We’re really fortunate that we’ve been all-remote from the very beginning and we’ve documented heavily from the very beginning. So, we’ve empowered future teammates to take advantage of that and we haven’t lost any of that knowledge as we’ve scaled.
This week on the podcast, we have Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab, book author, and Guinness World Record holder!
We talked about why GitLab uses “all-remote” to describe the company’s remote identity, how hybrid model remote teams can lead to anxiety and guilt, GitLab’s handbook-first approach, and why “story-telling ability” is essential in remote teams.
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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:
- How Darren got the rare title of “Head of Remote”
- Why GitLab choose “all-remote” as their company identity
- Why hybrid remote teams can lead to guilt and burnout
- Why “storytelling ability” is important in GitLab
- GitLab’s “handbook-first” approach
- Darren answering questions from Twitter
Mentioned resources:
- Darren’s Twitter
- Darren’s Instagram
- Andreas Klinger of AngelList: Normalizing Hiring Outside Silicon Valley
- GitLab’s Guide to All-Remote
- The importance of a handbook-first approach to documentation
- GitLab Handbook
- Informal Communication in an All-Remote environment
- GitLab onboarding
- GitLab communication
Full transcript:
Jovian: Welcome to another episode of “Outside the Valley,” a podcast by Arc, the remote hiring platform that helps you hire senior remote software engineers easily. Here, we interview remote startup leaders, remote work advocates, and workers of distributed teams who thrive outside of Silicon Valley. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. I’m super excited for the interview. When I started this podcast, I’ve never expected that one day I’ll have a Guinness world record holder as a guest, but here we are. He’s also an author who wrote the book titled “Living the Remote Dream.” And most importantly last year he joined GitLab as their very first ever…Is that correct?
Darren: Yep. That is correct.
Jovian: Yep. Very first ever Head of Remote. And for those of you who don’t know GitLab, it is a complete devops platform with thousands of features delivered as a single application. If you’re a devops expert or you’re a software engineer, chances are you’ve heard about them. GitLab is also one of the pioneers of the Remote Work Movement with more than 1,200 team members spread across 67 different countries and regions, more than 300 patents owned by all the team members, all with zero office space. We’re going to talk about more about everything remote related to GitLab. But first, let’s welcome Darren Murph. Darren, welcome to “Outside the Valley.”
Darren: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Jovian: Yeah. Super excited for this. So, yeah, just to kick this off, can you share a bit more about yourself and your story that made, you know, remote work very close to your heart? I mean, you even wrote a book about it.
Darren: Yeah. Remote’s been near and dear to my heart for a very long time. So, when I was actually in university, I joined as a contributing editor for what was then a very small consumer tech publication called Engadget. It’s now a world leader in the space. And so, from the very beginning, I was writing remotely. So, the team was all over the world. We were five or six people. I was in North Carolina at the time and it was just natural.
The team was set up to work remotely. We used, I believe it was IRC at the time, so this was well before the days of Slack. But it just came natural. That’s how I began communicating with the team. And it just felt like an ideal way to do it. My first actual full-time role out of university comically enough was with a telecom company called Nortel. And they made a piece of software that essentially if your desk phone rang, it would ring your laptop, which sounds really funny now, but at the time, it was super progressive.
And so because of that, they encouraged a work from home culture because our product enabled work from home. And I fell in love with it. I live in a pretty rural pocket of North Carolina. It’s where my family is, my wife’s family. We’re a big family people. We’re big into community and there just aren’t that many opportunities in this rural part of the country outside of remote work. And I just have a strong passion for reversing rural depopulation and spreading opportunity to underserved places. It impacts me and I want other people to have that same opportunity. So, this role at GitLab was an amazing fit and I’m thrilled to be able to use the platform to help proliferate remote-first and all-remote companies.
Jovian: Yeah. I think there’s getting a lot more and more discussion on how remote work empowers, you know, rural areas. You know, there’s a government initiative called like the Tulsa Remote or Rural Online Initiative. So, I think there is very fantastic progress. So, it’s not all about, you know, productivity, you know, making like…doing faster software. But it’s really like, a real thing that you can observe like it helps people. So, I’m really excited about the products, remote work. So, I want to talk about your position a little bit, Head of Remote. The position, Head of Remote is pretty new. I have only seen literally two people with this title in the world. The first one is Andreas Klinger from AngelList who was in this podcast. And actually when I talked to him, “So, what does Head of Remote entail?” And so, in short, his answer was like, “It was kind of like a made-up title.” So that’s him. Yeah.
Darren: It’s funny. Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. It’s really funny. Actually, I’m good friends with Andreas. He came to a panel that I was on last year and we were talking together after the panel. And I was telling him what I did at GitLab and we were chatting with GitLab lab CEO, Sid. And Andreas said, “So, this is crazy, but this person here, he is actually better suited for this title. Like, mine is Head of Remote, but it really should be Head of Remote Product. It’s not like I’m necessarily in charge of making sure our team acclimates well to working remotely. It’s more on the engineering side.” And so, in the typical GitLab fashion, we created a merge request to change my title and Sid merged it. And so, that was that. So, we actually used GitLab the product to change the title to be more indicative of what I’m doing here at the company.
Jovian: Wait, so when you joined GitLab, your title wasn’t Head of Remote?
Darren: No, it wasn’t. It was so long and convoluted that I don’t even remember it at the time. It was like All-Remote Culture Curator, which in fairness was what I was hired to do. So, a lot of folks are familiar with the devops side of GitLab, but they’re less familiar with, we’re pioneering the future of work.
