14 ms·

GitLab raises $100M from Iconiq, GV, and Khosla, at $1.1B valuation

320 points by sethbannon 8y ago

dopamean 8y ago
Yikes that's a lot of money. I wonder if they'll still continue to pay developers less than their peers because they live somewhere more affordable.
- pritianka 8y ago
  We actually spoke to this topic in our Series C announcement last year. If we pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more expensive areas. By making it about the cost of living, we make sure everyone is taken care of based on living needs. That said, we have an awesome chief culture officer who is leading efforts to make sure our comp calculator is fair and encourages people to apply.
  - pritianka 8y ago
    https://youtu.be/5dhjw-TT964?t=5561 https://youtu.be/5dhjw-TT964?t=5561
    - samueldavid 8y ago
      so by his words, it means that if I live in a third world country but I work as hard as my peer in SF I'm going to get paid less by a unit of work? even tho we both are equally good and working as hard?
  - jabits 8y ago
    I did not know companies actually do this. I would never work for a different salary than my peers (based on location). In my small "virtual" company, most of my colleagues live and work in Wisconsin (US). I live in Hawaii, where the expenses are much higher, but I would never dream of asking for more money, and I would be laughed out of the room (virtually!). Years ago, when I was an officer in the Air Force, we all had the same salary, but the government did provide Housing Allowances. This is similar, but not the same thing. A unit of salary is for a unit of work, and I do not believe this should vary by geography. If their workers choose to live in SF vs Oklahoma or Buffalo, then they pay the price. I realize that I have less "real" wages than the rest of my team in Milwaukee or Green Bay, but Maui has its compensating benefits.
    - 0xffff2 8y ago
      I agree, and I think that military housing allowances (which are adjusted for CoL) also have the additional justification that (generally speaking) you don't get to choose where you are stationed. As a service member, the military tells you where to go and you go, so it makes a certain amount of sense that you're then paid enough to live there. As a software developer in the civilian world, my physical location has nothing to do with my work, so it makes no sense for my compensation to be based on my location.
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    I don't understand this rational at all. If a developer in SF is worth x dollars to you, why are they suddenly worth less if they move to a lower CoL area? If you're paying salaries that are livable in a high CoL area, you aren't discouraging people living there, you're freeing people to move wherever they want. I'm a Silicon Valley based dev who really wishes he could move far, far away from here without taking a huge pay cut, so I'm obviously biased. That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be?
    - lordnacho 8y ago
      It's a negotiation, right? And at least some of the cards are known, such as an admittedly noisy estimate of what people will accept as a salary. Basically the company shares in your lowered living costs if you are somewhere cheap. Hopefully they won't eat the whole savings, something should be left for both parties.
      - ahkurtz 8y ago
        What do you think is the likely outcome here?
    - jcdavis 8y ago
      > That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be Because your salary is much more influenced by market supply and demand than the value you create for your employer.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        The market for remote work isn't geographically constrained, so it doesn't make sense to make pay offers as if you were hiring in specific geographically constrained markets rather than the unconstrained remote work market.
        jcdavis 8y ago
  - dx87 8y ago
    So high COLA areas typically already have better schools, utilities, and public services, but you reward employees living in those areas with higher pay because it would be unfair to pay them the same as people in lower COLA areas? Why would anyone choose to work for you if they don't live in a high COLA area?
    - pritianka 8y ago
      That's probably usually true but as an SF resident, I can tell you the schools, utilities, and public services aren't what I would call world class here :p. Wish this was more like New York that way hehe.
      - ahkurtz 8y ago
        Spend some time in the Midwest or deep South.
  - jkaplowitz 8y ago
    This system fails badly when people move between cheap and expensive cities over the course of their lives, and might need to build savings at expensive city levels when living in a cheap city. Why not just pay everyone at the expensive city level? If you were hiring a true consultant rather than an employee or a full-time "contractor," you would pay them solely based on value delivered and the defensibility of their pricing given GitLab's business needs. Their cost of living wouldn't matter. For employees at an all remote company, I don't see why their cost of living should matter any more than that. And applicants in expensive cities would not be dissuaded. Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc.
    - pritianka 8y ago
      This is really useful information. Thanks for sharing. I will put this in front of our CCO, Barbie.
      - jkaplowitz 8y ago
        Thanks!
      - ahkurtz 8y ago
        So you've never heard this before or won't comment here?
        pritianka 8y ago
        "Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc." I, personally, did not know about the way we treat intl comp on the calculator because I do not work in people ops. I found it useful new information.
  - mi_lk 8y ago
    I really don't find it convincing. If you pay as much as your competitors, why would talents in expensive areas would be discouraged to apply to your company and go to your competitors? If you're assuming that big city people would feel bad because the small city people get paid more in terms of cost of living, then I'd say that's a bad assumption. People living in any city should know its pros and cons, why is it up to you to decide that the cost of living is the metric?
  - robdachshund 8y ago
    Ew
  - fierro 8y ago
    that's a weak argument; some places cost more to live because they are better places to live. It's a personal decision to live in New York over Kansas
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > If we pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more expensive areas. If you do location-based pay, you are even more strongly discouraging applications from people in less expensive areas, especially if you don't adjust salaries for relocations after someone is employed, since someone in a less-expensive area who might consider working for you is encouraged to delay their application, seek employment that will let them wlive in a more expensive area, and then apply to GitLab (and, if you don't do post-enployment location-based adjustments, then move back to the cheap area.) > efforts to make sure our comp calculator is fair and encourages people to apply. As long as you pay people differently for the same work based on where they live when they apply, your comp calculator will not be fair. To the extent that place of residency at time of application correlates with status in any protected class, it also seems to be a pretty open and shut unlawful discrimination by disparate impact case waiting to be filed, too.
    - DailyHN 8y ago
      So what I'm understanding is that, if I'm stuck in an awful city with low wages, Gitlab would like to prevent upward mobility so I stay there. What does this look like when it comes to company culture? Emphasis on maintaining a "diverse" team?
      - orf 8y ago
        Alternatively, they would offer you a fair salary what allowed you to move to a city with higher wages (and a higher cost of living).
    - DouweM 8y ago
      Note that GitLab _does_ adjust compensation when relocating: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#relocating https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... + https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/ https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/ That means that as someone working at GitLab, my current wage is competitive compared to local companies, + I get all of the perks of remote work, working on open source, developer tooling, etc, and all of this will still be the case if I were to move elsewhere. The exact amount of money deposited into my account each month would go up or down, but my lifestyle would stay roughly the same. I know I’d make a lot more money if I lived in, say, the Bay Area, and if I made that same amount of money pretty much anywhere else I could live like a king, but I honestly don’t care. I quite like my decidedly not-king-like life today, and I love that with GitLab, I can have this same life and job wherever I choose to live. I’m currently living in the Netherlands, but am planning to move to Mexico in a few years to be closer to my fiancée’s family. If all goes well, GitLab will travel there with us, and while my compensation will see a decrease, our life style won’t. GitLab’s compensation philosophy is one of competing with the local market, instead of putting a fixed price on the value I or anyone else provides to the company, and that’s totally fine by me. If it wasn’t for GitLab, I’d probably be working at one of those local companies, so aren’t I still better off? For the company, it means that it/we can hire great people wherever they may be on earth, without being limited to the subset of great people who also happen to or want to live in the specific city the company happens to be based in. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are some amazing engineers out there who have zero interest in living in the Bay Area, and who don’t particularly care about maximizing their yearly take home pay, as long as they make enough money to provide for themselves and their family, and can live in whatever city or country or continent that they prefer. The map on our team page is a testament to that: https://about.gitlab.com/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/team/ (mobile-friendly: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/teampage-map/ https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/teampage-map/) FWIW, I know of colleagues who have moved to locations with both lower and higher cost of living compared to the location they were hired in, and I’ve never heard about requests to move being rejected.
