own instead of an area under the US.
  - akarambir 9y ago
    For India, they have just two areas: Mumbai and Anywhere else. I am living in Gurgaon(near New Delhi) and it is as expensive as Mumbai in terms of renting an apartment. So Mumbai(0.227) and elsewhere(0.103) is not fair. I guess they don't have much data for elsewhere. I appreciate them being transparent about this. But the calculator suggested salary was too low for me to consider applying :(
meddlepal 9y ago
What does this comment even mean? If their employees do not like the compensation package they should negotiate better or leave. Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary? Negotiate if you want better comp. Nobody in this industry is a McDonald's/Walmart wage slave. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to work for GitLab.
- chrissnell 9y ago
  GitLab has an exclusively remote workforce that is globally distributed. They put their compensation guidelines up on their wiki for the world to see and readily acknowledge that they adjust salaries for cost-of-living. It’s not a huge problem for them, I suppose, because they are willing to hire workers in lower-cost areas where tech jobs at well-known companies are relatively scarce. Personally, this goes against my hiring philosophy and as a remote manager at another company, I insist on remote salaries for my team that match Bay Area salaries. I make up the difference by getting pick-of-the-litter hires that I wouldn’t have a chance of getting if I was going up against the Facebook/Google/Netflixes for a local SFBA hire. I don’t know if GitLab employees have much recourse individually or collectively. It will probably take a market change to get them to adjust. I have no beef with them and would have considered them more seriously during my last move—such a rad product!—-but their comp is close to $100K less than what I can get working remote for many other SFBA startups.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    That's a good thing though, paying with regards to market rate - it's what SF has to do, given how cost of living there is exorbitant and even with the high wages there unaffordable.
- geofft 9y ago
  > Have you worked there? Do you know what the total compensation package is or are you just knowledgeable about base salary? This is pretty rude given that you're the one who's not knowledgeable here. GitLab is extremely public about salary - if you go any job application page they'll tell you what the pay bands are. There is very limited room for negotiation, on purpose. I agree that nobody is forced to work for GitLab. I completely skipped them over in my last job hunt because their pay bands were much lower than anything else I could find, even though I would have enjoyed the job. I have a friend who did the same. I think that's unfortunate for GitLab / the world and wish they would raise their pay so they can attract candidates who are getting higher offers elsewhere, so they can build a better service. This is a very different sort of complaint from wage slavery, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.
bflesch 9y ago
What sources is this argument based on? Don't they have a mainly remote team?
NicoJuicy 9y ago
GitLab is Europe + remote. But i don't know what you're talking about. Some clarification would be nice
earlybike 9y ago
> Are you also planning to pay your employees market rates now? This is a defamatory statement and surprisingly not done anonymously. So, maybe you present us the full story, otherwise it's hard to believe that all employees of Gitlab are underpaid and that one person like you knows salaries of all employees there.
- geofft 9y ago
  > This is a defamatory statement Why is it defamatory? > one person like you knows salaries of all employees there. Their salaries are public.
manigandham 9y ago
If people are willing to work for them, then they are in fact paying the "market rate" - a meaningless term in itself. Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else. Let them decide for themselves.
- geofft 9y ago
  > Anyone who doesn't want to work for GitLab can easily work somewhere else. That's certainly true. But as a GitLab user, I want to make sure they're hiring the best candidates to work on the product. Is that an unreasonable thing to want?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Ok but that's a different topic. I also think you want the best product, regardless of how that's done. Asking for the best candidates is a rather indirect way to get there and I'm sure they understand their business better than anyone here.
    - geofft 9y ago
      I think they understand their business well, but I'm not sure if they understand market salaries well, given that our culture is notoriously opaque about salaries and one would hope that senior leadership at GitLab is not in the habit of applying to individual-contributor jobs at other companies to get a sense of what offers look like. That means that hearing people complain about their pay bands is probably one of the only good ways for them to get information about whether they're significantly below market or not - as I mentioned in another comment, I just didn't bother applying to GitLab because they were so far below what I could get elsewhere, so they have no information from their normal HR process that I even exist, let alone what a competitive salary for me would be. Once they have that information, then yes, I trust them to make decisions that are good for their business (I wanted to work there, after all!), but I still think that it's appropriate for users to express opinions if we think they're making poor decisions.
      - 9y ago
yesimahuman 9y ago
If their salaries are too low, then they should struggle to hire and it'd be their own damn fault. The calculator salaries are lower for my area than what I see, so they should fail to hire here if they are truly that low.
relaunched 9y ago
Full disclosure, my wife is a gitLabber. Gitlab is uncomfortably transparent with how they compensate their employees. Given their remote policy and openness regarding compensation, no one is surprised with their pay and everyone can take it or leave it, which you can view https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... If you are a developer / professional living in a rural area and don't want to move or have a commute, I'm certain you'd find gitLab both lucrative and a fun place to work.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bluelu 9y ago
  If they were consequent about paying less or more depending on where you live, they would also charge their customers less or more depending on where they live.
  - relaunched 9y ago
    I'd imagine, like most companies, they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver. While the argument you're making is sound, I'd challenge you to think of it this way: gitLab wants the best talent, no matter where they live. If they happen to live in a high cost area, vs someone that lives in a low cost area, both uniquely qualified, would it make sense to make sure two qualified candidates get approximately the same buying power's worth of compensation? Companies already adjust base pay based on your location, Google, for example. It also takes a bit of the good versus bad negotiator penalty out of the equation, which provides a level of fairness that doesn't exist in most companies.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      > they charge their customers based-on willingness to pay related to market forces and the value they deliver. So do I, that's why I don't work for a company that says "well you life in a low-cost area, so you need to charge us less". Their policy is transparent, and it is take-it-or-leave-it. I think the salary gripes you're hearing from many commenters is that they are leaving it, when they'd very much like to work for Gitlab, as it's a company I personally like. However, what they're doing will either get them developers in the most highly-paid areas (where their salaries are actually competitive) or lower-paid developers that are actually not the best their local market has to offer (because the best developers are already employed elsewhere for higher pay). So, in essence, what they're doing is limiting their top-tier prospects to people who live in high-cost areas. As another commenter said at some point, living in the Valley has such high cost because there are benefits to it. Developers in SF can find a job more or less the minute they walk out of the door of one company, and that's something that's expensive. I don't have the same luxury, and Gitlab says "well, since you aren't paying for the privilege of job liquidity, we'll give you a lot less money".