We’re the world’s largest all-remote company. What we’ve managed to do at scale with zero offices, I mean actually zero offices, our entire executive team is spread all over the world. They all work from not an office. It’s not necessarily from home. It can be a hotel, or an airplane, or anything else.
But no one really knew about that side of it. So, my job was to come in, and help evangelize that, and talk about that to the outside world. And help influence other companies and show them the way. We certainly want to help influence more of that because we believe the rising tide will lift all boats.
But after I got in, there was a big need for actually evangelizing, and explaining, and helping internally. We have a lot of people that have joined the company with decades of experience in a co-located space. And just acclimating to a fully remote company takes some time, and it takes some expertise, and it takes some guidance, and it takes a lot of iteration. It’s not something that necessarily happens overnight. And so, a lot of my job has become working with talent branding, and hiring, and recruiting, onboarding and making sure all the pieces are there internally so that the team feels confident that they can work well, communicate well, and just be comfortable and happy in a fully remote space, especially if they’re coming from a co-located space where working this way can be quite different.
Jovian: All right. Talk us through a little bit about why GitLab is like incredibly bullish about the remote work. Like, you mentioned, you joined like…I already forgot the title. Like, Remote Resource Curator…
Darren: Yeah. Exactly.
Jovian: …ends up dying. But that means that at one point the executive was thinking like, “Hey, we need to be one of the proponents of the remote work.” It’s almost your identity, right?
Darren: Pretty much.
Jovian: I mean, we see other companies that are also remote, but there are kind of like…it’s kind of like they…I would say, it’s kind of like a site message from them. Like it’s, “Oh, we are remote. Yes, we love it.” But that’s not their whole…I don’t want to say selling point, but that’s not their whole identity, so to speak.
Darren: That is a great word. Identity is a great word. Now, all-remote is 100% tied in with GitLab’s identity.
Jovian: Exactly.
Darren: Look, here’s the thing, when you look back at what GitLab is going to be and the impact it’s going to have on the world, if you fast forward 50 years, people will look back at what we did on the devops side and it changes the world. It’s currently changing the world. It’s helping software be built more quickly. It’s empowering more people in more places to build more software. It’s amazing. But the lasting, lasting legacy well after the software is used and iterated on is going to be what we did to change society from a work standpoint. So, if you dial back the clock in the early 1900s, you have Henry Ford inventing the assembly line. And I don’t know if the people at the time, when they showed up to work at the assembly line the first week, if they knew that they would one day be on a page in a history book on how this fundamentally changed how we worked.
But I actually can mentally fast forward 50 years from now. And I think right now we’re writing the first page on what will be another chapter in future history books where society will look back and say, “Oh, awesome. People finally figured out that they could use the internet to fundamentally change how people live their lives, and work more efficiently, and empower people in a new way.” It’s amazing to be a part of that.
We’re really fortunate that we’ve been all-remote from the very beginning and we’ve documented heavily from the very beginning. So, we’ve empowered future teammates to take advantage of that and we haven’t lost any of that knowledge as we’ve scaled.
But yeah, it’s absolutely part of our identity. Part of our vision is for more remote-first and all-remote companies to proliferate. We don’t want to be the exception. We want to be the norm. And anything that we can do to help that and contribute to that is part of who we are.
Jovian: I like to the fact that you said that everything was well documented, like from the beginning. I guess it’s also like the fact that the nature of the product itself, right, is about documentation. You know, pull requests, and merge, and so whatnot is naturally…everything’s naturally documented. Basically, you guys kind of like dogfooding the product itself.
Darren: Absolutely.
Jovian: And yeah, it’s amazing. So, when it comes to, like you mentioned as a proponent of for remote work, right, as GitLab want to be the voice of telling people, “Hey, you can actually work remotely. And I believe it’s not only in tech, right. Other industries, like whenever there are some parts that can…I don’t know. I mean, for assembly line, probably it’s a bit hard, right? But some part of it…
Darren: Yeah. That’s right. If you’re building hardware, it’s really hard. If you’re doing anything else where your output is purely digital, you should go remote. So, things like hospitals where people need one-on-one care, things like actually physically assembling a car, really difficult to do. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’ve seen even surgical robots where if you have low enough latency, you actually can do some things like that. So I do think we’re moving towards that future. But in the here and now, anything that’s digital, you should do it remotely. If you walk into an office, open up a laptop, and just stare at it all day, you could do that from anywhere in the world. It’s a pretty easy litmus test.
Jovian: Absolutely. I agree with that. So, now a lot of companies are starting to realize this, right? And some of them are trying to experiment. So say with remote days, or remote weeks, and whatnot. And some of them even started hiring some teams remotely, like they started first and it leads them to become a hybrid team. Right. But there are some problems with that when you’re a hybrid team. Hybrid tier means some of the…some or most of the employees or team members are co-located and some of them are remote. But you did talk…can you talk us through what are the pitfalls on this and why should companies that is currently using the hybrid model, should try to move to all-remote?
Darren: Yeah. We’re at an interesting inflection point.
So, we fundamentally believe that all-remote is the purest form of remote because, by its default, everyone is on a level playing field. Everyone is a first-class citizen. There are no hallway conversations that you miss. There are no meetings after the meetings where information is disseminated but not documented. There’s not an office where these things can take place, so it doesn’t impact the psyche of the team.
