29 ms·

GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue with Every Employee Working from Home

833 points by janvdberg 8y ago

josefresco 8y ago
Were the original 9 remote as well? Looks like the original two were remote - I just wonder what the composition looked like when they "hit it big".
- YorickPeterse 8y ago
  If my memory serves me right, yes. Some of the early employees did work/live together for 2-3 months during Y Combinator if I remember correctly, but apart from that everybody has always been remote. Source: early-ish/current employee (#28 I believe, not exactly prestigious).
  - josefresco 8y ago
    So my follow up was/is - is this remote setup in fact their "secret sauce"? Seems like being a part of Y Combinator did more for their initial success.
    - YorickPeterse 8y ago
      I think there is no single "secret sauce", instead it is a combination of many different things. This includes being all remote, because it does drastically affect how a company operates.
- jobvandervoort 8y ago
  Yeah, we were all working remotely from the start. We never had an office. We moved in together for a few months during YC.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Submarine piece? Lots of successful startups grow into large companies or exit without being remote, and remote startups fail just as easily. GitLab's success is arguably because of developer disenchantment with Github, as well as Gitlab giving more away for free than Github (VCS, CICD pipeline, etc), regardless of employee location arrangement. Also, what is "success"? Taking $150MM (EDIT: corrected) in investment and not showing profitability [1]? I am not against the startup underdog story (a rising tide lifts all boats). I am against marketing fluff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425
- ghaff 8y ago
  Many, many stories in magazines and newspapers start with a PR pitch. There's nothing especially noteworthy about it. It's how lots of stories get started. To your broader point, I expect both extreme butt-in-seats and extreme remote are one of those characteristics you can map to successful and unsuccessful companies and you can probably find just about any pattern you want to find. (And of course most companies are some sort of blended model depending on company and function.)
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    So we're in agreement this is a non-story? "GitLab's Secret To Saving On Office Space Expenses (EDIT: And Wages)" would've been a truthful (albeit less sensational) headline.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I don't think it's so much saving on office expenses. They also get access to a lot of talent, and yes, sometimes for less than if they were in the Bay Area. This isn't an especially original story; it's been written about before. But it is still interesting for those not already in the know that you have fully remote companies.
      - deleted 8y ago
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- bdcravens 8y ago
  I agree 100% that being remote has nothing to do with success. However that link points to Github taking $350M, and they had been around for a few years before they took their first VC $. Until September, Gitlab had been pretty light on the funding, relatively speaking. (about $150M total, and that's after a $100M round in September) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-funding-rounds https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-f...
- holman 8y ago
captaindiego 8y ago
Does anyone have any more information on what sort of structure, organization cultural things can be put in place to help a company function fully remote?
- wjohnsto 8y ago
  GitLab actually has their entire handbook open: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
- dsumenkovic 8y ago
  Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Thanks wjohnsto for sharing a link to our Handbook. I'd love to share our "All Remote" page as well. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/. There you can read how remote work is changing the workforce, how it changes the organization, advantages for employees and organizations and what did we learn about remote working. Additionally, our blog page is the great place to learn about our culture and remote working at GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/blog/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/. Here's the list of our blog posts I would recommend. This may be a really interesting read for you: [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote-companies/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote-... [2] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions-and-getting-things-done/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote-companies-stay-connected/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote... [4] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates-devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates-... [5] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/
  - bengale 8y ago
    Thank you for making these available and being so open.
    - dsumenkovic 8y ago
andrew_ 8y ago
I interviewed with them when they were at 40 remote employees (as far as I can recall). Sadly, I lacked the chops they were looking for. But I was thoroughly impressed with how passionately they spoke about their remote culture. I've been remote now for 10 years with 3 different companies, and I'll never go back to an office unless my family is in dire straights. I hope this article gets play, and I hope to see many more like it in the future. Working remotely is still undervalued and niche, and I'd like to see more companies get up to speed and become open to it.
- tapatio 8y ago
  Do you have a home office or rent office space? If home office, how is it being around family 24/7? What's the optimal remote working setup in your opinion?
  - sigfubar 8y ago
    There isn't a generally optimal remote working setup because every remote worker and their situation is different. My "remote office" is in a corner of my living room that also doubles as a kitchen. It's in the middle of everything, which some people might find distracting, but is just right for me. You see, I've done my time in high-pressure, low-focus, fast-paced financial environments, so being in the middle of my family while I work is stimulating and rewarding. I normally go to the office (a few miles away) when I have more than one meeting to attend. This allows me to keep my work chatter away from home, where others might be distracted by it. All this to say that the onus is on you to make sure that our setup fits your personality. Look within yourself for clues on how and where to work, then make it happen, and be mindful of changes over time.
  - andrew_ 8y ago
    I have a small family, and a "home office". My wife works and I take care of the infant. My home has an open floor plan where the kitchen and living room are one in the same, and that's my primary workspace. I'm not a fan of a dedicated room, and I work solely on a laptop - long ago rid myself of elaborate stationary setups, I enjoy taking my laptop into multiple rooms, even outside. When the wife gets home, work typically stops. I'm a night owl and she's an early riser, so I'm not working when she's around in the morning, and I like work at night after she falls asleep. We also have two dogs, which are a JOY to have around during the day. Having the kid and dogs around, combined with occasional errands and household tasks, provides the exact right amount of distraction and interruption I like to have. I typically only work in 2 hour increments, and then tend to another responsibility, or purposefully head out to do something for an hour. Breaks in the day keeps my mind fresh and oddly enough, allows me to focus more when I sit down to work. As for what the optimal setup is - that's incredibly personal and subjective, and everyone needs to figure that out for themselves over time. Some generic advice would be: - set at-work time limits - set off-limits hours where you do not work under any circumstances - find a comfortable space (that can be anything from a coworking space, to the living room) - find your perfect "white noise." it can get really quiet at home. having something in the background can help. I personally like to keep netflix running, or a movie streaming.
romanovcode 8y ago
I remember reading that they pay developers based on where they are located so for example developer from SF would get 140k while developer from Minsk would get 50k. Is it still true?
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Yeah I think that's still true and they have a salary calculator somewhere. I don't know why you'd hire SV programmers when your entire company is remote. They're easily double the price of anywhere else and not twice as good.
  - otras 8y ago
    Here’s a link to their calculator: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
    - grogenaut 8y ago
      All I see is a formula. Is that the calculator?
- otras 8y ago
  Looks like that is still true. They’re pretty open about their model of location-based pay [0]: "Market rates for roles are different for different regions and countries. We pay market rates instead of paying the same wage for the same role in different regions." [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
- megaman8 8y ago
