GitLab likes to describe itself as one of the world’s largest all-remote companies — and as a thought leader on best practices for remote working. It’s a message delivered in multiple venues — and it’s proving to be especially relevant during a pandemic.

For example, this week the company launched a new course on Coursera titled “How to Manage a Remote Team,” promising in-depth lessons from its own in-house experts. “As an open-core company, we’ve publicly documented and iterated on everything it takes to run a well-oiled remote work machine,” co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in a statement.

Earlier this month a new video also appeared on YouTube from the developer conference GOTO Chicago 2020. In the video (filmed remotely in April), GitLab’s senior developer evangelist Brendan O’Leary describes how the company built its “asynchronous enterprise” with 1,200 employees.

The Case for Remote Work

O’Leary believes that all-remote workplaces will be the future of work — and he notes that science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke made the same prediction in 1974.

Clarke said that with the computers of the future “Any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business… It means we won’t be stuck in cities. We’ll live out in the country or wherever we please and still carry on complete interactions with other human beings as well as computers.”

“He was right,” O’Leary said. “He knew that that kind of collaborative tooling was going to come to computing.

“You hear folks talk about a minimal viable product? Well, we talk about a minimal viable change.”

#culture #devops #profile