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A few years ago I really wanted to join GitHub as a software engineer. I was living in San Francisco and visited their office for some events, and I thought it

A few years ago I really wanted to join GitHub as a software engineer. I was living in San Francisco and visited their office for some events, and I thought it would be an awesome place to work. I tried reaching out to a few people who worked there, but I could never get my foot in the door. There were a lot of things I would have loved to build at GitHub, and they were all the same things that GitLab is doing now. I felt that there was so much potential to build things like CI, DevOps, and eventually a PaaS to compete with Heroku. I really think they should have acquired something like TravisCI or CircleCI and made that part of their platform, but it seems like they haven't really done anything significant in the last 5 years. I'm a very happy user of GitLab now, and the product is awesome. But I don't think I would ever join the company. First of all, they don't pay competitive salaries for remote workers (cost-of-living adjustments). I also don't think they have a very good company culture, and to be honest, it still feels a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. But I'm sure I'll get over that eventually.

fqb 8y ago
Could you elaborate about the salaries for remote workers? I'm a frontend developer in southern Europe and I'd love to work for Gitlab because I love the product.
- foepys 8y ago
  You can read everything about it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... They once had a online calculator where you put in your location (basically only SF, non-SF US, and outside US) and position but apparently they switched to another model that includes employee performance and other factors.
- tempay 8y ago
  Example: https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/#compensation https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/... Full details are here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Not great pay - very interesting to see a direct comparison of pay levels in different locations though, e.g. Scotland pays 1/3 of New York.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      I think it comes down to their policy of adjusting to provide the same quality of life, which I disagree with for remote companies. Their London salaries are fine, but one of the main reasons for me working remotely would be to increase my quality of life by living more remotely but still earning a London-like salary. Otherwise you've moved away from many conveniences, will likely have to pay much more for travel, but will still have to live with the quality of housing you could afford in the city.
      - sleepychu 8y ago
        Yeah this is very much discouraging you from living in a low cost of living area. After all, compensation should be about the value of the work you're doing. Not the value of the money to you. If we experience high deflation, should my salary go down?!
  - Aissen 8y ago
    Thanks, this made me discover that GitLab doesn't hire everywhere it seems; these countries are excluded: Brazil, Crimea, Cuba, France, Iran, Ireland, Japan, North Korea, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Syria https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines
    - fqb 8y ago
      Seems like my country it's excluded. Gotta look for another company then
    - adrinavarro 8y ago
      I wonder why Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden… are excluded, but not Germany or the United Kingdom or many other EU countries.
- nathan_f77 8y ago
  I don't have any first-hand experience, and I'm sure there are exceptions. I've heard that GitLab will pay around $80k for a remote software engineer in a country with a low cost-of-living. That engineer could be earning $150k-$250k at a different company (e.g. Basecamp, GitHub, etc.) I realize that $80k is a lot of money for Europe/UK/Asia/South America/rest of the US. But if you're a top engineer, you could double or triple your income by working for a different company (or as a consultant.) I should mention that I don't have any problem with GitLab's compensation, and I think it's actually pretty fair. But fair doesn't really matter. A top engineer will just go to the company that pays more. I'm sure GitLab has a lot of great engineers, but just based on their compensation, I'm pretty sure it's not one of the best engineering teams in the world. Here's a few references/articles/job boards: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 * https://dev.to/sam_ferree/why-i-think-cost-of-living-pay-for-remote-workers-is-bs-5b68 https://dev.to/sam_ferree/why-i-think-cost-of-living-pay-for... (see some of the comments in there) * https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did-3ee87013cfc2 https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-... * https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com * https://remoteok.io https://remoteok.io