  I know i'm in a minority opinion here, but to be honest I think it would be totally fair for an employer to pay everyone the same regardless of location in the US (as long as their not forcing you to move to a more expensive city - if they force you to be in a more expensive city, then they need to pay up), if it's a remote company. I know it may sound harsh to some. But, think of it this way, it will encourage more companies to become remote, thus opening more doors for people and allowing more people to work remotely. After all, a low salary in a low cost of living city is usually better than a high salary in palo alto, considering the enormous delta in living costs and taxes.
jchw 8y ago
I've always been impressed with how far GitLab has come. At my previous job we switched to GitLab during the period where GitHub felt like it wasn't improving. While I think GitHub has picked up the slack pretty effectively, I still think GitLab offers a very compelling package. I didn't use the Kubernetes integration, but we definitely used GitLab CI and registry, and a lot of other features that GitHub didn't or still doesn't really have an equivalent for.
johan_larson 8y ago
Is there no HQ at all? Even for the executive team?
- jobvandervoort 8y ago
  Nope, there's only Sids house in SF that has a few desks for when people want to visit _something_.
- boleary-gl 8y ago
  There is no headquarters, even the executive team is remote. Many of them live in the Bay Area (where Sid, our CEO moved) but our VP of Product, for instance, is in Portugal. IThere is a boardroom dedicated to GitLab where board meetings happen. But even for each of those, there is a zoom bridge for remote executives to join: https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/
kzisme 8y ago
These sorts of articles always excite me that more places will be moving towards remote work, and hopefully using Gitlab as an example. In the past I've had some not so great experiences with remote work. I've had two remote gigs thus far and the first was pretty horrible. On-boarding took a month (to receive a machine), and I frequently went days without hearing from anyone. There was zero communication even when I attempted to create meetings to talk (since pings were never replied to). It pretty much felt like being on an island - especially when most of your co-workers had worked together for anywhere from 2-10 years. Remote culture didn't really exist at this job. At my current job it has been great - we use Slack to communicate and there is hardly any radio silence. Before starting, I was told we work to live not the other way around. I received my machine and ~actually~ had an onboarding process. It feels like I'm a part of a team (albeit small) and that makes a world of difference when working remote. The one thing I haven't fixed yet is being on a routine/schedule. It isn't the best to work, sleep, and relax in the same room every day, but I've been working out of the house more lately which has seemed to help.
- 49531 8y ago
  Getting out of the house makes all the difference for me. Public libraries are a wonderful resource, most have quiet common areas and rooms you can reserve for meetings.
  - kzisme 8y ago
    I have found that if I don't make it out of the house I am not nearly as motivated as I am when working from a coffee shop or similar. For me, it's mostly been coffee shops and places to eat. I might start going to a university library that has many free meeting rooms, but that's the closest "large" library near me.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- robohoe 8y ago
  Having a hard start/stop time and your personal "office space" helps a lot. Try putting something on your schedule around 4-5pm, such as working out or going for a walk. It'll certainly help you disconnect from work.
sgb_QQ 8y ago
It's worth pointing out that Gitlab's hosted service has suffered a myriad of pretty disastrous outages and problems over the past 12 months. In my experience, it's been totally unreliable compared to it's rivals. So I wouldn't say that they are a leading example of success just yet, although they certainly have a good shot.
- umvi 8y ago
  I would guess most companies prefer to self-host GitLab internally. That's what mine does and we've never had any problems with it.
  - deleted 8y ago
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- jchw 8y ago
  Well, historically speaking and also likely true today, GitLab has made most of its customers by virtue of being the 'enterprise' solution. It existed before GitHub Enterprise, and was a good way to have Git hosting behind the firewall. GitLab's hosted service, on the other hand, has traditionally been free and best-effort. That and they're moving hosting providers, which is definitely a non-trivial migration. It's definitely fair to complain if you paid for the hosted version, but I think GitLab was plenty successful without monetizing GitLab.com.
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    The paid for hosted version is AFAICT difficult to run reliably as well - especially the CI runners. GitLab prioritize breadth over depth - i.e. new features over bug fixes. As far as I can tell, their regression testing is sub-optimal. Expanding a diff on a code review was broken in two releases.
    - jchw 8y ago
      I administrated an instance of GitLab EE for around a year solo for my previous employer. It was absolutely painless. The biggest issue I recall hitting was when I upgraded my LetsEncrypt setup broke, because they added LetsEncrypt setup to the core. The bug that caused it was fixed a couple days later anyways, though. We used GitLab CI very heavily. The only issue we hit was disk space on workers filling up - but it was easy to resolve this by making a Cron job run `docker system prune`. Generally, the GitLab team definitely has moved very quickly on new features and that has caused things to break here and there. I also agree they could use better regression testing. Still, they are very responsive to issue reports and most of the time issues that I care about are resolved very quickly. GitHub as a competitor obviously is a lot more stable. But, I was definitely willing to trade some stability for the features GitLab offered, and I do feel they have been steadily improving in the past year.
jack6e 8y ago
Skipping over the little annoying facts that fully remote work is not some secret strategy, and that no Fortune 500 company (as an index of success) is 100% remote, let's just do a direct comparison of competitors: - GitLab is 100% remote and, according the article, was most recently valued at $1 billion, 350 employees, and has an unknown/hidden (or I can't find) number of users. - Github has a headquarters and also remote work, and was recently acquired for $7.5 billion, with 800 employees and 31 million users. So...is remote work a secret? Did it lead to a comparative success over a competitor offering similar services but a different organizational strategy? Not really, not even close, no. More accurately, we should say GitLab has so far managed to make remote work a success for themselves through leadership, organizational culture, and some other actually secret ingredient, which is where the real story lies. Lots of remote companies fail. What has GitLab done right? Sadly, this article only skims the possibilities.
- sixo 8y ago
  Gitlab is also 3 years younger as a company, and Github had a undeniable first-mover advantage in the space.
  - williamchia 8y ago
    GitLab the open source project was started in 2011. GitLab the company didn't start until 2014. GitHub is 6 years older than GitLab.
    - richardwhiuk 8y ago
      On the other hand, GitLab didn't have to do any UI work to start with, they just appeared to copy and paste GitHub.
      - Aeolun 8y ago
        Huh? It doesn’t look the same at all, or at least it doesn’t now or at any time I used it.
sandworm101 8y ago
Last year i switched from totally remote to totally in-office. (From law to defense.) Now I cannot even access my work email from home. It is great. Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediatly. Sometimes i have shifts where i must man a paticular desk for certain hours, but mostly i set my own schedule. We have a gym, including a pool, in the office that we are expected to use on company time. Even going to the dentist is on company time. It is a unique office culture that i never expected. Until i got here i had no idea how unhappy i was while working remote.
- williamchia 8y ago
  > Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediately. Sounds like wherever you were working before was doing it wrong. I work remote and no one ever expects immediate email or slack. It is because the whole company is remote that this is the case - you can't have this type of expectation when folks are in every time zone across the globe. Although I love remote, it's not for everyone. There's a lot to be said for perks like gym, dental, etc. It's really nice that you found a good fit!
- YorickPeterse 8y ago
  At least in case of GitLab, many of this is allowed (or even promoted) to do during company time. For example, if you go to the dentist for one hour you don't need to somehow make up for that. The same goes with Emails: the remote first culture means basically everybody fully expects it to take at least several hours before they get a reply. In other words: I think this is more about the company, and less about remote versus non remote.
mongol 8y ago
How is tax on salaries handled in a situation like this? Seems like it would be really complicated.
- YorickPeterse 8y ago
