
GitLab Strategy - tosh
https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/
======
tosh
Inspiring how open Gitlab is in how they run things.

Their handbook is a fantastic resource for distributed companies (but also for
non-distributed companies).

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

e.g. here is how they do CEO shadowing:

[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/)

~~~
sdinsn
> Inspiring how open Gitlab is in how they run things

Are they profitable? If not, they aren't inspiring me

~~~
emilycook
> Are they profitable?

The goal is to go public by November 18, 2020. You can read all about it here:
[https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/)

We have an MR open to mention our long term profitability target for Q4FY25
here: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/22559/diffs)

------
GreaterFool
I feel bad for GitLab.

It's better than GitHub in almost every way. And yet GitHub is more popular
both in open-source and enterprise. And in enterprise we are usually left with
unholy combination of GitHub and JIRA because GitHub project management is a
joke and they haven't done anything useful in that space for years.

But for some reason pushing for anything other than GitHub is always an uphill
battle. And the web interface GitHub offers isn't any good either; I can't use
it without OctoTree (amazing stuff BTW, works with GH and GL! Kudos!). So what
does GitHub really offer that makes it so popular? A friendly name? A cute
OctoCat?

And GL leads the way and GH copies their features some years down the line and
GL fights and GH is still more successful.

I think this is sad.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I am not a GitLab user, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I've
read more than a few comments here on HN that GitLab stability and performance
is worse than GH. For a mission critical system like source control, stability
and performance are more important than any other features.

~~~
emilycook
GitLab employee, this is somewhat of a drawback to how transparent we are
about our issues. I know this might seem like I'm just trying to PR spin it,
but it's a real phenomenon. We post about any little problem we have, and 99%
percent of our Issues are public, so it probably seems like we have a lot of
downtime and problems because of how often we talk about them

~~~
nerdwaller
Unfortunately the perception was earned a few years ago created not by running
“more openly” but real user experience and breaking people of that experience
over several months is a long uphill battle for GitLab. I’m involved with a
large group of Python developers that echos the same feeling, even though
generally speaking many of us find GitLab (performance and reliability aside)
a better and more comprehensive product.

I’d guess this was a consequence of a strategy decision that went against the
plan (probably an expectation mismatch with users). I think the large part of
the problem is the public GitLab instance is (was?) the beta environment, so a
lot of issues popped up constantly while people were evaluating the options.
In our group we are all volunteers, so when downtime impacts the little time
we can dedicate (push code, review, deploy) it’s a fairly big deal.

Our python group (pyslackers.com) runs in the open as much as we can, so for
us we went where the exposure and ease to be involved is (Github), even though
from a raw feature perspective we liked what we had on GitLab when it worked.

~~~
emilycook
That's definitely fair, and warrented. We haven't really had the resources for
(relatively) long to put into performance when we were still in early stages.
However we've constantly been improving that, to the point where I truly doubt
you'd find that we suffer disproportionately from performance issues more than
any competitor.

Before I worked here, I was on a team that evaluated different devops tools,
and I felt the same apprehension about the uptime. But we eventually chose
gitlab, and the only real downtime we experienced was during the 2017 outage.
And we liked having the option to switch to self-hosted if it became too much
of an issue

~~~
nerdwaller
There’s a pretty vocal group that favors GitLab, I campaigned for it
internally at a few companies as well - having so much of the tooling in once
place is pretty nice. It’s obvious that GitLab is making quick improvements
consistently.

The project boards are better than most others, the CI is phenomenal, and I
have noticed the review process is being worked on.

Keep up the good work, we need options in the space!

------
autotune
Funnily enough paying their employees somewhat competitive market rate still
isn’t on there.

~~~
sytse
What rate do you think is off? For example our rate for an intermediate
developer in San Francisco is $160k a year and options. See
[https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-
en...](https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/engineering/backend-engineer/)

If you mean we pay local rates please see
[https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-
rates/](https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/)

~~~
autotune
I'd highly recommend doing an internal, anonymous, survey to see if employees
are happy with their compensation. Literally every GitLab employee I've talked
to is extremely unsatisfied and tends to agree with the sentiment about being
underpaid relative to other companies for those not in SF, and a very common
theme I've heard is being heavily low balled when reaching the offer stage.
Somewhat anecdotal but still more so than other software companies willing to
pay market rates, also worth noting I am not a GitLab employee just a very
common theme when chatting with them. Something is obviously wrong with your
"compensation calculator" if the general sentiment is this widespread.

~~~
YorickPeterse
Salaries at GitLab were increased (at least for engineers) towards the end of
2018. This meant that at least my salary went from so-so to something I am
actually really happy about (this was combined with some other adjustments,
such as my experience level), and something that is hard to beat here in The
Netherlands.

In other words, the opinion will vary from person to person.

------
clarkevans
The linked strategy page says they are aiming for a liquidity event by 2020.

Of any tech company, GitLab seems like the most ripe for a conversion to an
ESOP, which is often accompanied by a liquidity event for early investors.
GitLab seem to be already operating as an employee-centered business, so from
the outside looking in, conversion to an ESOP might be quite compatible with
their existing culture.

EDIT: When you convert to an ESOP, you often work with an investment bank
(such as [https://www.awcfund.com/](https://www.awcfund.com/)). As I
understand, the investment bank provides a loan to a new tax-exempt
foundation, which uses the cash to buy the stock from early investors; this
foundation then repays the investment bank from revenue. These sorts of
investors specialize in ESOP deals and they see the foundation which owns them
money as less risky investments since ESOPs can grow faster than similar
public for-profit companies since: (a) they are employee owned, and (b)
because of the ESOP's tax-exempt status.

