It really looks like this guy found his calling, good for him! I'm impressed his managed to keep his organization healthy with 700 remote employees, that takes some real business/management talent.
In my own business, we are a remote team of 6 and we do pretty well. The way we've made it work so far is by doing very little collaboration, and instead opting to each have our own focus with little overlap. There are times when I'd really love to have some other engineers to whiteboard with and collaborate on difficult problems, but that seems impossible to do remotely. At least very easily.
Thanks! What we do for remote brainstorming is using indentation in Google Docs. We find that most ideas can be represented by a tree structure. We use indentation to indicate what is connected. You can't easily do arrows between different ideas but I've seen it work on almost every case.
Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?
Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?
If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire".
I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.
- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.
- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.
- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).
Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.
Buffer and Basecamp come to mind, plus they are more efficient: they pay significantly more while managing to turn impressive revenue/profit vs the headcount.
Isn’t that the wrong metric to look at? You are looking for massive successes from the very small number of remote companies to compare with the massive successes out of all companies. A better (but still somewhat flawed approach) would be to take a random sample of non-remote companies equivalent in size to the number of remote-only companies and compare the distributions of their success.
I work for one Or at least one where remote-only is quite common. Side effect : I have no idea how many coworkers I have, just know the team I work with normally and a few outside.
It's a tech company, but it's an manufacturing one.
I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?
And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....
Profitability means nothing at this stage (and is sometimes even undesirable). As long as it is following the same growth path as more established companies in its segment, it can be considered a success.
For entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of All-Remote culture I think the hiring page is better [1]. And a list of countries that they dont hire due to legal reasons. [2]. And list of countries they have listed as cooperate entity for Payroll [3]
I think a lot of the issues and problems with All-Remote is not in the communication or working style ( which can be adopted ) but actually in the hiring and legals where smalls startups have absolutely no time, idea, nor the energy to do it themselves. I remember reading HashiCorp's founder saying the same thing where its was the hardest part of hiring across the world.
given the majority of coworkers are now remote due to coronavirus, I hate it. I miss just grabbing someone to my computer and have a chat about my problem. now I'll have to arrange a meeting, share screen and all, do you see it, do you hear me?
plus in meetings remote workers rarely get the chance to speak. otherwise opinionated colleagues are now silent.
I think gitlab has a huge advantage in remote work as in their mission is clearly understood by their employees ( to clone github.com). Its a very outsourcable class of problem where requirements are clearly understood and employees aren't required to really come up anything new or innovative.
I am yet to see a 100% remote company thats doing something brand new and innovative.
C'mon that's just unfair. GitHub is Microsoft now, I for one I'm glad gitlab exists even if I don't personally use it much, but it's a nice replacement if centralized microsoft-owned github goes down like it has been in the last weeks/months...
Basecamp has a lot of competition and probably some frontend clones maybe, but I don't think it could be called unoriginall or a copycat of any of it's competitors (Todoist,Asana,Etc)
They also have great (free) books on working remote like REWORK. Maybe you like that example better?
sys_64738|6 years ago
DoofusOfDeath|6 years ago
iamcasen|6 years ago
In my own business, we are a remote team of 6 and we do pretty well. The way we've made it work so far is by doing very little collaboration, and instead opting to each have our own focus with little overlap. There are times when I'd really love to have some other engineers to whiteboard with and collaborate on difficult problems, but that seems impossible to do remotely. At least very easily.
sytse|6 years ago
BTW We're trying to bring real-time collaboration to GitLab issues so you can do the same in GitLab. I spend some time on that this weekend https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301...
machiaweliczny|6 years ago
ng7j5d9|6 years ago
Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.
Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?
throwaway5752|6 years ago
I think you can look at subsets of companies for precedent.
- Regional sales staff are very frequently distributed by territory (obviously not remote in customer contact, usually) and work out of their homes. This is common across many companies in and out of tech.
- Distributed teams where you have smaller satellite offices where cross-team functions are remote and coordinated across time zones, which have to be remotely coordinated. This is almost universal in tech in my experience, and widespread outside of tech.
- Hybrid companies where some staff are fully remote or people have a certain number of days per week that can be remote. This is so common as to be universal in tech, in my experience (particularly for support rotation/SRE work).
Fully remote work, to me, seems just minor extension of all of those existing practices.
gordon_freeman|6 years ago
https://automattic.com/work-with-us/
rwmj|6 years ago
Edit: And is still profitable now. It sounds like I was saying it was only profitable before being acquired :-)
e1g|6 years ago
Xcelerate|6 years ago
teunispeters|6 years ago
I think one of the important questions though is how does the hiring/firing and maintenance of relationships between employees (including management) be handled when face-to-face is over video conferencing only, usually? How do you measure who's doing well - and encourage them to continue? And nudge ones not doing well - and let them go if they're really not fitting?
And of course maintaining work/life balances is hard....
lovebes|6 years ago
DailyHN|6 years ago
paxys|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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pawelk|6 years ago
tree3|6 years ago
Nowyouknow|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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kyawzazaw|6 years ago
Irishsteve|6 years ago
ganstyles|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
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sytse|6 years ago
ksec|6 years ago
For entrepreneurs or anyone thinking of All-Remote culture I think the hiring page is better [1]. And a list of countries that they dont hire due to legal reasons. [2]. And list of countries they have listed as cooperate entity for Payroll [3]
I think a lot of the issues and problems with All-Remote is not in the communication or working style ( which can be adopted ) but actually in the hiring and legals where smalls startups have absolutely no time, idea, nor the energy to do it themselves. I remember reading HashiCorp's founder saying the same thing where its was the hardest part of hiring across the world.
This may actually be startup idea to solve this.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/hiring/
[2] https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/faq/#country-hiring-guidelines
[3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...
alohaandmahalo|6 years ago
Loads of guides in the links Sid mentioned.
Plenty to watch in our Remote Work playlist at GitLab Unfiltered: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0Kq7QUX-Ux5f...
We're doing a webinar on Friday (2020-03-13) and would be happy to answer Qs there as well: https://gitlab.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hSUtLvcSTsqQ7ftNb...
kuharich|6 years ago
cpach|6 years ago
PunchTornado|6 years ago
plus in meetings remote workers rarely get the chance to speak. otherwise opinionated colleagues are now silent.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
dominotw|6 years ago
I am yet to see a 100% remote company thats doing something brand new and innovative.
agustif|6 years ago
Basecamp has a lot of competition and probably some frontend clones maybe, but I don't think it could be called unoriginall or a copycat of any of it's competitors (Todoist,Asana,Etc)
They also have great (free) books on working remote like REWORK. Maybe you like that example better?
Anyways nothing in life is black or white
unknown|6 years ago
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