GitLab's Secret To Success? All Its 350 Employees Work Remotely (inc.com) 106
Inc. magazine explains a unique feature of GitLab. "Every employee of the San Francisco-based startup, which offers tools for software developers, works from home."
Three years ago, that was nine people. Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected.... GitLab meetings and presentations are uploaded to YouTube. Its employee handbook -- over 1,000 pages long when printed -- is publicly available online as a resource, so employees can get questions answered without waking up co-workers in a different time zone.
The biggest advantage to an all-remote team is obvious: Your hiring pool is gigantic, and you don't need to convince top talent to move for you. GitLab's percentage of quality job applications is similar to other companies -- its dramatic number of recent hires is due to how many applications it receives, 13,000 in the second quarter of 2018 alone. On the other hand, maintaining a culture is really difficult. "To be honest, I was definitely a bit concerned," says Dave Munichiello, a general partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV, which invested in GitLab in 2017. "What happens when the all-hands meeting isn't a bunch of folks hanging around the water cooler listening to the CEO articulate the vision and the mission?"
GitLab's leaders constantly think about it. Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij even hired away Netflix's vice president of talent, Barbie Brewer, to serve as chief people officer. Virtual coffee breaks, where employees talk about their lives outside GitLab, are built into everyone's schedules. Senior leaders hold office hours in video chat rooms that anyone can join. When GitLab meets its monthly goals, everyone gets a free dinner. "What we've learned from GitLab," Munichiello says, "is that when you have a leadership team that's as committed to remote-only as they are, and as communicative and transparent as they are, and as insistent on documentation as they are, it can work."
The biggest advantage to an all-remote team is obvious: Your hiring pool is gigantic, and you don't need to convince top talent to move for you. GitLab's percentage of quality job applications is similar to other companies -- its dramatic number of recent hires is due to how many applications it receives, 13,000 in the second quarter of 2018 alone. On the other hand, maintaining a culture is really difficult. "To be honest, I was definitely a bit concerned," says Dave Munichiello, a general partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV, which invested in GitLab in 2017. "What happens when the all-hands meeting isn't a bunch of folks hanging around the water cooler listening to the CEO articulate the vision and the mission?"
GitLab's leaders constantly think about it. Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij even hired away Netflix's vice president of talent, Barbie Brewer, to serve as chief people officer. Virtual coffee breaks, where employees talk about their lives outside GitLab, are built into everyone's schedules. Senior leaders hold office hours in video chat rooms that anyone can join. When GitLab meets its monthly goals, everyone gets a free dinner. "What we've learned from GitLab," Munichiello says, "is that when you have a leadership team that's as committed to remote-only as they are, and as communicative and transparent as they are, and as insistent on documentation as they are, it can work."
Re:amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
I tried work from home. I often had 6 beers down by lunchtime, and the quality of my work showed it.
This is not that uncommon. I worked for a company a decade ago that tried "work from home". For about 20%, productivity went up. For about 40% it stayed about the same. But for the other 40% it declined, in many cases to zero.
I remember a conference call where one employee had to interrupt the call several times to yell at her kids to keep the noise down. It turns out she was using "work from home" to cancel her daycare and take care of her kids on company time. She was back working at the office the following week.
Work-from-home can work, but not for everyone, or even for most people, and it requires good managers to determine who should work from home and who should not, and to keep tabs on productivity. Oh, and "good managers" are hard to find, and for many jobs, productivity is notoriously hard to measure.
I wish GitLab the best of luck, but they do not yet have a proven track record, and they are treading down a well worn path that has mostly led to failure.
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So fire the people for whom it went down or remove the privilege of working from home. Problem solved.
Right. Just fire 40% of your workforce. Then just hire replacements, and spend a year rebuilding your business while working with the new employees, and expending enormous amounts of expensive management bandwidth to figure out which of them are unproductive, and then fire them and iterate again.
