After several very successful interviews and a very optimistic report from the recruiter, Gitlab called me to reject me- at 3 AM, on New Year's Day, as in right as I was getting home from celebrating opportunities in the year to come.
3 AM, New Year's Day. Awful timing. The author here talks about not being a fit- yeah that f---ery made it clear that company was not a fit for me. And I lost all respect for them, and have never seen a reason to offer them a 2nd chance, either as an employee or a customer.
I mean the timing sucks, but really the question that would be running through my mind is what kind of company culture is encouraging folks to work at 3am on New Years Day? There shouldn't be much more than a skeleton crew of Ops folks available on-call on major holidays at a sane company.
The rose parade is on the 2nd if the 1st is a sunday. That makes it at least an unofficial holiday. I recall generally getting an alternate day off for 'new years day' if the 1st was on a weekend.
Maybe somewhere with a different calendar entrenched might not care so much about Jan 1 though.
ETA: I would assume this is an isolated incident of calling people at 3am until given more evidence to the contrary.
Agreed (and the GitLab person in a sibling thread said this as well), but I'm just saying, being a remote-first company should make you less likely to do this, not more. It'd be more understandable to me if they generally hired from a narrow window of timezones and recently expanded to hire from anywhere.
ETA: I think I see now, you're thinking that I am suggesting this is a comment on GitLab at large, when it's more likely an isolated incident. I would agree with that. I didn't mean to imply otherwise, but I understand how it came off that way.
You're saying that I am generalizing too broadly from my experience working remotely? Just linking articles like this is kinda unhelpful, I'd prefer if you stated what your objection was, rather than leaving me to guess and to make your argument for you. That might not be as dramatic as linking an article like a mic drop but it's more productive and prevents misunderstandings.
What I'm saying is that in a remote company (distributed across many timezones anyway), you encounter this situation regularly. So you'd expect the culture of those companies to be prepared for this situation. If I'm missing something in that analysis, I'm happy to be corrected on it.
(I'd point out this was exactly the kind of confusion I was talking about. We had different ideas about what argument I was making, so when I tried to interpret what your criticism was, I guessed wrong.)
A single instance of an employee making a mistake isn’t that interesting imo. If they had a page on their docs which said “call people immediately, regardless of their local timezone” that would be worth discussing.
I agree it's likely an isolated incident unless we hear evidence to the contrary. Maybe the point I was making wasn't important enough to make, I didn't mean to suggest GitLab was systematically calling people at 3am, but I can see how my comment got swept up in the surrounding discourse and seemed to imply that.
While it's possible that it could have been 3 AM on Jan 1 in Sydney and midday on Dec 31 in the United States, I think anyone at GitLab, including the recruiter who made the call, would agree that the timing of this call was a mistake - even if the recruiter was within their working hours.
Total opposite experience. Fantastic interviews that didn’t result in an offer but I was invited to a follow up conversation with the recruiter sharing some of the details of my interviewers’ feedback and a disconnect between my salary requirements and the level corresponding with my experience. I was invited to apply again and I may well do so.
That's good to hear. I've interviewed with them twice, and both times were pretty awful. I didn't think anyone there wanted to spend time with me, I was just one in a million applying. I get it, but it was still a bad experience enough that I can't recommend them to anyone else.
I interviewed with them. I did well, they asked me to go to a final round but I had to abort. The people doing the technical tests were awful. I can't remember another time I've been treated so much like a child. Given that I was quite excited about the idea of joining, I put in a little extra work beforehand to learn their frontend stack etc. On hearing this they were not just dismissive, but actively condescending about it.
On one of the technical tests, after getting through the meat of it, instead of having a nice chat etc the interviewer spent some time doing what I consider as exploring any possible area he could trip me up on and trying to make me feel uncomfortable.
I actually felt a little physically ill after that interview. Usually I quite enjoy interviewing. Someone having a bad day? Could have been, but there were two people on each call. I don't wish to work somewhere where people act like that.
GitLab team member here! I hope you have mentioned this to a recruiter.
> I don't wish to work somewhere where people act like that.
Me neither. But I can't complain about my interview experience. I enjoyed it more than any other interview in my career.
> 1. Spend company money like it is your own money. No, really.
The author’s commentary:
> Instead of crafting the perfect policy to fit humans into, hire adults and expect them to act like it. If someone can't reign in expenses and stays at the Ritz-Carlton every night, the answer isn't to have a policy that prevents it, the answer is that person shouldn't work for your company. They aren't a good fit.
My take:
If I’d spend my own money to stay at the Ritz-Carlton (I like nice places, I have the money to pay for it, etc.), then why does this make me a bad fit for GitLab? If the company doesn’t want the Ritz-Carlton expensed then make a policy for it.
Either GitLab has “shadow” policies in place (annoying unwritten rules) or the author doesn’t understand the policy that GitLab has. I wondered if their Core Values had something about thriftiness which might disqualify the Ritz:
> GitLab's six core values are Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent.
They go on to say:
> Every dollar we spend will have to be earned back. Be as frugal with company money as you are with your own. In saying this, we ask team members to weigh the cost of purchases against the value that they will bring to the company.
So they’re not really asking people to be as frugal with company money as they are their own. They’re asking people to be as cheap as GitLab wants them to be — without being specific about it.
There's always shadow policies at places like these. The buzz-word bingo of core values is for marketing and designed to captivate people (usually young) that haven't learned to call bullshit when they see it.
More specifically, shadow policies open the door up to favoritism.
Another example: “unlimited” time off is granted inequitably. Some teams and individuals are more pressured than others to stay within an unwritten amount of time off.
Unlimited vacation policy is like unlimited hosting - everyone knows there're arbitrary applied rules. Take too much and "you're not performing well enough".
More to say, some studies [0] have shown that with Unlimited Paid Time Off "employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates".
Overall, I think Gitlab is building a culture that _to me personally_ looks weird, you know when you talk to someone and have a gut feeling that you can't trust them?
Did they fix location-based pay yet, many times discussed on HN in context of Gitlab? If not, any news on introducing Purchasing Power Parity?
it seems like an easy way to create ambiguous bias to fire someone who is in the grey area before the Ritz Carlton. (i.e., I stayed at Motel 6, and this other person who I also hate stayed at the Holiday Inn - lets get rid of them)
It might be if the person is more productive staying at the Ritz because it makes them more relaxed and that in turn helps them think, or do a killer presentation or whatever.