That said, there aren’t that many all-remote companies and it’s really hard to unwind a co-located or a hybrid team all the way back to where there’s no office. Now, if you’re small enough, if you’re under 50 people, I actually would strongly encourage you close the office and just do it because it will only get more difficult as you add more people.
But if you’re a larger company and you already have one or two offices established, but you want to build a larger remote team or you want to introduce remote into your culture, there’s kind of a rip the Band-Aid off approach that you really need to take. And you have to commit to being remote-first in everything you do even when you have the office.
Now, this is going to feel weird because essentially your office is going to become the millstone instead of the point of pride. And what I mean by that is, if you generally would have eight people in a boardroom and then you’d have eight people dialing into a Zoom call, so you have 16 people total, what you really should be doing is to have all eight people in the boardroom, open up their individual laptops, and look into their webcam so that all eight people that are outside of the office feel like they’re on a level playing field.
Now, what this is going to do is serve as a forcing function so that everyone in the boardroom feels super awkward and they all look at each other and they say, “What are we doing?” And that’s exactly the point. You should not be in the boardroom. Consider how much collective commute time it took to get all eight people in the boardroom when you actually could be doing this call from anywhere. It makes no sense.
And so, you’re just going to have to live with the fact that by going remote-first, some of your office is going to become glaringly impractical. And I think that’s a good thing. It acts as a forcing function, it gets you closer to being able to close the office. There’s nothing wrong with that. If it comes down to the decision of, should we just be fully co-located or should we allow remote, definitely allow remote.
And the truth there is if you’re operating a company on multiple floors, definitely if you’re operating a company across multiple office buildings in different regions, you’re already remote to each other. You already have portions of the company that are remote to another portion of the company. So it behooves you to implement great remote-first practices, even if you just need two offices to communicate well with each other. And then if you get that done, it enables you to also hire purely remote team members and start to build that side of your team out. By going remote-first, they don’t feel like a second-class citizen from day one.
You got to watch out for the pitfalls, especially if you’re a leader leading a remote team. Remoters tend to feel really guilty. Remoters can feel FOMO. It hurts on the isolation front if you have a physical in-office happy hour that they know is happening but they can’t contribute virtually. There are ways to mitigate this.
If you google GitLab Informal Communication, you’ll see a lot of tips that we use to make sure that we have virtual pizza parties around the world, where you know, we have a rolling pizza party, where it’s dinner time in one region and they throw photos up of enjoying pizza with their family. And then an hour later, it’s dinner time somewhere else and then an hour later, it’s dinner time somewhere else. If you have Slack and you have a hybrid team, you could totally do this even with some people being all in the office and some people being remote.
The point is you really have to focus on the remoters and give them additional attention because there are going to be some nuance things that they miss in the office. And it’s up to leadership to make sure that that isn’t a detriment to the overall team morale.
Jovian: Yeah. And I totally agree with you, especially in a part where the…the FOMO part. It’s actually…I feel like it’s even more,…it’s really…we don’t talk about it more. Like the FOMO of remote team members that work with a…remote team members when the company is…most of them are co-located. Like one of the GitLab’s articles about the hybrid team is that the guilt that came to these remote team members, right.
Darren: That’s right.
Jovian: Am I contributing enough and am I missing anything? Do I have a good relationship with my boss or even my coworkers? And actually, that kind of feeling can burn you down. And then at least you…I need to work more, I need to work more, and you get burned out. And then your KPIs drop, your productivity drop, and then it’s just bad for everyone.
Darren: You really have to watch out for the overall temperature and the atmosphere in the room in a hybrid setup. Because what can happen is there can be this low-level persistent kind of anxiety or stress on a remote team member in a collocated space. Because every day they wake up and they have a 30-second commute from their bedroom to their office. And meanwhile, they know that their colleagues in the office have grueling multi-hour commutes with trains that don’t work and people everywhere. And you show up and you’re supposed to work on the same project. Like before you even start work, you’ve had fundamentally different days, one of which is obviously not as amenable to great mental health as the other.
So, right from the get-go, the remoter is starting from a much healthier place. And you really have to watch out for the in-office subset that they aren’t overly abrasive about that. I mean, the truth is some people really like being in the office, but you need to create a culture where that’s not at the detriment of those outside of the office.
And funny enough, the FOMO thing about remoters having FOMO about missing out on happy hour, you should actually watch out for the opposite of your in-office contingent saying, “You know, I feel like I’m missing out on additional time with my family. Additional sleep, additional exercise, additional clean eating. I really want to go remote too.” And I mean, honestly, I think that’s a good thing if your team can be honest about that and say, “Hey, let’s try this out. I feel like I would gain a lot more from being on the other side of this.”
And a quick side note on that, one of the common tropes about disadvantages to remote, is isolation and loneliness. But the reason this comes up in surveys is because by and large, they’re serving people that work in hybrid remote companies. So, of course, they’re isolated and lonely because they have a subset of the company that physically gets together on a daily basis and they’re not in that.
But see, that equation starts to change when you’re all-remote because if you ask an all-remote team, are they isolated and lonely, you’ll get a much lower percentage that say yes because there’s no FOMO, there’s no missing out on the office. Everyone is equally empowered to engage with their family, engage with their community, and engage with each other. I mean, look, we have people in over 65 countries. I’ll jump on some Zoom calls and I’ll see backgrounds from Europe, and from APAC, and from Africa that look nothing like home. And it’s an amazing cultural exploration. It’s just an amazing icebreaker on a call where I can get to know someone more intimately because their background looks nothing like mine. And that’s actually something that I don’t think you can get in a co-located space. So, in many ways, I’m less isolated. I feel more connected with the world at large just because I’m interacting with a more geographically diverse set of people on a daily basis.
