 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, 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 seven, 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 p.m. 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. I try, yeah, actually part of my job here at GitLab is to make the all remote section of our handbook a lot bigger and better than it is. So I'm still cranking away in a very different capacity than covering consumer electronics, but still cranking, yeah. All right, remote. Yes. 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 1,100 employees and completely remote. So in 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 you're working from somewhere outside of an office, now that's on you to do. Then 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 onboarded at GetLab 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, you know, 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. We, 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. I mean, we have people that travel all around the world and every month they're in a different time zone and that's the beauty of it. So we have over 1,100 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 where 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 like commonator people were like, if you're in finance, it might not be the best fit. And 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 then 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 vacation, 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 foreign. 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 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 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 but 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 wanna 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 Get Lab Commit and Get Lab 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, well 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. Is there anything along the communication technologies that you recommend? Do you use video conferencing or phone calls or 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 3,000 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 can 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. Yeah, 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, well, 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 far into 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. But 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 the last follow up on that is we've reached a point where people expect, you know, immediate response. It's a text, it's something like that. When I'm dealing with dispersed and remote, how do you make sure, how do you, 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'll 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 time zone is covered, but that also means there's almost a guarantee that someone on your team is in a vastly different time zone. 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 remote. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. All right. Check out thecube.net for all of our coverage, whether you were at an event or watching remote or after it, we've got all the content for you. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.