  - djloche 8y ago
    There's serious room for improvement in the salary calculator, calculator to account for growing metro areas, and I think most of this comes from trying to rely on numbeo for your rent indexes. Eg. Why in the world doesn't Portland OR have its own rent index vs rest of OR? The 'Hot Markets' adjustment should also take a wider account for cities / towns / suburbs that are probably also booming. For example, I'm in the PDX metro area, but on the WA side of the river. My housing costs have gone up 41% to 2.5 years thanks to the booming housing market here, but the current gitlab calculation doesn't account for it thanks to the combined factor of being in the metro area but not in the right city/state, combined with the fact that the big growing metro area doesn't have it's own rent index. Of course, this could be smoothed over and fixed as part of the hiring process, but it would be nice to know up front that you were using up to date data in your attempts to pay market rate salaries.
  - briansteffens 8y ago
    I was interested in working at GitLab a couple years ago but the salary calculator changed my mind. It lumped all the cities in Oregon together which gave some weird results depending on which city you live in. I can't imagine how wonky the data gets internationally, and it seems like the fairness of your salary would depend on the accuracy and granularity of the data GitLab has for your particular region.
    - SuperQue 8y ago
      Yup, as a hiring manager I lost a couple of good hires due to the comp calculator. Especially in markets, like where I live. The market for engineer salaries is much higher, due to the demand. But the cost of living is very low, by comparison. I've been complaining about this for a while, but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        > but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure. I know you alone can’t do anything about this, but the longer this painful task is put off, the more difficult will be to rectify as Gitlab grows (more people = greater labor cost expense increase when the problem is addressed). It’s peope ops debt.
    - detaro 8y ago
      Just looking at Germany: the salary calculator assumes everything outside a select few cities is costing the same. I sincerely hope they don't use that calculator to make the actual calculations for candidates but spend the effort to calculate an actual number for the location, otherwise that's entire areas that are just laughably inaccurate. E.g. Stuttgart, according to some numbers the city with the second-highest average rent in the country is not in a special case and thus assumed to be in the cheapest class. Let's estimate CoL 30 % higher than Berlin, 10 % less compensation.
  - agensaequivocum 8y ago
    And now you are just discouraging those in cheaper cities such as myself.
  - pritianka 8y ago
    Hi folks - appreciate the discussion here. Our ceo put down his thoughts in the GitLab handbook about our policy to pay local rates - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c.... Do check it out. Doesn’t mean the calculator is perfect but speaks to the universal comp vs localized.
    - 0xffff2 8y ago
      FYI, #2 on that list should say "than" rather than "then". Also, the link to the compensation calculator is 404 for me.
  - nserrino 8y ago
    Ok, so maybe people in high cost of living areas aren't discouraged when the salary scales with their cost of living. But doesn't that effectively bias gitlab against those candidates because they have to pay them more? At some point there are unavoidable incentives that crop up as a result of the asymmetry.
mwj 8y ago
Maybe they can spend some of that cash improving the atrocious service levels on gitlab.com
sidcool 8y ago
This may be a reaction to Microsoft's GitHub acquisition. They need a stronger competition.
cschep 8y ago
wow.
devstevedev 8y ago
Maybe they can improve the awful performance. They keep denying it's due to their site being in Ruby, but I don't buy it. Rewrite it in Go already.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  "Rewrite it in Go already." So you've done a complete analysis of how much effort that would take and the loss of reliability inherent in rewrites versus the potential gains at scale?
- YorickPeterse 8y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png (backend request timings for the past 24 hours) indicates Ruby isn't as bad of a choice as you might think.
  - merb 8y ago
    actually mean is at 128ms, which is not really good... besides mean is not what you should actually target.
- ahkurtz 8y ago
  It's mostly due to them not paying developers enough and also having a cavalier attitude about engineering concerns. Their free product is a loss leader designed to sell you their B2B and it doesn't need to be great it just needs to be used. As with the rest of their philosophy the less they spend and can get away with the better for them. From their perspective.
- shdh 8y ago
  Golang: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
- jeltz 8y ago
  No, it is not because of Ruby. It is either about not prioritizing performance in their development process or lacking the skills to write fast software. The Gitlab team would probably write a slow application in Go too.
sqs 8y ago
Congrats to the GitLab team! They and a few other companies lately have shown fantastic customer and revenue numbers around an open source product. (I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on.) This is an important step toward increasing the % of all software that is open source. Calling Joseph Jacks to give some data here... (I know some other names of companies with tremendous numbers but don’t recall which are public info, so I don’t want to risk it.)
- pritianka 8y ago
  +1 to the "I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on." I've been super impressed working with Sid that his eye is always on the prize and he pushes us to work towards making our users and customers happy rather than go after any vanity metrics. It's ironic but this is novel in the valley now :p.
- josephjacks 8y ago
  Two resources: 1) http://oss.cash/ http://oss.cash/ 2) https://medium.com/open-consensus/ https://medium.com/open-consensus/
- brlewis 8y ago
  Curious how https://www.cypress.io/ https://www.cypress.io/ is doing.
cjdu 8y ago
:/ This feels like a 100% reaction to the GitHub acquisition by VCs not understanding the market. I'll bet the inbound to them was nuts the weeks following the new. Good on Sid for fleecing the VCs though how GitLab ever supports that valuation is beyond me.
- ryanackley 8y ago
  This. I've never used any of their products but I've always found their marketing to be spot on. They perfectly positioned themselves as a 3rd option to GitHub and BitBucket. With the GitHub acquisition and Atlassian's stock on fire right now, they were in the perfect position to go for an insane valuation.
  - shdh 8y ago
    I've used all three and I prefer GitLab.
- mo1ok 8y ago
  Agreed. Gitlab is cool but $1 billion valuation? Seriously? Do they even have significant marketshare over GitHub and Bitbucket?
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    Given that a few months ago GitHub was valued at $7.5bn, why would GitLab need to have higher marketshare to get to the $1bn valuation?
    - dfee 8y ago
      I think we should interpret “over” as “within the context of”.
      - kgwgk 8y ago
        Good point, I may have misunderstood the comment.
therealmarv 8y ago
Hope they put a lot of it (money) in their server infrastructure and better management of incident handling on gitlab.com. Thinks can break or get slow (sure) but their competitor (github) is in comparison rock solid. I cannot even count the 503 or git downtimes on gitlab.com I hope they look on a lot of worse case scenarios like e.g. an upgrade breaks things, DB issues etc. and look how big big cloud installations are doing this stuff (staged updates, roll backs etc.)
- btasovac 8y ago
  We are heavily focusing on performance improvements - both in the product (so that features run better)[1] and in our GitLab.com infrastructure team (so that GitLab.com runs more reliably)[2]. Thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label_name%5B%5D=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues
  - adtac 8y ago
    I'll just say that gitlab.com, in my experience, has been much faster than it used to be the past few weeks. Things now don't take forever, which is a good thing. It's still slower than Github, but the improvement (due to the GCP migration?) is quite visible. Keep moving forward :)
