GitLab Developer Evangelism Team, 9 Sep 2020

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From YouTube: The Asynchronous Enterprise • Brendan O'Leary • GOTO 2020

Description

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Chicago 2020. #GOTOcon #GOTOchgo
http://gotochgo.com

Brendan O'Leary - Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab

ABSTRACT
The one question I'm asked more than any other when talking about working at GitLab is: wait, you don't have any offices? That is often followed by a confused look or the direct question: How?
Writing down decisions, asynchronous communication, measuring results, not hours. Companies often aspire to these goals...however in an all-remote company, they aren't aspirational - they are requirements. GitLab has grown from 9 people in 2014 to over 900 people in 55 different countries with a valuation of almost $3 billion.
In this talk, we'll discover some of the not-so-secret sauce that GitLab has leveraged to achieve this growth.
On this journey, our values have remained the same. We value collaboration, results, efficiency, diversity & inclusion, iteration, and transparency [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
00:22 GitLab's story
05:54 The (case for) asynchronous enterprise
06:46 Release cycle time is critical
07:51 Remote is part of the solution
10:13 Challenges
12:15 Values
12:36 Iteration
13:42 Transparency
15:08 Efficiency
16:20 Communication guidelines
17:34 Trust

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://gotochgo.com/2020/sessions/1427/the-asynchronous-enterprise

RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Tsedal Neeley • Remote Work Revolution • https://amzn.to/3lTDGtI
David Burkus • Leading from Anywhere • https://amzn.to/3fUThp0
Maria Sam • Remote Work Secrets • https://amzn.to/3CDRYV1
Phil Simon • Reimagining Collaboration • https://amzn.to/3yGPXoA

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A

Hi, my name is brendan, and today what I'd like to talk to you about is something that I call the asynchronous enterprise, but before I really get into it. I want to talk a little bit about gitlab's story and because I think the history of get lab the company I work for is critical to understanding the rest of what I'm going to talk about today.

A

So let me just give you a few highlights from our history in 2001 in ukraine, dz dimitri, the creator of gitlab had two problems: one he didn't have running water at home and two. He didn't have collaboration software that he could use with his other fellow software engineers at work and to hear our ceo and not dz. Tell it.

A

He solved quote the most important part problem first and he built gitlab an open source collaboration tool for software developers to collaborate with other software developers and in 2012 get lab was on hacker news and our ceo sid was in the netherlands and saw it there.

A

He was impressed because there were 300 contributors at the time, a clean code base, and it made a lot of sense to him that something you collaborate with is something that you can contribute back to as an engineer, and so he asked dz if it's okay for uh sid, if it would be okay for sid to go start gitlab.com and host this open source uh tool for folks that might want to have it hosted and dz said.

A

Well, it's open source software feel free, do what you want with it and then in 2013 uh dz sent out a very meaningful tweet. It's a tweet that we can kind of trace our company history back to today, and it said just I wish I could work on gitlab full time.

A

Sid saw that tweet and said to dz. Why don't we do this together uh and kind of the rest? Is history from there and but actually in 2015.

A

Another uh european friend of ours that we had never met before named camille made a contribution from his native poland, and that contribution was the get lab runner and that git lab runner would then become the main agent that ran gitlab, ci jobs and camille would be the person that who convinced dz and sid, to put it all into a single application, and even though they disagreed at first camille, made a compelling enough argument and that's really where the origin of gitlab as a complete devops platform delivered as a single application came from, and that was all done remotely from their homes in europe.

A

Now a little while, uh after that or kind of in the middle there, they company was growing enough that they wanted to go see if they could make it work in silicon valley. At y, combinator y combinator is an incubation uh investment group there in silicon valley, and they had the very typical y combinator experience.

A

Everyone shared a single house and a single car. You can see the get lab bus there in the picture. You can also see our older logo on there. um There was actually a user during that time. That said that they had nightmares about that logo, which is pretty bad ux for a logo, and so it was changed not long after that and then of course, after y combinator, you have to get an office in san francisco, so here's our first office.

A

It was at 1233 howard street in downtown san francisco, and uh I bet you can guess from the picture uh who the salesperson is. I love hayden he's great our first sales person, but they did stick him at the folding table there in the corner and well here's the thing. uh Hayden was one of the main reasons that this was actually also our last office, and it was the last office because people stopped showing up to work, but work was still getting done.

A

Hayden was living in alameda at the time and that commute was just unbearable and he wasn't getting things done. He could do his job better if he just stayed home, and so because of that this office was actually our last office, and today we have over twelve hundred team members on the get lab team and we work from 65 different countries and we still have exactly zero offices and those gitlab team members are everywhere and I do really mean everywhere.

A

There are all six inhabiting continents and I suppose, if someone had an internet connection and was visiting antarctica, they could work from there as well, and I'm really proud to tell people about having these colleagues all over the world. It's exciting to meet amazing engineers and professionals that I would have had no chance to meet if it weren't for gitlab's dedication to hiring across the globe and being an all remote company.

A

So where did I fit into this? Well, I joined get lab in around 2017. I had been a get lab user beforehand and kind of fell in love with the product.

