
GitLab Made $10.5M in Revenue with Every Employee Working from Home - janvdberg
https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/2018-inc5000-gitlab.html
======
andrew_
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
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?

~~~
andrew_
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.

~~~
triangleman
I'm sorry but I don't understand, are you saying that you are able to do your
work at the same time as taking care of a baby?

~~~
spullara
It is completely impossible to have a real full time job and take care of a
child at the same time unless yours happens to sleep the entire time. If this
was possible all those moms could just work from home! I can barely work at
home without locking the door if children under 5 are in the house and there
is another adult taking care of them.

------
esotericn
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
>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
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
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.

~~~
shanghaiaway
If you really think it's unfair then you would have moved to Indiana to
downward adjust your salary. Sounds like posturing to me.

~~~
komali2
Why does the solution to "something is unfair" necessitate me equalizing the
situation on my own? That's some cronyism right there. That's like... I dunno,
apologizing to my boss for him firing me for taking a sick day.

The arbiter of the unfairness is the company policy. That's who we blame, not
the employee who happens to benefit. They are no more to blame than the person
who doesn't benefit. The causal relationship simply doesn't exist. I'm
actually curious about the reasoning you applied to somehow pin the duty of
responsibility to the employee that benefits?

------
monkeynotes
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.

~~~
imsofuture
IMO a better advantage is that you can hire talent from anywhere, without the
caveat that they have to uproot their life to join your team. Paying local
market rate is shitty (generally) and reduces your competitiveness against
other remote employers that don't try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries
(which is most of them, FWIW). Not to mention, how could you possibly make 10m
rev/employee but with a straight face worry about them making 20k 'too much'
because they live in Iowa or something!?

I wouldn't even bother applying at Gitlab because I know they won't pay me
competitively. Pass!

TLDR: "can pay local market rates" only works if you're the only company to
ever offer remote work, and you have to compete only with other local market
offers. Which is a fantasy in 2018.

~~~
savanaly
>and reduces your competitiveness against other remote employers that don't
try to squeeze 10-40% off employee salaries

Well, duh. Google paying its engineers X instead of X + 100,000 reduces its
competitiveness against other employers too. Doesn't mean they should raise
salaries by 100k across the board though. Companies pay what they must to
attract the workers they need, why would they pay more? They're in most cases
not a charity being run for the benefit of the employees. And for remote work,
being remote is usually a huge perk for the employee so naturally it comes
with a shortfall in somewhere else, such as salary.

~~~
imsofuture
Sure I agree with your general point, but other remote companies WILL pay
more.

I've worked for 3 companies remotely over the past 6 years. Every single one
of them, including being employee #8 or so at a seed-round startup paid more
than the _max_ Gitlab would pay me for a backend role. Like, in 2012, as
employee #10 at a bootstrapped startup, I was paid more. Gitlab pays crazy
under market, end of story.

~~~
tracker1
GitLab's rate calculations are really off for a few markets... Phoenix, Austin
and Atlanta come to mind there. Software Devs do var above the mean income in
the area relatively speaking than in other cities.

------
jack6e
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.

~~~
zerogvt
Github also had real trouble with their cash flows. MS bought the popularity
and the current and future projects that are hosted there (probably overpaid
for all that).

Now - why remoting would work better for the company (off the top of my head):
1\. next to zero office-space rental costs 2\. you're going shopping for
talent in the whole world and you can hire regardless of visas, eligibility,
etc. I.e. you hire better talent, for less money (they don't need to pay
outrageous rents for SF/London/Munich/Dublin/whatever) 3\. You get happier
employees (they don't get to see their families once every six m onths or so)
4\. You get easier on-calls schedules 24/7/365 if you get a few ppl on
different timezones 5\. You get diversity from day 0 and local eyes in almost
all markets that you care to sell anything 6\. You _have_ to document more and
better since you _have_ to work with tickets 7\. You make your meetings
worthwhile because your time matters (and you're not valued or paid according
to "chair-time" that can be filled with boring nonsense meetings so that you
can coast through the day)

There's a bunch of other advantages in other areas (ecology, general economy,
tech, etc) but since the focus is on what's in it for the company I won't go
into these.

~~~
maccio92
> MS bought the [...] current and future projects that are hosted there

what? microsoft doesn't own any projects hosted on github other than their own

~~~
dragonwriter
It's pretty clear the GP was using that in the sense that one often refers to
acquirers buying customers, not in terms of actually buying IP of the
projects.

~~~
zerogvt
Exactly.

------
kzisme
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
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
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.

------
freefal
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?

