Story
GitLab 's Remote head on hiring, embarking and why Slack is a no-work zone
With more than 1,200 employees in over 65 countries and an estimated $3 billion, GitLab is one of the most successful full-range start-ups in the world.
It would be redundant to describe it as an example of a remote company's textbook, because the firm actually wrote a textbook about it.
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Remote 's head of GitLab, Darren Murph, who filled me with his advice on how to get things done, his advice for all the companies that suddenly had to move to remote work, and why GitLab gets rid of all its Slack messages 90 days later.
So the official title for you is "Head of Remote." What does that mean?
It's telling the world our remote story, it's making sure people who join the company get acclimatized to work in an all-remote setting and it's building up the educational piece. Our handbook's "all-remote" section contains dozens of guides on how we do everything remotely, from async, to meetings, hiring and compensation, and I'm the author of all that.
We are doing that to make the world better; we 're putting everything out there, it's open source. We want that to be read, implemented and used by other companies. We never saw COVID coming but I kind of knew it was going to be necessary down the road. Fortunately, I have started working on it beforehand. It's been nuts, now that the world wants it. In that remote manual, we packed our best ideas and it's just been off the charts for businesses downloading it. That was wild.
why did GitLab go out remote?
By default it had been remote. The first three people to join the organization were in three separate countries ... and the internet was the only way to do it.
The one brief moment in time when the organization had a co-located wrinkle ... they 'd moved for Y Combinator to California. At the time I think there were like nine or ten people. Of course, coming out of Y Combinator, you 're just getting an office at the time-it 's just what you've done.
This lasted about three days, I think. People then just stopped showing up.
