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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 an

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
  > 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. We have a very detailed post-mortem of the database incident we had in January, along with a list of precautions (every one with an issue) we took to make sure it doesn't happen again in https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o... We're also actively working on improving our reliability; you can check up on all ongoing efforts in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=availability https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I regularly slam them about their reliability on Twitter, but I keep using them, because I love how integrated the product is. I really have no complaints about either gitlab.com or the EE version, which I pushed that we migrate to at work. If they can reduce the service problems, it'll be a great service.
- naturalgradient 9y ago
  A possible interpretation is that Gitlab chooses to not pay for top-tier distributed systems talent and will thus never reach the service quality they want. Everything comes at a price.
- dxhdr 9y ago
  > 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. Well, they openly discriminate based on zipcode. It's their right as a business but it runs counter to the internet age remote-work utopia everyone wants. Kudos to them for even running a remote-work business, though. We need more of them.
  - unethical_ban 9y ago
chrissnell 9y ago
These "_______ raises $__MM Series _ round" posts always end up like this. They are essentially rah-rah-hooray posts with little or no technical content. HN has always been down on blatant marketing and that's what these posts feel like. I think you would have been seeing a completely different discussion if the post was "GitLab launches _______".
dpeterson 9y ago
What "toxicness"? I don't see any in this comments section? Did HN delete most of it or did the community down vote those entries into oblivion? Due to a few comments in here I did some digging on the compensation they calculate publicly. Honestly, I can actually see why they are getting negative feedback from it. Paying people 221k in San Fran for the same job they would pay max 102k for in Minnesota, regardless of the city, seems quite unfair. Minneapolis is actually quite expensive. Why not pay for the value a developer provides independent of location? Plus, if someone moves to a less expensive location, they lower the pay. Looking at all their compensation rules, I would never feel secure about knowing how much I might be paid month to month. It seems they can make new rules as they go along. Might they want to reduce my pay if my average monthly grocery bill goes down after learning to cook?
- estsauver 9y ago
  It has been heavily downvoted now. When I commented, almost all of the discussion was on two threads that are now either removed or really far down the page.
tyldum 9y ago
Used to be a fan, but the change in licensing is worrying me. We started with the enterprise edition, which was the top tier at the time. Since then another tier has been added above and another one is in the works. The road map is not encouraging, unless you are on premium or ultimate editions. And the license costs at least five times as much. Also the road map shows a very Oracle-esque thinking, that only the big guys need advanced features and they are willing to pay what it takes. I hope they find a better way, like scaling of the features rather than the features themselves. Reluctant to place more eggs in our GitLab basket.
iamnothere 9y ago
Anecdotally, I've seen this same sort of phenomenon play out in plenty of other discussions. The worst ones are typically conversations about JS frameworks, iOS vs Android, messaging apps with "private" chat features (Telegram/Signal/etc), and battles about Gitlab/Github. For some reason these subjects seem to create an open invitation for haters of all stripes to list their grievances about the product under discussion. I used to think it was mostly astroturfing -- and there may be some of that on occasion -- but lately I've come to understand this phenomenon as a "feature" of humanity's tribal nature, much like sports team preferences. (Edit: that's not to say that fair criticism of a product is a bad thing. It can be healthy! But these conversations often go beyond balanced criticism, at least from my perspective.)

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
> 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. We have a very detailed post-mortem of the database incident we had in January, along with a list of precautions (every one with an issue) we took to make sure it doesn't happen again in https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o... We're also actively working on improving our reliability; you can check up on all ongoing efforts in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name[]=availability https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...
StavrosK 9y ago
I regularly slam them about their reliability on Twitter, but I keep using them, because I love how integrated the product is. I really have no complaints about either gitlab.com or the EE version, which I pushed that we migrate to at work. If they can reduce the service problems, it'll be a great service.
naturalgradient 9y ago
A possible interpretation is that Gitlab chooses to not pay for top-tier distributed systems talent and will thus never reach the service quality they want. Everything comes at a price.
dxhdr 9y ago
> 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. Well, they openly discriminate based on zipcode. It's their right as a business but it runs counter to the internet age remote-work utopia everyone wants. Kudos to them for even running a remote-work business, though. We need more of them.
- unethical_ban 9y ago

chrissnell 9y ago

These "_______ raises $__MM Series _ round" posts always end up like this. They are essentially rah-rah-hooray posts with little or no technical content. HN has always been down on blatant marketing and that's what these posts feel like. I think you would have been seeing a completely different discussion if the post was "GitLab launches _______".

dpeterson 9y ago

What "toxicness"? I don't see any in this comments section? Did HN delete most of it or did the community down vote those entries into oblivion? Due to a few comments in here I did some digging on the compensation they calculate publicly. Honestly, I can actually see why they are getting negative feedback from it. Paying people 221k in San Fran for the same job they would pay max 102k for in Minnesota, regardless of the city, seems quite unfair. Minneapolis is actually quite expensive. Why not pay for the value a developer provides independent of location? Plus, if someone moves to a less expensive location, they lower the pay. Looking at all their compensation rules, I would never feel secure about knowing how much I might be paid month to month. It seems they can make new rules as they go along. Might they want to reduce my pay if my average monthly grocery bill goes down after learning to cook?

estsauver 9y ago
It has been heavily downvoted now. When I commented, almost all of the discussion was on two threads that are now either removed or really far down the page.

tyldum 9y ago

Used to be a fan, but the change in licensing is worrying me. We started with the enterprise edition, which was the top tier at the time. Since then another tier has been added above and another one is in the works. The road map is not encouraging, unless you are on premium or ultimate editions. And the license costs at least five times as much. Also the road map shows a very Oracle-esque thinking, that only the big guys need advanced features and they are willing to pay what it takes. I hope they find a better way, like scaling of the features rather than the features themselves. Reluctant to place more eggs in our GitLab basket.

iamnothere 9y ago

Anecdotally, I've seen this same sort of phenomenon play out in plenty of other discussions. The worst ones are typically conversations about JS frameworks, iOS vs Android, messaging apps with "private" chat features (Telegram/Signal/etc), and battles about Gitlab/Github. For some reason these subjects seem to create an open invitation for haters of all stripes to list their grievances about the product under discussion. I used to think it was mostly astroturfing -- and there may be some of that on occasion -- but lately I've come to understand this phenomenon as a "feature" of humanity's tribal nature, much like sports team preferences. (Edit: that's not to say that fair criticism of a product is a bad thing. It can be healthy! But these conversations often go beyond balanced criticism, at least from my perspective.)