It's the problem with these policies. They're written open-ended, but there is really a "right" answer and it's whatever the boss decides. Good boss? Maybe they stick up for you. Bad boss? You're going to regret that decision.
Would you pay for Ritz Carlton out of your own pocket for a business trip?
Imagine for a second that company is not reimbursing you for travel expenses, would you go for medium priced hotel or for 5* hotel with your own money for company business trip (not your leisure vacation)?
answer becomes obvious if you look at issue this way
Maybe the Ritz Carlton is a little excessive but I've seen a lot of companies that deny international business class flights for anyone below the director level even when I know many coworkers who regularly fly business class for personal vacations. Your analogy breaks down a little because if I'm traveling for work then I can't imagine being required to pay for the trip myself. However if I was traveling there on vacation, I can imagine a world where I'd splurge. Do you think the company should pay in that case? Or is their value less about being cheap more than it is about not being excessive?
Imagine company gives $100/night allowance for hotel, but we can make thought experiment and say that allowance is $0 (and $100/night is included in salary instead).
That makes travel allowance a part of your paycheck, and all expected travel expense is loaded upfront in your salary.
then it becomes up to you - whether you go to luxury hotel for a business trip, or a medium range. Company becomes indifferent to your choices, and it becomes your choice how much to spend.
I would make a different choice because it’s a totally different situation. If a company wants me spending $100/night on hotels then give me $100/night. Don’t say, “Spend our money as if you were spending your own money” and then be upset when I do that.
company i work for just gives us the prices. choose the location and they tell you how much you can spend on flight on hotel based on current rates. very easy. but we have access to a lot of data.. probably not so easy for other companies to price map the world.
but they could probably at least give specific examples. ritz Carlton no, but something nicer than motel 6... maybe take the median price for hotels within x mile radius and add 10% or whatever, let the employee work it out and if some excessive expense shows up it shouldn't be too hard to work it out by hand to see if they were being unreasonable
It's also not a good comparison because if you're truly an employee, you pay tax on that money, whereas the company saves tax on that company expense. The answer of your previous hypothetical would totally depend on _all_ the circumstances. Do I personally control the reward system for having gone to the conference? Do I need day to day consistency? What are my available options in the area and how do those help or hinder my ability to succeed? How much does the company, employed or otherwise, stand to make from my performing this task?
The only situation in which it'd actually be obviously excessive is when the choice would be considered truly opulent and wildly expensive given all of the circumstances.
A 3 star to a 4 or 5 star is probably not so clear if all options are available.
If I was tasked with going somewhere on behalf of a company that I don't control, then I'd pick a place that would likely start at a cost of around $3-400 USD per night with no exceptional circumstances prevailing. All hotels basically suck, that range would let me not be concerned about where I'm staying, and do well the next day if I needed to.
Amazingly corporations decided budgeting it out would save them money. Even a 500/night hotel cap is better than the difference going in the employees pocket from the corporation vantage point.
Why are so many people so intent on assuming malicious intent on behalf of individuals and positive intent on behalf of organizations. Corporations have exactly one mandate: make as much money as possible. You are a line item, a cost. They will always squeeze you because it is the nature of the organization.
> Would you pay for Ritz Carlton out of your own pocket for a business trip?
Yes. I would and have. Your personal means and current state in life shouldn't be part of company policy.
Policies like this are simply terrible for everyone. Those who would spend trip over some unspoken convention and upset others without knowing. Those who would not spend are left with a worse experience for no reason. No one has a clue about what is or isn't allowed, so everyone suffers.
i wouldn't pay for a hotel out of my own pocket for a business trip. the whole point of a business trip is that you are going out of your way to do something valuable for the company, and would like to be as comfortable while doing so as the company's limits allow. it's up to the company to tell you what those limits are.
You assume your fictional business is doing poorly. I assume my fictional business is killing it and so yes I would stay at the Ritz with my peerset that I might see at breakfast, or the evening happy hour, or in SF especially, walking to a client/office.
No. No reasonable person would think that paying the premium for the Ritz would result in comparable increased returns.
They are looking for sensible people, not people who try to weasel every single definition and sentence. This applies to all communication, being able to understand others and read between the lines, and not try to one-up people by interpreting their words literally.
When the policy is "use common sense", that means "you don't have to go to a motel, you can expense breakfast, you can use the laundry if you're staying for a week or more".
Of course, people's perspectives vary. That's why you can talk and communicate to understand better. "Hey, I need to take a week long business trip, can I expense laundry?" It's not difficult.
> Bad boss?
If so, an open policy is the least of your problems.
Often (a similar class of hotel) can be a fairly efficient use of resources.
In many cities (London, Dublin, etc) the price difference between shit tier and excellent hotels is marginal, and the excellent ones tend to be better located, leading to less travel/lost time.
The same can be applied to flights: taking the faster, business class ticket, direct flight with a flag carrier airline is often more economical in terms of "lost time" than using the budget airlines.
> > 1. Spend company money like it is your own money. No, really.
I normally maintain a ratio. When I was a junior, the rule I adhered to is spend $10 of company money like your would spend $1 of your own money. As I became more senior, I adjusted that ratio to $100:$1.
This keeps things in perspective but acknowledges that spending money generally makes money for a business.
So if I would pay $100 a night in a personal trip, I should be fine spending up to $10000/night of company money? I don't think that would fly at most companies.
Edit: Unless you're a C-level executive, I guess. But then you'd probably be fine spending 10k for a personal trip, too.
Will I book that executive class hotel within walking distance of my venues instead of La Quinta? Yes. Will I book that better plane ticket instead of cattle class? Yup. etc. Those are probably in the range of about a factor fo 4x-5x.
This also holds a little better if I talk about lab equipment. I have wasted a lot of time trying to do measurements with $100-ish pieces of equipment when I should have bought the $10K piece of lab-grade equipment that I then use for other projects as well. Now I try to optimize that better.
if you don't understand how expenses should work and what a reasonable expense is then you're not a culture fit for a company that relies on employees having common sense.
