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GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#271

Post by garrettdimon »

Perihelion wrote: post #73
bryanh wrote: post #58

160 employees remote is impressive and commendable. Zapier is fully remote as well (but half the size in employee count). I'd say "write everything down" is a great shortcut to the sorts of practices you need to cultivate. We've also noticed that over-communicating is critical but hard - it is surprising the things that are "yeah yeah, we know" to some but are "oh we're doing that?" to others. This is only natural -…

Honestly, I haven't seen a company that does the hybrid remote/on-site thing well. I'm sure they exist, but every time I've worked at one the people who were remote were out of the loop on almost everything. Hybrid remote/on-site requires some great discipline. If you have a watercooler chat with someone about a feature, it's easy to forget that a remote colleague wasn't there for the discussion/not document what was…

It's definitely doable, but it has to be remote-focused. At Wildbit, we have 12 in Philadelphia and another 14 in 14 different cities around the world. They keys are in the small things.

When we do video chats, the folks in Philly call in just like they were on a home computer. They don't all get together in a big room and call in. We also make a point to run all of our conversations through group chat and project management software. And plenty of the Philly folks work from home regularly as well. Remote work isn't simply tolerated, it's put first.

The remote folks (myself included) miss out on some of the office benefits like family-style lunches and get togethers, but we all make regular trips there and get to partake. It's not purely about location either since we're spread across numerous time zones. It just takes more deliberate communication.

There's always going to be water cooler chats, but those can just as easily happen via email where nobody would see them. We have to make a point to capture and share things to the right people.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#272

Post by edblarney »

ghaff wrote: post #198
edblarney wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are screwing this up. By offering people medicore, local salaries, they are losing a massive opportunity to clean up on the great talent in remote areas. Why would someone want to live in a low-end city (assuming they are mobile) - when they could live the same 'quality of life' in a much cooler place? Assuming a degree of mobility - the whole point of living in a 2cnd tier place is that you can save a l…

Even talking about "Boston" as a single thing is tough. There's Boston/Cambridge urban folks and there are people who live an hour west or an hour north. That's an enormous difference in terms of housing prices. And even that is an oversimplification. School districts and other factors make a huge difference within that same one hour radius.

There's variation on a single street :)

But what neighbourhood you live in Boston is a choice.

Picking up and leaving a city is not a choice for most people.

Also the 'cost of everything except housing' is pretty consistent - everyone pays roughly the same a gallon of gas, and an identical basket of groceries.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#273

Post by vonmoltke »

peterjmag wrote: post #201
farslan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do it here are DigitalOcean and it's just awesome. We have people in NYC HQ and remote all over the world (for example I'm working from Turkey). The key is not only over communication, also to care about your remote employees, let them feel like they're really a part of the company, bring them to the HQ, not per year, multiple times, etc.. There are many things but so far DigitalOcean is one of the best companies…

Can confirm—DigitalOcean is great at remote work. I'm consistently impressed by how well connected I feel, despite being across the ocean from our HQ in NYC. People really care and put in the effort to make it work. It also definitely helps that both "sides" are well represented—we're almost exactly 50% remote at the moment. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =) https://www.digitalocean.c…

> And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're hiring. =)

Yeah, and your hiring process is rife with stupid biases like autorejecting people based on who they worked for in the past.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#274

Post by ghaff »

emj wrote: post #245
ghaff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is contrarian. As someone who has worked remotely to a significant degree for quite a while, I also find face to face get togethers (whether in an office or elsewhere) incredibly valuable. You're welcome to your own preferences of course but, as someone on a largely remote team, I consider regular get-togethers in various forms pretty much essential.

Could we quantify this a bit more? A largely remote team for me is a 3-7 person teams, all but project lead are remote. The regular get together are 4-8 hours every month plus some annual dinners. The remote distance is just 20km - 500km I think our face time is abit excessive but it's ok, even nice, but that's because it fits into my workday and family life, and it's always paid travel time.