Jovian: Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with that. Especially when everyone is on a Zoom call, like five people, everything on it. And it’s just more…it’s just smoother. Like, for example, actually Arc is hybrid teams. Even most of our team members are based in Taipei, Taiwan, but we do have some people who work remotely. Like, I live in Taipei, but I remotely, I don’t go to the office. And we have some people in North America. But before, whenever we have meetings, it’s basically the exact same thing that you mentioned, like three or four people in the same room together and only one…it’s me or other people…one person that’s just in Zoom. And it’s kind of awkward because you cannot hear what they’re saying. And then if there’s someone that’s telling a joke, you cannot get it. And then you cannot ask them to repeat the joke again because it’s not funny. So, this kind of like dynamic. It’s just, like you mentioned, this anxiety current, you know, it just keeps coming.
Darren: Yeah. And leadership has to work really hard to essentially give the remoters a leg up. It almost feels like you’re giving them the advantage, but you have to do that just to level the playing field.
But I wouldn’t be afraid of doing that because if you make your company more remote-friendly, you’re going to get better quality applicants. Your company is going to be more nimble.
If you just decide, look, we’re scaling too fast for this office, you’ve already set up a good remote-first culture, you can just close the office. Like you almost don’t even have to think about it. Hanging onto tradition and hanging on the co-located is actually a bad business move because companies that are competing with you that do embrace remote, given enough time are going to run circles around you, even if it’s just from an efficiency standpoint.
Jovian: Right, right, right. It’s just kind of like a marathon, like just slowly and you just get left behind. So, you also recently published a post about the importance of using the precise terminology in describing remote work, like GitLab uses all-remote. I really never thought about these different terminologies like remote teams, distributed teams. And thus, you absolutely focus the distinctions of absence of physical space. Can you dive a bit more or talk us through a bit more, like why do you think it’s super important to get this terminology, you know, zero on this?
Darren: Yeah. So, we fundamentally believe that all-remote is the proper term to describe what we’re doing. And the reason is, the alternatives leave room for misinterpretation. So, if you consider the term fully distributed, so you’ll hear some teams that are 100% remote say we’re fully distributed.
The problem with this term is “distributed” could mean that you have multiple offices that are distributed from each other. So, they’re strategically placed in various geographies. They are distributed, but you’re in no way remote. And then the other thing about that is it implies that there are epicenters of power. So, there are decision-making centers.
Jovian: That’s right. Yeah.
Darren: Or there are time zones that are more important than others. This creates problems. This creates friction. If there’s any center of power then it inherently means everyone else is a second-class citizen compared to that center of power.
And so, being all-remote, it makes no bones about the fact that we have no company offices. But I also love that it makes clear…We don’t say you have to work from home. We simply say there are no offices to commute to. And so, if you would prefer to work in a coworking space or an external office, GitLab will actually reimburse for that. We recognize that not everyone’s home is the most amenable place to work. And about one in five GitLabers actually take us up on that and work outside of their home on a regular basis.
On top of that, we have some geographies where there’s a lot of people. Raleigh, North Carolina is a great example. We have a location channel with everyone relatively close to Raleigh. Many of those people will actually get together on a semi-regular basis and work at the same co-working space. So, they kind of create many GitLab contingents just because they happen to be near each other and they want that shared physical energy.
Jovian: Yeah. That’s interesting point that you brought up that when we say distributed through this, an epicenter of a power where decisions are made. And I feel like it’s also similar to parallel that there’s a parallel we can draw with the hybrid model where some people will have this anxiety that they’re very far away to the decision-maker of the core of the company, so to speak. So, when you take away the idea of there’s an epicenter and like immediately people will be like, “Oh, everything is fair here.” So, yeah, it’s a real subtle thing that you need to think it through, yeah.
Darren:
It’s very subtle, but I’m telling you it makes a difference. And even if you’re operating an all-remote team, but your entire executive team is based in the same city, it still sends the message that there’s something more important about that city, or that region, or that time zone than anything else. And this explicitly works against a mission to be fully asynchronous and to fully empower everyone to contribute equally.
You just have to watch out for subtle things like that because it matters. It matters if you have the people making most of the decisions in one time zone or one city and they can easily just get together, you know, maybe no one has to know. They’re just going to go grab an office and hammer something out and not tell anyone. It starts to whittle away at the trust in the organization. And then it can be toxic over time.
Jovian: Yeah. And speaking about solid, there’s one solid thing that I noticed in this call, like in your Zoom name, it’s your name, dash, your title. Darren Murph-Head of Remote. I feel like…correct me if I’m wrong, but is it also a part of [inaudible 00:26:36], like when you’re in a Zoom meeting with 10 or 20 people, you know who are the people and who they are because they probably never met before? Is that one of it?
Darren: Absolutely. It’s intentional. It’s one of the many intentional communication efforts that we go through. And so, essentially our Zoom name, we type in our first name in the first name field, and then in the last name field, we type in our last name dash our title. And this is because there’s oftentimes calls with over 100 people on it. And it’s nice to…when a face pops up and they’re vocalizing, you can easily see their title. And as with anything in the GitLab handbook, everything is public. And so our org chart is public and you can easily just google GitLab org chart, dial up who that person is, see what team they work for, what product they’re working on. Really helpful so you don’t have to pause the meeting and ask someone who they are.