~~~
shafyy
That's exactly what I thought. $10.5M yearly revenues with 350 employees is
rather bad.

~~~
dblessing
Please see Sid's comment at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014).
The numbers are from two separate points in time.

~~~
shafyy
Fair.

------
robtimescale
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
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.

------
jchw
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.

------
dmode
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
DigitalOcean.

edit: not fully remote but almost, and increasingly

~~~
RussianCow
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-
openin...](https://www.digitalocean.com/careers/#anchor--current-openings)

------
samblr
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.

------
chadash
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.

------
jacquesm
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
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
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.

------
romanovcode
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?

~~~
fyfy18
Still seems to be true, even within countries the discrepancy is pretty bad.
They give the formula, but don't have a calculator, but you can use their
"Move" calculator to estimate it:

[https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/move/](https://about.gitlab.com/job-
families/move/)

Someone in London who is on £60k would get £35k if they moved to Bristol, or
£30k in Brighton. Definitely a lot lower than market rates.

~~~
madcaptenor
The adjustment seems overly aggressive. Salary is proportional to 0.7 *
Rent_Index + 0.3, where Rent_Index is normalized to be 1.0 for New York City -
so basically they're adjusting salaries as if 70% of your spending goes to
rent. They probably should use an index that's a bit less aggressively
weighted towards housing costs.

~~~
brittany6229
We ran linear regressions to see which factor was more statistically relevant
between Cost of Living, Cost of Living with Rent Index, and Rent Index. We
chose rent index from Numbeo based on those evaluations, which expresses the
ratio of cost of rent in many metro areas. Since we are using San Francisco
salary benchmarks, we divide by 1.26 to normalize the rent index to San
Francisco. We multiply the Rent Index by 0.7 and then add 0.3, so the sum
would equal 1 (i.e. we pay San Francisco rates in San Francisco).

~~~
madcaptenor
So where does the 0.7 and 0.3 come from?

------
molteanu
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.

~~~
Macha
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
How do they help with #3?

------
captaindiego
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?

~~~
dsumenkovic
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-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/18/the-case-for-all-remote-
companies/)

[2] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-
distractions...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/17/eliminating-distractions-
and-getting-things-done/)

[3] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-
remote...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/27/remote-future-how-remote-
companies-stay-connected/)

[4] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-
facilitates-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/17/remote-work-facilitates-
devops/)

[5] [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-
right/](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/16/remote-work-done-right/)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Thanks for sharing this. A quick suggestion though: you might want to limit
the number of links you share in a single comment, as these 2+5 seem a bit too
much for me, and they might look like you're trying to publicize your company
a tad too much.

Or, from a slightly different perspective, they might look like you're trying
to say as much as possible about the company you work for, instead of focusing
on providing value to your readers.

To be clear, this just as a simple suggestion, based on the perception I had
from your comment and from my personal experience (former tech evangelist at
Amazon for 6 years, trying to give you my 0.02 to make you succeed in one of
the hardest jobs in the world - I've been in these shoes :D)

~~~
Aeolun
While I agree with the suggestion, the way you tried so hard to be non-
confrontational about it made it a little bit nauseating :P

~~~
simonebrunozzi
You know? You are actually right. And your suggestion to me is very valuable.
Thanks for sharing it.

------
toomuchtodo
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)

~~~
holman
> Also, what is "success"? Taking $350MM in investment and not showing
> profitability

That's an odd thing to say. Most companies that take investment aren't
profitable- that's kind of the point of taking VC: you want the cash in order
to greatly grow the business more than if you were sitting within
profitability the entire time. There's a difference between "unprofitable" and
"choosing not to be profitable".

