Hand-written note summary from https://hbr.org/podcast/2024/06/how-gitlab-leads-its-fully-remote-workforce.

In 2014, Sid Sijbrandij and his business partner founded Gitlab. He was in netherlands and his co-founder in Ukraine. First few employees worked out of Sijbrandij’s house. But at some point they stopped working from his house and Sijbrandij wasn’t concerned at all. He was convinced Gitlab can be done just remotely.

Today, Gitlab is fully remote with 1800 remote employees across 60 countries. In this podcast, Sijbrandij talks about how to hire talent that work great in a remote setting and how to nurture a great remote culture.

Highlights:

• It’s not about number of hours you put in, but the results you achieve.
• Remote allows access to talent from all over the world.
• Hybrid gives you the worst of both the worlds (some people online, some people in-person).
• Remote makes you document better.
• Gitlab is fully open source, and the wider community is also contributing constantly.
• After Series-B, with the money we could spend on an office, we bought big monitors for our employees.
• Risks of a fancy campus is that it makes people feel like “they’ve arrived” and can take it slow.
• Hire people who are self-starters.
• We have a ”song book” about our values.
• We do coffee chats.
• For managers, make sure every one has a career plan, and be consistent.
• Fast internet, video conferencing, slack, version control works.
• Use recordings to prevent meeting fatigues.
• Almost all meetings at Gitlab are at most 25 minutes. It’s ok to zone out sometimes.
• We are a handbook first company. Handbook open to the world gives talent trust to apply to Gitlab.