  - fqb 8y ago
    Thank you for the information
  - maccard 8y ago
    They have a calculator [0] The same job, with the same experience is paid less than half what it is in SF in the UK. That's not really very enticing. https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/#compensation https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/...
    - kabes 8y ago
      I don't know how they came to that calculator. But it seems that someone in Ethiopia would earn $20k more than someone in the Netherlands (outside of Amsterdam)
  - 8y ago
nicodjimenez 8y ago
I could not agree more with you that Github should have acquired a CI tool and worked on PaaS. Big missed opportunity for them and for their customers. I do expect Azure to become well supported on Github at some point, but Github had the opportunity to build something truly awesome and cloud vendor neutral. Very sad and weird they sold out, but it is theoretically possible Microsoft will do a better job moving Github forward. Gitlab seems fine but it's just not as smooth / good looking as Github. Github is one of the best websites ever made in my opinion. I do like the fact Gitlab is more aggressive in adding CI features. Maybe I'll check them out...
nicoburns 8y ago
> It still feels a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. But I'm sure I'll get over that eventually. Isn't that a vital part of market economies functioning. I don't entirely agree with free markets, but IF we have this kind of system then this kind is absolutely crucial.
rvanmil 8y ago
> I felt that there was so much potential to build things like CI, DevOps, and eventually a PaaS to compete with Heroku. That would’ve been great and maybe they still will now that they’ve become part of Microsoft.
DouweM 8y ago
Hey Nathan, I'm very curious about what you mean by "I also don't think they have a very good company culture". I've been at GitLab since early 2015 (employee #10), and the culture is one of the major reasons why I joined, and stayed. :) Would you mind elaborating? For anyone else reading along, our Handbook (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/) covers our culture (and every other aspect of working here) very well.
- nathan_f77 8y ago
  Hi there, glad to hear that you enjoy working at GitLab! My impression was just based on some things I've been hearing about compensation, and a couple of negative comments and articles. I think the best way to explain it is that GitLab sounds like a more traditional place to work. Similar to companies in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's very unlikely that I would accept a job in one of these countries for the same reasons. Software engineers are typically not paid very well and are treated more like "code monkeys" who report to their managers and don't have any self-direction. I guess I've just been spoiled by Silicon Valley, so the rest of the world doesn't feel very competitive compared to some of these SV startups.
  - DouweM 8y ago
    I'll leave the subject of compensation to the threads dedicated to it, but 'software engineers [...] are treated more like "code monkeys" who report to their managers and don't have any self-direction' absolutely does not apply to GitLab. Have you had a chance to check out our values (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/) or our section on making decisions (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#making-decisions https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#making-decisio...)? What you're describing is pretty much the opposite of how we actually work :)
  - DouweM 8y ago
    I also feel like you're painting companies outside Silicon Valley with a pretty broad brush. There's nothing about a healthy engineering culture that makes it unique to Silicon Valley, and there are many, many companies in those regions you mention that would take significant issue with that generalization. If you want to optimize for annual salary, Silicon Valley is probably the place to be, but if you want to optimize for happiness (however a developer may define that for themselves), it's just one of many potential places to go, and if you want to optimize for work/life balance, it's probably not even in the top 10.
Nokinside 8y ago
>a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. Can you elaborate on that? Because ripping off and competing against original developers is what open source specially allows. That's one of it's benefits of open source. If someone can improve and and do cheaper, they should do it. I don't see any moral implications. Software business service business not manufacturing business. (at least 99%). If you are against ripping off, maybe put more restrictive license or go closed source. Then you can leverage accumulating IP from work you do.