OK, then the policy should be, “Have common sense, understand how expenses work, and what reasonable expenses are.” But their policy is “Spend our money like you are spending your own money.”
Yes and no. If it's my money, if I don't spend it I will save it for another thing, so I have an incentive to spend less. I know they are trying to emulate the same incentive as a policy with that words. Personally I think that using the words "use common sense" would feel more honest.
I missed a step in your logic from "culture fit" to "common sense".
I certainly know that "reasonable expense" is a cultural issue, and strongly related to family wealth.
Someone coming from a working-class single parent family making $40K/year has a different idea of what "reasonable" means than someone from a professional class family with two working parents making $350K/year.
Just because these two employees now make the same money working the same job position for the same company doesn't mean they both automatically have the same idea of what's "reasonable."
For example, is it reasonable to get room service while at a hotel on company business? As someone from a $40K/year family, I never considered it until my boss mentioned it.
So yes, it's a cultural mismatch. But the conclusion shouldn't be that I wasn't a cultural fit (because I came from a working class culture), nor that I didn't have common sense, but rather that a company's specific corporate culture needs to be learned, and explicit communications may help.
If I’d spend my own money to stay at the Ritz-Carlton (I like nice places, I have the money to pay for it, etc.), then why does this make me a bad fit for GitLab?
Because you missed the crucial qualifying phrase, "every night".
The point of the policy wasn't that one should never, ever go out treat oneself to nice things. But that at some point, it get to be objectively (and grossly) inefficient and, to put it bluntly, reckless.
In fact, most people I know who in fact can afford to stay at the Ritz-Carlton every night (when traveling) don't, just as a matter of principle.
And yeah, they seem to also expect you to have a sense for what's called sound judgement, or shall we say business sense. That is, to know (at least approximately) where to draw the line, without an explicit policy for every last expense category.
And if you don't agree with this philosophy (or it isn't basically obvious to you) - then it would seem you probably aren't a good fit for GitLab.
(In the OP author's point of view, that is. The Ritz-Carlton analogy comes from them, not GitLab).
The more nights the company is asking you to travel away from home, the stronger the argument for the Ritz.
You seem to think more nights makes it a weaker case.
Travel is brutal, being away from home is brutal. The reason things like the Ritz and first class airline seats exist is that there are people who need to travel a lot and one way to keep them functioning at a high level despite the relentless pace is to provide superb comfort and service.
GitLab can decide to be that kind of company or not but when business travel becomes routine and frequent for one individual it’s dishonest to pretend they should scrimp like it’s their own much rarer leisure travel.
A quick search confirms that are -plenty- of nice, boutique hotels (in downtown areas of the usual fancy cities) offering perfectly decent rooms in the under $300/night range, even on short notice. The only reason we go for the Ritz's price range ($600-$900) is to tell ourselves (or others) that we stayed at the Ritz.
The ability to distinguish between the cost-value ratios of the two categories -- and to understand that yes, even for a large, successful company, unnecessary expenses of this sort do add up -- is precisely the sensibility that GitLab[*] is looking for.
[*] Again, a hypothetical GitLab - the Ritz-Carlton example comes from the blogpost author, and not from GitLab.
People like you are the reason why I have to spend an extra 3 hours traveling to get a connecting flight that saves $30, despite the fact that everyone, from my manager on up would agree that my time is worth far more than $10/hour. But our travel policy is that you have to book a flight within X percent of the lowest fare, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Gitlab is just asking people to use a little bit of common sense.
We have a similar policy but managers can just force-approve travels outside the policy when it makes sense. If your company don't even allow that, then the issue is not people like OP but HR/Finance drones or managers lacking common sense.
I really wonder about this kind of article. The company I work for has some similar values to GitLab and some different ones. I've learnt something from every job I've worked in, good or bad.
But these values are nebulous concepts. The usually come from what the company already thinks it does rather than an aspiration. As an aspiration they would kind of suck.
My personal position is that you should think about the values of the organisation you work for and understand them, why they're there, where they came from. But don't internalise them, don't have corporate values in your heart. They are strictly limited and they aren't and can't be actually meaningful to the organisation itself because it's not a person. Someone there could still get you fired or do things that run against those values because they feel like it and the organisation as a whole will not protect you just because those values are written.
I've had a little interaction with GitLab and it wasn't good. Clearly some of the people I talked to were not following these values, they were not kind and understanding. But I know people who do work there and enjoy it. The company I work for talks about values a lot, and that's fine, I agree with the ideas behind them, mostly, but I think those talking about it have less control over the actual values and culture at the org than they think.
If you work for a small company and the original founder made the values, you can derive a lot about the company culture from the founder, and the values they announce (truthful or not) are a way of understanding them.
If you work for a big company, and the values were made at a corporate event, the values are a lie. They were made to sound good, but do not reflect the opinions of any one person. At best they represent some average of what the people most eager to declare generic human values at corporate events feel.
In either case, it’s just internal marketing. The true values of a workplace will be evident after a while, no matter what the values are declared as.
Especially, when a company has the value “transparency”, they usually don’t.
"Spend money like it's your own." It isn't and you can't put savings from enduring discomfort in your retirement account or forgo your holiday for additional comfort now.
There is a reason we like rules, policies and principles written down and enforced as written.
"There are no rules" With suggestions of "values" or whatever in place means you can't know in advance what an infraction is and you can be punished in an entirely unjust fashion with no recourse beyond appeal to those higher castes. This is a normal course of events in humans organised under a regime known as a dictatorship. Be it a smallish company or a country.
In a small organisation it really can work with little to no abuse. The larger the organisation gets the more horrible it generally becomes. At the country level it is essentially universally horrific for those who have to live subject to it. (Debate Singapore elsewhere, it's not interesting here).
The rule of law is a good thing. Being friends with the right people making what one person can do wildly different to another sucks very hard.
The flip side to note is that you can't make a bad employee (usually a manager) a good one by making policy pronouncements. You can't make (necessary) social norms accepted and socially enforced and adhered to by passing rules.
"We have no rules" presented as a positive for any community is a statement one should immediately be concerned about and consider its implications. It's up there with "There is no set amount of annual leave - take what you need" It just isn't at all likely to work in your favour unless you've decided you're short term and game it and even then it miraculously probably won't be approved or paid before you are cut for trying to actually take a reasonable amount.