  For a few countries (The Netherlands and The United States for example) we have official entities that employ people. I for example am employed by the Dutch entity, meaning my salary and taxes are handled like any other Dutch employer. Outside of these countries we employ employees as contractors, meaning they have to do the taxes and such themselves if I'm not mistaken.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  I imagine they just use an outside payroll firm, many large corporations use companies like ADP (the one I work for does).
- dudul 8y ago
  They probably just use ADP. Benefits are most likely more complicated to handle than payroll. May be hard to find competitive plans that cover the entire country.
monkeynotes 8y ago
One of the corporate advantages of 100% remote is the business can pay your team whatever their local market rate is, this is usually a lot less than SF, Seattle, NY etc. Additionally, you can often avoid paying certain benefits if your team member is outside of the US. This is a huge competitive win for organizations who are willing to organize around remote work. I personally am not sure how I feel about salaries weighted in such a way, partly feel like people doing equal work should be compensated equally since they contribute equally. On the other hand, potential employees are free to accept of turn down an offer and the market will continue to adjust accordingly. Full disclosure; I've noted elsewhere on HN that I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview which made the position fiscally uninteresting. I swear I am not bitter :) - I just think that this aspect of the employment strategy is interesting and worthy of dissection as it is probably something we will see more and more with remote positions.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview If you took the job, and then moved, how would they know?
  - Androider 8y ago
    Because they're not paying you in bitcoin or by brown paper envelope. There's federal, state & local city tax reporting for each employee, W-4's to fill, W-2's to mail, health care providers to setup (different in each state even within the same company), 401Ks etc. Unless you're going underground not only from your employer but also the tax authorities. Now if you maintain your high-cost address but go tripping around the world, perhaps they wouldn't find out for a while.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      Gitlab is offering much more than the cost of local taxes as a bonus for maintaining a "high-cost" address. And your federal taxes would be almost entirely refunded; they'd be withheld normally but you qualify for the foreign earned income deduction based purely on your location during the year.
jacquesm 8y ago
We've been running TMC (my latest venture, now 10 years old) as a 100% remote company since day one. As of late though it starts to feel like a less-than-ideal solution for the longer term. Our customers expect a company that is more conventional and some of our colleagues have said rather explicitly that they would like to collaborate more closely in an office like setting. What with the rents in and around Amsterdam so far not having an office was one of the advantages we had over competitors.
- rafiki6 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, is there a reason that your customers want a more conventional setup other than perception? How about those colleagues? Are there legitimate reasons to collaborate in an office? For the latter, maybe the best solution is renting a conference room for those sessions that really need to be in person.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    Our work involves quite a bit of interaction with the customers and they are all rather very conventional companies themselves. We do the 'rent a conference room' so frequently now that it starts to approach renting an office.
freefal 8y ago
I realize they are growing fast but isn't it a little early to declare success (as the title seems to) when you're generating $10.5 million with a cost structure that includes 350 employees?
- sytse 8y ago
  Totally agree that those numbers would make an outsized burn rate. The team member number is from a different date than the revenue number. Our team member number is public on https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ (currently 383). Our current ARR is multiple times the number cited. We're not profitable but on some months we're cash flow positive. We don't aim to be cash flow positive until 2022.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Considering Gitlab’s revenue model, how come you’re only cash flow positive some months? I’d assume both income and employee count is mostly steady, unless you’re hiring people just about as fast as cash flow is increasing?
    - tracker1 8y ago
      Servers and Data Centers cost money... operations scaling, advertizing, etc.
    - sytse 8y ago
      Income as in revenue is steady. Cash flow has more variance since people pay for GitLab one or more years upfront. On average we have negative cash flow since we're investing the money we raised in growth by doubling incremental annual contract value every year. But in some months we have a few large orders that push us to cash flow positive. We could be cash flow positive every month but that would at the cost of our rate of development. Right now we're focussed on making GitLab a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. That means we have to make a lot of progress every month https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/22/gitlab-11-4-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/22/gitlab-11-4-released/
esotericn 8y ago
The GitLab compensation calculator seems really odd. At least personally, when I saw it, it drew almost all of my attention away from the mechanics of the role and towards trying to game this thing in order to get paid comparatively well. If someone takes a job with a London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay? Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income? I'd considered applying in the past but don't really feel comfortable with the fact that it's not really 'remote' because if I actually live where I want to, I'd get paid peanuts. Evidently it works for them, but to me it looks like some weird way to push everyone into the expensive cities.
- komali2 8y ago
  >London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay? Apparently, stupendously, yes (based on what apparent employees in this thread are saying) >Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income? It's in the contract. I would absolutely lie to them, I would 1:1 fiscally motivated to do so.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    The whole thing baffles me. I dunno. I'm sure it works if you just take jobs without caring what you get paid. Maybe that describes most of GitLab's staff. It's a cool product, so it wouldn't surprise me. The mental overhead of maintaining a London postcode just for the sake of it I think would have me looking elsewhere (and I live in London and have no intention of leaving). I'd be wondering about where they draw the line, and whether if I move two stations out they'd try and dock my pay or whatever.
    - komali2 8y ago
      Yea, theres a massive thread above us getting into the weeds about like, the very nature of capitalism, but for me it boils down to a simple issue: I think it's unfair that I get paid more than my equally productive colleague, just because I happen to live in SF and he happens to live in Indiana. Also nearly entirely defeats the purpose of remote work. I'm into it cause it'd be dank to pull a San Francisco salary while chilling in Vietnam and paying 200$/mo for rent.
clubm8 8y ago
One thing I don't like about Gitlab is their salary formula. They dock you in pay if you are in a lower cost of living area. First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. Otherwise, aren't we subsidizing those who choose to live in an expensive place like SF or NYC over those who are happy with a smaller city like Portland of Austin? Second, while many cities have growing tech scenes, SF and Seattle remain fairly unique job markets. If you're outside those cities, you may have less expenses, but you also lose out on networking and may find it harder to find your next job (if for no other reason than the fact nonremote companies will shy away from relocating you if another qualified candidate is local).
- michaelmior 8y ago
  Could you not equivalently say that pay is boosted for those living in areas with a higher cost of living?
- ravenstine 8y ago
  > First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. If it's wrong(and illegal) to pay people differently based on their race or gender, I can't see how it should be alright to pay people differently based on their cost of living. There ought to be a movement to outlaw this practice. EDIT: Before you reply, note that I no longer think my argument is good.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Are you kidding me? No one ever said "all markets are created equal". There is a very real difference in cost of living and local economies and competitive opportunities for employees in different markets. There's nothing you can do to fix that. This is where "equality of opportunity" and "equality of outcome" diverge.
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icedchai 8y ago
10.5 million in revenue with 350 employees? Anyone see a problem?
- ggregoire 8y ago
  Yes, not sure why nobody is talking about that? I guess the plan is to be acquired soon.
- sytse 8y ago
  I responded to the other thread about this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014
indigodaddy 8y ago
"Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected." Interesting that they don't use Gitter for chat. Perhaps they will be transitioning towards using it? GitLab acquired Gitter in March 2017; perhaps the article didn't get this detail correct...
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  They integrate Mattermost into the Omnibus....
scrozart 8y ago
I imagine a huge benefit not covered in the article is fewer HR issues. I work at a growing software house and there are lots of guys who simply have no clue how to interact with women in a healthy manner.
molteanu 8y ago
What is the actual usefulness for github (or gitlab) in a company setting? In my free time, sure, I can browse github, search for projects, snippets of code, maybe raise some issues or fix something, but where I work, we do have github accounts but I don't think anybody uses the actual interface. We just store our repositories, and then use a git client to pull/push and view the changes, and Jira for tickets. Isn't the value of the product lost in this case or does github offer more than what meets the eye here? I mean, I would guess a simple server would be enough to store the repositories.
- bradhe 8y ago
  There are a lot of workflow tools that make your life easier as a developer. Indeed you can cobble them together from other tools (Gerrit, for instance, for merge requests) but having a vertically integrated suite developed by a single vendor for a bunch of small workflow improvements is really nice.
- Macha 8y ago
  So this is mostly about Gitlab EE/Github Enterprise in an enterprise setting: 1. Control of your data. You get to keep your code on your servers and don't have to worry about Github themselves being breached. 2. PR workflows to enforce code reviews. Also a central place to view them. Also it links to JIRA so you can go from a ticket to a code review. 3. Finding internal clients (more useful for big companies were you might not know all of them). "Hey, there's a security bug in InternalLib 3.5 and we need everyone to update to 3.6. Who's using it?". Hey, who owns/uses "m-asd-indexer.dc1.mycompany.com". 4. Familiarity. Most devs these days are at least aware of how open source github workflows work, as opposed to email + patches or other approaches. 5. Global search. "Oh, hey, InternalProcessor 4.6 is doing something odd when we call internalDooDad.foo(bar) . Let's go search for that and figure out if we can understand the behaviour". "Hey, we've standardised on service X for access control, how have other projects integrated it?"
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    How do they help with #3?
Kiro 8y ago
Is $10M supposed to be impressive or something? They have 350 employees. The article is good but I don't understand why the title is written like that.
airnomad 8y ago
I lived in an area where a lot of people were contracted to work for the US Army in their bases in Afganistan, Iraq, etc. for support roles (kitchen work, IT maintenance etc) with 6 months deployment, then a month free and 6 months again. It was kind of a work that attracted many people from many different nationalities and their pay level was adjusted by average income in their home countries. So their expenses during the deployment were the same but the amount they would bring home was as much as 3x different for the same role.
ksajadi 8y ago
What’s interesting in this piece for me is not the remote working but that they raised $145.5M and generate $10.5M
- atestu 8y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I can't believe they're bragging about it…
  - debacle 8y ago
    IIRC their revenue last year was 6 figures. That's very impressive growth for a somewhat crowded space.
- btasovac 8y ago
  You can see a comment from our CEO related to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014
robtimescale 8y ago
I hired over 250 engineers at Elastic in 4 1/2 years and helped grow the team and most worked remote and now I'm a Big believer in distributed teams. It worked great at Elastic and now hiring some remote engineers at www.timescale.com My personal experience in recruiting since 2004 for Engineers, is that some markets like San Francisco, NYC are so so competitive and super expensive to hire, it makes a LOT of sense to think about have completely remote teams or partially remote. There is a lot of technical talent beyond the major markets.
- aflat 8y ago
  How do you manage to sort through all the resumes you must get? Please say you put them in Elastic and have a Kibana dashboard to sort the keywords you want to the top, that would be too awesome :) I had someone internal submit my resume about a month ago but haven't heard a word. I imagine it part of it must be due to the volume of resumes you must get.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
So, one could rent a mailbox and VNC, maybe even a sleeping pod, in the most expensive neighbourhood in the world and then use the pay boost to live like a king somewhere really cheap. Do they visit addresses to make sure you live there permanently?
- plaidfuji 8y ago
  You think your coworkers who actually live in that city and have real expenses wouldn’t rat you out the instant you slip up and they find out?
pkaye 8y ago
I was initially reading this as "GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue for Every Employee Working from Home". Now that would truly be a remarkable number as most major tech companies are <$2M/employee.
let_var 8y ago
Good for adopting the culture of remote working and making it work. But not sure what they'll do if I joined them while living in a big tech hub and then move to smaller cities. Are they going to enforce a pay cut? But nothing has changed, I was remote then, and I am remote now. It should be based on the value that the talent brings.
- detaro 8y ago
  Their employee handbook is clear on that: you need to inform them and they'll offer a you a new contract at the reduced rate.
chadash 8y ago
Article says that they have ~$10.5M revenues with ~350 employees. That works out to $30,000/employee. That's really not very impressive. I'm sure this puts them pretty deep in the red (assuming their employees make a good amount more than 30K/year), although they are obviously still in the growth stage. Still, it seems a bit early to be touting this company's success as a remote-first organization though.
ulisesrmzroche 8y ago
I believe in remote work but these numbers are terrible.
dmode 8y ago
I don't want to berate the fully remote work culture, but $10.5M is small change. Unless we have a multi billion dollar company proving this working model at scale, I will remain skeptic. Also, it is hard to know whether being remote is actually detrimental to Gitlab, considering they are unable to match the success of Github which has physical offices
- AYBABTME 8y ago
  DigitalOcean. edit: not fully remote but almost, and increasingly
  - RussianCow 8y ago
    Unless this has changed recently, DigitalOcean has a physical office in NYC, so they are not fully remote. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, they said more than half of their engineers were at that office. Edit: Based on their job postings[0], it looks like they have physical offices in at least NYC, Cambridge, and Palo Alto. I'm not sure what the ratio of remote to on-site personnel is these days, but DO is definitely not a fully remote company. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openings https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openin...
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  Why does it only matter what is successful for multi billion dollar companies? Most people don't work for those kinds of companies.
samblr 8y ago
What many of us fail to notice is not how small revenue is for 350 employees but despite of that - company exists and they are doing really well with the product. Im sure there will be many examples of similar numbers to be found which do not have remote and those companies will be burning a hole for remting real estate and infrastructure.
rs86 8y ago
Promising "200% developer speed" is basically meaningless
thesausageking 8y ago
At an average cost of $150k fully-loaded (rough guess), they're losing ~$40m / year. Not sure that warrants a victory lap.
throwaway487548 8y ago
I know so many beautiful remote places in Himalayas - ideal for remote working... But there is almost zero demand for subcontracting or plain coding into a remote repository.
sixtypoundhound 8y ago
Nice headline but don't run to your VC just yet.... $10.5 MM revenue split 350 ways is $30,000 per employee. I mean, nice to have revenue and growth but we're a way from being able to trumpet that from the roof-top yet. That EVA is roughly in line with many small service business which don't require $100MM infusion of venture capital....
- askafriend 8y ago
  Their actual current revenue numbers are a multiple of the $10.5M stated here. The $10.5M is just the last known publicly known number. An employee clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014
  - orarbel1 8y ago
    That employee is the CEO :)
webXL 8y ago
Juxtapose this story with Amazon "charging" their HQ2 hosts $48k per employee [0] in tax credits. For being such an efficient company on the surface, they sure have a long way to go in finding efficient ways to expand work environments. GitLab might be on to something. [0] http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job
adobeeee 8y ago
I'm a big fan of remote working and I like github but it needs to be clarified, its "every employee working from home" and not 10.5M per employee. Dang can you have a better headline- "gitlab made 10.5M by being 100% remote-only"