- akerl_ 8y ago
  GitHub isn't open-source, so while you're correct about what open source licenses allow, that's not really tangible to the complaint that they ripped off GitHub.
  - Nokinside 8y ago
    I see. It seems you are right. Github is closed source, Gitlab CE is open source, Gitlab EE is closed source. Reframing the question: Isn't ripping of and competing with the implementation of an idea is just normal business. Or is there something like gentleman rule where you should not copy business ideas as fast as you can?
    - matteeyah 8y ago
      Just a small addition - GitLab EE is source-visible and proprietary licensed. Everyone can browse the source code over at [1] [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee
    - akerl_ 8y ago
      The initial GitLab UI felt a lot like a direct copy from GitHub. I'd consider "normal business" to be some combination of creating new benefits for your service that your competitors don't have and replicating the kinds of benefits they add, hopefully doing them better. As an example: both GitHub and GitLab have recently launched features in the "security monitoring for your projects" space, but they're both independently good features. Had GitLab launched the feature and then GitHub just copied all the css/js and stood up a clone of it, I'd consider that to be highly questionable.
Barbie_GitLab 8y ago
I will address the concerns around compensation. I appreciate the comments and understand that working remotely is not valued the same by all and has its own unique challenges. However, the challenge of location influenced pay is not unique to remote companies. I worked at large, traditional companies for years who had different pay for team members in the Silicon Valley, and those in other offices. Of course, with team members in so many different locations, many without meaningful local compensation data, the challenge grows. We don't have it perfect at GitLab yet, but we continue to try to make it better. It's a complex topic, but I will add some thoughts to the discussion. We do look at rent index as a factor within Compensation. It is not the only factor but it would be unfair not to take it into consideration. Afterall, there are not many locations in the world where $117,000 is considered low-income. (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-income-san-mateo-san-francisco-marin/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-...). I'm thrilled that we can provide team members with a meaningful career without forcing them to move to a high-cost area. I have often seen cases at other companies where we make a great offer to an out-of-area candidate. They think the compensation is amazing and jump on a plane to start their new job in the Silicon Valley only then realizing that they can't afford a home here and may need to get a roommate to pay the rent unless they live far enough away and endure a long commute. The big salary suddenly looks a lot smaller after seeing the cost of living. However, it is not the only factor we look at and we are continuing to improve the model we have for compensation. We also set a minimum rent index so those very low cost areas are actually paid above market. We do this to ensure that the gaps are not too large. We also pay the market data for a region widely. If you're within a 90 min. commute of San Francisco, for example, you would still make the SF pay. Where you see region broadly represented (like the example of "the rest of the UK), that is because the rent index across the region was less or equal to the minimum rent index set. When you see a location that you perceive to be a lower rent index, getting higher compensation, that could be because we also add a contractor factor in those locations where we are hiring as contractors, knowing that there are often additional expenses to cover as a contractor. With that being said, we are constantly trying to get meaningful compensation data in various locations so we can rely more on the market data and less on the rent index. It is my intention that if we see that the market is changing with more remote companies, we will also adjust our benchmarks to be an accurate reflection of the market. I know that there will always be a company out there willing to pay more and that we will lose some talent because of that. I also know and have seen, that GitLab is able to attract and retain some of the best engineers I've seen (and I've seen some great engineers!) due to its product, culture, and all remote work life.