Does anyone like HR and think of the HR dept. as a positive who doesn't work in HR? They're the pointy end of nastiness who are absolutely not on the side of anyone who is abused by someone senior. How's Harvey Weinstein's HR dept doing?
“I like spending all the money I have. Every dollar left unspent represents labor that has been given away without enjoying the fruits of that labor. If I die I won’t take any money with me.”
“You’re fired, you’re not a good fit.”
“You fired me for discriminatory purposes and used your intentionally vague travel and expense policy as an excuse, I’m suing you.”
I see 100 person startups with policies like this, not major corporations like Gitlab. Yikes.
Meh, it worked at Google for a really long time, and only broke down around 50,000 employees. "Spend money like it's your own" was literally in the T&E policy and people understood it to mean "be reasonable, but also don't be miserable."
I agree some amount of clear rules is good and keeps you from guessing, but the article says that the policy goes on to cover those, so what's the problem?
Not every employee-employer relationship is adversarial, no matter how much HN wants to believe it is. (Although, I grant you, beyond a certain size it tends to become adversarial.)
I find that money thing hard, people do spend their own money differently.
If I would spend company money like I spend mine there would not be growth at all, just cost cutting and terrible amounts of not invented here syndrome.
Before given guidance on expensing when I was a younger and newly hired, they said spend like it is your money, be reasonable. I was a poor kid.
I expensed one subway sandwich and stretched it three meals and felt guilty expensing a snack later in the evening. When they later clarified and said I had $70/day, I realized they have different life experiences for what a person spends. I also ate better than I ever had in my life.
My rule of thumb company money == 10X my money. The reason is things I buy with my money typically don't have the same substitution and multiplier effects as stuff I spend the companies money on.
Substitution: Bought something instead of spending time.
Multiplier: Spent money to be more effective with my time.
Really think like an accountant. Realize your time costs the company $500-600 a DAY. And 1.5X to 2X a year than what they pay you. Save a week of time, $3000 not counting moving your ship date forward an inch. Something that increases your productivity by 5%? That's worth $10k a year.
I use gitlab since a lot of years. Let me phrase it like this: in the past I was more happy with using gitlab than I am nowadays. And it gets worse over time.
1. Nearly all features feel like they are half-baked. I do not even know where to start my enumeration of things that can be improved. The worst is maybe the search, followed by the wiki, followed by the issues.
2. It is more important for them to add more features then to improve existing features.
I think this is a direct consequence of the company politics as stated in the article. People may like working there and see it as gold standard. But from my point of view (as a paying customer) I’d like to see more people there work more on consolidation and refinement. Of course engineers prefer working on the cool new stuff. If there is no one who forces the focus on improving existing stuff, nothing gets better over time. At our company we have the same sickness, I wonder what others are doing differently that they don’t have the same problem. E.g. Apple.
On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to gitlab. Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?
This is a leadership problem (or not a problem) at its core. The engineers make whatever the people at the top reward making. Unless the people running the actual business side of the business choose to invest in maintenance and refinement it won’t happen. And very often that is a deliberate choice.
I think a lot of engineers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to stuff like this because what we value is good engineering and convince ourselves that such a thing is a prerequisite to the overall business success.
If you can’t convincingly argue why $work will have a positive ROI with engineer hourly rates then it won’t happen. How I’ve sold it in the past is having a bug bash where we groom and fix a couple hundred open issues and then use it as marketing fodder. It’s possible to make bugfixes as flashy as a new feature release if you sell it right.
> On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to GitLab.
Honestly, in larger organizations self-hosted GitLab is still one of the better options. It has lots of features and gets the basics right (though not all are excellent) - you get code review, CI/CD, even functionality for issue tracking, Wikis and much more.
You might use Jira or Atlassian for some of those, or maybe something more tailored and optimized for your workflows in smaller orgs, but GitLab still offers you options for most of the things you might want to do (even some monitoring and feature flags).
As long as you can keep up with resource requirements and updates, as well as configuration, you aren't likely to get fired for picking it and you'll be able to succeed and ship projects while using it, if self-hosting is a must/preferable.
> Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?
In my case, dealing with updates is a bit easier now and breakages don't affect the whole solution (since previously I ran Omnibus GitLab for my own needs, which made launching it easier, at the expense of more coupling) and the total footprint would be much lower, if only Nexus wouldn't love to gobble that much RAM.
Sometimes integrating a bunch of specialized solutions is also a valid approach, especially because in my case container image cleanup in GitLab was a bit of a mess and while Nexus still has its problems (e.g. skipped deletion of old container images when they have multiple tags), it's a bit better and gives you more control.
Gitea is great, though and should work with most of the popular CI solutions as well - whether you want to run Drone, Jenkins, or anything else.
1. Can we stop calling salaried corporate jobs “adventures?” Gag. Literally the opposite of an adventure.
2. This is way too similar to the Gitlab employee handbook, just glugging down the company kool-aid. Gitlab thinks they’ve figured out work culture despite producing an inferior product to competitors.
3. Writing everything down is exhausting. Asynchronous-only communication is exhausting. That’s a major reason why more companies don’t operate like Gitlab. Throwing face to face communication in the trash is the opposite of agile, might as well write letters to each other and deliver them on horseback.
The summary of this article is “Gitlab is so cheap they make employees write down everything they do and think rather than sparing any expense to facilitate regular in-person communication, and when they do send employees on-site they stiff them on traveling costs with a vague and passive aggressive travel policy that refuses to provide specific guidelines, which will lead to inevitable inequitable enforcement of unwritten rules among a workforce of diverse backgrounds, incomes, and cultural ideals surrounding money.
The reactions to this article don't surprise me, but they do make me sad. People seem really cynical about what we have no reason to believe is anything other than an honest request for some common sense.
This kind of attitude - trying to extract the maximum benefit for yourself that the rules allow - is the reason why we end up with stupid policies like having to ask your manager, director and VP for $500 for a lab device, instead of just making an adult decision and buying it.
It feels so cynical and it poisons the well for the rest of us. It's the same energy as wanting to know an exact list of words that can get you in trouble with HR, as though you could then say whatever you wanted within those technical boundaries.
