>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE!
Covering GitLab Commit 2020.
Brought to you by GitLab.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's
coverage of GitLab Commit 2020
here in San Francisco.
Still hard saying 2020 and not thinking we're in the future.
Joining us, first time on the program,
Darren Murph, who's the head of remote at GitLab,
and a little birdie told me that he also has
a Guinness Book of World Record,
so Darren, before we get into your day job,
bring us back, as it's an interesting thing.
>> Yeah, it's true, it's surreal to have that record.
So I'm the world's most prolific professional blogger,
which is kind of crazy, I've written about
10 million words or so,
when the record was given, it was about 17,000 articles,
which was an article published every two hours,
24/7 for four straight years,
which actually makes my chest hurt just a bit
saying that out loud, but--
>> Yeah, Darren, I'm going to do the Turing test right now,
because I'm not sure you're a human being.
I have been a blogger, when I had my regular cadence
of two to three articles a week,
and knew that 10 PM, when the kids were in bed,
when I would do that stuff.
The amount of words you're saying
does not compute with me, but amazing stuff,
congratulations on that,
and you still, you don't keep up that pace anymore, do you?
>> Well I try, actually part of my job
here at GitLab is to make the outermost section
of our handbook a lot bigger and better than it is,
so I'm still cranking away.
A very different capacity
than covering consumer electronics,
but still cranking, yeah.
>> All right, remote.
Really interesting topic,
when we talk about the future of work,
you talk about the gig economy, there's all these ways
that how do we leverage and enable
a global and changing workforce,
and it's really fascinating, GitLab,
over 1100 employees and completely remote,
so the keynote this morning talked about
the woman in New Zealand that's completely cut off
with everything except for the internet,
she does her own power and everything like that,
but she can just be part of the team,
and you don't even know.
So tell us a little bit,
what does that mean, head of remote for your role?
>> So as we've grown, it's interesting,
there's an intersection of hiring and recruiting,
talent branding, but also process.
So we have a lot of people joining the company
that come from co-located spaces,
and there's a certain acclimation period
to getting used to remote and doing remote well.
You think about people that have joined
a co-located company, they walk into an office
where they've had a professional
design their office space, so they have ergonomic chairs,
ergonomic monitors, everything is set up for them.
But if you're working from home,
or working from somewhere outside of an office,
now that's on you to do.
And how do you do meetings well,
how do you do asynchronous well?
So part of my role is to work through those processes
to make sure everyone, when they're on-boarded at GitLab,
is given the best possible experience,
if they're coming into a remote role for the first time.
>> Yeah, do you have any bias towards,
does it make sense to just build it in my home,
is it good to go to, "Oh, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts
"and there's this cool place where I can go,
"where they have good coffee and there's people
"I can hang out with, it's everything in between."
What are some of the best practices there?
>> The beauty of all remote is,
we don't say you have to work from home.
You can work from anywhere.
So wherever you're most comfortable,
maybe that's a coworking space,
maybe that's at a friend's house,
maybe that's a different place every month.
We have people that travel all around the world,
and every month they're in a different timezone,
and that's the beauty of it.
So we have over 1100 employees,
but none of them operate their days
quite the same as anyone else,
and that's the beauty of a super diverse and inclusive team.
And we'll actually reimburse coworking space expenses
if you just feel more comfortable working in a group
or you need to leave your home for any reason.
>> Okay, we talked to Sid a little bit about,
"Does this remote work for every type of job?"
His feedback from the Y Combinator people
were like "If you're in finance,
"it might not be the best fit."
And I want to understand, how does the software help?
Does it, if I'm someone that's doing development,
does it poke me every once in a while and say
"Hey, maybe you should eat and sleep
"every once in a while, and you've been going at this
"a little long time."
How does both the HR and the technology piece fit together?
>> Well we hire people that are managers of one,
so having a high degree of autonomy
is really important, so you need to have
a lot of self-awareness in managing your day,
and that includes taking breaks.
And so we encourage people to take vacations,
take breaks whenever they need it,
and again, everyone is different,
so we enable people to take that as they need that.
But no doubt, when you're hiring,
you want to look for things like that,
it helps to have some experience in the working world,
definitely with interns and junior-level people,
you need to check in with them more often
because managing their own time and themselves
when you're not in an office setting can feel a bit full.
But actually, GitLab, the product,
is tailor-made for remote teams
because it's built by a remote team.
And even on the marketing side of things,
where no code really is involved,
we use it to manage entire projects
and entire events, and the beauty of that
is that it hones in on documentation,
which is essential to do remote well.
So we say, any part of a project
that you're moving forward,
try to move that forward and add context
in a way that someone else who may be asleep right now,
when they wake up and read your stuff along the way,
they have context of what you did,
and can pick it up from there,
and move it on to the next step.
So that helps us work really well remotely,
but honestly that is probably useful
for co-located teams as well.
And so a lot of people look at us as,
"Oh, you have this all-remote team,
"things must be drastically different."
But the truth is, all-remote
forces you to do things that you should be doing anyway,
transparency, documentation, iteration,
we just have to do them much more quickly,
and much more intentionally.
>> Yeah, when everybody gets together
at an event like this, are they okay
being on the same room, or do they want to go
document some things and hand things off?
>> The funny thing about that is,
people will often say "I don't know if I could work well
"in a remote environment because I really love the energy
"of being with other people."
And the truth is, in-person interactions
are vital to a remote company.