    - pritianka 8y ago
      Yay! Thanks for sharing the positive experience. We know .com performance is something we need to improve and as mentioned in the comment above, are working super hard to get there.
    - mercer 8y ago
      Seconded. I moved to Gitlab because of pricing issues, and initially it felt sluggish to the point where I considered moving back to Github or Bitbucket (although the latter felt slow too). This is no longer the case. Things still feel sluggish, but not egregiously so.
fisherfriesuk 8y ago
Zoinks! I have wanted to and tried to like GitLab. I can't. Everything about it is less than half baked, most of all their CI stuff. It's hard to see them having line of sight to a $1B valuation when they can't do the basics and are trying to recreate the terrible monolithic systems of years gone by. That's not a world I want to live in ever again...
- pritianka 8y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. We value iteration over perfection and so that can be jarring sometimes. I am surprised to hear about the CI experience though. Did you try the Auto DevOps pipeline or just CI generally? Would love to help out if you are open. Twitter.com/pritianka DM me!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jl-gitlab 8y ago
    To add on, we are actively working on balancing how we deliver new and deep solutions, CI in particular is an area where we want to provide better solutions for more complex problems (as well as address some of the challenges like hung builds or other issues people are running into.) You can read about our vision for CI here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/ I'd also be up for a chat sometime if you'd like to talk about some of the issues that are impacting you and what we might be able to do to help. twitter.com/j4lenn
- jl-gitlab 8y ago
  Really sorry to hear you've had that experience. I'm the PM for CI and we're really proud of how our CI product in particular has been rated by industry analysts, and how we've maintained interoperability, though of course that doesn't speak to where you've struggled with our solution. If you'd like to chat about it sometime I'd definitely be up for it.
  - brandonwamboldt 8y ago
georgewsinger 8y ago
To people who have used GitLab: is there any way in which GitLab is not just an incremental improvement over GitHub? Or is there something I'm missing? (Genuine question; not trolling).
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  Self-hostable, built in CI...
  - 0x0 8y ago
    Agreed, for me this is a killer feature. Being able to just download the gitlab-runner executable (1 file) on mac/windows/linux and register a private runner - even on gitlab.com - and the simple configuration of CI builds, with the deep integration of CI results in the whole gitlab experience (commit browser, merge requests ("merge if CI succeeds", etc)) is best of class. Edit: I'm not usually bothered by downvotes but I'm curious about what kind of agenda whoever downvoted this has.
  - edcarter 8y ago
    Self hosting is a big one. Having control over your source code and a core component to development workflow is important to some people.
- maaarghk 8y ago
  I personally couldn't really name one but it is many small incremental improvements adding up to something bigger. When a place I used to work at mandated a switch away from GitHub to GitLab I was a bit annoyed and saw it as penny pinching, going for the cheaper but crappier option, but since using it daily for a while I am a convert. I have my own installs of the free version running in some places now as well, and I find that pretty painless. Their CI tool is nice as well, dead easy to get started with.
- pritianka 8y ago
  Thanks for asking. One of our big goals is to address the awareness-gap about the GitLab offering. So instead of a version control system that lets people try out different integrations, GitLab provides an opinionated (yet flexible with key integrations and the option to opt out of anything you don't want) way to run the entire software development and deployment lifecycle. You can start with planning your issues, then you create the code (usually in your editor of choice but there's a web IDE that makes quick fixes much faster in GitLab), then you store your code with our version control. Using the GitLab CI you can set up automated jobs that include all kinds of tests (we provide the Auto DevOps pipeline for a set of best practices to automatically do tests and security scans and also provide Prometheus metrics without you having to do a thing). Then comes the CD part, followed by monitoring via Prometheus and tracing with Jaeger. You can deploy the code to k8s clusters directly on GitLab making k8s a lot more accessible to developers and then run it on any cloud. Our GKE integration is pretty dope. I personally am working on bringing similar serverless functionality to the product soon as well. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I covered the main aspects from my perspective. You can learn more here - https://about.gitlab.com/features/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/
gm3dmo 8y ago
Gitlab. The Evernote of source control.
- deleted 8y ago
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neom 8y ago
As Jack Welch says, strive to be #1 or #2 in your industry, seems gitlab is well positioned to make a run at this, and given the price tag Github set for this type of product in the devtool space, 1.1 seems very respectable. Nice work Gitlab CEO, good luck! :)
bberenberg 8y ago
Be careful when considering the market share of these vendors based on anecdotal SaaS experience. A large portion of their revenue comes from their enterprise editions which are hosted in-house. We're seeing significant growth by GitLab in this area with our enterprise clients.
- datadudenybills 8y ago
  I saw somewhere MongoDB claimed like near universal usage in fortune 100s or 500s, meaning Mongo was used at all these big, successful companies. GitLab is that...it's mongodb to GitHub PostgreSQL. GitHub isn't "cool" anymore but it powers the world. GitLab is "cool" to some, but ultimately it's software sugar.
- CapnCrunchie 8y ago
  I previously worked at GitLab, and I can confirm this is the point that I find most commenters on HN miss. GitLab's web platform, at the moment, is essentially a marketing expense to get people to use GitLab and push it into their day jobs.
pritianka 8y ago
This article by Frederic over at Techcrunch has an interview with Sid, our CEO at GitLab. It should answer a lot of people's questions in the comments below. https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/
- catwell 8y ago
  > As Sijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub and Bitbucket competitor [...] GitLab wants to be far more than that. It now offers products in nine categories So basically, instead of being a GitHub competitor, it is now an Atlassian competitor.
  - sytse 8y ago
    Atlassian is indeed broader then just BitBucket and a better comparison. GitLab does a broader offering than Atlassian by including things like packaging, monitoring, and security. And GitLab is a single application instead of a suite of tools with different data models.
    - jtwaleson 8y ago
      The offering in most categories is already good enough (for our little startup in Amsterdam), and we're still on the free tier! We only have to use a single integrated SaaS offering which fits almost all of our needs. The CI/CD is far beyond "good enough": it is fantastic, especially with runners on EC2 auto-scaling. Congrats on closing this round Sytse!
      - sytse 8y ago
        Thank you very much. Glad to hear it is working well for you.
Proven 8y ago
Haha here we go, GV. Now those who complained about GH and moved to GL again have something to complain about... And I commented here two months ago how these guys will end up being a part of Google's Adware Network.
scrollaway 8y ago
I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus. Then very recently I've had to use Gitlab for a variety of new projects. And just... wow, it has come a long way. There is an incredible amount of tooling and features, native to Gitlab. It's actually scary, and in some places even gets messy (feature overload). But a lot of it is useful stuff Github really should be offering. Things like more metadata on projects, subprojects. A very in-depth permission system (invite users with read-only access, issue-only access; membership expiration, ...). Branch protection integrated into various features. Native CI! That's the big one. Travis is terrible. I used Gitlab CI to deploy one of my most recent project and ... it's been great. Was very simple to configure, felt a lot less magic and constrained than Travis, and it's very well integrated into Gitlab. All this to say that I'm just about converted. Unfortunately, I have my 10+ year old profile on Github which includes membership to various projects and orgs, but I'm now pretty definitely using both platforms. Edit: Here's my Github profile so people know I mean business when I'm praising Gitlab. https://github.com/jleclanche https://github.com/jleclanche
- dasmoth 8y ago
  It certainly seems to fill a niche. That said, I rather miss the minimalism and focus on individual developers (vs organisations and processes) of early Github.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Do you think that focus is gone? I find both Gitlab and Github have plenty of focus on the dev (Github more so). It just so happens that Github has developed a lot of tooling for orgs and projects since. Compare to Bitbucket's profile pages for example: https://bitbucket.org/astanin/ https://bitbucket.org/astanin/