This kind of segues into a core premise at GitLab, which is the notion of self-service and self-learning. And so, we do everything we can to not impede on someone, not bother someone to get something that could otherwise be found by just searching for it. And even if that’s a title or what they do, that’s why we make the handbook public and we teach people to self-service and go look for it in the handbook first before imposing on someone else’s time.
Jovian: All right. I’m going to add my title after this call, like Jovian Gautama, podcast person, so that people know who I am.
Darren: Perfect. Exactly. Perfect.
Jovian: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And like you mentioned, it’s a good segue to the thing I want to talk about, about the GitLab’s handbook-first approach. So, I always had this idea or like this joke that going remote is one of the best things that companies can do to get their shit together. Sorry for the profanity.
But it’s more like, okay, when you go remote everything must be really good. Documentation, and you know, communication structure, remote infrastructure, and whatnot. So, it’s very exciting when GitLab specifically had the name for it. It’s called handbook-first approach. A couple of questions. Do you think it’s essential for every company to have a similar path? And how would you advise smaller level companies to start on this? Let’s say, for like 5%, 10%, or like 50% startups, what’s the steps that I can do to be more handbook-first approach?
Darren: So, the answer is yes. You have to work handbook-first if you want this to work long-term. To dial back and answer your first question, the reason why this kind of gets skipped over in a co-located space is because you can create a torturous loop of meetings to fill in the knowledge gaps over, and over, and over, and over again. And because we’ve done it for so long, it just feels like work when it’s actually the opposite of work. And we get away with it because it’s tradition and we don’t know any other way to do it.
But if you work for a week in an all-remote where you work handbook-first and meetings aren’t needed to find things that should be documented, you could never go back. It’s just mind-numbing to have a meeting to get an answer to something that should have been documented potentially years ago, but no one stopped to write it down so people just have to keep re-asking and re-asking.
The other reason we call this handbook-first instead of just blanket documentation, so if you read most common recommendations on how to go remote, you’ll probably read documentation. There’s just like the blanket term, like take it however you want it. That’s fundamentally a bad approach.
If you just allow the whole company to document in whatever way they see fit with no single source of truth, no universally agreed-upon approach and format to documenting, you’ll have one team that documents in Google Docs, one team that documents in Notion. No one talks to each other. No one has access to each other’s documentation repository. And people still have to ask each other questions and people still have to have meetings to find things amongst teams. So, documentation isn’t the answer. Handbook-first is the answer.
What I mean by handbook-first is if you google GitLab handbook, you’ll see what it is. If you printed it out, it’s over 3,000 pages, but it’s easily searchable, so you don’t have to know everything. You just need to know how to find what you need when you need to find it. It’s essentially how you use Google. If you’ve used Google to find things like recipes or math equations, you can use Google to find something in the GitLab handbook.
Handbook-first simply means if it’s not in the handbook, it doesn’t exist. And if you have a company that believes in that and operates like that, the entire company will be invested in continually polishing, iterating, and updating the handbook because it is the only single source of truth.
Slack is not a source of truth. Email is not a source of truth. A Zoom Meeting is not a source of truth. If any work-related progress is made in any of those other platforms, it’s on the DRI. It’s on the person responsible for holding those meetings to then contextualize what is important and put them in the appropriate places in the handbook such that anyone else who needs this information, current, and future, will be able to find it.
This requires an amazing amount of intentionality and you have to embed this from day one in onboarding and then you have to reinforce it by continually answering people with links. When they ask you a question, you should be able to answer them with a link in the handbook. If you cannot and they genuinely are asking you something that has never been done before, then you should develop the solution, answer them, and then immediately document that in the handbook such that anyone that comes after you and ask that same question will simply be able to find it in the handbook. You have to pay it forward. You have to have a culture that believes in doing that, and paying it forward, and being diligent about it. Otherwise, it falls apart.
You should do this at any size company, but the smaller the better. You had mentioned, what about a 5-to-10-person company? This is the best time ever to do this. You can start a handbook. We use GitLab for our handbook. It’s the best tool I’ve ever seen to build a handbook because it allows literally anyone in the company to make a merge request, make a proposal to change any other page in the handbook. And that is universally empowering. So, you don’t have just the executive team that can make changes to the handbook. So, we use GitLab, I would recommend using it. It’s open core, so if you want to try it out and see how it works for you, go for it.
I’ve actually recommended early, early stage teams to consider hiring a former journalist as a documentarian, like a fully dedicated. And in some ways, that’s what I am as Head of Remote. It’s like you’re responsible for making sure that things are being documented the right way, that they’re being formatted the right way, such that your people can find them and it empowers efficiency instead of inefficiency.
And you may say, you know, that’s probably not my highest priority hire. I really need another engineer. I’m telling you, you don’t even…you can’t possibly understand how important it is to start doing it now.
You’re investing in your long-term efficiency by hiring someone like that to document all of your processes now. It will make your life infinitely more efficient. It pays for itself. If you start adding up the people hours that you would spend in meetings re-asking the same question, you can very easily do the ROI math on why someone like this pays for themselves in almost no time.
Jovian: Yeah. I literally can feel the intensity in your face when you just talk about this. I can see like it’s…
Darren: Yeah. I mean, I’ve worked in places where this is not done and it’s infuriating. Look, life is too short to just keep asking the same questions in meetings.