833 points by janvdberg 8y ago

Were the original 9 remote as well? Looks like the original two were remote - I just wonder what the composition looked like when they "hit it big".

YorickPeterse 8y ago
If my memory serves me right, yes. Some of the early employees did work/live together for 2-3 months during Y Combinator if I remember correctly, but apart from that everybody has always been remote. Source: early-ish/current employee (#28 I believe, not exactly prestigious).
- josefresco 8y ago
  So my follow up was/is - is this remote setup in fact their "secret sauce"? Seems like being a part of Y Combinator did more for their initial success.
  - YorickPeterse 8y ago
    I think there is no single "secret sauce", instead it is a combination of many different things. This includes being all remote, because it does drastically affect how a company operates.
jobvandervoort 8y ago
Yeah, we were all working remotely from the start. We never had an office. We moved in together for a few months during YC.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

Submarine piece? Lots of successful startups grow into large companies or exit without being remote, and remote startups fail just as easily. GitLab's success is arguably because of developer disenchantment with Github, as well as Gitlab giving more away for free than Github (VCS, CICD pipeline, etc), regardless of employee location arrangement. Also, what is "success"? Taking $150MM (EDIT: corrected) in investment and not showing profitability [1]? I am not against the startup underdog story (a rising tide lifts all boats). I am against marketing fluff. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224425

ghaff 8y ago
Many, many stories in magazines and newspapers start with a PR pitch. There's nothing especially noteworthy about it. It's how lots of stories get started. To your broader point, I expect both extreme butt-in-seats and extreme remote are one of those characteristics you can map to successful and unsuccessful companies and you can probably find just about any pattern you want to find. (And of course most companies are some sort of blended model depending on company and function.)
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  So we're in agreement this is a non-story? "GitLab's Secret To Saving On Office Space Expenses (EDIT: And Wages)" would've been a truthful (albeit less sensational) headline.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I don't think it's so much saving on office expenses. They also get access to a lot of talent, and yes, sometimes for less than if they were in the Bay Area. This isn't an especially original story; it's been written about before. But it is still interesting for those not already in the know that you have fully remote companies.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
bdcravens 8y ago
I agree 100% that being remote has nothing to do with success. However that link points to Github taking $350M, and they had been around for a few years before they took their first VC $. Until September, Gitlab had been pretty light on the funding, relatively speaking. (about $150M total, and that's after a $100M round in September) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-funding-rounds https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gitlab-com#section-f...
holman 8y ago

captaindiego 8y ago

Does anyone have any more information on what sort of structure, organization cultural things can be put in place to help a company function fully remote?

wjohnsto 8y ago
GitLab actually has their entire handbook open: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
dsumenkovic 8y ago
Hello, Community Advocate from GitLab here. Thanks wjohnsto for sharing a link to our Handbook. I'd love to share our "All Remote" page as well. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/. There you can read how remote work is changing the workforce, how it changes the organization, advantages for employees and organizations and what did we learn about remote working. Additionally, our blog page is the great place to learn about our culture and remote working at GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/blog/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/. Here's the list of our blog posts I would recommend. This may be a really interesting read for you: [1] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote-companies/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote-... [2] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions-and-getting-things-done/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote-companies-stay-connected/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote... [4] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates-devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates-... [5] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/
- bengale 8y ago
  Thank you for making these available and being so open.
  - dsumenkovic 8y ago

andrew_ 8y ago

I interviewed with them when they were at 40 remote employees (as far as I can recall). Sadly, I lacked the chops they were looking for. But I was thoroughly impressed with how passionately they spoke about their remote culture. I've been remote now for 10 years with 3 different companies, and I'll never go back to an office unless my family is in dire straights. I hope this article gets play, and I hope to see many more like it in the future. Working remotely is still undervalued and niche, and I'd like to see more companies get up to speed and become open to it.

tapatio 8y ago
Do you have a home office or rent office space? If home office, how is it being around family 24/7? What's the optimal remote working setup in your opinion?
- sigfubar 8y ago
  There isn't a generally optimal remote working setup because every remote worker and their situation is different. My "remote office" is in a corner of my living room that also doubles as a kitchen. It's in the middle of everything, which some people might find distracting, but is just right for me. You see, I've done my time in high-pressure, low-focus, fast-paced financial environments, so being in the middle of my family while I work is stimulating and rewarding. I normally go to the office (a few miles away) when I have more than one meeting to attend. This allows me to keep my work chatter away from home, where others might be distracted by it. All this to say that the onus is on you to make sure that our setup fits your personality. Look within yourself for clues on how and where to work, then make it happen, and be mindful of changes over time.
- andrew_ 8y ago
  I have a small family, and a "home office". My wife works and I take care of the infant. My home has an open floor plan where the kitchen and living room are one in the same, and that's my primary workspace. I'm not a fan of a dedicated room, and I work solely on a laptop - long ago rid myself of elaborate stationary setups, I enjoy taking my laptop into multiple rooms, even outside. When the wife gets home, work typically stops. I'm a night owl and she's an early riser, so I'm not working when she's around in the morning, and I like work at night after she falls asleep. We also have two dogs, which are a JOY to have around during the day. Having the kid and dogs around, combined with occasional errands and household tasks, provides the exact right amount of distraction and interruption I like to have. I typically only work in 2 hour increments, and then tend to another responsibility, or purposefully head out to do something for an hour. Breaks in the day keeps my mind fresh and oddly enough, allows me to focus more when I sit down to work. As for what the optimal setup is - that's incredibly personal and subjective, and everyone needs to figure that out for themselves over time. Some generic advice would be: - set at-work time limits - set off-limits hours where you do not work under any circumstances - find a comfortable space (that can be anything from a coworking space, to the living room) - find your perfect "white noise." it can get really quiet at home. having something in the background can help. I personally like to keep netflix running, or a movie streaming.

romanovcode 8y ago

I remember reading that they pay developers based on where they are located so for example developer from SF would get 140k while developer from Minsk would get 50k. Is it still true?

IshKebab 8y ago
Yeah I think that's still true and they have a salary calculator somewhere. I don't know why you'd hire SV programmers when your entire company is remote. They're easily double the price of anywhere else and not twice as good.
- otras 8y ago
  Here’s a link to their calculator: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#compensation-calculator https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    All I see is a formula. Is that the calculator?
otras 8y ago
Looks like that is still true. They’re pretty open about their model of location-based pay [0]: "Market rates for roles are different for different regions and countries. We pay market rates instead of paying the same wage for the same role in different regions." [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/global-c...
megaman8 8y ago
I know i'm in a minority opinion here, but to be honest I think it would be totally fair for an employer to pay everyone the same regardless of location in the US (as long as their not forcing you to move to a more expensive city - if they force you to be in a more expensive city, then they need to pay up), if it's a remote company. I know it may sound harsh to some. But, think of it this way, it will encourage more companies to become remote, thus opening more doors for people and allowing more people to work remotely. After all, a low salary in a low cost of living city is usually better than a high salary in palo alto, considering the enormous delta in living costs and taxes.

jchw 8y ago

I've always been impressed with how far GitLab has come. At my previous job we switched to GitLab during the period where GitHub felt like it wasn't improving. While I think GitHub has picked up the slack pretty effectively, I still think GitLab offers a very compelling package. I didn't use the Kubernetes integration, but we definitely used GitLab CI and registry, and a lot of other features that GitHub didn't or still doesn't really have an equivalent for.