I would not want to work with many people in this thread.
I agree with most of the stuff in the article. Seems like they have a good engineering culture at gitlab.
Which is a pity because their business sense is awful. The first major issue was the whole deleting inactive repositories debacle. They never officially announced it, but they never denied it, and were commenting on the outrage as if they were planning to go ahead with it. The whole way they handled that left a sour taste in my mouth.
So I casually started looking for somewhere else to host my code. And during this time, I suddenly realized something else: if you are not logged in, the "explore page" or whatever you want to call it has disappeared. I have no idea when this happened, but it shocked me.
It still exists (https://gitlab.com/explore) but there is no link to it anywhere. On github, they don't make it easy to find, but at least it is still there.
As a place that is pro open source, why would you go out of your way to hide all the open source code on your platform?
This utter disconnect between their values and their actions is very off putting.
I've moved all my stuff to codeberg.org and have been very happy since. At least they give a crap about open source software AND do something about it.
No company is perfect.. I log into Gitlab, stuff works, devs are happy. Everything else is a bonus. No explore page? who cares, devs are still happy. Inactive repositories debacle? No time for that, to be honest! I think you are holding Gitlab to the wrong standards.
Of course no company is perfect, and I don't expect perfection. Github is owned by Microsoft, so I have very low expectations of their morals.
But gitlab say that they value open source. So that was the standard that I was holding them against. If a code forge claims to support and value open source software, why would they hide all the open source code on their platform? Why would they consider deleting stale open source repos?
I was just holding them up to their own standards, but I see they don't care about that.
It's similar to holding Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers to different standards. Google doesn't claim to give a shit about privacy, but Mozilla do. So when Firefox does some privacy blunder people get upset. But when Chrome does it, people don't care because they already had such low expectations of Google.
Some people try to live their lives by their principals, and not just "as a bonus".
Am I the only one that saw lot of the values in this article being eerily similar to some of Amazon's: Bias for action, lots of doc writing, one way and two way door decisions. I'm not sure what to make of it
I agree that there a massive benefit to this and asynchronous communication can be more productive. However from a personal point of view, I’m dyslexic and find verbal communication much more efficient for me. Reading or writing can take longer than others expect. I also don’t always feel I can express myself correctly with written communication.
This is just a comment and unfortunately I don’t have a solution. I suppose this is more an ask to be mindful that others might excel in different ways.
For me, the biggest challenge to all of this is recruitment and review. It's easy to have a set of values and give everyone freedom but then how do you identify at interview if people fit those values? How do you review people's performance while "treating them like adults". The simple truth is that not everybody behaves like an adult, a good number of humans are happy to earn big dollars and do as little as possible (or certainly not work as well as they could).
Interestingly, I note a lot of people complaining about gitlab interviews but maybe that is the point. They tested you by disagreeing with something you wrote to see how you reacted. If you got defensive or didn't have the means to come back to their complaint, maybe you don't have the right culture!
Original author here - I would encourage anyone who wants to learn more to read the entire GitLab Values page [1] - it is massive (would be 51 pages if printed out). This summary is just that - a summary.
For example the Spending Company Money page [2] doesn't begin and end with the quote I shared - it just begins with it. It's the starting point, and in no way the articulation of the _entire_ policy. There are lots of guidelines past that to help folks out and understand what is reasonable...but the starting point is what is important. Trusting people to make good decisions for themselves and for the company is a very healthy thing, and I feel bad for folks who haven't gotten to experience that in work environments.
Thanks for all the commentary - it was a nice send off to make it to the top of this site for a time :)
I wish they put more effort into their support, instead of stonewalling people. I wrote them a support request and all I got back was asking for my subscription level. No they cannot possibly help me, without knowing my precise subscription level, which I myself do not even know, but my employer knows. Instead of just checking their friggin database for my damn subscription level, better stonewall a paying (payed for) customer. That'll score highly with the people!
Writing things down is important, but if you don't have a system in place to take your writings and do something useful with it like create a searchable knowledgebase and do things like charts or admonitions then it doesn't add a lot of value. GitLab does a pretty good job converting markdown and has some nice extensions, but I think it easy to take that for granted and forget how much value it is adding by creating tidbits like just saying to write things down.
Gitlab seems like a gem. I often find myself referencing their handbook, specifically in my role as a UX researcher. I hope to eventually work somewhere with that type of documentation-centered culture.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread3 AM, New Year's Day. Awful timing. The author here talks about not being a fit- yeah that f---ery made it clear that company was not a fit for me. And I lost all respect for them, and have never seen a reason to offer them a 2nd chance, either as an employee or a customer.
[0] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/federal-...
Maybe somewhere with a different calendar entrenched might not care so much about Jan 1 though.
https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/federal-...
It is a 2 week period where fuck all tends to get dome because somebody, somewhere is on PTO or otherwise unavailable.
No.
Being cognizant of other people's timezones/work schedules is an important part of remote work. If you call me at 3am, it'd better be urgent.
Agreed (and the GitLab person in a sibling thread said this as well), but I'm just saying, being a remote-first company should make you less likely to do this, not more. It'd be more understandable to me if they generally hired from a narrow window of timezones and recently expanded to hire from anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
You're saying that I am generalizing too broadly from my experience working remotely? Just linking articles like this is kinda unhelpful, I'd prefer if you stated what your objection was, rather than leaving me to guess and to make your argument for you. That might not be as dramatic as linking an article like a mic drop but it's more productive and prevents misunderstandings.
What I'm saying is that in a remote company (distributed across many timezones anyway), you encounter this situation regularly. So you'd expect the culture of those companies to be prepared for this situation. If I'm missing something in that analysis, I'm happy to be corrected on it.
(I'd point out this was exactly the kind of confusion I was talking about. We had different ideas about what argument I was making, so when I tried to interpret what your criticism was, I guessed wrong.)
While it's possible that it could have been 3 AM on Jan 1 in Sydney and midday on Dec 31 in the United States, I think anyone at GitLab, including the recruiter who made the call, would agree that the timing of this call was a mistake - even if the recruiter was within their working hours.
Oops, we lost your data - but don't worry, the team here all agrees that it was a mistake.
