What people tend to get wrong about remote work

Published May 20, 2020

What do people tend to get wrong about remote work? And how can companies make it work better for them?

While just about every tech company on the planet has become remote over the last few weeks, GitLab has been at this a while — since pretty much day one of its existence back in 2014, in fact. Since then they’ve grown to more than 1,200 employees across 65 countries, with a staggering valuation of nearly $3 billion. They’ve figured out some stuff along the way, sharing it all in an ever-evolving handbook.

I recently hopped on a call with GitLab’s head of Remote, Darren Murph, to get some insight on how they make it all work. This is the second part of my interview with Murph; he and I chatted for quite a while, so I’ve split it into two parts for easier reading. You can find Part I here.

TechCrunch: There’s this ongoing conversation about how people are coming away from this remote experience. Are they walking away saying, “yeah, that was great, we can do this day-to-day, I wouldn’t have seen that before,” or is the fact that they’re being thrust into this, and on not the best terms, going to have a negative impact?

Do you think this [sudden shift] is going to have a positive impact on remote work?

Darren Murph: I do. I’m a long-term optimist on this.

There’s a Gartner survey that just came out. They surveyed over 300 CFOs globally; 74% of them said that they’re going to shift some of their workforce permanently remote after this… even though this is the worst possible way to be thrust into remote.

This is the worst of circumstances, and people are still like, “You know, I love not having to commute.” And businesses are like, “You know, I love saving $10,000 per desk by not having that real estate.”

If it’s working in the worst of times… six to 12 months from now, when the crisis is abated and people have had time to lay the remote structure, build their handbooks, get the right remote hygiene integrated into the DNA of their company… it’s going to be like, warp-speed accelerator.

If you can make it work now, you can make it work any time.

GitLab’s head of Remote on hiring, onboarding and why Slack is a no-work zone

Published May 19, 2020

With more than 1,200 employees distributed across over 65 countries and a valuation of nearly $3 billion, GitLab is one of the world’s most successful fully remote startups.

Describing it as a textbook example of a remote company would be redundant, because the company actually wrote a textbook about it.

I recently had a chance to talk to GitLab’s head of Remote, Darren Murph, who filled me in on how they get stuff done, his advice for all the companies that had to suddenly shift to remote work and why GitLab gets rid of all its Slack messages after 90 days. (Fun fact: Darren wrote for TechCrunch’s corporate cousin Engadget in a past life, where he earned a Guinness World Record for writing an absolutely ridiculous number of posts.)

Darren and I chatted for quite a while, so I’ve split the transcript into two parts for easier reading. Part two coming tomorrow!

TechCrunch: So your official title is “Head of Remote.” What does that entail?

Darren Murph: It’s three things.

It’s telling our remote story to the world, it’s making sure that people who join the company acclimate to working in an all-remote setting and it’s building out the educational piece. The “all-remote” section of our handbook has dozens of guides on how we do everything remotely, from async, to meetings, to hiring and compensation, and I’m the author of all of that.

We do that to better the world; we put it all out there, it’s open source. We want other companies to read it, implement it and use it. We never saw COVID coming, but I kind of knew that down the road [this handbook] would be necessary. Thankfully, I started working on it in advance. Now that the world needs it… it’s been crazy. We packaged up our best thinking in that remote playbook, and it’s just been off the charts with companies downloading it. It’s been wild.

Why did GitLab go remote in the first place?

It was remote by default. The first three people to join the company were in three different countries… so the only way to do it was through the internet.

The one brief moment in time where there was a co-located wrinkle to the company… they’d moved to California for Y Combinator. I think there was like nine or 10 people at the time. Of course, coming out of Y Combinator, at the time, you just get an office — it’s just what you did.

I think that lasted about three days. Then people just stopped showing up.

[Laughs]

But work kept getting done! Because even in the office they were just communicating on… whatever it was at the time. It probably wasn’t Slack, I don’t think Slack existed.