If some people can work from home while others can't, you will build resentment. Also, the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" phenomena will mean that the people coming to the office and interacting with management every
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They are a lot of jobs that still need a human presence to do. However they are a lot of them, that could be done remotely.
I have a 50 minute commute, to drive to my office, to use the Company provided laptop to connect to servers hosted a thousand miles away. Attend phone meetings, or Webex. Then at the end of the day, I pack up my Company provided laptop and commute 50 minutes back to my home. We if there is an issue, I can just VPN into these same servers and if there is an escalation, I call into thes
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This is common with the traditional company. With a corporate culture spanning generations. People with the 20th century MBA's (The MBA Program for many school had modernized in the early 2000's with a stronger focus on Business ethics, and Human Resources) is based mostly on dealing with manufacturing as the core industry. There peoples performance can be carefully measured and rated. Today the economy is more towards the Service sector. where a workers value, isn't as measurable. The companies top coder,
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this is the future.. I hope other companies are paying close attention to this...
also.. employees need regular traning... even people in tech
It is not necessary to be true. It all depends on the type of your services/products. If it is about software and you can do anything online, then yes; otherwise, you still need some people on the ground to have physical access to certain tasks. In this case, it happens to be fine with doing everything online. However, if your company is servicing clients with servers and your company host the (physical) servers, then you still need a kind of office for your data center even though majority of your employee
Vice president of talent? (Score:1)
People officer?
What is this, Candyland?
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I think your Feelings officer needs to have a talk with you.
The mix is the problem (Score:3)
I think it's way easier to have a remote only or a presence only company than when you have to mix.
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Mix is ok when all the employees get to mix. For example, having 1-2 work from home days a week. The management picks which day of the week everyone needs to be in. It's great because if there's one co-worker you can't stand, you can schedule your home days when he's in, and vice versa. So there's one day with 100% on-site staffing, the other four with 75% staffing (not everyone opts in). Parking, lines at the cafeterias and bathrooms, all more reasonable thanks to this policy. By requiring everyone
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It's by team rather than department, so even more granular. Java developers and web developers could have different team-wide "in" days for example. If there's a project that requires one of each team for whatever reason, then the people on each team with a similar schedule can be matched up together.
There's also a curveball of people who choose to do 4d x 10h instead of 5d x 8h workweeks. This cannot be combined with work from home, but if you'd rather truly be off on the day you're not in, that works o
Don't believe the hype (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is Age of Aquarius, where corporations formed in the nebula of the internet world are no longer required to sustain profits as long as they can continue to attract investment capital. This recent spate of positive spin in the financial news distribution network means they're golden.
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How long did it take till Amazon made profit ?
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Not that long if you disinclude capital investment. They didn't make a profit because they were plowing it into more servers, more warehouses, more infrastructure. If that's the case, then not making money makes sense on a long term scale. If you're spending it on current salaries, then your business is failing if you don't start to profit soon.
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Re: Don't believe the hype (Score:2)
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You're mixing numbers from different years. They have 350 employees now. They made $10.5 in revenue last year. Those numbers would seem to suggest that they are a rapidly growing company. Sure enough, your link mentions that they've had a "dramatic number of recent hires", likely as a response to the 200,000+ new code projects and the seven-fold increase in orders they saw after Microsoft announced it was buying GitHub earlier this year. I'd expect that their revenue for this year will be large enough to su
GitHub vs. GitLab (Score:2)
I have to admit, I never realized that this two are different companies ...
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same thing with South Korea and North Korea, but in both cases the latter is best than the former.
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You might want to Google latter vs former [google.com]...
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North Korea is often jokingly referred to as "best korea" on the internet.
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the only mistake I see is using superlative, instead of comparative, and that's because I changed the last part of the sentence and forgot to fix the previous.
Stop assuming people's preferences on Koreans.
Also, my pronouns are zero/one and I am non-binary.
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Your mistake is that you mixed up former with later, and the attempted joke was rather lame anyway.