On one of the technical tests, after getting through the meat of it, instead of having a nice chat etc the interviewer spent some time doing what I consider as exploring any possible area he could trip me up on and trying to make me feel uncomfortable.
I actually felt a little physically ill after that interview. Usually I quite enjoy interviewing. Someone having a bad day? Could have been, but there were two people on each call. I don't wish to work somewhere where people act like that.
> 1. Spend company money like it is your own money. No, really.
The author’s commentary:
> Instead of crafting the perfect policy to fit humans into, hire adults and expect them to act like it. If someone can't reign in expenses and stays at the Ritz-Carlton every night, the answer isn't to have a policy that prevents it, the answer is that person shouldn't work for your company. They aren't a good fit.
My take:
If I’d spend my own money to stay at the Ritz-Carlton (I like nice places, I have the money to pay for it, etc.), then why does this make me a bad fit for GitLab? If the company doesn’t want the Ritz-Carlton expensed then make a policy for it.
Either GitLab has “shadow” policies in place (annoying unwritten rules) or the author doesn’t understand the policy that GitLab has. I wondered if their Core Values had something about thriftiness which might disqualify the Ritz:
> GitLab's six core values are Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent.
They go on to say:
> Every dollar we spend will have to be earned back. Be as frugal with company money as you are with your own. In saying this, we ask team members to weigh the cost of purchases against the value that they will bring to the company.
So they’re not really asking people to be as frugal with company money as they are their own. They’re asking people to be as cheap as GitLab wants them to be — without being specific about it.
Another example: “unlimited” time off is granted inequitably. Some teams and individuals are more pressured than others to stay within an unwritten amount of time off.
More to say, some studies [0] have shown that with Unlimited Paid Time Off "employees took less time off than previously, presumably leading to higher burnout rates".
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.8121...
Overall, I think Gitlab is building a culture that _to me personally_ looks weird, you know when you talk to someone and have a gut feeling that you can't trust them?
Did they fix location-based pay yet, many times discussed on HN in context of Gitlab? If not, any news on introducing Purchasing Power Parity?
It's the problem with these policies. They're written open-ended, but there is really a "right" answer and it's whatever the boss decides. Good boss? Maybe they stick up for you. Bad boss? You're going to regret that decision.
Imagine for a second that company is not reimbursing you for travel expenses, would you go for medium priced hotel or for 5* hotel with your own money for company business trip (not your leisure vacation)?
answer becomes obvious if you look at issue this way
That makes travel allowance a part of your paycheck, and all expected travel expense is loaded upfront in your salary.
then it becomes up to you - whether you go to luxury hotel for a business trip, or a medium range. Company becomes indifferent to your choices, and it becomes your choice how much to spend.
what would you choose this time?
same for business class tickets
The only situation in which it'd actually be obviously excessive is when the choice would be considered truly opulent and wildly expensive given all of the circumstances.
A 3 star to a 4 or 5 star is probably not so clear if all options are available.
If I was tasked with going somewhere on behalf of a company that I don't control, then I'd pick a place that would likely start at a cost of around $3-400 USD per night with no exceptional circumstances prevailing. All hotels basically suck, that range would let me not be concerned about where I'm staying, and do well the next day if I needed to.
Amazingly corporations decided budgeting it out would save them money. Even a 500/night hotel cap is better than the difference going in the employees pocket from the corporation vantage point.
Why are so many people so intent on assuming malicious intent on behalf of individuals and positive intent on behalf of organizations. Corporations have exactly one mandate: make as much money as possible. You are a line item, a cost. They will always squeeze you because it is the nature of the organization.
Yes. I would and have. Your personal means and current state in life shouldn't be part of company policy.
Policies like this are simply terrible for everyone. Those who would spend trip over some unspoken convention and upset others without knowing. Those who would not spend are left with a worse experience for no reason. No one has a clue about what is or isn't allowed, so everyone suffers.
It's nonsense.
They are looking for sensible people, not people who try to weasel every single definition and sentence. This applies to all communication, being able to understand others and read between the lines, and not try to one-up people by interpreting their words literally.
When the policy is "use common sense", that means "you don't have to go to a motel, you can expense breakfast, you can use the laundry if you're staying for a week or more".
Of course, people's perspectives vary. That's why you can talk and communicate to understand better. "Hey, I need to take a week long business trip, can I expense laundry?" It's not difficult.
> Bad boss?
If so, an open policy is the least of your problems.
In many cities (London, Dublin, etc) the price difference between shit tier and excellent hotels is marginal, and the excellent ones tend to be better located, leading to less travel/lost time.
The same can be applied to flights: taking the faster, business class ticket, direct flight with a flag carrier airline is often more economical in terms of "lost time" than using the budget airlines.
> > 1. Spend company money like it is your own money. No, really.
I normally maintain a ratio. When I was a junior, the rule I adhered to is spend $10 of company money like your would spend $1 of your own money. As I became more senior, I adjusted that ratio to $100:$1.
This keeps things in perspective but acknowledges that spending money generally makes money for a business.
So if I would pay $100 a night in a personal trip, I should be fine spending up to $10000/night of company money? I don't think that would fly at most companies.
Edit: Unless you're a C-level executive, I guess. But then you'd probably be fine spending 10k for a personal trip, too.
Will I book that executive class hotel within walking distance of my venues instead of La Quinta? Yes. Will I book that better plane ticket instead of cattle class? Yup. etc. Those are probably in the range of about a factor fo 4x-5x.
This also holds a little better if I talk about lab equipment. I have wasted a lot of time trying to do measurements with $100-ish pieces of equipment when I should have bought the $10K piece of lab-grade equipment that I then use for other projects as well. Now I try to optimize that better.
I certainly know that "reasonable expense" is a cultural issue, and strongly related to family wealth.
Someone coming from a working-class single parent family making $40K/year has a different idea of what "reasonable" means than someone from a professional class family with two working parents making $350K/year.
Just because these two employees now make the same money working the same job position for the same company doesn't mean they both automatically have the same idea of what's "reasonable."
For example, is it reasonable to get room service while at a hotel on company business? As someone from a $40K/year family, I never considered it until my boss mentioned it.