Jovian: Absolutely. Yeah.
Darren: I’ve got mountains to climb, I’ve got family to hug. Like, what are we doing? Why are we spending any more time in the workplace, in meetings than we have to? Like, let’s all help each other out.
The more discipline you have in the company, the better you work, the faster you work, and the faster you can get out of there and go embrace life. And who are we kidding? That’s what this is all about. Like we shouldn’t shy away from it.
Jovian: Absolutely. Yeah. And again, like you mentioned, it has to be appropriate in intentionality. Like, this is not natural. The natural thing to do is…[inaudible 00:35:08] just, “Hey, can you tell me this? I need you, people.” That’s natural. But to go the one step further to, you know, document stuff, make it like your second nature, it’s actually not easy. It’s funny. I just remember that, I know a friend, he’s running a bootstrap company quite successful and they’re like 13 to 15 people. And they’re very diligent in documentation. And one of the tricks that they do is like they never pay for the paid version of Slack.
Darren: Love this. We do the same thing. I know exactly where this conversation is going.
Jovian: Right, right. Right. So, either you document this or just you lost everything.
Darren: No, this is…I’m actually building a handbook page right now in the all-remote section of the handbook. So, by the way, if you google GitLab Guide to All Remote, you’ll find all of the guides I’ve written on how we do everything related to remote. They’re all open source. Feel free to copy and paste them, implement them, and we would love that. We have an Inspired by GitLab page that you’re welcome to create an MRR and add your company to if we inspire you in any way.
So, we actually, even at GitLab, we do not pay for the most premium tier of Slack because we want our messages to disappear after 90 days. This is a forcing function. So, I’m building this page on forcing functions like things you need to have in place that force you to do things the right way. And this is one of them.
So because every message expires after 90 days, it is impossible to do any work in Slack and we want that to always be the case. But that also has a side benefit as an all-remote company. It forces Slack to be purely for informal communication in a way that you can engage in conversations that you would never feel comfortable engaging in, in a co-located space.
So, I’ll give you an example. We have a Slack channel…so, all of our Slack channels are topical. So, we have one called In the Parenthood. So, any parent, or want to be parent, or just a person that’s interested in learning about parents, everyone can join this channel. Which will commonly see things in there like, “Hey, my 7-year-old won’t cooperate and get dressed for school in the morning. Does any other parent have a roughly 7-year-old with any tips on getting their kid to cooperate?” Now, this is a really rich and amazing conversation and you can really get to intimately know each other through kind of funny but real conversations.
Then you would never walk into a physical office space and say, “Hey, I’m late because my 7-year-old was being totally uncooperative. Can we just pause for a minute and talk about how we deal with that as a team?” No one’s going to do that because you check that side of you at the door. It’s just one of these office norms where you feel like you’re not comfortable bringing that into the workspace.
But when it’s just an informal communication channel on Slack where it’s not urgent, you can just kind of respond to it whenever you want to, we have these conversations all the time. So, I tell people because of that, I feel more connected with my remote team all around the world, many of whom I’ve never met in person than I ever would if the same thing were in a co-located space.
Jovian: Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. I never thought about it that way. That if you go async with using GitLab on our tool and then the Slack will be just for either pure banter or just like life-related stuff, not necessarily work-related.
Darren: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah.
Jovian: Yeah. So, for listeners, by the way, for everything that Darren mentioned here, the documents and whatnot, you can find it on the show notes. Right. I’d also love to touch upon the fine details of GitLab’s culture. So, last week, you know…actually, take a step back a little bit. Hiring and onboarding is always like a big issue when it comes to remote. Honestly, it’s not even a remote thing. It’s literally a company thing.
A lot of co-located companies still have issue when onboarding new people, like where to go, and where is this particular document, and whatnot. So, again, remote onboarding still a challenge. So, what do you think others can learn from GitLab’s process? Okay. Actually…Okay. Sorry. Sorry, I just cut that. Because I’m using like an IKEA desk on top of desks. Okay, cool.
So, three, two, one. So, last week we asked this question on Twitter, you know, what question that you want to ask Darren for the podcast? A question from Nina Thampy on Twitter and you’ve answered it awesomely about the GitLabs’s onboarding. And you guys are very transparent. There’s this page where you can see the whole process. But one thing that stood out in your answer is this inclusive onboarding, where if I’m new team member, there’s some kind of preferred ways, “Oh, I want to do self-serve or I want to have more people to kind of help me out.” Can you dive a bit more into this? This is a pretty brand-new concept. I never heard about this.
Darren: Yeah. So, GitLab, I would say, has the world’s most comprehensive onboarding process. And the good news is you can see it and copy it. So, you can google GitLab onboarding template. The template is there. Every new hire uses that onboarding template. It’s over 200 different checkboxes. So, there’s no ambiguity on if you’re done with onboarding or not. You simply go through the list. We have it structured out by weeks, it’s four dedicated weeks. And then there’s a beyond four weeks where people can take as much time as they need to explore other areas.
But a key point there is, we actually give you time to onboard. So, a lot of companies, they’ll say, “Hey, welcome to the company. We’re going to give you all this time to onboard.” And by hour four, something has caught on fire on a desk nearby and you’re looped into this work crisis. You’re never properly given the time to learn the culture, learn the people, learn the processes. You’re just kind of thrown into the fire and it’s really unfair. It’s a terrible employee experience right from the get-go. So, we’re very intentional about not doing that.
