No Office, No Problem: Software Unicorn GitLab's CEO Warns You're Probably Doing Remote Work Wrong

Sid Sijbrandij knows the perils of working from home. In 2018, after years of toiling exclusively from a small room in his 47th-floor apartment in a San Francisco high-rise, the entrepreneur developed foot problems. So he moved in a treadmill desk alongside his Zoom-friendly green screen and three monitors. 

But GitLab’s CEO says the problem isn’t remote work, but how it’s practiced. Unless you’re employed by one of the handful of companies that have fully embraced the new work reality, Sijbrandij (pronounced see brandy) thinks you’re probably doing it wrong. His radical take on remote work: It’s effective only if you go all in. Partial measures will create tiers of employees who will split the workforce over time, driving away top-performing remote workers who don’t want to compete with lesser-achieving on-site colleagues. “We’ll see some companies . . . go back [to the office] and try to make the best of it, and I think they’ll struggle,” he says. 

How GitLab does it: The only time staffers meet in person is for the company’s annual all-hands gatherings, held (in pre-Covid times, anyway) in lively and relatively cheap locations like Greece. Another pillar of GitLab’s remote-work absolutism: radical transparency. It publishes a public online handbook detailing how it approaches pretty much any topic. You won’t find individual employees’ salaries, but you will find its executives’ strategic objectives for the current quarter and the exact formula for calculating wages in the 67 countries in which GitLab staff live, from Kenya to Morocco to Serbia. (There’s also a section on how and when to talk to Sijbrandij, and one on his cat.) Anything not in the handbook, which would run to 8,400 pages if printed, is likely in an internal Google Doc. Every meeting at GitLab has at least one companion online doc. 

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