Slashdot Mirror
GitLab's Secret To Success? All Its 350 Employees Work Remotely (inc.com)
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."
this is the future.. I hope other companies are paying close attention to this...
also.. employees need regular traning... even people in tech
You know they're jerking off in there, don't you? DON'T YOU?
says so on every jar. regardless product developers have developed products ignoring that advise allowing the bee poop to make it into our babys' tiny faces by the glopful.. the sequel; honey i immunized & pacified the kids.. on vdo soon.. more like a public service clip? may be shown on the /./better days ahead thread/
next; already taken all of your meds, still feeling crappy?
a primer on finding our status in the spiritual bankruptcy proceedings.. exciting.. us unchosen semi-innocents can finally reach a settlement with ourselves?
People officer?
What is this, Candyland?
I think it's way easier to have a remote only or a presence only company than when you have to mix.
bickerdyke
I use Gitlab, and actually prefer it to Github, but something is rotten in Denmark - or wherever Gitlab employees work from. This is the second Gitlab "success" article in as many weeks, run on the Inc. site. The last one was "How This Startup Made $10.5 Million in Revenue With Every Single Employee Working From Home" (https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/2018-inc5000-gitlab.html). Let's do some math. Assume that the $10.5M in revenue is gross - because they would say it was net if it was. Being very generous and valuing their average employee salary at $40K, that would put their payroll expenses at $14M. There's no way that Gitlab is even close to profitable right now and, considering that both these articles were run on Inc., I'm assuming somebody got their palm greased.
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?
I have to admit, I never realized that this two are different companies ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Distributed software company operates in distributed manner.
Film at eleven.
P.S. To be honest, I'm completely amazed that they are 350 employees. It seems too big too quick. I'd short them at this point, if it was an option.
let's build a 5B campus and make everyone come to work.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
That's the sound of Marissa Mayer's head exploding.Yeah I know it's hard to hear anything from behind that $180+ million golden parachute, but it happened...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
With the egos of a lot of managers whom want people's physical presence, this is why IBM banned working from remote. Other companies have followed suit, because they feel physical meetings are critical to the daily function of the company.
So, no, the trend is against this.
> 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?
Yeah, because any normal developer when thinking of the challenges in his workplace goes immediate "if only if I understood our CEO's vision and mission better!".
Sometimes it can be a bit shocking to see just how full themselves management sometimes is.
I guess it's time to replace "when all you have is a hammer..." with "when you are a CEO every problem looks like it is caused by employees not understanding your vision".
Yes, culture is important, but the all-hands is not the thing that will magically change it. And it won't solve your broken tools, software, priorities or processes either, especially if years of penny-pinching broke them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
> we win every single DoD contract
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...
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 an exception too. Most people could get used to remote/telework, but I also think there are a lot of people who crave face to face interaction and are too lazy to get to know people -much easier to treat the office as a social gathering- so they want the office experience. That and if you take away all the socializing most people would be done with their day at 10:30.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Yes, jerking off in groups is way more entertaining, I agree with you ... who cares about work when we need to discuss what our team lead fished yesterday !!!
I disagree, wasting time in office is way easier then doing nothing at home where you have no excuses for doing nothing.
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 some customers will give out pie in the sky specs, try to bully people into getting a better deal, dropping the product mid design, then ramping back up because they couldn't find someone else to do it. Dumping a lot of additional "one more thing" specs to the design, and getting pissed that they have to pay for it.... This often requires 1 more employee to deal with the BS for every 2 people working on it.
You argument doesn't discredit Remote Work. Your "Private Space" area is mitigating the issues of a work environment, by bringing some of the comforts of work at home into the office. However your business specialty is probably what is allowing the efficiencies, more then your work environment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 doing online meetings, and the product was conferencing software, I would wager that the distributed team would do that better as well.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Does GitLab have 350 employees in the generally accepted meaning of the term? Are they paid a salary with some benefits and work about 40 hours each week exclusively for the company? Or are these 350 people kind of like part-time contractors where they are paid a few buck to 'contribute' to the project whenever they feel like it? Anybody know?
No, but then again I'm not a raging homo like you.
"Virtual coffee breaks, where employees talk about their lives outside GitLab, are built into everyone's schedules." that's interesting stuff, but the linked article doesn't expand on it at all, so I found this write up on Quartz in case anyone is interested. Seems like it would be a bit awkward at first, but I don't hate the concept, but it seems awkward, part of the coffee break is getting away from your desk.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
That may be true, but if you do what most companies do and put your office in a big city, you're probably paying $25,000 a year per employee for the office space. You're also paying double to triple the salary so the employees can live in poor accommodations in densely populated city. Let's not forget sick days, since most office workers do have some paid sick days. Office workers require sick days for sicknesses that don't put them down for the count but ARE highly communicable, such as colds. Remote employees don't.
I believe you could hire 150 or more remote employees for less than the cost of your 50 employees. Might not be 350, but the costs to the company are significant.
That isn't to say you're doing it wrong, but it is to say your competition is busy cutting costs and you will fall behind.
It's not about the building or the commute, it's about high-bandwidth face to face communication between human beings. Videoconferencing remains a mess of high-latency nose-gazing. It's awful. You need to work closely with your team. You don't need to commute, you don't need a building... but come on, work with your team in person on a semi-regular basis or enjoy being run over by poor productivity, poor communication, and infighting.
You give me 50 in-office employees
We get more done with those 49 employees
Yeah, but your attrition rate is pretty bad.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
If they are all in their own offices and there are meeting rooms I'm not sure where the high bandwidth comms take place. Do they Skype each other?
What clintons remote teams? Something about email?
Because he likes the feeling of control too much, much like a prison guard
They use the Meatspace for Business. The resolution is incredible, and they recently upped the character limit.
"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?"
^is this a fucking joke?^ NOBODY wants to hear the CEO articulate their vision as they drone away during useless, hour-long all-hands meetings. That people like dave even speak like that is emblematic of so much that's wrong with many businesses today - the stupid, obfuscating buzzwords, thinking that the average employee has anywhere near the same goals as a CEO (or cares about their 'vision'), etc.
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. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How long are the smoke breaks?
...own office
I wish I had mod points to vote your comment up just for that. We were in a building that was all small offices and were very productive. Rent got too expensive so we moved to a building with very few offices with a huge open space, and productivity dropped greatly. IIRC, it dropped by over 60%. It was so bad that we had to hire more people. Since then we changed to all working remotely, and productivity improved a good bit but not by nearly as much as it did when we worked on-site in offices. Management is still fine with the reduced productivity since we're on the west coast and many people working from home that start working an hour earlier than we would normally start. We're on the west coast with a lot of east coast customers so that's a really good thing. Also, some people work some later in the day. Overall, working remotely is a hit on productivity but for us having longer coverage during the day makes it an overall positive.
We have a dedicated project manager that works full-time on analytics and adhere strictly to agile so I think our measurements of productivity are pretty accurate.
It's a two sentence mission statement. The rest is all commit logs.
Re "Videoconferencing remains a mess of high-latency nose-gazing. It's awful" AC.
Move to a part of the US that has great networks and a lower cost of housing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
She was refusing to use a secure phone and insisting on using her own personal phone instead... oh wait.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
So, it would seem that you're running out of cash, fast - The "Oh things are great" article is one of the mistakes you have made. Multiple articles, could mean the fire under you is burning quite well.
So, ta-ta GitLab. Perhaps you could do the decent thing and give people a decent amount of warning if there's a problem and you're struggling into oblivion?
I wonder how the Linux kernel ever got developed...