So, we give people weeks to get through onboarding because we firmly believe that if you help someone build a firm foundation, they’re going to be a better team member. They’re going to have higher retention. It just pays off in every which way across the spectrum.
So, on the issue of inclusive onboarding, people learn differently. Some people prefer visuals, some people prefer the written word, some people prefer verbal communication. Some people prefer to do things more isolated, they feel more comfortable in their own space. Some people thrive in an energetic setting with lots of other people, and noise, and just energy around them. And we allow any of those people to onboard however they see fit.
So, I’m actually onboarding someone right now and she prefers the quieter version of this. And so because you have 200 checkboxes to address when you join, you can just sort of go through them step-by-step, read at your own speed, answer at your own speed, reach out to people if you feel like you need help. Everyone is given an onboarding buddy, which is an amazing resource. This person, you’re empowered to ping nonstop if you need to. That’s part of their job to be there for you. But it helps minimize the kind of like pray and spray approach.
You have this onboarding buddy where you can directly go to them with any question. And if they don’t know the answer, they have been at the company long enough to know exactly who to go to, which is a way more efficient way to onboard and get the answers more quickly. It’s just more respectful for the person that’s coming on board.
But if you prefer the more typical new hire orientation, we have a new Labers’ channel where everyone who joined in the same week as you, in the same month as you, you can see who they are. Anyone can just throw a Zoom link into there and say, “Hey, you know, new Labers, everybody, let’s hang out for an hour. Let’s talk about what our hobbies are. Let’s talk about what companies we came from. Let’s talk about our hopes and dreams. What department do you work in? What has confused you about onboarding? What is awesome about onboarding?”
That’s the same as a new hire orientation without having to the all prim and proper and carry a certain air about yourself when you walk into an office. So, we allow both of those types of people to thrive and onboard in a way that suits them best. I don’t know of any other company or any other structure where you can get that and be fully inclusive to give people information in any way that they want to consume it.
Jovian: Yeah. Absolutely. That’s why I told you, like this is the first time I hear about this. Like you can choose your own path to start with GitLab. Right. So, the next thing I want to talk about, you know, creating social connections. We talked about it a little bit, right, you know, with various channels in Slack, the pizza party. These sort of things that…you know, creating genuine social connection is hard, especially when you’re like thousand-something people right across different time zones. So, what are the main principles and initiatives? So we already kind of like touching about the initiative, right, but if we’re talking from the principles’ standpoint, what were the moving principles that you think other companies can adopt when it comes to creating social connection? And the second one, is there any other fun initiatives that we haven’t mentioned?
Darren: The first is being intentional about informal communication. So, in a co-located space, a lot of times you’ll see companies put restrooms near the center of the building to sort of develop interactions because surely people will just run into each other, they’ll be close to each other, and then the informal communication will just spontaneously happen. It’s a really bad approach. If you’re intentional about it, like our People Group, for example, we’ll structure team calls.
So, you’ll have the marketing team, for example, they have a monthly call. It’s like a show and tell. And there’s an agenda attached to that document. And anybody that wants to bring something and show off on the webcam, this is something they built, something they created, something that their child created or that their spouse created, and just want to talk about it, and it will kind of open their team up to seeing something that they’re passionate about, that’s something that you have to intentionally put on the calendar. But when people show up, and they get that vulnerability, and they see sides of people that they don’t normally see just during the workday, that’s how you build bonds and build relationships.
The other part is we’re really intentional about in-person interactions. So, it’s funny. We’re an all-remote company, but I think we’re more intentional about when we get together than even companies that are co-located.
Jovian: Absolutely.
Darren: When you’re co-located, there’s just kind of take-for-granted factor where you see everybody on a daily basis kind of like, “Hi, Jim. You know, hi, Jane.” But it’s a miracle that you’re seeing people. I mean, people are miracles. Like we lose sight of this. And so, in an all-remote company, we get our entire company together every 9 to 12 months at a company summit called Contribute. And this is a highly-engaged activity. We have people that circle this week on their calendar a year in advance. Like they cannot wait to get together and meet people in the flesh that they’ve worked with virtually. And that week means so much to them.
Whereas if you take a co-located space, you know, you have somebody going on a company retreat-like, “Oh, what can I do to get out of this? Like another week that I have to be on the road?” It just changes your perspective all the way around. So, we’re really intentional about that. And we have a handbook page as well in the All Remote section that lays that out.
But I think the last thing just kind of refers back to a thing I already mentioned is, use Slack for informal communication. You can build topical channels on travel, and mental health, and women, and parents, ERGs, resource groups. Get people together about topics that they’re passionate about, and give them a forum to discuss it, and relationships will happen.
Jovian: Yeah. That is fantastic. It’s a great way to put it. And also, not easy because sometimes if you’re not subtle with it or you don’t put like thought into it, then this informal communication can be really forced, you know, “Hey guys, let’s have fun together.” So, it’s kind of like…so if you’re not designing it well and it’s kind of…again, it’s not easy.
Darren: Yes. And look, if you’re going to be intentional about meeting your sales metrics, you should also be intentional about informal communication.
Jovian: Awesome.
Darren: You gotta put them on a level playing field. Sales and revenue is just as important as the fabric of the people that help get you there.