We have to be really intentional about that as well.
So we get as many people as we can together
for things like GitLab Commit
and GitLab Contribute, where we invite the entire company.
But the subtle difference is,
when you're in a co-located space, and you see people
on a daily basis, sometimes you can take for granted
the in-person interactions you have,
because you think "Oh, I'll just see them again
"and again and again."
But in a remote setting, when you have to be intentional
about when you'll see a person,
there's a certain level of energy
and you proactively look forward to moments like that,
because you don't get them as often.
So we build a lot of great bonds and relationships
around those key in-person moments.
>> Yeah, is there anything
along the communication technologies
that you recommend, do you use video conferencing,
or phone calls, what's some of the recommended,
how do you make sure you get
some high-bandwidth interaction?
>> There's a few tools that we use that
didn't exist not too long ago.
But because they exist now,
they've made all remote as a concept
far more approachable and feasible.
Google Docs is a big one,
we cover agendas and things like that,
and something that can be edited
by multiple people at once.
Zoom is another one, Zoom is really amazing
for video communication,
because many many dozens of people,
hundreds of people, can be on the same call,
and with very little technical difficulty,
everyone can communicate well,
which has been amazing for us, being able to see each other
and connect in a meaningful way.
And the last one is actually GitLab the product.
So we build our handbooks, we have over 3000 pages
of publicly accessible GitLab handbook,
how we do everything.
That is all publicly available on the web
and built and edited by GitLab the product,
and so as we use GitLab the product
to edit and iterate on our handbook,
we, as a GitLab team, see things
that could be done better or more efficiently,
and that gives us a flywheel of making the product
better and then making the handbook better,
and so on and so forth.
>> Darren, I'm just curious, are there any
kind of interesting findings that you've had
going to a company this size, now,
with everything remote that surprises the team?
>> Well I've worked remotely my entire career
in different stages of remote.
So, some of the companies have been about 50/50,
and some have been most of the people in the office
and then I've been one of maybe 10% of the company
that works outside of it.
You see all different facets of how
people and companies communicate when you're in
a hybrid remote setting.
But the beautiful thing about all remote
is it truly makes everyone a first class citizen.
So a lot of people will say in a hybrid setting,
if I don't go to the office frequently enough,
I miss out on some things,
or maybe I miss out on praise or promotion opportunities,
things like that, you feel like a second class citizen.
So in an environment like that,
you have to take certain approaches to include people,
you have to think about it intentionally
to include those remote individuals,
whereas if it's all remote,
you're all on a level playing field.
I think the other interesting thing is,
we have an amazingly diverse team,
over 65 countries, because we hire the world's best talent
from wherever they are.
And so you'll be talking with someone on a call,
and you'll just see what's in their background,
and you think "That looks completely foreign to where I am."
And it's an amazing way to engage with someone
and learn about them, learn about a new culture,
and truly keep a more global perspective.
I think lastly, all remote enables a workforce
that may have been rejected
at other stages of the workforce,
so things like caregivers or working parents,
or military spouses, where their spouse
has to move at each new deployment.
A lot of these people might say
"You know, it's too complicated to continue
"to reinvent my career with every move along the way."
Well, in an all remote setting,
your job goes with you as those changes in life happen.
And I just think that's going to become more the norm,
where the notion of moving for a career
will seem silly, it's like the career should just follow you
no matter where life takes you.
>> Yeah, I guess last followup on that is,
we've reached a point where people expect
immediate response, it's a text, it's something like that.
When I'm dealing with dispersed and remote,
is that something you deal with, is it something that,
is a team monitoring and handling that,
but how do I make sure that I'm a little,
I would think that it has to be a little bit more
forgiving of not being an instant response.
>> I tell you, all remote is actually much better
for your mental health and sanity
than other settings, and it's because
it forces us to work asynchronously.
There's no other way to do it,
we have people spread across 65 countries,
so almost every timezone is covered,
but that also means, there's almost a guarantee
that someone on your team is in a vastly different timezone.
So they may be asleep the entire time you're up working.
We also allow people to just structure their day
day to day differently,
depending on what they have going on.
Appointments, things they need to attend to
with their children, things like that.
So with an asynchronous mindset,
it enables all of us to take a step back
and just assume that whatever we're doing
is done with no one else online.
So it kind of removes the burden
of this nonstop string of Slack messages
where you have to respond to things immediately
within a given timeframe.
We don't operate in that construct.
And I'll tell you, just from a mental health standpoint,
when you have an entire company that embraces that,
we're all given a little more breathing room
to do really good deep work that requires long periods
of uninterrupted time.
And we've seen massive improvements on the product
and just team morale when we embrace that.
And I feel like as a whole, as a society,
we're getting close to a tipping point
where people are just to their limit
on how many more Slack messages
or emails or pings or urgent, urgent, urgent things
they can do while also doing their job well.
So, we may be a little bit ahead of the curve on that,
but my hope is that the industry at large
embraces that, and allows their people
more time to actually do the work they were hired to do.
>> Darren Murph, love the idea,
hope it definitely spreads beyond,
everybody absolutely can use the breathing room
and being able to focus,
because we know that multitasking really is a myth,
when it comes down to it,
so great to be able to chat with you in person,
and thank you for all the work you're doing in remote.
>> Thanks for having me here, I appreciate it.
>> All right, check out theCUBE.net
for all of our coverage, whether you're at an event
or watching it remote or after it,
we've got all the content for you,
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.
(techno music)