~~~
sytse
I don’t understand how this would work. Investors own the majority of Gitlab.
Wouldn’t becoming a public company in 2020 be a much better return for them
that making it employee owned?

------
gtirloni
Every time a GitLab's competitor is in the news we get flooded with HN
submissions about GitLab. That can't be a good PR strategy.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Just curious, which one of their competitors is in the news?

~~~
marcinzm
Github released a new package registry yesterday.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Got it, thanks.

------
jtwaleson
I imagine that the on-prem and public versions are completely different beasts
to operate.

It's quite the engineering feat that they reached the current scale with the
same codebase! I believe maintaining one shared codebase will be expensive in
the long run: locally you want simplicity, SaaS you want scalability, micro-
services and all that.

~~~
sytse
GitLab now consists of 31 different services
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#com...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/architecture.html#components)

This allows us to scale GitLab.com and with our Unix packages and Charts it is
still easy to install.

------
kayhi
Why do people contribute to Gitlab and help a for profit company for free?

I'm curious about what motivates you such as improving a tool that you use
everyday or code quality?

~~~
jjeaff
It's a for profit company, but they still not only give away the source code,
but offer a great deal of hosted functionality for free.

So contributing helps the community whether your contribution also helps the
company or not.

Seems kind of like asking "Why would you give money to the Red Cross? They
have employees that get paid a salary for running it."

If it's a good cause and you benefit from it, I certainly wouldn't avoid
supporting it simply because someone else might profit indirectly from my
contribution.

~~~
kayhi
Thanks for the response, I'm not in the open source community and didn't think
of Gitlab and Red Cross as a similar concept.

------
correct_horse
> We use GitLab at GitLab Inc., to drink our own wine

Nice try, but that's called dogfooding.

~~~
sytse
Agree, this didn’t stick. I changed it [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-
gitlab-com/commit/9e4ecf5b...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/commit/9e4ecf5b78a6da64dbd2cb93409ed7b262afcfdd)

------
ralph84
> In CY2015 we became the most popular on-premises software development
> lifecycle solution

[citation needed]

~~~
jjeaff
What other on premise lifecycle development solutions are there?

~~~
ralph84
IBM, Atlassian, CA, GitHub, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Perforce, to name a few.
Even if you believe GitLab's 100,000 number, Atlassian claims more than that
and they're a public company so less likely to fudge the numbers.

~~~
techntoke
Most of Atlassian customers are using their cloud solutions at this point.

------
Truth2019
2020: It has been an amazing ride but all journeys come to an end. Joining the
Google family will allow us to offer our customers much better experience
while retaining our independence. We are developers at heart and this is why
we want to give developers the source control tools they deserve!

~~~
danieldk
Under _Principles_ :

 _Independence: since we took financing we need to have a liquidity event; to
maintain independence we want to become a public company rather than be
acquired._

At any rate, even if it happens, GitLab CE is open source, which can't be said
for some of their competition.

~~~
bdcravens
The question is, is that their call to make? Does Goldman Sachs share the same
opinion?

~~~
marcinzm
From what I can tell 5 out of 7 board seats are owned by VCs and it's very
unlikely the founders retain majority shares given their 5 rounds of funding.
So I doubt it's their call to make in any way.

~~~
bdcravens
I can promise you they are already in talks with at least one large company.
You know those phones started ringing when Microsoft bought Github. I'm not
ready to believe that Goldman Sachs is now a principles over profit kind of
company.

~~~
sonnyblarney
If one takes GitLab's communication entirely at face value, one might consider
there is some kind of 'principled' thing going on here, but I suggest that
'it's just a business' and that GitLab isn't some shiny example of much, other
than a well run entity.

All of the 'everyone can do this' language in their communications, is just
that, communications, it has a cognitive resonance with words such as
'equality' which appeal to some (well, all of us in a way) - but it's
marketing.

The are what they are because it works for those involved, and also makes them
money. Many boring business without fancy communications provide immense
surpluses to the world.