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Today I don't want to talk to you so much about git lab the software, but about git lab the company, because as much as I believe in the product, I think it's more interesting and larger the impact that we can have on the way people work together.

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Also I'd love to continue this conversation afterwards, uh you can reach me on o'leary crew on twitter. Again, I wish we were together, so we could talk about it more in person, but I'd love to talk about it. uh There virtually.

A

So, given that story, we heard about git lab what does that mean for the rest of us in tech and in other industries?

A

Well, I think it's clear that technology is the future and the now of every industry and the few tech hubs in the world just aren't sustainable as the only source of technical talent, but it's also complicated because it's complex to scale outside of those hubs without a massive capital investment.

A

And so it begs the question: how has git lab made this work at such a large scale? And I think that answer is actually relatively simple and boils down to one word trust.

A

But first, let's talk about the situation we're in.

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It was almost 10 years ago that marc andreessen said that software is eating the world, and I would say that software has eaten the world already and in fact he was quoted even more recently by saying that psycho time compression was going to determine winners and losers in tech and winners and losers in tech will be winners and losers in their respective industries.

A

And that's because competitiveness depends on how fast teams can deliver code, which is to say how quickly they can create customer value and there's an accelerating rate of innovation in all industries leading to increased competitiveness and lowering the barriers to entry and executive leaders know that software is powering businesses and critical to their success and traditionally tech hubs like silicon valley, san francisco, new york, are thought of as the centers of these types of revolutions.

A

However, the latest indeed data shows that, while most of those metros still do dominate, their dominance is waning and the need for talk top tech talent requires companies to look outside of those traditional tech hubs and a big part of that solution, I think, is remote right that distributed workforce. That we saw on that map is part of that answer, but just are important are other things that are kind of emergent benefits and emergent challenges when looking at a massively global distributed workforce.

A

So working asynchronously can be a really hard thing for companies to adopt, but it's critical when working across time zones.

A

You know that work across time zones and with different cultures brings in new perspectives and diverse ways of working together that you just wouldn't find if you were stuck to one geography or a few geographies where you could have offices and that all together adds up to enable this unprecedented, yet very sustainable growth that we've seen in companies like gitlab, who have embraced all remote, and I do want to say that, even though it does seem like git lab has a lot of this figured out and we've written down a lot of our findings.

A

It's definitely a journey, not the destination. You know, even in the challenging time we're facing right now get labs had to adjust the way that we work together. Just like everyone has sure we were already working remotely and not from an office, but everyone has to adjust to the fact that um in many countries, kids are at home and parents are trying to learn how to homeschool them.

A

This is a challenge for everyone, and it just goes to show that companies always have to be thinking about how they're going to adjust the way they work together. To the environment that their employees are living in and even more boldly than saying remote is part of the solution.

A

I would say that remote and all remote is the future of work, but it does have its challenges and here's the thing. It sounds really bold for me to say that, but I'm not the first to say it. In fact, in 1974, arthur c clarke said it.

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He said of computers at the time that they will make it possible for us to live wherever we like.

A

We won't be stuck in cities, but still able to carry out interaction with other human beings as well as computers, and he was right that was before the internet as we know it today, and you know he knew that that would that kind of collaborative tooling was going to come to computing, but it doesn't come without its own set of complications and speaking of those challenges right, we've seen those as git lab has grown from that small office that you saw to the global force of 1200 team members today, if there's 105 195 different countries in the world with different legal systems right and they all have their own nuance when it comes to hiring individuals, there, there's thousands and thousands of culture, differences that can make defining the companies defining the values, rather that a company has founded on hard and just the concept of time zones right.

A

We know that that is a challenging uh concept in general in computer science, but it also can be a huge challenge, because asynchronous work is hard. That's what makes time zones hard coordination takes longer with async work, and so, if there's too much coordination, the question becomes the same as the classic software question. Will it scale how does one scale a distributed workforce without that massive capital investment, because not everyone has the kind of cash line around that a fang company does and more to the point, how did gitlab scale to its thousand plus employees?

A

Well, it's also important to know that gitlab isn't the only one basecamp automatic the company behind wordpress and envision and many others have been embracing remote for years even before the current crisis, but as the base camp handbook puts it, there's as much to unlearn about how you work as there is to learn and in a more direct way of putting it. Gitlab has a very critical mission of everyone can contribute, and everyone really means everyone.

A

When you take away the constraint of place, you take away the constraints of an office or a commute. It makes collaborating with everyone in the wider community, much more natural, for instance, since we're based on an open source project. Our core team that manages that project is in our slack and on our zoom calls, and the way that we work together is through a very clearly articulated set of values.

A

It's these values. That spell the word, credit results, efficiency, diversity and inclusion, iteration and transparency, and next I want to kind of dive deep into how these values help us to succeed at all remote. You can be off in your original decision and still adjust to the right decision. If you take smaller steps, we focus really intensely on iteration, allowing us to adjust scope constantly and reducing the need for coordination, which enables these asynchronous cross-time zone workflows and we're fanatical about it.

