Co-founder & Executive Chair of GitLab. Co-founder of Kilo Code. I love economic mobility, remote work, new cities, big art, incentive design, and curing cancer
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Below is a thread about the future of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. I predict that remote will go through a trough of sorrow due to hybrid not working out, and most companies will return to being office based. But many all remote companies will see success.
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On today’s earnings call, I announced my transition from @GitLab’s CEO to the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making a full recovery.
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.@paulg I always loved your tweet below 🙂 Today we announced our quarterly earnings and crossed over $100m of quarterly revenue. About 2.5 years ago this was under $100M annually. Thanks to all our customers, contributors, users, partners, and team members for making this happen
A startup reported their ARR has reached $99.9m. I know two things from this: their ARR, and that they don't fudge their numbers.
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YouTube having a 2x speed playback function has probably done more to accelerate learning than some medium size universities.
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Google can search the entire internet in under 1 second but searching just my Google Drive always takes more than 5.
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Want to learn more about remote work? We published the the most comprehensive list of articles I've seen so far about.gitlab.com/company/cul…
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Wonder what software we use at GitLab? We published our entire tech stack about.gitlab.com/handbook/bu…
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At GitLab with 650 people we don't have an asset we have to depreciate. Our depreciation limit is $5000 and we don't have a physical item that expensive or such a lease. All remote helps to prevent long term office leases and so far nobody needed a Mac Pro or Pro Display :)
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GitLab Inc. has grown from 407 people at the start of the year to more than 1000 today, welcome everyone! Last week we hired 35 people and we have hundreds of open vacancies to be hired in the three months remaining so please apply if you're interested about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/
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Due to the Coronavirus we’re seeing a huge uptick in people visiting our guide on how to work remote like we do @gitlab. See the guide for yourself at about.gitlab.com/company/cul… to prepare for what might be coming.
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When working remote it is important to formalize informal communication. Explicitly plan time to create, build, and maintain social connections and trust. In our handbook we list 15 methods about.gitlab.com/company/cul… which I'll summarize in this thread.
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And stop saying that all creative thinking needs a whiteboard. There are 2 advantages to a whiteboard (you can draw arrows and circles) but linked are 17 reasons why a shared Google Doc is better, including that everyone can write on it at the same time. about.gitlab.com/company/cul…
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As Bretton Putter said in the linked tweet: "The majority of CEOs who ran office-based businesses before the pandemic and didn't invest in their culture unknowingly relied on their office space environment to hold their unwritten culture together".
The majority of CEOs who ran office-based businesses before the pandemic and didn't invest in their culture unknowingly relied on their office space environment to hold their unwritten culture together
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Somehow the lesson that companies deduce from this isn't that that should go all remote, but that they should go hybrid, combining remote and co-located work. I think that hybrid is much harder and less likely to be successful. This thread will include examples of why it is hard.
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Today is the last day of the fiscal quarter for GitLab Inc. We're over plan with more growth in ARR (incremental ACV) this quarter then we had 18 months ago as the total ARR over the life of the company. I'm proud of our team and thankful for the trust our customer put in us.
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I can't stress enough how amazing it is that all remote is more effective even though it is happening suddenly, without proper organization, and during a pandemic that itself is stressful and lowering productivity, especially for people that have children that can't go to school.
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If you don't require this you get hybrid calls, and these are horrible (see link). The only thing worse isn't getting invited to the meeting in the first place because the co-located people had an impromptu chat and even forgot to tell you the outcome. about.gitlab.com/handbook/co…
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Cool to see people using GitLab to quickly build an open source ventilator to help with the shortage due to COVID-19 gitlab.com/TrevorSmale/OSV-O… @iamsternlicht wrote a great article about it forbes.com/sites/alexandrast…
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Employees will discover that the company didn't make the shift from rewarding attendance to rewarding output, and that remote workers are not getting promoted at an equal rate because they are less visible. Jeff Morris Jr. had a good take on this in
Note that a friend just sent me:
I feel like WFH full time is the new “unlimited PTO”- like nice to have but good luck getting promoted and rising ranks as full remote employee.
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When remote it is important to be intentional about informal communication (see the link). But that doesn't mean that having part of the people in the office will help to make the remote people feel included, instead it will make it harder to include them.
When working remote it is important to formalize informal communication. Explicitly plan time to create, build, and maintain social connections and trust. In our handbook we list 15 methods about.gitlab.com/company/cul… which I'll summarize in this thread.