Nah... (Score:2)
Hear that? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hear that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Telecom world is (kinda) remote (Score:2)
I work in cable. We're all remote workers in that if we're at the office we aren't working. I'm out at field hubs and headends. My boss is a three hour drive away. I go for weeks without seeing any of my direct coworkers, although I do see local techs and customer service people pretty regularly. We still feel like a team. I could work from home on office days if I wished but usually I go to a hub anyway just because I enjoy driving and my house isn't really set up for office work.
But I also feel like I'm a
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Re: Define employee (Score:2)
Virtual coffee break??? (Score:4, Informative)
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shit company that pays peanuts (Score:1)
As someone who has been auto-declined interviews at gitlab because of my salary requirements, they are not the place you want to work for. What they do is pay you based on regional "average" pay for that role. I work somewhere in the midwest remotely out of Cali; they do not want to pay me what I'm asking for the role because they believe I'm not worth it because of my geographic region. But, Cali thinks I'm worth it, and so do the other companies I've worked for out of Cali.
So, fuck you Gitlab.
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they believe I'm not worth it because of my geographic region
VPN. And a dead drop for 'official' mail correspondence.
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Misleading others
Yeah. Like going to work for a startup for a small salary but the promise of an equity share once the company issues securities and/or is sold to an investor or hedge fund.
"Oh, sorry. The shares we created are exempt per SEC regulation D and may only be transferred to qualified investors." Everyone else stomps out of the meeting mad. I'm sitting there and raise my hand, "But I've been a qualified investor under SEC rules for years. Pay up."
Employee Handbook? 1000 pages? (Score:1)
A one-thousand page employee handbook? What the actual fuck? I've worked for a lot of places and the most I've seen is 40-50 pages.
What in the world is in this dense tome, and who actually reads it?
Remote work is awesome. (Score:2)
I worked as a contractor for Cisco for 1.5 years/18 months as a SQA tester. Flexible hours, no commuting, still work when sick, etc. Best job ever. I miss it. Too bad they are mostly gone now. :(
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Re: Remote Work Doesn't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if you have no meetings and people keep their doors closed with a DND light on...
Why wouldn't you just have the employees work from home so they don't have to commute and the company can reduce its office space costs?
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You give me 50 in-office employees and I'll do everything GitLab does and more in half the time.
If you want to know the secret to having productive employees, it's called "private space." Every one of my 49 employees has their own office, with a lock on the door and a DND light, and we have ZERO meeting rooms. Meetings are entirely unnecessary.
We get more done with those 49 employees, than companies 5 times our size do, which is why we win every single DoD contract we bid on.
No matter how much you attempt to validate it, paying for a building that you force employees to commute to is simply a stupid and outdated concept, especially when you treat your employees like they're not even fucking there.
Enjoy being underbid by the next guy who understands how 21st Century technology works.
Re: Remote Work Doesn't Work (Score:3)
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Move to a part of the US that has great networks and a lower cost of housing.
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I wonder how the Linux kernel ever got developed...
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I always read this as Dungeons or Dragons.
I then nod a little and smile to myself, thinking that there still is a market for Dungeons,
then realise it is Dungeons AND Dragons...
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I don't think GitLab is doing a lot of DoD contract work. So you may be mixing apples with oranges.
I normally find productivity on a project to be related to the quality of the customer.
Government agencies normally give out clear specifications on what they want, if your company really focuses on those type of work bids, then your staff of 50 people are focused on DoD requirements, and methods. So they can be more productive then say a generic consulting firm who deals with a bunch of customers. Because som
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In the broad sense, physically close teams trump remote teams. For the 'meetings are unnecessary', I'll presume you exempt ad-hoc meetings from your statement (else why be local?)
However, in the context of a gitlab sort of product, a distributed team means you are having to eat your dogfood and have a very built-in sense of what would make the product better for the target market.
By the same token, if you told me there was one team that only ever saw each other face to face and another that was always doin
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You give me 50 in-office employees
We get more done with those 49 employees
Yeah, but your attrition rate is pretty bad.