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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."
You know they're jerking off in there, don't you? DON'T YOU?
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.
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.
> 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."
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 these same meeting or use WebEx.
So your job at Home Depot, may require you to be there, however during your travel you may get stuck in traffic, due to volume of people like me, who needlessly is required to drive to the office every day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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, my write 3 lines of code that day, however those 3 lines were backup with hours of research, checking to make sure it doesn't have a negative effect on other systems, Runs well, and when other coders see those lines they know exactly what it is doing.
I think it is less about egos (while still a factor) but more to lack of training on how to deal with it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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 employees may be telecommute to work. Some other type of services, e.g. manufacturing, will need more physical access. You may dream about having robots to do everything in manufacturing, but that is still a dream which may not come true soon. Besides, the company still need physical access to maintenance those robots.
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.
"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.
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?
They use the Meatspace for Business. The resolution is incredible, and they recently upped the character limit.
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.
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).
Well, nowhere in the article will it say. You could try asking the Gits directly, and not get an answer. You could have enough people ask them, and get a lie for an answer. Between all that you can probably gauge where the truth is.
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"
So fire the people for whom it went down or remove the privilege of working from home. Problem solved.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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 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 everyday will be tuned into office politics and get promoted, while the remote people will be the first to get laid off. So the incompetent lazy people move up, and the self-motivated get pruned.
"Work-from-home" first became a big fad in the 1990s. Can you name a single company that adopted that policy and is still in business? They all either died or went back to using a regular office. I doubt you can even name a single successful company that stuck with telecommuting for more than 5 years.
Ok so just fire them then. If you are that bad at hiring to have 40% of your workforce bag out on you then you don't deserve to be in business.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Uh, I've worked from home for probably 10 years now and my company is doing fine.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I wonder how the Linux kernel ever got developed...