methyl 9y ago

Does the new round going to help with reliability problems? I use GitHub ~90% of time and I can't recall any downtime, while for GitLab it's very often to see it being unavailable. I find the service great but it's really frustrating to see it being down so often.

nik736 9y ago
You don't remember any downtime with GitHub? Lol.
- samblr 9y ago
  .. recently github has been awfully slow
earlybike 9y ago
I stopped using Github for private repos for three years. I get them for free from Bitbucket and Gitlab. So, I think the actual contender to Gitlab is Bitbucket and not Github. However, Bitbucket feels a bit more organized and mature (the UI). What I also like: Bitbucket has the real Trello integrated which is great. I still like Gitlab, it's always good to have competition.
- dominotw 9y ago
  what does this comment have to do with parent comment about site reliability/uptime ?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  How is Github not the main contender just because of private repo pricing? GitHub is the Goliath here. Also none of this has anything to do with up or down time.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    > GitHub is the Goliath here For open source projects, but it appears to me that the enterprise projects are more BitBucket. This is just my experience, but I can't see how GitHub even competes with Enterprise Support that comes from BitBucket.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

estsauver 9y ago

What I'm most surprised by in this thread is the toxicness. As of right now there are only two threads that I can see, one that is slamming Gitlab's salaries and one that is slamming their reliability. Gitlab is building something nearly completely in the open, and doing it quite well in my opinion. They're the best open source reference for how to ship on premises software I've seen, and I frequently refer people to them as an example. You may not like their compensation structure, but they have certainly been quite transparent. If we want to see more companies build around open source and bring transparency, a small touch of forgiveness is probably worthwhile. I'm a little disappointed in the HN community. (I'm not affiliated with gitlab other than being a customer.)

