This is the direction my current employer is headed. I was sent on a week long course to evaluate the viability of PowerApps. While there is certainly some cool stuff in there, it just doesn't feel like we should be moving all our development there wholesale. There is certainly a time and place, or at least that is how it seems to me.
Business / money making / crucial systems? No. Some random HR survey application? Maybe. Sadly Microsoft seems to have convinced a number of folks in our organization that this tool set is appropriate for all our development.
The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence.
There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent.
I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.
This is a problem at every org scale as well. We have this issue with a 1000+ developer org where we still can't give our PMs and other non-developers read-only access to the gitlab issues because it would be another 200 headcount worth of full-price licenses. It's basically the sole reason we can't utilize most of their jira/confluence alternative product line and still keep issue tracking and docs mostly outside of gitlab.
If you are just using the .git hosting part, it would be really easy to setup an open-ssh server yourself... Could you explain why you are not hosting your own ssh server already ?
They didn't say they're only using the git hosting, they're just not using the issue trackers because that would require adding non-devs. For all you know they could be using GitLab for CI, merge requests, package management, and deployments, none of which require adding new people to the team.
Exactly this, we use it for all of those things. None of which provide value to PMs, designers, and other non-engineer roles within teams that still need to collaborate on issue tracking and documentation.
It seems strange to me when management makes mistakes like this. It's reminiscent of requiring people to move when the company moves office locations, or offering people money to volunteer to be laid off.
In each of those cases, the ones who are most fearful for their jobs are often the least competent who know they'll have a hard time getting a new job. The highest skilled folks have no problem walking away because they know they can get another job in no time.
I guess it's the management delusion that each employee is fungible and can be replaced with a new employee without any loss of productivity.
I don't think managers generally think that there is no loss of productivity when you have churn. Loss of productivity due to churn is a very well known phenomenon. But it's also true that almost any employee can be replaced, and if they can't you should probably fix your org structure or processes so that they can be. Having single employee dependencies is one of the worst scenarios for organization robustness, and that includes people at the C-level. The old adage that a good manager should aim to make themselves replaceable has some merit.
All that said, I think people often incorrectly assume that having people in an office will yield productivity gains. I don't know of any research that definitively shows that to be true, and good management should be doing result based performance management not ass in seat performance management anyways. Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis.
> Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis.
I'm teaching a software development programme to mostly 18 to 20 year old students. One of the ideas behind the programme is that students need to work through many increasingly difficult programming assignment. And that they do this for 40 hours per week in our 'office' (a class room with fancier furnishing and less density).
Due to COVID, we experienced some periods during which we had to revert to (partially) working from home. On average, about 40% fewer assignments were completed during these periods.
Our explanation (and also the reason that we have students come in full-time in the first place) is that:
A) Students who get stuck need to be able to easily seek help at that moment. Many students just don't ask for help when working from home, regardless of the many things we tried to stimulate this.
B) When students get stuck, feel frustrated, feel tired or are satisfied with something they've accomplished, many will come up with the idea to play a quick computer game. And get sucked in for the rest of the working day. This doesn't seem to apply to the few older students (with working experience) we have though.
So what does this tell us about employee productivity when working from home? Probably little, though I wouldn't be surprised if an organisation with lots of juniors has similar experiences.
Just pointing out that your data has a pretty clear confounder. “Wfh” and “wfh during the initial stages of a global pandemic” are very different things.
This isn’t about “single” employee dependency though, companies are seeing significant attrition due to these policies. There’s no way to know this is safe and it’s probably hard to estimate costs.
Even in an ideal configuration where your employees are basically redundant raid drives (and yes you need to pay a lot for this redundancy which I doubt most employers do), you generally don’t want to lost too many at once, and even if you survive you still have high costs associated with replacement (training, hiring, fit, etc)
It might still be the best long term decision in some cases, but man, you better be making this decision based on more than a hunch.
Are they showing some sign of regretting the loss, or operating on the premise that the good workers are in the office and the problem children are going away? If it’s the latter, then talent is fungible and they’ll just find more.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to measure the productivity of individual workers and even harder to link that to specific outcomes.
Thus if all the best workers are replaced and now we have higher system failures, more bugs, and slower project releases, then management can choose to believe that those problems are unrelated to the decision that caused people to leave.