So yes, it's a cultural mismatch. But the conclusion shouldn't be that I wasn't a cultural fit (because I came from a working class culture), nor that I didn't have common sense, but rather that a company's specific corporate culture needs to be learned, and explicit communications may help.
Because you missed the crucial qualifying phrase, "every night".
The point of the policy wasn't that one should never, ever go out treat oneself to nice things. But that at some point, it get to be objectively (and grossly) inefficient and, to put it bluntly, reckless.
In fact, most people I know who in fact can afford to stay at the Ritz-Carlton every night (when traveling) don't, just as a matter of principle.
And yeah, they seem to also expect you to have a sense for what's called sound judgement, or shall we say business sense. That is, to know (at least approximately) where to draw the line, without an explicit policy for every last expense category.
And if you don't agree with this philosophy (or it isn't basically obvious to you) - then it would seem you probably aren't a good fit for GitLab.
(In the OP author's point of view, that is. The Ritz-Carlton analogy comes from them, not GitLab).
You seem to think more nights makes it a weaker case.
Travel is brutal, being away from home is brutal. The reason things like the Ritz and first class airline seats exist is that there are people who need to travel a lot and one way to keep them functioning at a high level despite the relentless pace is to provide superb comfort and service.
GitLab can decide to be that kind of company or not but when business travel becomes routine and frequent for one individual it’s dishonest to pretend they should scrimp like it’s their own much rarer leisure travel.
The ability to distinguish between the cost-value ratios of the two categories -- and to understand that yes, even for a large, successful company, unnecessary expenses of this sort do add up -- is precisely the sensibility that GitLab[*] is looking for.
[*] Again, a hypothetical GitLab - the Ritz-Carlton example comes from the blogpost author, and not from GitLab.
The only reason you tell someone you stayed at the Ritz is because you haven't stayed there often.
Gitlab is just asking people to use a little bit of common sense.
This is very clearly not what they’re asking people to do. That’s the problem.
But these values are nebulous concepts. The usually come from what the company already thinks it does rather than an aspiration. As an aspiration they would kind of suck.
My personal position is that you should think about the values of the organisation you work for and understand them, why they're there, where they came from. But don't internalise them, don't have corporate values in your heart. They are strictly limited and they aren't and can't be actually meaningful to the organisation itself because it's not a person. Someone there could still get you fired or do things that run against those values because they feel like it and the organisation as a whole will not protect you just because those values are written.
I've had a little interaction with GitLab and it wasn't good. Clearly some of the people I talked to were not following these values, they were not kind and understanding. But I know people who do work there and enjoy it. The company I work for talks about values a lot, and that's fine, I agree with the ideas behind them, mostly, but I think those talking about it have less control over the actual values and culture at the org than they think.
If you work for a big company, and the values were made at a corporate event, the values are a lie. They were made to sound good, but do not reflect the opinions of any one person. At best they represent some average of what the people most eager to declare generic human values at corporate events feel.
In either case, it’s just internal marketing. The true values of a workplace will be evident after a while, no matter what the values are declared as.
Especially, when a company has the value “transparency”, they usually don’t.
There is a reason we like rules, policies and principles written down and enforced as written.
"There are no rules" With suggestions of "values" or whatever in place means you can't know in advance what an infraction is and you can be punished in an entirely unjust fashion with no recourse beyond appeal to those higher castes. This is a normal course of events in humans organised under a regime known as a dictatorship. Be it a smallish company or a country.
In a small organisation it really can work with little to no abuse. The larger the organisation gets the more horrible it generally becomes. At the country level it is essentially universally horrific for those who have to live subject to it. (Debate Singapore elsewhere, it's not interesting here).
The rule of law is a good thing. Being friends with the right people making what one person can do wildly different to another sucks very hard.
The flip side to note is that you can't make a bad employee (usually a manager) a good one by making policy pronouncements. You can't make (necessary) social norms accepted and socially enforced and adhered to by passing rules.
"We have no rules" presented as a positive for any community is a statement one should immediately be concerned about and consider its implications. It's up there with "There is no set amount of annual leave - take what you need" It just isn't at all likely to work in your favour unless you've decided you're short term and game it and even then it miraculously probably won't be approved or paid before you are cut for trying to actually take a reasonable amount.
Does anyone like HR and think of the HR dept. as a positive who doesn't work in HR? They're the pointy end of nastiness who are absolutely not on the side of anyone who is abused by someone senior. How's Harvey Weinstein's HR dept doing?
“I like spending all the money I have. Every dollar left unspent represents labor that has been given away without enjoying the fruits of that labor. If I die I won’t take any money with me.”
“You’re fired, you’re not a good fit.”
“You fired me for discriminatory purposes and used your intentionally vague travel and expense policy as an excuse, I’m suing you.”
I see 100 person startups with policies like this, not major corporations like Gitlab. Yikes.
I agree some amount of clear rules is good and keeps you from guessing, but the article says that the policy goes on to cover those, so what's the problem?
Not every employee-employer relationship is adversarial, no matter how much HN wants to believe it is. (Although, I grant you, beyond a certain size it tends to become adversarial.)
If I would spend company money like I spend mine there would not be growth at all, just cost cutting and terrible amounts of not invented here syndrome.
I expensed one subway sandwich and stretched it three meals and felt guilty expensing a snack later in the evening. When they later clarified and said I had $70/day, I realized they have different life experiences for what a person spends. I also ate better than I ever had in my life.
Substitution: Bought something instead of spending time. Multiplier: Spent money to be more effective with my time.
Really think like an accountant. Realize your time costs the company $500-600 a DAY. And 1.5X to 2X a year than what they pay you. Save a week of time, $3000 not counting moving your ship date forward an inch. Something that increases your productivity by 5%? That's worth $10k a year.
1. Nearly all features feel like they are half-baked. I do not even know where to start my enumeration of things that can be improved. The worst is maybe the search, followed by the wiki, followed by the issues.
2. It is more important for them to add more features then to improve existing features.
I think this is a direct consequence of the company politics as stated in the article. People may like working there and see it as gold standard. But from my point of view (as a paying customer) I’d like to see more people there work more on consolidation and refinement. Of course engineers prefer working on the cool new stuff. If there is no one who forces the focus on improving existing stuff, nothing gets better over time. At our company we have the same sickness, I wonder what others are doing differently that they don’t have the same problem. E.g. Apple.