koolba 9y ago
> What I'm most surprised by in this thread is the toxicness. As of right now there are only two threads that I can see, one that is slamming Gitlab's salaries and one that is slamming their reliability. After many year on the internet, it's not that surprising. It's best summed up as, "Haters gonna hate.". The jabs at the cloud offerring's reliability are valid. That includes both uptime and the horrendous data loss event they had earlier this year. I don't recall anything major after though not knowing about internals, can't tell if they learned from it or have just gotten lucky. As a CE user I love GitLab. It does what it says on the tin and for the most part I don't have to think about it. The UI changes every other release are bit haphazard but not enough for me to truly care. I've always thought that slamming their open comp policy is hilarious. They're one of the most open companies about how they handle comp and the result is they get insulted for it. I'm not saying I agree with the formulas (in particular the non-NYC COLA adjustments are out of whack) or the general approach, but to say they're worse than the voodoo guesswork that goes into figuring out how much a company is going to pay you is disingenuous. Especially if it's after a number of interviews only to find out they're going to low ball you. At least in GitLab's case I know, at the current comp levels, I'd never work there or even interview there. And that's beyond fair for the worker. Plus it seems to be working fine because they've got a bunch of people that are happy to work there.
- matteeyah 9y ago

deckar01 9y ago

> WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg is joining the company’s board. I suspect this has more to do with Akismet than WordPress. They are using Akismet to filter spam issues, but it seems to have a problem with false positives after making edits.

mattl 9y ago
More likely Matt knows a lot about running a free software business, which is what GitLab is for the most part.
- relaunched 9y ago
  This is interesting because the two companies are very similar, with Automaticc being a few steps ahead in several areas: distributed workforce, developer first, size / stage of the company. It helps to have someone who has solved the very problems you'll be facing.
  - pibefision 9y ago
    25% of the webs runs on Wordpress, which is more than a few steps ahead, in my opinion.
    - hellojason 9y ago
      Recent stats now suggest just under 29% of the web (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/al...).

__s 9y ago

On wages: the lowest pay they offer in London Ontario is higher than my current salary, & I've been given a 10k raise over the course of the past two years. Figured I'd mention seeing people going as far as getting into the topic of minimum wage. Slippery slope (as an aside, totally for hire)

wtflmaohnisdumb 9y ago
Canadians are criminally underpaid. I made significantly more than many full-time employees (I'd wager the majority) on more than half of my internships. Adjusted for rent and cost of living. I do love London, Ontario though. Beautiful place even if it's too homogenous and quiet outside of around Western university.

pathseeker 9y ago

Good, a company that cares about open source to dethrone Github.

baldfat 9y ago
I don't see how GitHub will ever be dethroned due to the mind share and market share of Open Source projects. It is a simple process to move to GitLab BUT all the developer tools for many projects relies on GitHub. When I get a package in Racket or R they normally come from github automatically.
- sangnoir 9y ago
  10 years ago: > I don't see how SourceForge will ever be dethroned due to the mind share and market share of Open Source projects.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    That was due to SourceForge and how they decided not to develop their project and destroy the user experience.
    - eecc 9y ago
      you never know what may happen to GH, they're private property after all. Options help in keeping all actors sober and sane
    - dbbk 9y ago
      There is absolutely nothing stopping history repeating itself with GitHub.
- y4mi 9y ago
  i've recently come across quite a few repositories with the header 'this is a read only clone, go here (gitlab) for the real repository'
- urda 9y ago

keepper 9y ago

Hopefully now they will realize that they should run on a colo rather than be wholly on the cloud... and hire for that expertise (their previous attempt to do so was a bit amateurish, which is understandable ). Nothing blows money faster than unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth when you're not charging for it... And before you down vote me, realize that github, their main competitor, runs on a colo for this very same reason. No matter how much revenue you get from paid accounts, and selling on-prem installs, the free service popularity which fuels the paid revenue will outpace it for the forseable future. Trying to reign in those cost, isn't a bad ( or hard ) thing.