    - dasmoth 8y ago
      Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion was when they added built-in enforcement of code review workflows. A feature which I seem to recall they copied more-or-less directly from GitLab... (And I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. But diversity is nice...)
village-idiot 8y ago
$1.1B in valuation is insane, and seems to exist to justify $100M funding rounds.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
I started using GitLab a week ago. Only because they offer free private repos. GitLab feels unpolished and I encountered so many small UI bugs. If they said they are three people and just founded their startup, ok, sure. But Series D, at a $1B valuation? I guess their priorities lie somewhere else.
- pastor_elm 8y ago
  Their staff is globally 'remote' with salaries determined by where you live i.e. cheap labor.
  - weka 8y ago
    So a developer in a Dhaka, Bangladesh is making the same as a developer in Palto Alto, California despite contributing the same work?
    - ecnahc515 8y ago
      No, I'd expect them to make significantly less than someone in the Bay based on Gitlabs compensation calculator.
- sytse 8y ago
  What is the first thing you think we should fix?
  - elygre 8y ago
    Not gp, but: you have a marvelous security system, but GitLab Pages does not use it. For an installation containing private/protected projects, this severely limits the use of Pages. For example, it is not possible to use Pages to build documentation that should only be available to project members. Everything published to Pages is available to the public.
    - sytse 8y ago
catwell 8y ago
And so, the clock starts. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19
- dasmoth 8y ago
  It is somewhat remarkable that the first reply to that (in 2012!) was "Smells like the next Microsoft acquisition to me."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bnchrch 8y ago
To who ever is doubting gitlab right now: Checkout their CI/CD flow in combination with their Docker/Kube integration. You'll see why they are poised to steal the rug from under github.
whoisjuan 8y ago
I use GitLab for all my side projects. I personally love the integrated CI/CD. But there's one thing that I absolutely hate and is their hierarchy model for repos. In GitHub, repos are first class citizens. For some reason, I feel that in GitLab you get a diluted repo experience. I think I would abandon GitLab altogether if Microsoft ever makes private repos free.
- jramsay 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I’m a Product Manager for Create (Git, merge requests etc) at GitLab. Why do you think the repository part of the project isn’t clear enough? What would make GitLab’s repo capabilities less diluted for you? I want to make sure using Git with GitLab is great.
- davidpthomas 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I'm a Solutions Architect at GitLab. You can certainly maintain a flat line of repos in GL just like GH. But as you scale and need to group projects by context (customer facing, webapps, bizapps, security, etc), hierarchies (ie. GL groups) provide some added benefits esp around access rights and inheritance of settings -- and the 1st class citizen child projects get things implicitly! Curious how you are using hierarchies in a way that doesn't feel right. Happy to help!
dustinmoris 8y ago
The reason why I think GitLab has been massively overvalued and why GitLab will ultimately fail is because it is storming head on into becoming a stale company. Normally a startup is innovating in one vertical, disrupting the market with new ideas or technology which enables users and the company itself to profit of those innovations. This continues normally until the startup has become number one in that vertical. Then it must defend its spot against other newcomers who want to disrupt. Part of the defence is diversification, use the capital to disrupt in other places as well. This has been the natural progression of every successful business I know. At some point that company is so big though, competing in so many verticals that it becomes stale. It stops innovating and is constantly on the defence. Only innovation comes through acquisition which is often just a way to defend your spot by buying early. GitLab is sort of not even trying to become number one in one vertical. Like the CEO said in his interview, GitLab already competes in 9 different verticals (JIRA, Jenkins, GitHub, NewRelic, Artifactory, etc.) and they are not near the top anywhere yet. They are going to become stale before even reaching a single peak in any industry. So far they have not innovated anything yet. Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different domains into one product", which is nothing more than a pricing strategy and a lack of focus and not an innovation. It's painful to watch. Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess.
- mwj 8y ago
  "Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess." Quote of the year
- shdh 8y ago
  Reads like a subjective hit piece. >Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different domains into one product" They have one of the best CI/CD products out on the market right now. git versioned yml/docker based jobs with multiple stages.
  - oweiler 8y ago
    > They have one of the best CI/CD products out on the market right now. git versioned yml/docker based jobs with multiple stages. CircleCI, Jenkins, Codeship etc. have similar offerings. And Jenkins also has the benefit of a huge plugin ecosystem.
kasbah 8y ago
Great news! For Kitspace [1] I am currently working on re-purposing GitLab for electronics projects. It's good to see that "upstream" is getting more financial support. I believe GitLab being open source is going to save me a ton of time and it could do this in other areas as well. I always thought GitHub could have been a much more remarkable product if it had been open source given its community. Let's make it happen with GitLab. [1]: https://kitspace.org https://kitspace.org
shdh 8y ago
GitLab is far superior to GitHub
tschellenbach 8y ago
I wonder how well they explain to their employees how this can wipe out their upside. Venture Deals by Brad Feld is a great read to help understand why this is potentially a dangerous situation to be in: https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalist/dp/1118443616 https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitali...
- yhoiseth 8y ago
  I’d be interested in hearing more, but not enough to read an entire book. Can you please elaborate or link to a shorter text, such as a blog post?
hal1 8y ago
Looks like a rampant acquisition by Google imho
dna_polymerase 8y ago
Okay, are we starting migrating to another hosted Git service right now or do we wait for them to start behaving shady and eventually selling out? Asking for a friend.
thsowers 8y ago
Came to the comments to complain about GitLab not having language stats on a repo landing page, as I thought that was the #1 missing feature. Very pleased to see it was added three months ago! Surprised it took this long, this is one of the first things I look at when considering contributing to a repo: Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)?
- Jedd 8y ago
  Neat that you got that complaint in first, then conceded it was invalid, then made it again. > Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)? If English is your first language, proficiency would include knowing that possessive its has no apostrophe. : )
dblock 8y ago
Right now sales people at GitHub are trying to convert our $200 grandfathered plan into a $2000 one per month at no avail because we can just move over to Gitlab and get same or better service. I’m thankful for Gitlab’s existence and am just watching this unfold popcorn at hand. I bet I can probably cut that $200 bill into a $0 if I asked Gitlab now after their big fundraise.
sjg007 8y ago
Is there room for one more?
pankajdoharey 8y ago
$1.1 Billion? That too much, even Github hasn't reached profitability yet inspite of being the most popular Code hosting site. Gitlab can never reach the level of popularity that Github has. Then how are they valuing it at the price point? Some of Khoslas investment lately are so off, for instance the 'Hyperloop' transport Inc.
Lorin 8y ago
I wonder if that means they'll finally create a dark theme which has been on the request list for years and has been pushed from releases time and time again.
ddtaylor 8y ago
GitLab is pretty awesome. I switched for many of my projects over the last few months and I'm most enjoying the time tracking functionality. Very simple, yet very powerful. It's nice to be able to estimate or track time using commit messages or a command line helper tool like gtt.
sbmthakur 8y ago
On a related note, is Gitlab profitable?
voidr 8y ago
> “Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat. Either the GitLab CEO has never heard about Jenkins and TeamCity or he is making false statements to get more investor money.
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
I run GitLab on my server and it is just too slow, sometimes I get a 503. I hope they take a look at this asap.
oliv3r 8y ago
While I'm a huge GitLab fan since June 4th, but one thing that concerns me greatly, which hopefully will be resolved with this extra money, is the huge number of growing issues. What's even more scary herein is, that some issues/feature request get put on the back-burner because "there's bigger problems to solve" or "more valueable features to build"