It probably depends a lot on the nature of the work and working styles but having a F2F sync every month or two seems pretty reasonable for a not too geographically distributed team.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#275

Post by mdekkers »

pc86 wrote: post #265
mdekkers wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied for a position at Gitlab a week ago, and didn't even get a response. Probably because I am too expensive, too old, and live in an area with strong labour laws and staff protection. It's a shame, because it would have been decent to at least get a "sorry, not interested" reply, but no response at all is just not cool. They write on their hiring page: Always leave feedback, this will help everyone to understa…

I don't think your local labor laws matter to Gitlab if they're based in your area.

I applied for a remote position, so either "everywhere" is their area, or "nowhere".

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#276

Post by ghaff »

cookiecaper wrote: post #235
ghaff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is contrarian. As someone who has worked remotely to a significant degree for quite a while, I also find face to face get togethers (whether in an office or elsewhere) incredibly valuable. You're welcome to your own preferences of course but, as someone on a largely remote team, I consider regular get-togethers in various forms pretty much essential.

Just curious, what specific value do you derive from these events that makes them "essential"? While I understand that a lot of people who may not have a lot going on at home may find them enjoyable, I really don't think it can be characterized as essential for accomplishing the job tasks. If face-to-face communication is "pretty much essential", what's the argument for continuing to run the company as a remote/distr…

>If face-to-face communication is "pretty much essential", what's the argument for continuing to run the company as a remote/distributed enterprise? Isn't the whole concept of telecommuting predicated on the fact that face time is not essential to performing the job function?

I think it's predicated on face time being not necessary on a day to day basis given the tradeoffs associated with requiring it.

A lot obviously depends on the task and individual preferences. I probably shouldn't have used the word "essential." However, I've found some level of F2F very useful and I'd probably encourage teams that weren't too distributed to get together physically on a semi-regular basis (as most want to do anyway).

It's funny that you mention the Linux kernel. I've heard GKH on a panel at a LinuxCon explicitly say that he thought one of the reasons that Linux development was so robust was because there was enough money in the ecosystem to get people to events like he was attending.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#277

Post by YorickPeterse »

winteriscoming wrote: post #247

More than knowing how they manage remote employees, at this point, with more than a week since the data loss incident, I would be genuinely curious to know if their backups are now functional and what plan they have put in place or planning to, to verify backups work. Furthermore, I won't be surprised if they have seen more concentrated spam attack, after the news of this data loss surfaced.

There's a work in progress merge request for the post mortem, which can be found at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/....

This blog post mentions a whole bunch of issues that are being worked on, this list can also be found at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/1108.

> Furthermore, I won't be surprised if they have seen more concentrated spam attack, after the news of this data loss surfaced.

Not yet. Since Akismet has been enabled for snippets it seems the amount of spam is gone, or at least not noticeable.

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#279

Post by wslh »

bryanh wrote: post #58

160 employees remote is impressive and commendable. Zapier is fully remote as well (but half the size in employee count). I'd say "write everything down" is a great shortcut to the sorts of practices you need to cultivate. We've also noticed that over-communicating is critical but hard - it is surprising the things that are "yeah yeah, we know" to some but are "oh we're doing that?" to others. This is only natural -…

If I remember well auth0 is fully remote too and LinkedIn return 167 profiles marking it as the current company.

They published the following article about remote work: https://auth0.com/blog/21-tips-for-remote-working/

Re: GitLab’s Secret to Managing Employees in 160 Locations: Write Everything Down

#280

Post by NadiaVat »

mdekkers wrote: post #244
sotojuan wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably set up to attract cheap Eastern European devs.

I applied for a position at Gitlab a week ago, and didn't even get a response. Probably because I am too expensive, too old, and live in an area with strong labour laws and staff protection. It's a shame, because it would have been decent to at least get a "sorry, not interested" reply, but no response at all is just not cool. They write on their hiring page: Always leave feedback, this will help everyone to understa…

@mdekkers glad we saw your post. I tried searching for you in our ATS, but could not find any application under that name. Can you email me directly on jobs@gitlab.com? I'd really like to see what happened to your application and why we didn't respond.
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