hackbinary 9y ago
Could you clarify what you mean by the difference between colo vs on-prem? We run their on-prem in our colo, and it works great for us.
- SteveNuts 9y ago
  He's talking about where GitLab should run their services from. He meant GitLab should purchase hardware and move into a colo rather than run off of cloud services.
- joeblubaugh 9y ago
  I believe he means that the "SaaS option" is run in the cloud by GitLab itself, which is probably very expensive given that the nature of the service is both storage and network-intensive. If GitLab operated their own datacenter(s) it could be considerably less expensive.
- citruspi 9y ago
  I think keepper meant that GitLab.com (the hosted service) should colo instead of running in the cloud[0]. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-the-cloud/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t...
- zaidf 9y ago
  Colocated hosting refers to a kind of hosting where Gitlab puts their own hardware inside of a data center. They primarily pay the data center for physical space (also called rackspace), bandwidth and power but they don't pay for the the server itself since the physical hardware belongs to you. Dedicated hosting is similar to colocated hosting with the only difference being the physical server is rented to you by the data center. This is different from cloud hosting because unlike cloud hosting, with dedicated servers you are the only customer using the physical server that is located in the data center. An off-shoot of dedicated hosting is a VPS (virtual private server.) VPS can be seen as a mix of cloud and dedicated in that the physical server's resources are split between x customers but each customer has their own virtual machine with root access.

odiroot 9y ago

Really happy for GitLab. They are definitely more than just another Github clone. As I don't need to maintain an installation myself I don't mind it having some issues. From the end user perspective it's doing its job.

nathan_f77 9y ago

> GitLab says that it plans to use it to add “new functionality for packaging, releasing, configuring and monitoring software.” I can't wait for GitLab to offer hosting. They already do such a good job with their CI containers. It will be amazing when I can host my code, run my tests, and deploy my app all on the same service.

jazoom 9y ago
GitLab is amazing but I wouldn't host with them until they fix their frequent downtime issues.

brianllamar 9y ago

congrats to GitLab they seem to be taking the right chances in the right places. I am hopeful this tangentially helps grow the Vuejs community as well. https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-21-why-gitlab-chose-vue-js/ https://www.heavybit.com/library/podcasts/jamstack-radio/ep-...

ssully 9y ago

I wish Gitlab all the success in the world. My team utilized Gitlabs on premise offerings and it's always been a good experience to use. They are adding new features at a modest pace and their support people have always been helpful. I really need to try them out for my personal projects but I haven't had the chance.

kecoco0207 9y ago

There are currently possible ways for the public to access and invest in the private start-up companies like GitLab and GitHub. For example, EquityZen is a platform that lets people to invest in private pre-IPO: https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comments&utm_campaign=investor https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=comm...

sytse 9y ago

We also announced today where we'll take GitLab in the future with complete DevOps, for more information please see the live event recording or slides https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million-to-complete-devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million...