On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to gitlab. Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?
I think a lot of engineers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to stuff like this because what we value is good engineering and convince ourselves that such a thing is a prerequisite to the overall business success.
If you can’t convincingly argue why $work will have a positive ROI with engineer hourly rates then it won’t happen. How I’ve sold it in the past is having a bug bash where we groom and fix a couple hundred open issues and then use it as marketing fodder. It’s possible to make bugfixes as flashy as a new feature release if you sell it right.
I haven't used it yet, but something to look into.
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-CI/woodpecker
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-CI/examples
Honestly, in larger organizations self-hosted GitLab is still one of the better options. It has lots of features and gets the basics right (though not all are excellent) - you get code review, CI/CD, even functionality for issue tracking, Wikis and much more.
You might use Jira or Atlassian for some of those, or maybe something more tailored and optimized for your workflows in smaller orgs, but GitLab still offers you options for most of the things you might want to do (even some monitoring and feature flags).
As long as you can keep up with resource requirements and updates, as well as configuration, you aren't likely to get fired for picking it and you'll be able to succeed and ship projects while using it, if self-hosting is a must/preferable.
> Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?
That said, for my personal needs, I migrated away from GitLab and run Gitea (for the code), Drone (for CI) and Sonatype Nexus (for container images, libraries etc.): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/goodbye-gitlab-hello-gitea-...
In my case, dealing with updates is a bit easier now and breakages don't affect the whole solution (since previously I ran Omnibus GitLab for my own needs, which made launching it easier, at the expense of more coupling) and the total footprint would be much lower, if only Nexus wouldn't love to gobble that much RAM.
Sometimes integrating a bunch of specialized solutions is also a valid approach, especially because in my case container image cleanup in GitLab was a bit of a mess and while Nexus still has its problems (e.g. skipped deletion of old container images when they have multiple tags), it's a bit better and gives you more control.
Gitea is great, though and should work with most of the popular CI solutions as well - whether you want to run Drone, Jenkins, or anything else.
It's also quite frustrating to encounter the endless threads on years-long open issues with no solution in sight.
It had the upside of making some things more integrated. MR and issues and CI work much better together than GitHub or atlassian.
But it had the down side of expanding into feature categories half baked.
I only managed to stay for 4 years before I couldn't stand it. But I'm more an SRE than a feature developers.
I left for a job that has "burn tech debt" as a key goal.
2. This is way too similar to the Gitlab employee handbook, just glugging down the company kool-aid. Gitlab thinks they’ve figured out work culture despite producing an inferior product to competitors.
3. Writing everything down is exhausting. Asynchronous-only communication is exhausting. That’s a major reason why more companies don’t operate like Gitlab. Throwing face to face communication in the trash is the opposite of agile, might as well write letters to each other and deliver them on horseback.
The summary of this article is “Gitlab is so cheap they make employees write down everything they do and think rather than sparing any expense to facilitate regular in-person communication, and when they do send employees on-site they stiff them on traveling costs with a vague and passive aggressive travel policy that refuses to provide specific guidelines, which will lead to inevitable inequitable enforcement of unwritten rules among a workforce of diverse backgrounds, incomes, and cultural ideals surrounding money.
the link is broken for me.
The link is https://blog.boleary.dev/gitlabs-values/#disagree-commit-and...
This kind of attitude - trying to extract the maximum benefit for yourself that the rules allow - is the reason why we end up with stupid policies like having to ask your manager, director and VP for $500 for a lab device, instead of just making an adult decision and buying it.
It feels so cynical and it poisons the well for the rest of us. It's the same energy as wanting to know an exact list of words that can get you in trouble with HR, as though you could then say whatever you wanted within those technical boundaries.
I would not want to work with many people in this thread.
Which is a pity because their business sense is awful. The first major issue was the whole deleting inactive repositories debacle. They never officially announced it, but they never denied it, and were commenting on the outrage as if they were planning to go ahead with it. The whole way they handled that left a sour taste in my mouth.
So I casually started looking for somewhere else to host my code. And during this time, I suddenly realized something else: if you are not logged in, the "explore page" or whatever you want to call it has disappeared. I have no idea when this happened, but it shocked me.
It still exists (https://gitlab.com/explore) but there is no link to it anywhere. On github, they don't make it easy to find, but at least it is still there.
As a place that is pro open source, why would you go out of your way to hide all the open source code on your platform?
This utter disconnect between their values and their actions is very off putting.
I've moved all my stuff to codeberg.org and have been very happy since. At least they give a crap about open source software AND do something about it.
But gitlab say that they value open source. So that was the standard that I was holding them against. If a code forge claims to support and value open source software, why would they hide all the open source code on their platform? Why would they consider deleting stale open source repos?
I was just holding them up to their own standards, but I see they don't care about that.
It's similar to holding Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers to different standards. Google doesn't claim to give a shit about privacy, but Mozilla do. So when Firefox does some privacy blunder people get upset. But when Chrome does it, people don't care because they already had such low expectations of Google.
Some people try to live their lives by their principals, and not just "as a bonus".
I agree that there a massive benefit to this and asynchronous communication can be more productive. However from a personal point of view, I’m dyslexic and find verbal communication much more efficient for me. Reading or writing can take longer than others expect. I also don’t always feel I can express myself correctly with written communication.
This is just a comment and unfortunately I don’t have a solution. I suppose this is more an ask to be mindful that others might excel in different ways.
Interestingly, I note a lot of people complaining about gitlab interviews but maybe that is the point. They tested you by disagreeing with something you wrote to see how you reacted. If you got defensive or didn't have the means to come back to their complaint, maybe you don't have the right culture!
For example the Spending Company Money page [2] doesn't begin and end with the quote I shared - it just begins with it. It's the starting point, and in no way the articulation of the _entire_ policy. There are lots of guidelines past that to help folks out and understand what is reasonable...but the starting point is what is important. Trusting people to make good decisions for themselves and for the company is a very healthy thing, and I feel bad for folks who haven't gotten to experience that in work environments.
Thanks for all the commentary - it was a nice send off to make it to the top of this site for a time :)
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
[2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/spending-company-money/
Edited for spacing and to say - one last time - GitLab employee here.