GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij says there’s no sense in a hybrid working from home model

The founder of an all-remote company explains the pitfalls of a hybrid model, saying you’re better to go all-out.

GitLab quickly gave up on office life, but still organises plenty of informal catch-ups. Picture: Supplied

Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and chief executive of collaborative software-development company GitLab, didn’t plan to lead the largest all-remote company in the world. It came about, he says, “because people stopped showing up at the office”. GitLab has experienced 50x growth in the past four years and has 1310 remote employees across 67 countries, 57 in Australia. Sijbrandij tells how the company does it and why half-in, half-out does not compute.

How did GitLab’s remote workforce evolve?

When I hired the first person in The Netherlands, I put a desk in a spare room in my house there, but by the third day they didn’t show up. I could see they were online and working. My co-founder was in Ukraine, our first employee was in Serbia, and I thought: “OK, I guess that makes sense.” We were all used to remote working.

When we came to the US in 2015, we went through the (start-up accelerator) Y Combinator program and they said: “It’s OK for engineers to be remote, but it’s better for marketing and finance functions to be co-located.” We got an office in San Francisco, bought a bunch of desks and negotiated with the landlord, and the same thing happened: after two days, people didn’t show up but they were online and working. People come to the office not because they like the commute but because they don’t want to miss out.

GitLab’s Sid Sijbrandij. Picture: Supplied

How do you keep people connected?

If you have two ways of working, it’s hard. People worry they miss out on information and career opportunities by not being in the office. But with everyone located somewhere else, we are all very used to communicating through the remote tools. We’re a pretty disciplined company and we have a lot of processes and we’ve invested a lot of time in making remote work well. For example, you need to organise informal communication.

Isn’t ‘organise informal communication’ a contradiction?

Remote meetings tend to start and end on time, there’s no chitchat waiting for the person to come in late because they can’t find the room, or hanging around after. You’re missing the banter.

Video meetings — as we all know now — work really well but they don’t take care of the informal part of it. You need to find a way to say: “Hey, I just want to hang out for 25 minutes and not talk about work.” That’s the hump we have to get people over, by instituting it. If you join GitLab, you’re going to get calendar invites for “coffee chats” — a 25-minute speedy meeting. You’re expected to be on time, but unlike every other meeting there’s no agenda. You can chat about work or about life outside of work; it’s about the permission to not be productive. In office life, it’s unclear what is going to be formal and informal, but remote work is so hyper-efficient — no walking between meetings, no water cooler to talk around — that you have to carve out time for informal things. We have a web page where we identify 18 ways people can create those informal times together.

“People come to the office not because they like the commute but because they don’t want to miss out.”

Some people crave social interaction with their colleagues, and others might not — do you insist on it?

When you’re onboarding, you have to do 10 coffee chats and cross them all off so you can get familiar with the concept. After that it’s up to you if you want to continue and it’s not for everybody. Some people say, “Look, I’ve got my whole family living around me — I’m good, Sid! I’m just going to do my thing!” And that’s fine. We’ve also got people who’ve met remotely working at GitLab and are now married, so there’s a whole spectrum.

Before the year of the pandemic, you would all get together physically from time to time?

Yes, we’d have offsites, usually in a touristy location where it’s easy for us to find a facility that can accommodate everyone. We’re going to do a virtual one this year, with a shortened program. Normally there’s a lot of time to get together. We do the functional things regularly so we don’t need to update on that, it’s about celebrating people.

Where are some of your more remote people located?

Charlie Ablett is a senior back-end engineer near Motueka (at the top of the South Island) in New Zealand and she’s off every grid with everything except mobile internet. There’s a 4G mobile antenna on a hill near her house and it’s a good connection so she can video call — she’s given us a virtual tour of her home and showed us her woodworking workshop, which is really cool.

With a good wireless connection, you can work for a fast-growing start-up that feels like a Silicon Valley company and we have 88 per cent year-over-year staff retention, which is way above the industry average. GitLab is not necessarily “work from home”; you should work from the place you are most productive.

How can companies that emerge from the pandemic with a hybrid model help narrow the gap between employees?

Get very intentional about it. Make sure everyone has at least one day a week working from home so they can empathise with the remote people. If you have a meeting, instead of everyone from headquarters dialling in from a conference room, everyone should dial in from their own individual pod. This makes sure the remote people are on the same level because otherwise they have a harder time interjecting, they’re on a delay and can’t see everyone because it’s one big picture of the conference room. But now you’ve kept your office open and you’re paying the lease, and you’ve closed the conference rooms and you’re telling everyone there that they have to sit at their desk … that’s going to be hard to manage.

There are companies trying (hybrid) and we’ll see how they fare. But you’ll still have two experiences: remote and in-office experience, and those having the in-office experience have more information and more access to career opportunities and have more visibility with management. Those are where things go wrong.