johan_larson 8y ago

Is there no HQ at all? Even for the executive team?

jobvandervoort 8y ago
Nope, there's only Sids house in SF that has a few desks for when people want to visit _something_.
boleary-gl 8y ago
There is no headquarters, even the executive team is remote. Many of them live in the Bay Area (where Sid, our CEO moved) but our VP of Product, for instance, is in Portugal. IThere is a boardroom dedicated to GitLab where board meetings happen. But even for each of those, there is a zoom bridge for remote executives to join: https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/visiting/

kzisme 8y ago

These sorts of articles always excite me that more places will be moving towards remote work, and hopefully using Gitlab as an example. In the past I've had some not so great experiences with remote work. I've had two remote gigs thus far and the first was pretty horrible. On-boarding took a month (to receive a machine), and I frequently went days without hearing from anyone. There was zero communication even when I attempted to create meetings to talk (since pings were never replied to). It pretty much felt like being on an island - especially when most of your co-workers had worked together for anywhere from 2-10 years. Remote culture didn't really exist at this job. At my current job it has been great - we use Slack to communicate and there is hardly any radio silence. Before starting, I was told we work to live not the other way around. I received my machine and ~actually~ had an onboarding process. It feels like I'm a part of a team (albeit small) and that makes a world of difference when working remote. The one thing I haven't fixed yet is being on a routine/schedule. It isn't the best to work, sleep, and relax in the same room every day, but I've been working out of the house more lately which has seemed to help.

49531 8y ago
Getting out of the house makes all the difference for me. Public libraries are a wonderful resource, most have quiet common areas and rooms you can reserve for meetings.
- kzisme 8y ago
  I have found that if I don't make it out of the house I am not nearly as motivated as I am when working from a coffee shop or similar. For me, it's mostly been coffee shops and places to eat. I might start going to a university library that has many free meeting rooms, but that's the closest "large" library near me.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
robohoe 8y ago
Having a hard start/stop time and your personal "office space" helps a lot. Try putting something on your schedule around 4-5pm, such as working out or going for a walk. It'll certainly help you disconnect from work.

sgb_QQ 8y ago

It's worth pointing out that Gitlab's hosted service has suffered a myriad of pretty disastrous outages and problems over the past 12 months. In my experience, it's been totally unreliable compared to it's rivals. So I wouldn't say that they are a leading example of success just yet, although they certainly have a good shot.

umvi 8y ago
I would guess most companies prefer to self-host GitLab internally. That's what mine does and we've never had any problems with it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jchw 8y ago
Well, historically speaking and also likely true today, GitLab has made most of its customers by virtue of being the 'enterprise' solution. It existed before GitHub Enterprise, and was a good way to have Git hosting behind the firewall. GitLab's hosted service, on the other hand, has traditionally been free and best-effort. That and they're moving hosting providers, which is definitely a non-trivial migration. It's definitely fair to complain if you paid for the hosted version, but I think GitLab was plenty successful without monetizing GitLab.com.
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  The paid for hosted version is AFAICT difficult to run reliably as well - especially the CI runners. GitLab prioritize breadth over depth - i.e. new features over bug fixes. As far as I can tell, their regression testing is sub-optimal. Expanding a diff on a code review was broken in two releases.
  - jchw 8y ago
    I administrated an instance of GitLab EE for around a year solo for my previous employer. It was absolutely painless. The biggest issue I recall hitting was when I upgraded my LetsEncrypt setup broke, because they added LetsEncrypt setup to the core. The bug that caused it was fixed a couple days later anyways, though. We used GitLab CI very heavily. The only issue we hit was disk space on workers filling up - but it was easy to resolve this by making a Cron job run `docker system prune`. Generally, the GitLab team definitely has moved very quickly on new features and that has caused things to break here and there. I also agree they could use better regression testing. Still, they are very responsive to issue reports and most of the time issues that I care about are resolved very quickly. GitHub as a competitor obviously is a lot more stable. But, I was definitely willing to trade some stability for the features GitLab offered, and I do feel they have been steadily improving in the past year.

jack6e 8y ago

Skipping over the little annoying facts that fully remote work is not some secret strategy, and that no Fortune 500 company (as an index of success) is 100% remote, let's just do a direct comparison of competitors: - GitLab is 100% remote and, according the article, was most recently valued at $1 billion, 350 employees, and has an unknown/hidden (or I can't find) number of users. - Github has a headquarters and also remote work, and was recently acquired for $7.5 billion, with 800 employees and 31 million users. So...is remote work a secret? Did it lead to a comparative success over a competitor offering similar services but a different organizational strategy? Not really, not even close, no. More accurately, we should say GitLab has so far managed to make remote work a success for themselves through leadership, organizational culture, and some other actually secret ingredient, which is where the real story lies. Lots of remote companies fail. What has GitLab done right? Sadly, this article only skims the possibilities.

sixo 8y ago
Gitlab is also 3 years younger as a company, and Github had a undeniable first-mover advantage in the space.
- williamchia 8y ago
  GitLab the open source project was started in 2011. GitLab the company didn't start until 2014. GitHub is 6 years older than GitLab.
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    On the other hand, GitLab didn't have to do any UI work to start with, they just appeared to copy and paste GitHub.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Huh? It doesn’t look the same at all, or at least it doesn’t now or at any time I used it.

sandworm101 8y ago

Last year i switched from totally remote to totally in-office. (From law to defense.) Now I cannot even access my work email from home. It is great. Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediatly. Sometimes i have shifts where i must man a paticular desk for certain hours, but mostly i set my own schedule. We have a gym, including a pool, in the office that we are expected to use on company time. Even going to the dentist is on company time. It is a unique office culture that i never expected. Until i got here i had no idea how unhappy i was while working remote.

williamchia 8y ago
> Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediately. Sounds like wherever you were working before was doing it wrong. I work remote and no one ever expects immediate email or slack. It is because the whole company is remote that this is the case - you can't have this type of expectation when folks are in every time zone across the globe. Although I love remote, it's not for everyone. There's a lot to be said for perks like gym, dental, etc. It's really nice that you found a good fit!
YorickPeterse 8y ago
At least in case of GitLab, many of this is allowed (or even promoted) to do during company time. For example, if you go to the dentist for one hour you don't need to somehow make up for that. The same goes with Emails: the remote first culture means basically everybody fully expects it to take at least several hours before they get a reply. In other words: I think this is more about the company, and less about remote versus non remote.

mongol 8y ago

How is tax on salaries handled in a situation like this? Seems like it would be really complicated.

