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Hi. GitLab PM here. I'm really sorry that this is your experience. Can you point me to this policy? I would like to propose a change to it given that's not refl

Hi. GitLab PM here. I'm really sorry that this is your experience. Can you point me to this policy? I would like to propose a change to it given that's not reflective of how most teams do planning and prioritization. We care very much about support issues, regularly prioritize a large portion of each release to addressing them, and can not do it effectively without ongoing involvement and feedback from the wider community. I will say that it is sometimes hard to separate the signal from the noise, given my team currently has 3k+ open issues. Please ping me (@gweaver) on issues that are relevant to you and I'll do my best to provide a status update / more information or bring in the relevant PM who can.

Aeolun 7y ago
> I will say that it is sometimes hard to separate the signal from the noise, given my team currently has 3k+ open issues. I think this is a different problem. But not something your customers should have to care about.
- skj 7y ago
  Even in business, empathy goes a long way.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I can understand why your work is difficult, but still want you to deliver me great service. Bad service is bad service, regardless of the reasons. Can you imagine sitting in a call queue and hearing, “We are sorry, but you will have to wait while we help the 2300 people in front of you.” Any sane person would think that maybe they wouldn’t have this issue if they’d hired more agents. That obviously doesn’t map 1 to 1 on dev, but it’s the scenario thst immediately popped in my head when reading the original message.
hobabaObama 7y ago
If the OP does not respond, she/he was probably a GitHub employee :P My experience with GitLab is simple awesome. Keep up the great work you guys!
rossmohax 7y ago
It is in your own Statement of Support: > Any assistance with modifications to GitLab, including new functionality, bug-fixes, issues with alpha features or other code changes should go through the GitLab issue tracker, triage, and release cycle. And it matches our experience as customer. We are power users and almost every single support issue we opened is a bugreport or a feature request. Support team can bring values to customers who don't read docs and have questions like "how do we do X", but for seasoned users of Gitlab you can't do much. It was discussed at length in support tickets as well as public issues tracker, that support team refuses to be single point of contact for paying customers, instead "we are open company, here is the issue , feel free to track it [ and best of luck convincing PM to priotise it sooner]", then support ticket get closed. This is like if you have missed delivery from Amazon, you call them, they give you driver's number, you call him, he says Police blocked roads and give local policy dept number, you call them next and they say that there is a manifestation on streets going out of control and give you leaders phone number, you call them, they tell you that energy crisis need to be solved urgently and so on... All you wanted is a replacement pair of socks, because they sent you wrong size earlier. By the way , here is a fulfilment manager phone number,ask him how come such and obvious picking error occured...
- mikekchar 7y ago
  If you do end up moving to another provider, I'd be interested to see if you get a better experience. Once of the things that puzzles me, especially for an open core solution, is that companies really don't want to do custom development. Or possibly they don't want to have the difficult discussion about cost. I'm always harping on about this, but I don't really see open source companies trying to build value the way Cygnus did. Instead of saying, "Pay us $x per seat and you get whatever we give you", say "Have as many seats as you want and pay us $x to make it do what you want". Cygnus actually did both with GCC and were quite successful at it. It's not just Gitlabs either. I can't think of a software provider with an open core model that primarily sells software development services (Hmmm... Possibly Code Weavers now that I think about it). I remember asking this to Gitlabs ages ago and they said that they tried this model before they took VC money but that they just couldn't get it to work. It still baffles me as to why that's the case.

Aeolun 7y ago

> I will say that it is sometimes hard to separate the signal from the noise, given my team currently has 3k+ open issues. I think this is a different problem. But not something your customers should have to care about.

skj 7y ago
Even in business, empathy goes a long way.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I can understand why your work is difficult, but still want you to deliver me great service. Bad service is bad service, regardless of the reasons. Can you imagine sitting in a call queue and hearing, “We are sorry, but you will have to wait while we help the 2300 people in front of you.” Any sane person would think that maybe they wouldn’t have this issue if they’d hired more agents. That obviously doesn’t map 1 to 1 on dev, but it’s the scenario thst immediately popped in my head when reading the original message.

hobabaObama 7y ago

If the OP does not respond, she/he was probably a GitHub employee :P My experience with GitLab is simple awesome. Keep up the great work you guys!

rossmohax 7y ago

It is in your own Statement of Support: > Any assistance with modifications to GitLab, including new functionality, bug-fixes, issues with alpha features or other code changes should go through the GitLab issue tracker, triage, and release cycle. And it matches our experience as customer. We are power users and almost every single support issue we opened is a bugreport or a feature request. Support team can bring values to customers who don't read docs and have questions like "how do we do X", but for seasoned users of Gitlab you can't do much. It was discussed at length in support tickets as well as public issues tracker, that support team refuses to be single point of contact for paying customers, instead "we are open company, here is the issue , feel free to track it [ and best of luck convincing PM to priotise it sooner]", then support ticket get closed. This is like if you have missed delivery from Amazon, you call them, they give you driver's number, you call him, he says Police blocked roads and give local policy dept number, you call them next and they say that there is a manifestation on streets going out of control and give you leaders phone number, you call them, they tell you that energy crisis need to be solved urgently and so on... All you wanted is a replacement pair of socks, because they sent you wrong size earlier. By the way , here is a fulfilment manager phone number,ask him how come such and obvious picking error occured...

mikekchar 7y ago
If you do end up moving to another provider, I'd be interested to see if you get a better experience. Once of the things that puzzles me, especially for an open core solution, is that companies really don't want to do custom development. Or possibly they don't want to have the difficult discussion about cost. I'm always harping on about this, but I don't really see open source companies trying to build value the way Cygnus did. Instead of saying, "Pay us $x per seat and you get whatever we give you", say "Have as many seats as you want and pay us $x to make it do what you want". Cygnus actually did both with GCC and were quite successful at it. It's not just Gitlabs either. I can't think of a software provider with an open core model that primarily sells software development services (Hmmm... Possibly Code Weavers now that I think about it). I remember asking this to Gitlabs ages ago and they said that they tried this model before they took VC money but that they just couldn't get it to work. It still baffles me as to why that's the case.