A

You'll hear folks talk about a minimal viable product, but we talk about a minimal, viable change. If it's a change that will make the application better default towards shipping it and that enables fast iteration.

A

We also have a directly responsible individual for every decision which increases our decision velocity greatly by not paralyzing us in decision by committee, and if you want to change something, you open a merge request as we'll see in a little bit. Our entire handbook is public and stored in source control.

A

So the way to asynchronously collaborate on a proposed change is to make a merge request, not a whole bunch of powerpoints and meetings.

A

And you know that has led us to our next value, which is transparency. We record everything by default. We've been in this mode of hyper growth for some years, which has meant most of the time that half the people that have worked that are working here have worked here less than a year.

A

We don't have the time to kind of train those folks in a whole bunch of meetings, and so we have to have everything recorded and able to be self-paced both uh from a learning perspective and from a discovery perspective, and that avoids you having to waste valuable time by holding multiple meetings or getting interrupted by the same questions, because you can answer a question once and broadcast it many times and specifically this last section about the receiver being able to avoid waiting around.

A

uh I think that's really critical and I want to kind of zoom in on that right. The receiver can move faster and avoid waiting around access. The best version of the information get the message from the most reliable source. You know that avoid waiting around seems really familiar to me as a self-professed amateur software engineer.

A

It's the same thing we do in code. When we talk about asynchronous code, we want to write our code in a non-blocking asynchronous way, so that we can be super efficient and we do that same thing with human communication by making it all transparent, and that leads to a lot of efficiencies.

A

We write promises down and agree to them in writing with measurable goals. It allows our team to have a bias towards action. If you can make a decision that has you know to do is a two-way door decision, then making that decision is going to be more efficient than waiting around to make the decision, and we want to give folks a responsibility to make those decisions, but then also hold them accountable that we're going to have rules and approval processes that make sense.

A

And again, let's talk more about writing down promises. I alluded to our handbook earlier, but it's really critical. It's almost 3000 pages, if you were to print it out, but it's not a printout. It's public on our website. It's public by default in our handbook, you'll find recorded video calls meetings that we've had that have been open to the public.

A

You can see every metric that every department in get lab is measuring themselves to, as well as the okrs, probably an open issue tracker where you can see what any department, whether it's marketing or engineering, is working on and then, of course, a comment section below every blog post and all of our documentation, so that folks can contribute from anywhere and a specific section of the handbook that I wanted to call out is our communication guidelines.

A

I always say that we communicate more about how we communicate than any company I've ever worked for, and so that includes that everything is in draft. You don't need to say something's in draft, because everything can be changed at any time. We use public channels in places like slack so that anyone can be brought into the conversation if they need to be.

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We say thanks to our team members publicly, and we have to be really intentional about that, because there isn't an office for us to run into each other and have those things happen, and we also use this very confusing term.

A

That, ironically, cannot is not itself a few words, but it's mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive few words ubiquitous language, and that means that we're very clear about what words mean and we try to avoid uh using words. That may mean more than one thing, or it could mean more than one thing: we're going to define what we mean by team member or versus employee, because some team members that work for git lab aren't employed by an entity because we don't have an entity in their country.

A

So we're very specific about that, and all this communication really leads to that. One thing trust is trust about the practical things of working together, but it's also trust in human connection, because being remote requires investing in individual and group work relationships in a way that we're not used to, because normally we get it.

A

We do get it for free in an office environment, and so we focus on video calls for discussion and information sharing, because it's much better than an audio call and you get to see the other person on the other end and while it's not possible in the current crisis, we also value and put a great deal of value on time in person. And so we have a travel, stipend, local meetups for git labs and get lab team members that live near each other.

A

And then our once yearly contribute where we bring the entire company together uh and not for company presentations, but for bonding and social interaction.

A

And when you build this kind of trust, your employees and co-workers aren't the only ones who benefit, um and you know, I think, there's another key benefit that we also have written down and that's the benefit for families and friends.

A

Right allowing you to work remote and decreasing your commute, basically down to zero, or maybe a little bit longer.

A

If you go to a co-working space is hugely beneficial because it gives you flexibility in how you allocate your time if you're working, asynchronously it you can move closer to loved ones or closer to family in case of emergency, and it's so important to us and we believe it so clearly, it's the last of one of the sub values I wanted to share with you, which is we say, families and friends, first work, second, and that was really clear to me. When I came back to git lab. I had my fourth child.

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While I was at working at get lab and it was completely different than going back to work after the other three.

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I was able to be there for the other kids and for my wife during the transition and be available to them all day long, instead of getting in my car and driving 40 minutes away, and that kind of value is really hard to put a number on.

A

But it allows employees to be empowered to contribute and give you their best when they're able to, but also allows them to fit their life into work instead of the other ways around.

A

So thank you very much again. I'd love to talk more on twitter. You can follow gitlab or o'leary crew, and we can chat more about this. We also have an all remote section of our company culture page there that you can see, which also includes a new ebook, that's free to download, as well as a going remote and an emergency or all of a sudden guide for the current crisis that we're all living through together and some great tips for getting started with remote work.