fqb 8y ago

Could you elaborate about the salaries for remote workers? I'm a frontend developer in southern Europe and I'd love to work for Gitlab because I love the product.

foepys 8y ago
You can read everything about it here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... They once had a online calculator where you put in your location (basically only SF, non-SF US, and outside US) and position but apparently they switched to another model that includes employee performance and other factors.
tempay 8y ago
Example: https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/#compensation https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/... Full details are here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Not great pay - very interesting to see a direct comparison of pay levels in different locations though, e.g. Scotland pays 1/3 of New York.
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    I think it comes down to their policy of adjusting to provide the same quality of life, which I disagree with for remote companies. Their London salaries are fine, but one of the main reasons for me working remotely would be to increase my quality of life by living more remotely but still earning a London-like salary. Otherwise you've moved away from many conveniences, will likely have to pay much more for travel, but will still have to live with the quality of housing you could afford in the city.
    - sleepychu 8y ago
      Yeah this is very much discouraging you from living in a low cost of living area. After all, compensation should be about the value of the work you're doing. Not the value of the money to you. If we experience high deflation, should my salary go down?!
- Aissen 8y ago
  Thanks, this made me discover that GitLab doesn't hire everywhere it seems; these countries are excluded: Brazil, Crimea, Cuba, France, Iran, Ireland, Japan, North Korea, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Syria https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines
  - fqb 8y ago
    Seems like my country it's excluded. Gotta look for another company then
  - adrinavarro 8y ago
    I wonder why Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden… are excluded, but not Germany or the United Kingdom or many other EU countries.
nathan_f77 8y ago
I don't have any first-hand experience, and I'm sure there are exceptions. I've heard that GitLab will pay around $80k for a remote software engineer in a country with a low cost-of-living. That engineer could be earning $150k-$250k at a different company (e.g. Basecamp, GitHub, etc.) I realize that $80k is a lot of money for Europe/UK/Asia/South America/rest of the US. But if you're a top engineer, you could double or triple your income by working for a different company (or as a consultant.) I should mention that I don't have any problem with GitLab's compensation, and I think it's actually pretty fair. But fair doesn't really matter. A top engineer will just go to the company that pays more. I'm sure GitLab has a lot of great engineers, but just based on their compensation, I'm pretty sure it's not one of the best engineering teams in the world. Here's a few references/articles/job boards: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924957 * https://dev.to/sam_ferree/why-i-think-cost-of-living-pay-for-remote-workers-is-bs-5b68 https://dev.to/sam_ferree/why-i-think-cost-of-living-pay-for... (see some of the comments in there) * https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-san-francisco-but-now-we-pay-everyone-as-though-all-did-3ee87013cfc2 https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-doesnt-employ-anyone-in-... * https://weworkremotely.com https://weworkremotely.com * https://remoteok.io https://remoteok.io
- fqb 8y ago
  Thank you for the information
- maccard 8y ago
  They have a calculator [0] The same job, with the same experience is paid less than half what it is in SF in the UK. That's not really very enticing. https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/#compensation https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/developer/...
  - kabes 8y ago
    I don't know how they came to that calculator. But it seems that someone in Ethiopia would earn $20k more than someone in the Netherlands (outside of Amsterdam)
- 8y ago

nicodjimenez 8y ago

I could not agree more with you that Github should have acquired a CI tool and worked on PaaS. Big missed opportunity for them and for their customers. I do expect Azure to become well supported on Github at some point, but Github had the opportunity to build something truly awesome and cloud vendor neutral. Very sad and weird they sold out, but it is theoretically possible Microsoft will do a better job moving Github forward. Gitlab seems fine but it's just not as smooth / good looking as Github. Github is one of the best websites ever made in my opinion. I do like the fact Gitlab is more aggressive in adding CI features. Maybe I'll check them out...

nicoburns 8y ago

> It still feels a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. But I'm sure I'll get over that eventually. Isn't that a vital part of market economies functioning. I don't entirely agree with free markets, but IF we have this kind of system then this kind is absolutely crucial.

rvanmil 8y ago

> I felt that there was so much potential to build things like CI, DevOps, and eventually a PaaS to compete with Heroku. That would’ve been great and maybe they still will now that they’ve become part of Microsoft.

DouweM 8y ago

Hey Nathan, I'm very curious about what you mean by "I also don't think they have a very good company culture". I've been at GitLab since early 2015 (employee #10), and the culture is one of the major reasons why I joined, and stayed. :) Would you mind elaborating? For anyone else reading along, our Handbook (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/) covers our culture (and every other aspect of working here) very well.

nathan_f77 8y ago
Hi there, glad to hear that you enjoy working at GitLab! My impression was just based on some things I've been hearing about compensation, and a couple of negative comments and articles. I think the best way to explain it is that GitLab sounds like a more traditional place to work. Similar to companies in the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's very unlikely that I would accept a job in one of these countries for the same reasons. Software engineers are typically not paid very well and are treated more like "code monkeys" who report to their managers and don't have any self-direction. I guess I've just been spoiled by Silicon Valley, so the rest of the world doesn't feel very competitive compared to some of these SV startups.
- DouweM 8y ago
  I'll leave the subject of compensation to the threads dedicated to it, but 'software engineers [...] are treated more like "code monkeys" who report to their managers and don't have any self-direction' absolutely does not apply to GitLab. Have you had a chance to check out our values (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/) or our section on making decisions (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#making-decisions https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#making-decisio...)? What you're describing is pretty much the opposite of how we actually work :)
- DouweM 8y ago
  I also feel like you're painting companies outside Silicon Valley with a pretty broad brush. There's nothing about a healthy engineering culture that makes it unique to Silicon Valley, and there are many, many companies in those regions you mention that would take significant issue with that generalization. If you want to optimize for annual salary, Silicon Valley is probably the place to be, but if you want to optimize for happiness (however a developer may define that for themselves), it's just one of many potential places to go, and if you want to optimize for work/life balance, it's probably not even in the top 10.