What's more, GitHub wasn't profitable the last ~5 years or so, from the day
they took VC. But they sold for $7.5B, so it doesn't seem that Microsoft has a
problem with their "unprofitability". That's how many solid, foundational
companies are created.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Taking investment is not success though. Maybe one day Gitlab will exit (most
likely outcome). Maybe one day they'll be profitable. Those days are not here,
and that would be success. That has not occurred yet.

~~~
irq11
Also, their business model is “GitHub, but cheaper”.

We now know what GitHub was worth, and it puts the lie to inflated valuations
in this space. When $8Bn is a huge deal for your industry, it gets hard to
sell higher valuations with a straight face.

~~~
williamchia
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion about GitLab's business model?
GitLab is pretty clear on the homepage. The business model is to compete in 9
different categories, only one of which is GitHub. (GitLab pricing is also
higher than GitHub which makes sense when the offering provides more the
functionality.)

~~~
irq11
Gitlab is absolutely _not_ higher than GitHub, unless you ignore all of the
people who are running self-hosted Gitlab for free.

GitHub makes most of its revenue from the self-hosted market. GitLab is
burning this market to the ground.

~~~
williamchia
GH Enterprise pricing is $21 /user/mo [1]

GL Ultimate pricing is $99 /user/mo [2]

[1]
[https://github.com/pricing/enterprise](https://github.com/pricing/enterprise)
[2] [https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-
managed](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed)

------
sandworm101
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
> 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!

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

~~~
YorickPeterse
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.

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

~~~
sytse
I responded to the other thread about this in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

------
webXL
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)

------
Kiro
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.

------
let_var
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
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.

------
scrozart
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.

------
airnomad
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.

------
josefresco
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
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
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
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.

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

~~~
boleary-gl
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/)

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

------
sixtypoundhound
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
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
That employee is the CEO :)

------
indigodaddy
"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
They integrate Mattermost into the Omnibus....

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

~~~
atestu
My thoughts exactly. I can't believe they're bragging about it…

~~~
debacle
IIRC their revenue last year was 6 figures. That's very impressive growth for
a somewhat crowded space.

------
adobeeee
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"

------
pbhjpbhj
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
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
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.

------
clubm8
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).

~~~
sytse
Our reasons for paying local rates can be found on
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-
operations/global-c...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-
operations/global-compensation/#paying-local-rates)

Paying the same wage in different regions would lead to:

1\. A concentration of team members in low-wage regions, since it is a better
deal for them, while we want a geographically diverse team.

2\. Team members in high-wage regions having less discretionary income than
ones in low-wage countries with the same role.

3\. Team members in low-wage regions being in golden handcuffs and unlikely to
leave even when they are unhappy.

4\. If we start paying everyone the highest wage our compensation costs would
increase greatly, we can hire fewer people, and we would get less results.

5\. If we start paying everyone the lowest wage we would not be able to
attract and retain people in high-wage regions.

~~~
dx87
Number 3 is pretty rediculous. I don't think I've ever seen another company
try to claim that they are doing employees a favor by paying them less money
than their peers.

~~~
Xixi
The issue with number 3 is for the employer, not the employee. GitLab doesn't
want demotivated/unhappy employees to stick around: they want them to actively
look for other opportunities and leave. Sounds reasonable to me.

~~~
clubm8
>The issue with number 3 is for the employer, not the employee. GitLab doesn't
want demotivated/unhappy employees to stick around: they want them to actively
look for other opportunities and leave. Sounds reasonable to me.

Ironically if you paid a high salary but allowed people to work in a low COL
area, this wouldn't be an issue... because the workers could aggressively save
for retirement and semi-retire fairly early in their career.

~~~
ozim
But you want unhappy employee to leave in 2-3 months or ASAP not sticking for
couple of years to earn his FIRE. I would say after 6 months you get to know
quirks of company up to that you might still be oblivious to bodies in
wardrobe.

------
rs86
Promising "200% developer speed" is basically meaningless

------
ulisesrmzroche
I believe in remote work but these numbers are terrible.

------
throwaway487548
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.

------
sgb_QQ
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.

~~~
jchw
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
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
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.