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The amazing thing is that the following is happening during a pandemic: "Many companies are learning that their workers are just as or even more productive working from home," according to Andy Challenger, SVP of staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. usatoday.com/story/tech/2020…
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With hybrid it is hard to give everyone the same work experience. Shopify did a great job thinking through this and will require everyone in a meeting to be physically separate and have their own camera and audio setup. nitter.app/tobi/status/1263483498…
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This is a dream coming true, Harvard Business School is working on a case study about GitLab and #allremote piped.video/watch?v=jdN5mj5i…
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Remote isn’t virtual work and an all remote company isn’t a virtual company. You do real work and can create real companies working remote. All companies are abstract concepts anyway, your office might be the most significant materialization of it but please don’t confuse the two
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People will rightfully judge software by how it looks. And open source software has historically not been as polished as proprietary software. Proud of our @gitlab design team sweating the small stuff as can be seen in the gallery of recent improvements nicolasdular.gitlab.io/gitla…
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I'm really excited about the 18 GitLab features we're open sourcing today about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/0… It includes package support for C, Java, Node, and .Net! This will create a ton of value and ensure there are more people who can contribute to improve these features more rapidly.
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My prediction is that at most hybrid companies the leadership will keep working from the headquarters and the default way of working will degrade from 'remote first' to 'remote allowed' (remote employees a second class citizens).
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The GitLab.com API fleet has been migrated over into Kubernetes. A 100% of all API traffic is now hitting the deployments installed by our own Helm chart. API requests should be faster going forward as shown by the Apdex score.
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In life minimalism has decreasing returns while a growth mindset has exponential returns. When consuming more than you produce consider first reducing consumption until you have a positive balance and then focus on growing that.
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GitLab is nr. 2 in the top 20 private companies in the tech industry that people want to work for forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsie… SpaceX is nr. 1, the company that iterates on rockets. Kudos to them for iterating on hardware, it is much harder. Incredible progress from Starship 1 to 11.
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During COVID we tend to equate working remote with Working From Home (WFH). At GitLab we'll pay for office space if you want it. WFH will never be the best for everyone. We do see that some people who prefer an office in the beginning transition to WFH during their first months.
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The productive remote employees will leave for 'all remote' companies that invested in getting everyone a manager who understands what they do by having only one function reporting to a manager, not a multifunctional team of which the manager doesn't understand most disciplines.
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Honored to see GitLab selected as the most transparent company. Thanks for this holiday present!
In 2020, the year of uncertainty, remote work, and societal change, the best businesses are transparent ones.
Using our database, interviews, and public documents, we found out how the world's 100 most transparent companies are building a better world.
theorg.com/insights/the-100-…
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GitLab has the right to migrate to the Netherlands for qualifying team members. Just added we can waive the 1 year tenure requirement if you are a member of an underrepresented group that is unsafe or if here is a lot of violence in your country. gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gi…
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All remote work is a first step in a revolution that will double the GDP of the world. In the thread below I'll describe how all remote education, connectivity, city safety, city density, and city services can unlock the rest. @SpaceX @LambdaSchool and @2xgdp are working on this.
“The best jobs really can be performed from anywhere .. the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet” @pmarca nails the impact of all remote. From now on we all win the geographic lottery
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Process is more important than tools. Process is on about.gitlab.com/company/cul… Tools we use are Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, and GitLab of course.
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GitHub now also free for education. Great to see that students benefit from our competition. thenextweb.com/dd/2018/06/19…
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The great news of this week is that from now on remote work will be allowed at Twitter, Square, Facebook and Shopify. But that doesn't mean that they will close their headquarters or other offices. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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“The best jobs really can be performed from anywhere .. the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet” @pmarca nails the impact of all remote. From now on we all win the geographic lottery
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I hope English TV shows in non-English speaking countries move from dubbing to subtitling. This would increase English proficiency. That would probably increase the ability to participate in the global economy and therefore income growth. cc @freddier
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he's a great person and manually made a backup before starting to work. The more you do, the more mistakes.
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The GitLab CI shared runners on GitLab.com are using 4,000 CPU cores concurrently. More than 12 million CI jobs run in the last 30 days. See our metrics for yourself at dashboards.gitlab.com/d/sv_p…
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Disadvantage of working remote is that I frequently have ‘headphone hair’ with a big dent in the hair from ear to ear.
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At Facebook, employees will have to be a certain level of seniority to be allowed remote. In our experience junior people tend to have more experience working digitally, not less. usatoday.com/story/tech/2020…
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Today is the 1 year anniversary since @GitLab went public. Here’s an overview of how we prepped for our S-1 filing and setting the IPO process in motion. Thank you to everyone who helped us along the way! bit.ly/3Vrpyai
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In 2011, GitLab was created as an open source tool, and soon after an impressive community formed around it. Last month, I shared at SaaStr Scale my learnings as we’ve built the GitLab company and continue to co-create the product with the wider community. piped.video/qcExFX-B2B0
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Zoom Pro tip: Zoom > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts and tick the box for 'Enable Global Shortcut' to Mute/Unmute My Audio. You can map it to any keyboard shortcut, like F1 (Cmd 1). You don't even need Zoom as your select window to mute/unmute. Huzzah!