sinaa 9y ago
Really happy for GitLab and wish you guys all the best (and luck). We've been using Gitlab for all our company's development, however, one major issue that is pushing us to switch over to GitHub is the fact that GitLab goes down almost every other day (or sometimes every day) due to deployments. Although during this often the site remains available, when CI is not executed or triggers are not performed, it is still extremely disruptive. I really hope that you prioritise having disruption-free deployments.
- sytse 9y ago
  Thanks for your comment. Self hosted GitLab has been very reliable but GitLab.com's availability has been far below par. It is our nr. 1 focus to improve this. Deployments should not cause disruptions. Over the last few months we solved the speed of GitLab.com. Availability is next.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    Firstly, I'm really happy to see Gitlab growing and desperately want to see it succeed. We need an open-source alternative, and the organisational transparency within the company is also wonderful. However... > we solved the speed of GitLab.com I'm currently browsing a repo tree and each page is taking 5+ seconds to load (I am literally browsing HN while waiting for pages to open). This is a common experience. Please please don't get complacent. Not yet.
    - sytse 9y ago
      Thanks, I wanted to indicate our primary focus moved from the speed to the availability. But you're very right that there is still much to improve. We're not happy until every page is fast. Specifically about the repo tree page load: 1. I'll share this comment with our VP of Eng 2. We're working on Gitaly to make git calls faster. 3. We're working on a multifile editor to make browsing faster. BTW Here is a graph of how some of the other pages improved https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ztha1av8t0fcau/Screenshot%202017-10-10%2008.59.11.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ztha1av8t0fcau/Screenshot%202017-...

fro0116 9y ago

It feels to me like GitLab might be shooting themselves in the foot by spreading their resources too thin, too quickly. They have the very grand ambition to take over the entire devops toolchain from source control to deployment, and some parts of the toolchain can certainly benefit from the tight vertical integration that GitLab provides, and when everything just works the product does end up providing a very streamlined user experience. However, this also means that their monolithic toolchain has to be able to out-compete best-of-class specialized tools in every part of the chain, and every part of the chain where they fail to do so could end up as a potential dealbreaker for a large subset of their user base. I've used GitLab.com for a few projects, and in general I've found the various aspects of their product sorely lacking in terms of overall polish, performance, and capability compared to excellent specialized products like GitHub for VCS, CircleCI for CI/CD, and Pivotal Tracker for project tracking/planning, etc. Also, the fact that they're trying to take over the entire toolchain means that just about everybody else in the devops space sees them as a direct competitor, so until they grow to become an 80-pound gorrila that nobody can ignore in at least 1 part of the toolchain, very few other companies building devops tooling will willingly integrate with their product, which makes them even less attractive for users with specific/more advanced needs that their product alone can't meet. With all that said, I really appreciate their dedication to open-source and am personally rooting for their success, but I can't help but shake the feeling that they're fighting a losing battle. DevOps tooling is simply too diverse, complex, and opinionated a field for any 1 company to dominate from end-to-end. Focusing resources to become the best tool for the job in 1 area and using that leverage to foster an open-ecosystem around that product seems like a much more viable long term strategy (though that could certainly prove to be difficult if you're trying to become the best tool for VCS, due to how entrenched GitHub is in terms of developer mindshare).

sytse 9y ago
We are very afraid of spreading ourselves too thin too. Recently we've been encouraged by how GitLab CI is doing, it is winning developers gitlab-ci-is-the-most-popular-next-generation-ci-system and industry analysts over https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous-integration-forrester-wave/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/27/gitlab-leader-continuous... I think what makes GitLab different is that more than 1800 people contributed to it to increase the depth. Our team members are focussed on increasing the breath. From https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ "We realize our competitors have started earlier and have more capital. Because we started later we need a more compelling product that covers the complete scope, that is integrated out of the box, and that is cloud native. Because we have less capital, we need to build that as a community. Therefore it is important to share and ship our vision for the product. The people that have the most knowledge have to prioritize breadth over depth since only they can add new functionality. Making the functionality more comprehensive requires less coordination than making the initial minimal feature. Shipping functionality that is incomplete to expand the scope sometimes goes against our instincts. However leading the way is needed to allow others to see our path and contribute. With others contributing, we'll iterate faster to improve and polish functionality over time. So when in doubt, the rule of thumb is breadth over depth, so everyone can contribute."