320 points by sethbannon 8y ago

Yikes that's a lot of money. I wonder if they'll still continue to pay developers less than their peers because they live somewhere more affordable.

pritianka 8y ago
We actually spoke to this topic in our Series C announcement last year. If we pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more expensive areas. By making it about the cost of living, we make sure everyone is taken care of based on living needs. That said, we have an awesome chief culture officer who is leading efforts to make sure our comp calculator is fair and encourages people to apply.
- pritianka 8y ago
  https://youtu.be/5dhjw-TT964?t=5561 https://youtu.be/5dhjw-TT964?t=5561
  - samueldavid 8y ago
    so by his words, it means that if I live in a third world country but I work as hard as my peer in SF I'm going to get paid less by a unit of work? even tho we both are equally good and working as hard?
- jabits 8y ago
  I did not know companies actually do this. I would never work for a different salary than my peers (based on location). In my small "virtual" company, most of my colleagues live and work in Wisconsin (US). I live in Hawaii, where the expenses are much higher, but I would never dream of asking for more money, and I would be laughed out of the room (virtually!). Years ago, when I was an officer in the Air Force, we all had the same salary, but the government did provide Housing Allowances. This is similar, but not the same thing. A unit of salary is for a unit of work, and I do not believe this should vary by geography. If their workers choose to live in SF vs Oklahoma or Buffalo, then they pay the price. I realize that I have less "real" wages than the rest of my team in Milwaukee or Green Bay, but Maui has its compensating benefits.
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    I agree, and I think that military housing allowances (which are adjusted for CoL) also have the additional justification that (generally speaking) you don't get to choose where you are stationed. As a service member, the military tells you where to go and you go, so it makes a certain amount of sense that you're then paid enough to live there. As a software developer in the civilian world, my physical location has nothing to do with my work, so it makes no sense for my compensation to be based on my location.
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  I don't understand this rational at all. If a developer in SF is worth x dollars to you, why are they suddenly worth less if they move to a lower CoL area? If you're paying salaries that are livable in a high CoL area, you aren't discouraging people living there, you're freeing people to move wherever they want. I'm a Silicon Valley based dev who really wishes he could move far, far away from here without taking a huge pay cut, so I'm obviously biased. That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be?
  - lordnacho 8y ago
    It's a negotiation, right? And at least some of the cards are known, such as an admittedly noisy estimate of what people will accept as a salary. Basically the company shares in your lowered living costs if you are somewhere cheap. Hopefully they won't eat the whole savings, something should be left for both parties.
    - ahkurtz 8y ago
      What do you think is the likely outcome here?
  - jcdavis 8y ago
    > That said, in my view as an employee, the value I create for the company isn't based on my physical location, so why should my salary be Because your salary is much more influenced by market supply and demand than the value you create for your employer.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      The market for remote work isn't geographically constrained, so it doesn't make sense to make pay offers as if you were hiring in specific geographically constrained markets rather than the unconstrained remote work market.
      - jcdavis 8y ago
- dx87 8y ago
  So high COLA areas typically already have better schools, utilities, and public services, but you reward employees living in those areas with higher pay because it would be unfair to pay them the same as people in lower COLA areas? Why would anyone choose to work for you if they don't live in a high COLA area?
  - pritianka 8y ago
    That's probably usually true but as an SF resident, I can tell you the schools, utilities, and public services aren't what I would call world class here :p. Wish this was more like New York that way hehe.
    - ahkurtz 8y ago
      Spend some time in the Midwest or deep South.
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  This system fails badly when people move between cheap and expensive cities over the course of their lives, and might need to build savings at expensive city levels when living in a cheap city. Why not just pay everyone at the expensive city level? If you were hiring a true consultant rather than an employee or a full-time "contractor," you would pay them solely based on value delivered and the defensibility of their pricing given GitLab's business needs. Their cost of living wouldn't matter. For employees at an all remote company, I don't see why their cost of living should matter any more than that. And applicants in expensive cities would not be dissuaded. Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc.
  - pritianka 8y ago
    This is really useful information. Thanks for sharing. I will put this in front of our CCO, Barbie.
    - jkaplowitz 8y ago
      Thanks!
    - ahkurtz 8y ago
      So you've never heard this before or won't comment here?
      - pritianka 8y ago
        "Additionally, the calculator's attempt to handle cost of living fails to address hot markets outside the US (hello from Montreal), treats many countries as way more homogeneous in cost of living than they really are, and gives a seemingly quite inadequate 17% adjustment for contractors. That doesn't cover legal and accounting fees, paid time off of various types, the cost and limitations in health insurance coverage attainable by one-person companies, normally employer-side retirement contributions, etc." I, personally, did not know about the way we treat intl comp on the calculator because I do not work in people ops. I found it useful new information.
- mi_lk 8y ago
  I really don't find it convincing. If you pay as much as your competitors, why would talents in expensive areas would be discouraged to apply to your company and go to your competitors? If you're assuming that big city people would feel bad because the small city people get paid more in terms of cost of living, then I'd say that's a bad assumption. People living in any city should know its pros and cons, why is it up to you to decide that the cost of living is the metric?
- robdachshund 8y ago
  Ew
- fierro 8y ago
  that's a weak argument; some places cost more to live because they are better places to live. It's a personal decision to live in New York over Kansas
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > If we pay the same (rather than by some measure of PPP) in every location, we are effectively discouraging applications from people who happen to be in more expensive areas. If you do location-based pay, you are even more strongly discouraging applications from people in less expensive areas, especially if you don't adjust salaries for relocations after someone is employed, since someone in a less-expensive area who might consider working for you is encouraged to delay their application, seek employment that will let them wlive in a more expensive area, and then apply to GitLab (and, if you don't do post-enployment location-based adjustments, then move back to the cheap area.) > efforts to make sure our comp calculator is fair and encourages people to apply. As long as you pay people differently for the same work based on where they live when they apply, your comp calculator will not be fair. To the extent that place of residency at time of application correlates with status in any protected class, it also seems to be a pretty open and shut unlawful discrimination by disparate impact case waiting to be filed, too.
  - DailyHN 8y ago
    So what I'm understanding is that, if I'm stuck in an awful city with low wages, Gitlab would like to prevent upward mobility so I stay there. What does this look like when it comes to company culture? Emphasis on maintaining a "diverse" team?
    - orf 8y ago
      Alternatively, they would offer you a fair salary what allowed you to move to a city with higher wages (and a higher cost of living).
  - DouweM 8y ago
    Note that GitLab _does_ adjust compensation when relocating: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#relocating https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c... + https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/ https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/ That means that as someone working at GitLab, my current wage is competitive compared to local companies, + I get all of the perks of remote work, working on open source, developer tooling, etc, and all of this will still be the case if I were to move elsewhere. The exact amount of money deposited into my account each month would go up or down, but my lifestyle would stay roughly the same. I know I’d make a lot more money if I lived in, say, the Bay Area, and if I made that same amount of money pretty much anywhere else I could live like a king, but I honestly don’t care. I quite like my decidedly not-king-like life today, and I love that with GitLab, I can have this same life and job wherever I choose to live. I’m currently living in the Netherlands, but am planning to move to Mexico in a few years to be closer to my fiancée’s family. If all goes well, GitLab will travel there with us, and while my compensation will see a decrease, our life style won’t. GitLab’s compensation philosophy is one of competing with the local market, instead of putting a fixed price on the value I or anyone else provides to the company, and that’s totally fine by me. If it wasn’t for GitLab, I’d probably be working at one of those local companies, so aren’t I still better off? For the company, it means that it/we can hire great people wherever they may be on earth, without being limited to the subset of great people who also happen to or want to live in the specific city the company happens to be based in. This may come as a surprise to some, but there are some amazing engineers out there who have zero interest in living in the Bay Area, and who don’t particularly care about maximizing their yearly take home pay, as long as they make enough money to provide for themselves and their family, and can live in whatever city or country or continent that they prefer. The map on our team page is a testament to that: https://about.gitlab.com/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/team/ (mobile-friendly: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/teampage-map/ https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/teampage-map/) FWIW, I know of colleagues who have moved to locations with both lower and higher cost of living compared to the location they were hired in, and I’ve never heard about requests to move being rejected.
- djloche 8y ago
  There's serious room for improvement in the salary calculator, calculator to account for growing metro areas, and I think most of this comes from trying to rely on numbeo for your rent indexes. Eg. Why in the world doesn't Portland OR have its own rent index vs rest of OR? The 'Hot Markets' adjustment should also take a wider account for cities / towns / suburbs that are probably also booming. For example, I'm in the PDX metro area, but on the WA side of the river. My housing costs have gone up 41% to 2.5 years thanks to the booming housing market here, but the current gitlab calculation doesn't account for it thanks to the combined factor of being in the metro area but not in the right city/state, combined with the fact that the big growing metro area doesn't have it's own rent index. Of course, this could be smoothed over and fixed as part of the hiring process, but it would be nice to know up front that you were using up to date data in your attempts to pay market rate salaries.
- briansteffens 8y ago
  I was interested in working at GitLab a couple years ago but the salary calculator changed my mind. It lumped all the cities in Oregon together which gave some weird results depending on which city you live in. I can't imagine how wonky the data gets internationally, and it seems like the fairness of your salary would depend on the accuracy and granularity of the data GitLab has for your particular region.
  - SuperQue 8y ago
    Yup, as a hiring manager I lost a couple of good hires due to the comp calculator. Especially in markets, like where I live. The market for engineer salaries is much higher, due to the demand. But the cost of living is very low, by comparison. I've been complaining about this for a while, but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      > but it's one of those things that we can't just vote on and change the whole company salary structure. I know you alone can’t do anything about this, but the longer this painful task is put off, the more difficult will be to rectify as Gitlab grows (more people = greater labor cost expense increase when the problem is addressed). It’s peope ops debt.
  - detaro 8y ago
    Just looking at Germany: the salary calculator assumes everything outside a select few cities is costing the same. I sincerely hope they don't use that calculator to make the actual calculations for candidates but spend the effort to calculate an actual number for the location, otherwise that's entire areas that are just laughably inaccurate. E.g. Stuttgart, according to some numbers the city with the second-highest average rent in the country is not in a special case and thus assumed to be in the cheapest class. Let's estimate CoL 30 % higher than Berlin, 10 % less compensation.
- agensaequivocum 8y ago
  And now you are just discouraging those in cheaper cities such as myself.
- pritianka 8y ago
  Hi folks - appreciate the discussion here. Our ceo put down his thoughts in the GitLab handbook about our policy to pay local rates - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c.... Do check it out. Doesn’t mean the calculator is perfect but speaks to the universal comp vs localized.
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    FYI, #2 on that list should say "than" rather than "then". Also, the link to the compensation calculator is 404 for me.
- nserrino 8y ago
  Ok, so maybe people in high cost of living areas aren't discouraged when the salary scales with their cost of living. But doesn't that effectively bias gitlab against those candidates because they have to pay them more? At some point there are unavoidable incentives that crop up as a result of the asymmetry.