YorickPeterse 8y ago
For a few countries (The Netherlands and The United States for example) we have official entities that employ people. I for example am employed by the Dutch entity, meaning my salary and taxes are handled like any other Dutch employer. Outside of these countries we employ employees as contractors, meaning they have to do the taxes and such themselves if I'm not mistaken.
ryanmercer 8y ago
I imagine they just use an outside payroll firm, many large corporations use companies like ADP (the one I work for does).
dudul 8y ago
They probably just use ADP. Benefits are most likely more complicated to handle than payroll. May be hard to find competitive plans that cover the entire country.

monkeynotes 8y ago

One of the corporate advantages of 100% remote is the business can pay your team whatever their local market rate is, this is usually a lot less than SF, Seattle, NY etc. Additionally, you can often avoid paying certain benefits if your team member is outside of the US. This is a huge competitive win for organizations who are willing to organize around remote work. I personally am not sure how I feel about salaries weighted in such a way, partly feel like people doing equal work should be compensated equally since they contribute equally. On the other hand, potential employees are free to accept of turn down an offer and the market will continue to adjust accordingly. Full disclosure; I've noted elsewhere on HN that I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview which made the position fiscally uninteresting. I swear I am not bitter :) - I just think that this aspect of the employment strategy is interesting and worthy of dissection as it is probably something we will see more and more with remote positions.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
> I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview If you took the job, and then moved, how would they know?
- Androider 8y ago
  Because they're not paying you in bitcoin or by brown paper envelope. There's federal, state & local city tax reporting for each employee, W-4's to fill, W-2's to mail, health care providers to setup (different in each state even within the same company), 401Ks etc. Unless you're going underground not only from your employer but also the tax authorities. Now if you maintain your high-cost address but go tripping around the world, perhaps they wouldn't find out for a while.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Gitlab is offering much more than the cost of local taxes as a bonus for maintaining a "high-cost" address. And your federal taxes would be almost entirely refunded; they'd be withheld normally but you qualify for the foreign earned income deduction based purely on your location during the year.

jacquesm 8y ago

We've been running TMC (my latest venture, now 10 years old) as a 100% remote company since day one. As of late though it starts to feel like a less-than-ideal solution for the longer term. Our customers expect a company that is more conventional and some of our colleagues have said rather explicitly that they would like to collaborate more closely in an office like setting. What with the rents in and around Amsterdam so far not having an office was one of the advantages we had over competitors.

rafiki6 8y ago
Out of curiosity, is there a reason that your customers want a more conventional setup other than perception? How about those colleagues? Are there legitimate reasons to collaborate in an office? For the latter, maybe the best solution is renting a conference room for those sessions that really need to be in person.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Our work involves quite a bit of interaction with the customers and they are all rather very conventional companies themselves. We do the 'rent a conference room' so frequently now that it starts to approach renting an office.

freefal 8y ago

I realize they are growing fast but isn't it a little early to declare success (as the title seems to) when you're generating $10.5 million with a cost structure that includes 350 employees?

sytse 8y ago
Totally agree that those numbers would make an outsized burn rate. The team member number is from a different date than the revenue number. Our team member number is public on https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ (currently 383). Our current ARR is multiple times the number cited. We're not profitable but on some months we're cash flow positive. We don't aim to be cash flow positive until 2022.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Considering Gitlab’s revenue model, how come you’re only cash flow positive some months? I’d assume both income and employee count is mostly steady, unless you’re hiring people just about as fast as cash flow is increasing?
  - tracker1 8y ago
    Servers and Data Centers cost money... operations scaling, advertizing, etc.
  - sytse 8y ago
    Income as in revenue is steady. Cash flow has more variance since people pay for GitLab one or more years upfront. On average we have negative cash flow since we're investing the money we raised in growth by doubling incremental annual contract value every year. But in some months we have a few large orders that push us to cash flow positive. We could be cash flow positive every month but that would at the cost of our rate of development. Right now we're focussed on making GitLab a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle. That means we have to make a lot of progress every month https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/22/gitlab-11-4-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/22/gitlab-11-4-released/

esotericn 8y ago

The GitLab compensation calculator seems really odd. At least personally, when I saw it, it drew almost all of my attention away from the mechanics of the role and towards trying to game this thing in order to get paid comparatively well. If someone takes a job with a London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay? Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income? I'd considered applying in the past but don't really feel comfortable with the fact that it's not really 'remote' because if I actually live where I want to, I'd get paid peanuts. Evidently it works for them, but to me it looks like some weird way to push everyone into the expensive cities.

komali2 8y ago
>London postcode and then moves a few hours north, what happens? Do they just get docked in pay? Apparently, stupendously, yes (based on what apparent employees in this thread are saying) >Do you trust them to tell you they've moved house even though they're going to lose tens of thousands a year in income? It's in the contract. I would absolutely lie to them, I would 1:1 fiscally motivated to do so.
- esotericn 8y ago
  The whole thing baffles me. I dunno. I'm sure it works if you just take jobs without caring what you get paid. Maybe that describes most of GitLab's staff. It's a cool product, so it wouldn't surprise me. The mental overhead of maintaining a London postcode just for the sake of it I think would have me looking elsewhere (and I live in London and have no intention of leaving). I'd be wondering about where they draw the line, and whether if I move two stations out they'd try and dock my pay or whatever.
  - komali2 8y ago
    Yea, theres a massive thread above us getting into the weeds about like, the very nature of capitalism, but for me it boils down to a simple issue: I think it's unfair that I get paid more than my equally productive colleague, just because I happen to live in SF and he happens to live in Indiana. Also nearly entirely defeats the purpose of remote work. I'm into it cause it'd be dank to pull a San Francisco salary while chilling in Vietnam and paying 200$/mo for rent.

clubm8 8y ago

One thing I don't like about Gitlab is their salary formula. They dock you in pay if you are in a lower cost of living area. First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. Otherwise, aren't we subsidizing those who choose to live in an expensive place like SF or NYC over those who are happy with a smaller city like Portland of Austin? Second, while many cities have growing tech scenes, SF and Seattle remain fairly unique job markets. If you're outside those cities, you may have less expenses, but you also lose out on networking and may find it harder to find your next job (if for no other reason than the fact nonremote companies will shy away from relocating you if another qualified candidate is local).

michaelmior 8y ago
Could you not equivalently say that pay is boosted for those living in areas with a higher cost of living?
ravenstine 8y ago
> First, I think I should be paid based on the value I bring to a company, not my location. If it's wrong(and illegal) to pay people differently based on their race or gender, I can't see how it should be alright to pay people differently based on their cost of living. There ought to be a movement to outlaw this practice. EDIT: Before you reply, note that I no longer think my argument is good.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Are you kidding me? No one ever said "all markets are created equal". There is a very real difference in cost of living and local economies and competitive opportunities for employees in different markets. There's nothing you can do to fix that. This is where "equality of opportunity" and "equality of outcome" diverge.
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icedchai 8y ago

10.5 million in revenue with 350 employees? Anyone see a problem?

ggregoire 8y ago
Yes, not sure why nobody is talking about that? I guess the plan is to be acquired soon.
sytse 8y ago
I responded to the other thread about this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014

indigodaddy 8y ago

"Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected." Interesting that they don't use Gitter for chat. Perhaps they will be transitioning towards using it? GitLab acquired Gitter in March 2017; perhaps the article didn't get this detail correct...

richardwhiuk 8y ago
They integrate Mattermost into the Omnibus....

scrozart 8y ago

I imagine a huge benefit not covered in the article is fewer HR issues. I work at a growing software house and there are lots of guys who simply have no clue how to interact with women in a healthy manner.