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There is so much talent outside of the major metro areas and all of these people can suddenly compete for the high paying and rewarding jobs at the world's leading companies. It will help spread income a bit more equally around the world (despite that inequality will still rise)
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Below is a thread about the 10 stages of remote work. Working remotely is not a binary yes/no decision but something that you can measure on a gradation scale all the way from no remote to strictly remote.
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Next week 42 people will start at GitLab. They will not provide the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. But they will help to make GitLab better, keep GitLab.com safe, help our customers be successful, and grow in many other aspects
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To grow a startup quickly, demand needs to grow alongside the product. When a single person is responsible for both it’s nearly impossible to put pressure on one without loosening up on the other. Starting with two distinct co-founders ensures both get attention. opencoreventures.com/blog/20…
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I think that whenever there is a headquarter there will always be two ways of communicating. To get everyone on the same level you need the leadership to leave the shared office so that the only headquarter is the one online.
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GitLab.com now is 3PB large. 2PB is used for object storage with half for the container registry. The Git repos are 500TB and the database is 3 TiB.
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Server runtimes come in many different types, enabling team collaboration and ready-to-use development environments in the cloud. They are gaining usage quickly and there is a cambrian explosion of new ones. A summary of each of the 67 server runtimes is in this 🧵
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We're seeing a lot of people joining GitLab who are looking for an all remote upgrade gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gi… Their previous company was partially remote and they want to be a first class citizen again.
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Congratulations to @remote for achieving 🦄 status in their $150M Series B led by @accel with participation from @sequoia @generalcatalyst @indexventures @twosigma! Everyone should be able to contribute and @remote allows companies to employ people all across the world.
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In the future people won’t trust closed-source software. Open core will replace it as the default. People want to be able to inspect, modify, and contribute to the code they use.
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First they ignore you. Then their employees create nitter.app/gitlabceohere Then they make private repos for 3 collaborators free about.gitlab.com/2019/01/07/… We don't expect to win in 2019 but it will be an interesting year for sure. Lots of respect for the leadership of @natfriedman
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Sorry to hear about the #npmlayoffs Two weeks of severance is very tight. Our apply to accept time is longer than that dropbox.com/s/zcc9118mc56rgq… Please note in your application you need us to go as fast as possible. We do have 130+ open vacancies about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/ #all-remote
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I want to thank Sue Bostrom for the suggestion to write this and @darrenmurph for partnering on remote. I welcome questions and suggestions. If you want to learn more about remote work we wrote an e-book full of tips that you can download from our homepage about.gitlab.com/
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After their most productive remote people leave the hybrid companies will blame the lack of productivity on remote instead of the actual cause of hybrid being very hard. You'll see the Yahoo/IBM like moves to force everyone to come to the office again. forbes.com/sites/carolkinsey…
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6 months ago I founded @kilocode to empower developers to pick the best model for the task at hand. We launched our application within a month and have since grown to become the best AI coding orchestration application. Over the last 5 months token usage has grown 1000x, from 4 billion to 4 trillion tokens a month! In September Grok Code Fast was responsible for 46% of those tokens despite only launching 4 days before the month started.
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It is not a virtual meeting, I'm not a virtual participant, and this isn't a virtual company. We're remote and real. I get that companies are an abstract concept but your co-located company doesn't consist of your office building and furniture either.
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Compensation Calculator for many of the roles we have at GitLab and hundreds of areas around the world. about.gitlab.com/handbook/pe…
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My thread about the future of energy: solar and wind will generate it, their price per peak watt will continue to come down, we’ll over-provision them by about 4x, we’ll need multi day storage and dynamic pricing, 90% of the time power will be free, and nuclear is too expensive.
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Over the last 3 months we had over 20,000 applications for the vacancies at @gitlab about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/ It encourages us to push for even more transparency about.gitlab.com/handbook/va… since many people cite that as a reason to apply.
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.@GitLab releases many features years before GitHub. Every month on the 22nd, transparent and open. 10 examples in this thread 💡 about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-g…
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If the fine #travisAlums are interested GitLab is going for 200 to 500 engineers this year. We currently have more than 30 open vacancies for engineers. As far as I know we're hiring in all the locations Travis has and had people. about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/
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At GitLab much of the work is multi-disciplinary, but we don't have the different disciplines report to the same manager. Instead we have stable counterparts and we require each hire to be a 'manager of one' who can self-organize without a project manager. about.gitlab.com/handbook/le…
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It is a great day for developers. It is also a great time for people to compare GitHub and GitLab - we'll have a blog post out soon on about.gitlab.com/blog/2020-0… #GitChallenge
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Can we normalize eating during a video call? If a lunch meeting is OK in person it should be OK to leave video/audio on when calling.