mwj 8y ago

Maybe they can spend some of that cash improving the atrocious service levels on gitlab.com

sidcool 8y ago

This may be a reaction to Microsoft's GitHub acquisition. They need a stronger competition.

cschep 8y ago

wow.

devstevedev 8y ago

Maybe they can improve the awful performance. They keep denying it's due to their site being in Ruby, but I don't buy it. Rewrite it in Go already.

bovermyer 8y ago
"Rewrite it in Go already." So you've done a complete analysis of how much effort that would take and the loss of reliability inherent in rewrites versus the potential gains at scale?
YorickPeterse 8y ago
https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png https://i.imgur.com/ah8jmdZ.png (backend request timings for the past 24 hours) indicates Ruby isn't as bad of a choice as you might think.
- merb 8y ago
  actually mean is at 128ms, which is not really good... besides mean is not what you should actually target.
ahkurtz 8y ago
It's mostly due to them not paying developers enough and also having a cavalier attitude about engineering concerns. Their free product is a loss leader designed to sell you their B2B and it doesn't need to be great it just needs to be used. As with the rest of their philosophy the less they spend and can get away with the better for them. From their perspective.
shdh 8y ago
Golang: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner
jeltz 8y ago
No, it is not because of Ruby. It is either about not prioritizing performance in their development process or lacking the skills to write fast software. The Gitlab team would probably write a slow application in Go too.

sqs 8y ago

Congrats to the GitLab team! They and a few other companies lately have shown fantastic customer and revenue numbers around an open source product. (I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on.) This is an important step toward increasing the % of all software that is open source. Calling Joseph Jacks to give some data here... (I know some other names of companies with tremendous numbers but don’t recall which are public info, so I don’t want to risk it.)

pritianka 8y ago
+1 to the "I mean, a $1B+ valuation is cool, but the underlying customer metrics are way more important because that’s what it’s all based on." I've been super impressed working with Sid that his eye is always on the prize and he pushes us to work towards making our users and customers happy rather than go after any vanity metrics. It's ironic but this is novel in the valley now :p.
josephjacks 8y ago
Two resources: 1) http://oss.cash/ http://oss.cash/ 2) https://medium.com/open-consensus/ https://medium.com/open-consensus/
brlewis 8y ago
Curious how https://www.cypress.io/ https://www.cypress.io/ is doing.

cjdu 8y ago

:/ This feels like a 100% reaction to the GitHub acquisition by VCs not understanding the market. I'll bet the inbound to them was nuts the weeks following the new. Good on Sid for fleecing the VCs though how GitLab ever supports that valuation is beyond me.

ryanackley 8y ago
This. I've never used any of their products but I've always found their marketing to be spot on. They perfectly positioned themselves as a 3rd option to GitHub and BitBucket. With the GitHub acquisition and Atlassian's stock on fire right now, they were in the perfect position to go for an insane valuation.
- shdh 8y ago
  I've used all three and I prefer GitLab.
mo1ok 8y ago
Agreed. Gitlab is cool but $1 billion valuation? Seriously? Do they even have significant marketshare over GitHub and Bitbucket?
- kgwgk 8y ago
  Given that a few months ago GitHub was valued at $7.5bn, why would GitLab need to have higher marketshare to get to the $1bn valuation?
  - dfee 8y ago
    I think we should interpret “over” as “within the context of”.
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      Good point, I may have misunderstood the comment.

therealmarv 8y ago

Hope they put a lot of it (money) in their server infrastructure and better management of incident handling on gitlab.com. Thinks can break or get slow (sure) but their competitor (github) is in comparison rock solid. I cannot even count the 503 or git downtimes on gitlab.com I hope they look on a lot of worse case scenarios like e.g. an upgrade breaks things, DB issues etc. and look how big big cloud installations are doing this stuff (staged updates, roll backs etc.)

btasovac 8y ago
We are heavily focusing on performance improvements - both in the product (so that features run better)[1] and in our GitLab.com infrastructure team (so that GitLab.com runs more reliably)[2]. Thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label_name%5B%5D=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests?label... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues
- adtac 8y ago
  I'll just say that gitlab.com, in my experience, has been much faster than it used to be the past few weeks. Things now don't take forever, which is a good thing. It's still slower than Github, but the improvement (due to the GCP migration?) is quite visible. Keep moving forward :)
  - pritianka 8y ago
    Yay! Thanks for sharing the positive experience. We know .com performance is something we need to improve and as mentioned in the comment above, are working super hard to get there.
  - mercer 8y ago
    Seconded. I moved to Gitlab because of pricing issues, and initially it felt sluggish to the point where I considered moving back to Github or Bitbucket (although the latter felt slow too). This is no longer the case. Things still feel sluggish, but not egregiously so.