molteanu 8y ago

What is the actual usefulness for github (or gitlab) in a company setting? In my free time, sure, I can browse github, search for projects, snippets of code, maybe raise some issues or fix something, but where I work, we do have github accounts but I don't think anybody uses the actual interface. We just store our repositories, and then use a git client to pull/push and view the changes, and Jira for tickets. Isn't the value of the product lost in this case or does github offer more than what meets the eye here? I mean, I would guess a simple server would be enough to store the repositories.

bradhe 8y ago
There are a lot of workflow tools that make your life easier as a developer. Indeed you can cobble them together from other tools (Gerrit, for instance, for merge requests) but having a vertically integrated suite developed by a single vendor for a bunch of small workflow improvements is really nice.
Macha 8y ago
So this is mostly about Gitlab EE/Github Enterprise in an enterprise setting: 1. Control of your data. You get to keep your code on your servers and don't have to worry about Github themselves being breached. 2. PR workflows to enforce code reviews. Also a central place to view them. Also it links to JIRA so you can go from a ticket to a code review. 3. Finding internal clients (more useful for big companies were you might not know all of them). "Hey, there's a security bug in InternalLib 3.5 and we need everyone to update to 3.6. Who's using it?". Hey, who owns/uses "m-asd-indexer.dc1.mycompany.com". 4. Familiarity. Most devs these days are at least aware of how open source github workflows work, as opposed to email + patches or other approaches. 5. Global search. "Oh, hey, InternalProcessor 4.6 is doing something odd when we call internalDooDad.foo(bar) . Let's go search for that and figure out if we can understand the behaviour". "Hey, we've standardised on service X for access control, how have other projects integrated it?"
- grogenaut 8y ago
  How do they help with #3?

Kiro 8y ago

Is $10M supposed to be impressive or something? They have 350 employees. The article is good but I don't understand why the title is written like that.

airnomad 8y ago

I lived in an area where a lot of people were contracted to work for the US Army in their bases in Afganistan, Iraq, etc. for support roles (kitchen work, IT maintenance etc) with 6 months deployment, then a month free and 6 months again. It was kind of a work that attracted many people from many different nationalities and their pay level was adjusted by average income in their home countries. So their expenses during the deployment were the same but the amount they would bring home was as much as 3x different for the same role.

ksajadi 8y ago

What’s interesting in this piece for me is not the remote working but that they raised $145.5M and generate $10.5M

atestu 8y ago
My thoughts exactly. I can't believe they're bragging about it…
- debacle 8y ago
  IIRC their revenue last year was 6 figures. That's very impressive growth for a somewhat crowded space.
btasovac 8y ago
You can see a comment from our CEO related to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014

robtimescale 8y ago

I hired over 250 engineers at Elastic in 4 1/2 years and helped grow the team and most worked remote and now I'm a Big believer in distributed teams. It worked great at Elastic and now hiring some remote engineers at www.timescale.com My personal experience in recruiting since 2004 for Engineers, is that some markets like San Francisco, NYC are so so competitive and super expensive to hire, it makes a LOT of sense to think about have completely remote teams or partially remote. There is a lot of technical talent beyond the major markets.

aflat 8y ago
How do you manage to sort through all the resumes you must get? Please say you put them in Elastic and have a Kibana dashboard to sort the keywords you want to the top, that would be too awesome :) I had someone internal submit my resume about a month ago but haven't heard a word. I imagine it part of it must be due to the volume of resumes you must get.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

So, one could rent a mailbox and VNC, maybe even a sleeping pod, in the most expensive neighbourhood in the world and then use the pay boost to live like a king somewhere really cheap. Do they visit addresses to make sure you live there permanently?

plaidfuji 8y ago
You think your coworkers who actually live in that city and have real expenses wouldn’t rat you out the instant you slip up and they find out?

pkaye 8y ago

I was initially reading this as "GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue for Every Employee Working from Home". Now that would truly be a remarkable number as most major tech companies are <$2M/employee.

let_var 8y ago

Good for adopting the culture of remote working and making it work. But not sure what they'll do if I joined them while living in a big tech hub and then move to smaller cities. Are they going to enforce a pay cut? But nothing has changed, I was remote then, and I am remote now. It should be based on the value that the talent brings.

detaro 8y ago
Their employee handbook is clear on that: you need to inform them and they'll offer a you a new contract at the reduced rate.

chadash 8y ago

Article says that they have ~$10.5M revenues with ~350 employees. That works out to $30,000/employee. That's really not very impressive. I'm sure this puts them pretty deep in the red (assuming their employees make a good amount more than 30K/year), although they are obviously still in the growth stage. Still, it seems a bit early to be touting this company's success as a remote-first organization though.

ulisesrmzroche 8y ago

I believe in remote work but these numbers are terrible.

dmode 8y ago

I don't want to berate the fully remote work culture, but $10.5M is small change. Unless we have a multi billion dollar company proving this working model at scale, I will remain skeptic. Also, it is hard to know whether being remote is actually detrimental to Gitlab, considering they are unable to match the success of Github which has physical offices

AYBABTME 8y ago
DigitalOcean. edit: not fully remote but almost, and increasingly
- RussianCow 8y ago
  Unless this has changed recently, DigitalOcean has a physical office in NYC, so they are not fully remote. When I interviewed there a couple years ago, they said more than half of their engineers were at that office. Edit: Based on their job postings[0], it looks like they have physical offices in at least NYC, Cambridge, and Palo Alto. I'm not sure what the ratio of remote to on-site personnel is these days, but DO is definitely not a fully remote company. [0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openings https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openin...
Consultant32452 8y ago
Why does it only matter what is successful for multi billion dollar companies? Most people don't work for those kinds of companies.

samblr 8y ago

What many of us fail to notice is not how small revenue is for 350 employees but despite of that - company exists and they are doing really well with the product. Im sure there will be many examples of similar numbers to be found which do not have remote and those companies will be burning a hole for remting real estate and infrastructure.

rs86 8y ago

Promising "200% developer speed" is basically meaningless

thesausageking 8y ago

At an average cost of $150k fully-loaded (rough guess), they're losing ~$40m / year. Not sure that warrants a victory lap.

throwaway487548 8y ago

I know so many beautiful remote places in Himalayas - ideal for remote working... But there is almost zero demand for subcontracting or plain coding into a remote repository.

sixtypoundhound 8y ago

Nice headline but don't run to your VC just yet.... $10.5 MM revenue split 350 ways is $30,000 per employee. I mean, nice to have revenue and growth but we're a way from being able to trumpet that from the roof-top yet. That EVA is roughly in line with many small service business which don't require $100MM infusion of venture capital....

askafriend 8y ago
Their actual current revenue numbers are a multiple of the $10.5M stated here. The $10.5M is just the last known publicly known number. An employee clarified here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014
- orarbel1 8y ago
  That employee is the CEO :)

webXL 8y ago

Juxtapose this story with Amazon "charging" their HQ2 hosts $48k per employee [0] in tax credits. For being such an efficient company on the surface, they sure have a long way to go in finding efficient ways to expand work environments. GitLab might be on to something. [0] http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job http://www.fox5ny.com/news/48k-per-amazon-hq-job

adobeeee 8y ago

I'm a big fan of remote working and I like github but it needs to be clarified, its "every employee working from home" and not 10.5M per employee. Dang can you have a better headline- "gitlab made 10.5M by being 100% remote-only"