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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."
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?
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.
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.
You might want to Google latter vs former...
"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
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.
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.