Nokinside 8y ago

>a bit sketchy that they ripped off GitHub and undercut them on pricing. Can you elaborate on that? Because ripping off and competing against original developers is what open source specially allows. That's one of it's benefits of open source. If someone can improve and and do cheaper, they should do it. I don't see any moral implications. Software business service business not manufacturing business. (at least 99%). If you are against ripping off, maybe put more restrictive license or go closed source. Then you can leverage accumulating IP from work you do.

akerl_ 8y ago
GitHub isn't open-source, so while you're correct about what open source licenses allow, that's not really tangible to the complaint that they ripped off GitHub.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  I see. It seems you are right. Github is closed source, Gitlab CE is open source, Gitlab EE is closed source. Reframing the question: Isn't ripping of and competing with the implementation of an idea is just normal business. Or is there something like gentleman rule where you should not copy business ideas as fast as you can?
  - matteeyah 8y ago
    Just a small addition - GitLab EE is source-visible and proprietary licensed. Everyone can browse the source code over at [1] [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee
  - akerl_ 8y ago
    The initial GitLab UI felt a lot like a direct copy from GitHub. I'd consider "normal business" to be some combination of creating new benefits for your service that your competitors don't have and replicating the kinds of benefits they add, hopefully doing them better. As an example: both GitHub and GitLab have recently launched features in the "security monitoring for your projects" space, but they're both independently good features. Had GitLab launched the feature and then GitHub just copied all the css/js and stood up a clone of it, I'd consider that to be highly questionable.

Barbie_GitLab 8y ago

I will address the concerns around compensation. I appreciate the comments and understand that working remotely is not valued the same by all and has its own unique challenges. However, the challenge of location influenced pay is not unique to remote companies. I worked at large, traditional companies for years who had different pay for team members in the Silicon Valley, and those in other offices. Of course, with team members in so many different locations, many without meaningful local compensation data, the challenge grows. We don't have it perfect at GitLab yet, but we continue to try to make it better. It's a complex topic, but I will add some thoughts to the discussion. We do look at rent index as a factor within Compensation. It is not the only factor but it would be unfair not to take it into consideration. Afterall, there are not many locations in the world where $117,000 is considered low-income. (https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-income-san-mateo-san-francisco-marin/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2018/06/26/hud-117000-low-...). I'm thrilled that we can provide team members with a meaningful career without forcing them to move to a high-cost area. I have often seen cases at other companies where we make a great offer to an out-of-area candidate. They think the compensation is amazing and jump on a plane to start their new job in the Silicon Valley only then realizing that they can't afford a home here and may need to get a roommate to pay the rent unless they live far enough away and endure a long commute. The big salary suddenly looks a lot smaller after seeing the cost of living. However, it is not the only factor we look at and we are continuing to improve the model we have for compensation. We also set a minimum rent index so those very low cost areas are actually paid above market. We do this to ensure that the gaps are not too large. We also pay the market data for a region widely. If you're within a 90 min. commute of San Francisco, for example, you would still make the SF pay. Where you see region broadly represented (like the example of "the rest of the UK), that is because the rent index across the region was less or equal to the minimum rent index set. When you see a location that you perceive to be a lower rent index, getting higher compensation, that could be because we also add a contractor factor in those locations where we are hiring as contractors, knowing that there are often additional expenses to cover as a contractor. With that being said, we are constantly trying to get meaningful compensation data in various locations so we can rely more on the market data and less on the rent index. It is my intention that if we see that the market is changing with more remote companies, we will also adjust our benchmarks to be an accurate reflection of the market. I know that there will always be a company out there willing to pay more and that we will lose some talent because of that. I also know and have seen, that GitLab is able to attract and retain some of the best engineers I've seen (and I've seen some great engineers!) due to its product, culture, and all remote work life.