Only the lowest members of the team understand the loss in real terms... and who wants their thoughts and opinions on things?
There's a definite internal disagreement over how to see it. A lot of managers are highly extraverted and will justify any cost to the business if it lets them work in the environment they prefer. Others had looked at productivity and seen it increase over the same time period. In my opinion the former group won a Pyrrhic victory but the war is still ongoing.
Not that this will help at all, but from my experience it really seems like the product has degraded in quality over the last few years.
Originally we only had a few folks using Teams, and the client was pretty snappy and just seemed to work. Then over time more features were added, and things started breaking.
For example:
On my desktop client, images will not load when clicked unless you back out of a conversation then come back in and click the image. This is not something I experience on the web client. Also on the desktop client, I cannot for the life of me do formatting any more. Bullet or numbered lists are out!
The web client seems to work better for me, but will start to chug near the end of the day, which requires a quick reload of the app.
IIRC, bill C-51 defined this as an act of terrorism. Wonder how that's going to play out. When it's indigenous people blocking a pipeline, the SWAT teams come out.
Is your city/country implementing lockdowns, and do you have a small apartment and/or your spouse working at the same time in the same space and/or young kids?
Those variables tend to make all the difference between "happy to work from home" and "about to experience a mental breakdown".
they have and I didn't care, because I don't need to leave my home to enjoy my life. If anything a fully remote world would be even better because then I can go live in the countryside and have my own land without having to see other humans
> do you have a small apartment and/or your spouse working at the same time in the same space
yep, and we get along great. I love spending all day with my partner and we've never been happier individually or as a couple
> young kids?
I choose not to have kids specifically so I don't feel like I have to get away from my own home and family to feel sane.
I've gotten the impression that the lockdown, pandemic world has been a brief breath of fresh air for the hermits, introverts, misanthropes of the world, and a taste for extroverts of how miserable it is for many of us to adapt to a world that doesn't accommodate our personalities and social preferences
I think you misunderstood my point about spouse and kids: it wasn't about getting away from them, but about juggling work with kids vying for attention -- how do you explain a 2 year old that daddy has to work and cannot play with her for a few hours, and that she must stay locked in because there's a lockdown outside? -- and a couple sharing very limited space working at the same time (just think of Zoom meetings!).
If I could I'd spend most of the day enjoying time with my daughter and give my employer about half an hour of my attention. Sadly, I need a full time job.
If you can go live in a cabin in the woods, congrats! You're part of the elite. Please understand the rest of us who aren't.
It makes all the sense in the world that affluent people with large houses or living in beautiful locations, without kids, or with antisocial tendencies ("hermits", as you put it) are doing well during this pandemic. What about the rest of us?
> I think you misunderstood my point about spouse and kids: it wasn't about getting away from them, but about juggling work with kids vying for attention -- how do you explain a 2 year old that daddy has to work and cannot play with her for a few hours, and that she must stay locked in because there's a lockdown outside? -- and a couple sharing very limited space working at the same time (just think of Zoom meetings!).
In that case it's a very different point and I understand the difficulty. But what does that have to do with remote work? Assuming the coronavirus is eventually under control, why not just work remote and send the kids off to a babysitter or wherever they would be while at the office?
> and a couple sharing very limited space working at the same time (just think of Zoom meetings!).
I feel like I often spend more time on meetings than actually coding so I can relate. Just buy a headset with a mic. Just like it's reasonable to invest thousands in a car if you have to commute to work, I think it's reasonable to invest at the very least 20 bucks on a convenience store headset to be able to focus a little better. If you can even splurge 100 bucks it's a big improvement. I'm physically closer to my partner than I was to my coworkers at my previous job, so I understand the concern, but I haven't had issues by just using headsets and muting as needed.
> ("hermits", as you put it) are doing well during this pandemic. What about the rest of us?
That was part of the point of my post. You've only had it rough for a year. What about us hermits for all the rest of human history when fully remote work has been a very rare luxury? For some of us, it's a countdown until we go back to a world that makes us as miserable for a lifetime as you've been for a year, except we won't have anybody fighting to let us keep the isolation and comfort we've been enjoying, whereas you have every world government and relevant expert sprinting to end this current way of life. It's frustrating to see people complain about being unhappy for such a short time and completely disregard how unhappy many people were with the old way of things and for how long
> Assuming the coronavirus is eventually under control, why not just work remote and send the kids off to a babysitter or wherever they would be while at the office?