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We would love a 10 minute video call with people who successfully advocated to use GitLab in their organization. If you are passionate about GitLab please DM me.
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Very proud that companies like @facebook and @Dropbox are inspired by GitLab to embrace remote best practices about.gitlab.com/handbook/in…
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Thanks Paul! At @gitlab we try to live our transparency value.
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Speed run joining Kilo Code’s engineering team! We’re building the open-source AI coding platform and are currently generating 5T tokens/mo. We are looking for experienced engineers who can ship what takes an entire team at other companies. Apply by Monday to join me at focus week in Amsterdam starting October 27. Link in the comments. Please share with people who can get code done.
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@paulg thanks for asking. We document more than 20 ways in which we organize serendipity and informal communication on about.gitlab.com/company/cul… The most important way is to make it normal to send a calendar invite for a coffee chat. Also consider investing with in a head of remote
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When a friend is going through a tough time don't offer a generic 'please let me know how I can help'. Instead figure out a small way to help, for example saving them time with home delivered meals. Instead of asking if that is OK to do send them an email it is coming their way.
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We have 18 new people starting next week but have many times more vacancies open about.gitlab.com/jobs/apply/ If you want to join a team about.gitlab.com/company/tea… that will grow from 500 to 1000 this year please apply. We hire in most countries, 51 and counting.
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Also these companies are going hybrid for the wrong reasons. According to Mark Zuckerberg "Social bond building, culture, creativity, white-boarding and brainstorming" needs to happen at the office. wsj.com/amp/articles/faceboo…
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Companies will pay market rates based on your location (see link). Rates outside of major metro areas will go up. Market rate inside of major metro areas might go down a little bit but this is counteracted by the giant shortage of talent that still exists. about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/0…
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That feeling when someone captures your company ambition more boldly than I would dare to say it: "GitLab is to GitHub what AWS is to DigitalOcean." news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
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One of the most eye-opening things people notice when they join GitLab has been Live Doc Meetings. They make remote meetings much easier to follow, more effective, produce better notes, and more inclusive. Run them yourself with this newly published guide: about.gitlab.com/company/cul…
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In San Francisco every time an operator becomes an investor they get their sleeves clipped. From then on they can only wear Patagonia vests.
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I'm grateful for the red team at GitLab doing an amazingly realistic phishing attack gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-sec… with custom domains and realistic web pages. The outcome was that 20% of team-members gave credentials and 12% reported the attack.
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Great blog post about how we measure engineering productivity at GitLab about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/0…
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This year, #GitLabCommit is going virtual. But we're not stopping there! We think everyone belongs at @gitlab, so this year you can attend for free. bit.ly/3hZCkJf
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Felicidades @freddier ! La educación debe ser asincrónica y tú lo estás haciendo realidad.
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The executive group at GitLab recently discussed what objectives and key results (OKRs) should be for the next quarter piped.video/watch?v=rZD9yWlM… I've never seen a public recording of such a conversation so I hope this is helpful to a few people.
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We have developed Package Hunter internally at @gitlab to help avoid supply chain attack risks, now available for everyone.
It helps to detect malicious dependencies in sandbox environments & monitors syscalls to report suspicious behaviour.
about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/0…
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Very proud of the @gitlab team-members and the wider community of almost tripling the revenue for the 6th year in a row gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gi…
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We’ve seen a substantial shift in how enterprises are developing, operating, & securing software by moving to a platform strategy. As a result, our One DevOps Platform is gaining momentum and broader adoption.
Read more about @GitLab’s Q1FY23 results: bit.ly/3tfDnME
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Most startups with knowledge workers have seen productivity go up since COVID despite all parents having their kids at home. Surprisingly most leaders want to go back to an office because 'culture'. Why not try to formalize informal communication instead?
When working remote it is important to formalize informal communication. Explicitly plan time to create, build, and maintain social connections and trust. In our handbook we list 15 methods about.gitlab.com/company/cul… which I'll summarize in this thread.
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Thanks @freddier and everyone at #PlatziConf for the birthday wishes!
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What is the best way to make decisions? Hierarchy or consensus? Time to stop the false dichotomy. At GitLab, we have the benefits and avoid the drawbacks of both: about.gitlab.com/handbook/le… 🤯
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A billion iPhones getting a minute long iOS update is almost 2,000 years of waiting. I wonder how many engineers Apple has working on live kernel patching.
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We just did a webinar for companies that are going remote because of COVID-19. Many great questions were asked and answered around tools, infrastructure, work style, overcoming resistance, checking-in, maintaining culture, and much more. Check the video at piped.video/watch?v=n4ZZaE-X…
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