fisherfriesuk 8y ago

Zoinks! I have wanted to and tried to like GitLab. I can't. Everything about it is less than half baked, most of all their CI stuff. It's hard to see them having line of sight to a $1B valuation when they can't do the basics and are trying to recreate the terrible monolithic systems of years gone by. That's not a world I want to live in ever again...

pritianka 8y ago
I'm sorry to hear that. We value iteration over perfection and so that can be jarring sometimes. I am surprised to hear about the CI experience though. Did you try the Auto DevOps pipeline or just CI generally? Would love to help out if you are open. Twitter.com/pritianka DM me!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jl-gitlab 8y ago
  To add on, we are actively working on balancing how we deliver new and deep solutions, CI in particular is an area where we want to provide better solutions for more complex problems (as well as address some of the challenges like hung builds or other issues people are running into.) You can read about our vision for CI here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify/ I'd also be up for a chat sometime if you'd like to talk about some of the issues that are impacting you and what we might be able to do to help. twitter.com/j4lenn
jl-gitlab 8y ago
Really sorry to hear you've had that experience. I'm the PM for CI and we're really proud of how our CI product in particular has been rated by industry analysts, and how we've maintained interoperability, though of course that doesn't speak to where you've struggled with our solution. If you'd like to chat about it sometime I'd definitely be up for it.
- brandonwamboldt 8y ago

georgewsinger 8y ago

To people who have used GitLab: is there any way in which GitLab is not just an incremental improvement over GitHub? Or is there something I'm missing? (Genuine question; not trolling).

AsyncAwait 8y ago
Self-hostable, built in CI...
- 0x0 8y ago
  Agreed, for me this is a killer feature. Being able to just download the gitlab-runner executable (1 file) on mac/windows/linux and register a private runner - even on gitlab.com - and the simple configuration of CI builds, with the deep integration of CI results in the whole gitlab experience (commit browser, merge requests ("merge if CI succeeds", etc)) is best of class. Edit: I'm not usually bothered by downvotes but I'm curious about what kind of agenda whoever downvoted this has.
- edcarter 8y ago
  Self hosting is a big one. Having control over your source code and a core component to development workflow is important to some people.
maaarghk 8y ago
I personally couldn't really name one but it is many small incremental improvements adding up to something bigger. When a place I used to work at mandated a switch away from GitHub to GitLab I was a bit annoyed and saw it as penny pinching, going for the cheaper but crappier option, but since using it daily for a while I am a convert. I have my own installs of the free version running in some places now as well, and I find that pretty painless. Their CI tool is nice as well, dead easy to get started with.
pritianka 8y ago
Thanks for asking. One of our big goals is to address the awareness-gap about the GitLab offering. So instead of a version control system that lets people try out different integrations, GitLab provides an opinionated (yet flexible with key integrations and the option to opt out of anything you don't want) way to run the entire software development and deployment lifecycle. You can start with planning your issues, then you create the code (usually in your editor of choice but there's a web IDE that makes quick fixes much faster in GitLab), then you store your code with our version control. Using the GitLab CI you can set up automated jobs that include all kinds of tests (we provide the Auto DevOps pipeline for a set of best practices to automatically do tests and security scans and also provide Prometheus metrics without you having to do a thing). Then comes the CD part, followed by monitoring via Prometheus and tracing with Jaeger. You can deploy the code to k8s clusters directly on GitLab making k8s a lot more accessible to developers and then run it on any cloud. Our GKE integration is pretty dope. I personally am working on bringing similar serverless functionality to the product soon as well. This is by no means an exhaustive list but I covered the main aspects from my perspective. You can learn more here - https://about.gitlab.com/features/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/

gm3dmo 8y ago

Gitlab. The Evernote of source control.

deleted 8y ago
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neom 8y ago

As Jack Welch says, strive to be #1 or #2 in your industry, seems gitlab is well positioned to make a run at this, and given the price tag Github set for this type of product in the devtool space, 1.1 seems very respectable. Nice work Gitlab CEO, good luck! :)

bberenberg 8y ago

Be careful when considering the market share of these vendors based on anecdotal SaaS experience. A large portion of their revenue comes from their enterprise editions which are hosted in-house. We're seeing significant growth by GitLab in this area with our enterprise clients.

datadudenybills 8y ago
I saw somewhere MongoDB claimed like near universal usage in fortune 100s or 500s, meaning Mongo was used at all these big, successful companies. GitLab is that...it's mongodb to GitHub PostgreSQL. GitHub isn't "cool" anymore but it powers the world. GitLab is "cool" to some, but ultimately it's software sugar.
CapnCrunchie 8y ago
I previously worked at GitLab, and I can confirm this is the point that I find most commenters on HN miss. GitLab's web platform, at the moment, is essentially a marketing expense to get people to use GitLab and push it into their day jobs.

pritianka 8y ago

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

catwell 8y ago
> As Sijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub and Bitbucket competitor [...] GitLab wants to be far more than that. It now offers products in nine categories So basically, instead of being a GitHub competitor, it is now an Atlassian competitor.
- sytse 8y ago
  Atlassian is indeed broader then just BitBucket and a better comparison. GitLab does a broader offering than Atlassian by including things like packaging, monitoring, and security. And GitLab is a single application instead of a suite of tools with different data models.
  - jtwaleson 8y ago
    The offering in most categories is already good enough (for our little startup in Amsterdam), and we're still on the free tier! We only have to use a single integrated SaaS offering which fits almost all of our needs. The CI/CD is far beyond "good enough": it is fantastic, especially with runners on EC2 auto-scaling. Congrats on closing this round Sytse!
    - sytse 8y ago
      Thank you very much. Glad to hear it is working well for you.

Proven 8y ago

Haha here we go, GV. Now those who complained about GH and moved to GL again have something to complain about... And I commented here two months ago how these guys will end up being a part of Google's Adware Network.

scrollaway 8y ago

I've been a long-time Github user and believer and vaguely followed Gitlab since their beginnings. Much as I admired their company and business, I had a lot of problems with their UI, UX and scattered focus. Then very recently I've had to use Gitlab for a variety of new projects. And just... wow, it has come a long way. There is an incredible amount of tooling and features, native to Gitlab. It's actually scary, and in some places even gets messy (feature overload). But a lot of it is useful stuff Github really should be offering. Things like more metadata on projects, subprojects. A very in-depth permission system (invite users with read-only access, issue-only access; membership expiration, ...). Branch protection integrated into various features. Native CI! That's the big one. Travis is terrible. I used Gitlab CI to deploy one of my most recent project and ... it's been great. Was very simple to configure, felt a lot less magic and constrained than Travis, and it's very well integrated into Gitlab. All this to say that I'm just about converted. Unfortunately, I have my 10+ year old profile on Github which includes membership to various projects and orgs, but I'm now pretty definitely using both platforms. Edit: Here's my Github profile so people know I mean business when I'm praising Gitlab. https://github.com/jleclanche https://github.com/jleclanche

dasmoth 8y ago
It certainly seems to fill a niche. That said, I rather miss the minimalism and focus on individual developers (vs organisations and processes) of early Github.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Do you think that focus is gone? I find both Gitlab and Github have plenty of focus on the dev (Github more so). It just so happens that Github has developed a lot of tooling for orgs and projects since. Compare to Bitbucket's profile pages for example: https://bitbucket.org/astanin/ https://bitbucket.org/astanin/
  - dasmoth 8y ago
    Do you think that focus is gone? Obviously, this comes down to opinion, but honestly: yes. In the case of GitHub, the point where I reached that conclusion was when they added built-in enforcement of code review workflows. A feature which I seem to recall they copied more-or-less directly from GitLab... (And I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. But diversity is nice...)