Until very recently day care was closed by law (actually, worse than closed: you had pointless "Zoom hours" which don't help at all, the baby bored looking elsewhere and I still cannot work) and babysitters forbidden. Now that they are temporarily allowed, I breathe a bit more easily. They are threatening with forbidding them once more if the second wave hits as seriously as the trends seem to indicate.
Once COVID19 is under control, if my wife and I can work remotely with comfort, and I can go to the office maybe once or twice a week just to hang out with my coworkers, I'd be delighted.
> What about us hermits for all the rest of human history when fully remote work has been a very rare luxury?
I agree that people who want to permantently work remotely should be allowed to. This seems something else to me, the pandemic changed everything, in some cases for the worse. It's not a choice anymore.
One more thing: we both use noise cancelling headsets. Believe me this isn't enough for two people holding Zoom calls at the same time if located in the same room.
Also: local internet connections suck. There's no way out of this because every provider sucks. I've called tech support during the pandemic multiple times, and they are clueless. I suppose they just cannot cope with so many people working remotely -- though they do manage to raise the price of my plan regularly!
Been using it since 2016, and I would say the advantages are mostly related to their DevOps features - there are integrations with k8s, SentryIO, and Prometheus to help you with operations.
Their CI/CD pipelines also seem a bit more refined than GitHub actions - maybe it is just a maturity thing though? That could also just be my inexperience with GitHub Actions.
I think there are also some project management differences in how the items are setup. GitLab, at the premium tier, has epics where I believe GitHub doesn't any distinction.
That being said I believe you kind of trade features with GitHub depending on how much you pay for each platform. Both are pretty good products as far as I am concerned.
> Their CI/CD pipelines also seem a bit more refined than GitHub actions - maybe it is just a maturity thing though? That could also just be my inexperience with GitHub Actions.
My experience with CI/CD is that github action's is stellar, while gitlab-ci is a huge mess of features that don't compose well. For instance, in gitlab-ci, you can specify that the job should only run when a specific file changes with `only:rules`, very useful for monorepo setups. Separately, you can specify explicit dependencies in your steps to construct a sort of DAG of your steps with `needs`. Those two features independently work great, but when used together, things become very weird, down to causing YAML parsing errors...
Another similar experience: Child pipelines are a mess. Child pipelines can't depend on the parent steps, can't download artifacts from the parent steps. Similarly, the parent can't access the child pipeline' artifact.
CI has some fun interaction with bot accounts. By fun, I've had MRs started by bot accounts running in weird CI contexts where some environment variables were not set for whatever reason.
Overall, gitlab-ci feels... poor. Github-actions, on the other hand, has been a joy to use, and is a lot less surprising. Most features tend to be thoughtfully designed and work well together. I can't give many examples here as it's hard to point out things that just work, but I've done extensive work with both gitlab-ci and a github actions and I certainly prefer working with github actions any time of day.
Currently a starter tier user with more than 25 users, and I don't know how I feel.
We had been mulling an upgrade to premium, but the price jump is a tough sell for us. This kind of leaves us in an predicament. Will have to see what GitLab can offer us as per their blog post.
I am lucky in that fact that I am a position where my opinions are listened to and respected. I have spent the last few years trying to improve a number of our processes. If I wasn't in this position, then chances are I would have moved on to greener pastures almost immediately.
Source control discipline is probably the single most valuable thing I have worked to improve. We still have a long ways to go, but we went from a place where on a team of roughly twenty developers with many active projects would constantly have to ask "Who has the latest code?" to a place that practices disciplined code management.
When I first started, my jaw almost hit the floor. I couldn't believe that no one actually knew how the source control worked (at the time TFVC). It is hard for me to explain just how bad things were. There were instances of features completely disappearing from production because some one never checked in the code.
Check-ins were at best months a part and production versions of code were scattered on different people's PCs.
After a long, long time we have most developers on board with good practices. There are still some who refuse to follow industry best practices, but our team, and the products we create have a much higher quality.
Business / money making / crucial systems? No. Some random HR survey application? Maybe. Sadly Microsoft seems to have convinced a number of folks in our organization that this tool set is appropriate for all our development.