Jovian: Got it. So, moving on a bit to the GitLab’s hiring process, right, GitLab’s hiring process is super transparent. And you also mentioned…there’s a question by Rose Barrett on Twitter. You also mentioned that the fact that GitLab is super transparent also leads to the high-level of intentionality in the candidate’s application. And this is an interesting point because I think most companies…a lot of remote companies like they subconsciously do that. Like you know, being open and whatnot, they actually got, you know, high-level applicants. I do believe that. I just want to expand the question a little bit. Is there any specific point or phase in the GitLab’s hiring process that you think GitLab can improve a little bit more when it comes to hiring?
Darren: Yeah. So, one of the things that I did kind of early on in my tenure was I added a section on the jobs FAQ that answers a very common question, which is what’s it like to work at GitLab? So, this is the most common question that we would get early, early on. And so, I said, “You know, I’m going to build out the FAQ and add this to the handbook bridge and answer this question.” So, I’ll put about three paragraphs up there and a handful of links that I’m confident that if you read through those, you’ll have a really good understanding of what it’s like to work at GitLab.
So, if you google what’s it like to work at GitLab, you end up on the FAQ and you’ll see it. Now, this filter allows people to kind of opt into applying. If you read that and you think this is the place for me, then you’ll probably apply. If you read that and you think not really aligned with it, then you probably won’t. And it saves us both time. It’s respectful for everyone. It enables GitLab to get higher quality candidates because people read that in advance. They have access to our vision, our strategy, what it’s like to work here. So they opt into it, we get higher quality applicants. And then also, we save people time from applying here if it’s just not the place for them. So, they can even respect that. Even if they don’t want to work here, they’re like, “Well, at least this company saved me some time and I can go find a role elsewhere.”
But as with anything at GitLab, iteration is a core value. We’re always looking for ways to improve it. I’d say right now I still think it’s too difficult to apply for a job. It’s still a pretty traditional application flow. It’s pretty long. It can be kind of wonky when it’s trying to pull in past experience from LinkedIn. Some of the things you have to repeat and you think, “Oh, the technology should just figure this out. It should pull in the right things.” So, I still think from an actual tech and application process, it’s still a little bit too wonky, too long.
Jovian: Got it.
Darren: I’m hoping artificial intelligence gets a bit better at conveying to us who people are without them having to repeat everything.
Jovian: Got it. Awesome. And another thing that you mentioned when it comes to what kind of traits that you are looking for when it comes to hiring. This is something that like, I mentioned Twitter, I’m pleasantly surprised that you say that, which is exceptional storytelling. Because I work in marketing. I truly believe stories are super powerful, more important than any, you know, conversion metrics, or crafts, and whatnot, this is the core of an identity, of someone’s identity, or company’s identity.
I’d love to dive a bit like, how does GitLab crystallize and identify this particular skill as the top characteristics to look for when hiring someone? Because sometimes in remote companies, people just stop at, “Oh, you have to be a good writer.” But you guys go another step to say the word storytelling.
Darren: Yeah, absolutely. Because it matters, storytelling matters. In an all-remote company, we fundamentally have to communicate with low-context. So, if you google GitLab low-context, you’ll find this long definition of what it is. But the long and short of it is, you have to communicate in a very detailed and precise way and think two or three questions ahead. Because you are probably moving a project forward where someone on the receiving end of it is asleep. So, you cannot just rely on constant feedback back and forth to get things to its conclusion.
You have to be able to lay out your concept, your idea, the construct of how you’re thinking, in a way that someone else when they wake up will be able to see that while you’re asleep and fully get it. That is the goal. Only storytelling can do that.
If you’re just a good writer, but you don’t think about how it weaves into the broader story of the project you’re working on, they’re still going to need to come back to you to fill in a lot of gaps. And at scale, this creates massive inefficiency. So, simply because we work asynchronously, you need to be able to tell great stories because you have to work as if no one else in the company is awake. You don’t have that crutch. So, it’s on you to put context around your ideas and move them forward.
Jovian: Awesome. So, yeah. And my last question for this chat…another question by Rose actually is, she wants to ask you what would you want to tell your younger self?
Darren: That’s a great question. It’s pretty simple. Be excellent to each other, be kind to people, embrace people. Life is all about relationships. Even work is fully built on relationships and life is really long and your network of people can be really tight. And you don’t really appreciate it early on how important other people are, how important community is, how important relationships are both in life, inside and outside of work. It matters. And people you think, I’ll never see this person again, you’d be surprised, especially in an increasingly remote world, everyone is just a ping away.
It’s incredible. You don’t have to live in the same city to work together, to plan together, to build companies together, to commiserate together, to cry on each other’s shoulder. It’s amazing. The distance between people is shorter than it’s ever been. So be good to good people. If you find a good person that kind of serendipitously pops up in your life, don’t just let that go. Pay attention to that. The universe might be trying to tell you something. So, that’s it. Be good to each other, be excellent to each other. Sooner or later, you’re going to appreciate it, and you’re going to need those people and they’re going to be people that need you.
Jovian: Yeah. And yeah, that’s a lovely way to wrap up our conversation today. So, Darren, again, thank you so much for the time. And it’s really an amazing chat. And how can people find you online?
Darren: Absolutely. Thanks so much. You can find me at Twitter @darrenmurph and on Instagram at @darren_murph.
Jovian: Got it. So, yeah, for listeners, you can find every GitLab resources as you can tell. Like, they got it all figured together…they’ve figured it all. You can find everything on the show notes and don’t forget to check out GitLab or maybe you can reach out to Darren and ask anything about GitLab, of course. Again, Darren, thank you so much for your time today.
Darren: You bet. Thanks for having me. Take care.
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