village-idiot 8y ago

$1.1B in valuation is insane, and seems to exist to justify $100M funding rounds.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago

I started using GitLab a week ago. Only because they offer free private repos. GitLab feels unpolished and I encountered so many small UI bugs. If they said they are three people and just founded their startup, ok, sure. But Series D, at a $1B valuation? I guess their priorities lie somewhere else.

pastor_elm 8y ago
Their staff is globally 'remote' with salaries determined by where you live i.e. cheap labor.
- weka 8y ago
  So a developer in a Dhaka, Bangladesh is making the same as a developer in Palto Alto, California despite contributing the same work?
  - ecnahc515 8y ago
    No, I'd expect them to make significantly less than someone in the Bay based on Gitlabs compensation calculator.
sytse 8y ago
What is the first thing you think we should fix?
- elygre 8y ago
  Not gp, but: you have a marvelous security system, but GitLab Pages does not use it. For an installation containing private/protected projects, this severely limits the use of Pages. For example, it is not possible to use Pages to build documentation that should only be available to project members. Everything published to Pages is available to the public.
  - sytse 8y ago

catwell 8y ago

And so, the clock starts. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/222444675116711936?s=19

dasmoth 8y ago
It is somewhat remarkable that the first reply to that (in 2012!) was "Smells like the next Microsoft acquisition to me."

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bnchrch 8y ago

To who ever is doubting gitlab right now: Checkout their CI/CD flow in combination with their Docker/Kube integration. You'll see why they are poised to steal the rug from under github.

whoisjuan 8y ago

I use GitLab for all my side projects. I personally love the integrated CI/CD. But there's one thing that I absolutely hate and is their hierarchy model for repos. In GitHub, repos are first class citizens. For some reason, I feel that in GitLab you get a diluted repo experience. I think I would abandon GitLab altogether if Microsoft ever makes private repos free.

jramsay 8y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I’m a Product Manager for Create (Git, merge requests etc) at GitLab. Why do you think the repository part of the project isn’t clear enough? What would make GitLab’s repo capabilities less diluted for you? I want to make sure using Git with GitLab is great.
davidpthomas 8y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I'm a Solutions Architect at GitLab. You can certainly maintain a flat line of repos in GL just like GH. But as you scale and need to group projects by context (customer facing, webapps, bizapps, security, etc), hierarchies (ie. GL groups) provide some added benefits esp around access rights and inheritance of settings -- and the 1st class citizen child projects get things implicitly! Curious how you are using hierarchies in a way that doesn't feel right. Happy to help!

dustinmoris 8y ago

The reason why I think GitLab has been massively overvalued and why GitLab will ultimately fail is because it is storming head on into becoming a stale company. Normally a startup is innovating in one vertical, disrupting the market with new ideas or technology which enables users and the company itself to profit of those innovations. This continues normally until the startup has become number one in that vertical. Then it must defend its spot against other newcomers who want to disrupt. Part of the defence is diversification, use the capital to disrupt in other places as well. This has been the natural progression of every successful business I know. At some point that company is so big though, competing in so many verticals that it becomes stale. It stops innovating and is constantly on the defence. Only innovation comes through acquisition which is often just a way to defend your spot by buying early. GitLab is sort of not even trying to become number one in one vertical. Like the CEO said in his interview, GitLab already competes in 9 different verticals (JIRA, Jenkins, GitHub, NewRelic, Artifactory, etc.) and they are not near the top anywhere yet. They are going to become stale before even reaching a single peak in any industry. So far they have not innovated anything yet. Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different domains into one product", which is nothing more than a pricing strategy and a lack of focus and not an innovation. It's painful to watch. Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess.

mwj 8y ago
"Their business model looks like their products: an absolute mess." Quote of the year
shdh 8y ago
Reads like a subjective hit piece. >Their only innovation is "free private repos" and "cramming 9 different domains into one product" They have one of the best CI/CD products out on the market right now. git versioned yml/docker based jobs with multiple stages.
- oweiler 8y ago
  > They have one of the best CI/CD products out on the market right now. git versioned yml/docker based jobs with multiple stages. CircleCI, Jenkins, Codeship etc. have similar offerings. And Jenkins also has the benefit of a huge plugin ecosystem.

kasbah 8y ago

Great news! For Kitspace [1] I am currently working on re-purposing GitLab for electronics projects. It's good to see that "upstream" is getting more financial support. I believe GitLab being open source is going to save me a ton of time and it could do this in other areas as well. I always thought GitHub could have been a much more remarkable product if it had been open source given its community. Let's make it happen with GitLab. [1]: https://kitspace.org https://kitspace.org

shdh 8y ago

GitLab is far superior to GitHub

tschellenbach 8y ago

I wonder how well they explain to their employees how this can wipe out their upside. Venture Deals by Brad Feld is a great read to help understand why this is potentially a dangerous situation to be in: https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalist/dp/1118443616 https://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitali...

yhoiseth 8y ago
I’d be interested in hearing more, but not enough to read an entire book. Can you please elaborate or link to a shorter text, such as a blog post?

hal1 8y ago

Looks like a rampant acquisition by Google imho

dna_polymerase 8y ago

Okay, are we starting migrating to another hosted Git service right now or do we wait for them to start behaving shady and eventually selling out? Asking for a friend.

thsowers 8y ago

Came to the comments to complain about GitLab not having language stats on a repo landing page, as I thought that was the #1 missing feature. Very pleased to see it was added three months ago! Surprised it took this long, this is one of the first things I look at when considering contributing to a repo: Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)?

Jedd 8y ago
Neat that you got that complaint in first, then conceded it was invalid, then made it again. > Am I proficient in it's primary lang(s)? If English is your first language, proficiency would include knowing that possessive its has no apostrophe. : )

dblock 8y ago

Right now sales people at GitHub are trying to convert our $200 grandfathered plan into a $2000 one per month at no avail because we can just move over to Gitlab and get same or better service. I’m thankful for Gitlab’s existence and am just watching this unfold popcorn at hand. I bet I can probably cut that $200 bill into a $0 if I asked Gitlab now after their big fundraise.

sjg007 8y ago

Is there room for one more?

pankajdoharey 8y ago

$1.1 Billion? That too much, even Github hasn't reached profitability yet inspite of being the most popular Code hosting site. Gitlab can never reach the level of popularity that Github has. Then how are they valuing it at the price point? Some of Khoslas investment lately are so off, for instance the 'Hyperloop' transport Inc.

Lorin 8y ago

I wonder if that means they'll finally create a dark theme which has been on the request list for years and has been pushed from releases time and time again.

ddtaylor 8y ago

GitLab is pretty awesome. I switched for many of my projects over the last few months and I'm most enjoying the time tracking functionality. Very simple, yet very powerful. It's nice to be able to estimate or track time using commit messages or a command line helper tool like gtt.

sbmthakur 8y ago

On a related note, is Gitlab profitable?

voidr 8y ago

> “Some of our tools, like continuous integration, are already best in class,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told VentureBeat. Either the GitLab CEO has never heard about Jenkins and TeamCity or he is making false statements to get more investor money.

dirtylowprofile 8y ago

I run GitLab on my server and it is just too slow, sometimes I get a 503. I hope they take a look at this asap.

oliv3r 8y ago

While I'm a huge GitLab fan since June 4th, but one thing that concerns me greatly, which hopefully will be resolved with this extra money, is the huge number of growing issues. What's even more scary herein is, that some issues/feature request get put on the back-burner because "there's bigger problems to solve" or "more valueable features to build"