Comment by jack6e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack6e | Hacker News Reader

Skipping over the little annoying facts that fully remote work is not some secret strategy, and that no Fortune 500 company (as an index of success) is 100% remote, let's just do a direct comparison of competitors:

- GitLab is 100% remote and, according the article, was most recently valued at $1 billion, 350 employees, and has an unknown/hidden (or I can't find) number of users.

- Github has a headquarters and also remote work, and was recently acquired for $7.5 billion, with 800 employees and 31 million users.

So...is remote work a secret? Did it lead to a comparative success over a competitor offering similar services but a different organizational strategy? Not really, not even close, no.

More accurately, we should say GitLab has so far managed to make remote work a success for themselves through leadership, organizational culture, and some other actually secret ingredient, which is where the real story lies. Lots of remote companies fail. What has GitLab done right? Sadly, this article only skims the possibilities.

Github also had real trouble with their cash flows. MS bought the popularity and the current and future projects that are hosted there (probably overpaid for all that).

Now - why remoting would work better for the company (off the top of my head): 1. next to zero office-space rental costs 2. you're going shopping for talent in the whole world and you can hire regardless of visas, eligibility, etc. I.e. you hire better talent, for less money (they don't need to pay outrageous rents for SF/London/Munich/Dublin/whatever) 3. You get happier employees (they don't get to see their families once every six m onths or so) 4. You get easier on-calls schedules 24/7/365 if you get a few ppl on different timezones 5. You get diversity from day 0 and local eyes in almost all markets that you care to sell anything 6. You _have_ to document more and better since you _have_ to work with tickets 7. You make your meetings worthwhile because your time matters (and you're not valued or paid according to "chair-time" that can be filled with boring nonsense meetings so that you can coast through the day)

There's a bunch of other advantages in other areas (ecology, general economy, tech, etc) but since the focus is on what's in it for the company I won't go into these.

> MS bought the [...] current and future projects that are hosted there

what? microsoft doesn't own any projects hosted on github other than their own

It's pretty clear the GP was using that in the sense that one often refers to acquirers buying customers, not in terms of actually buying IP of the projects.

Exactly.

I think they meant projects like Electron which are owned by Github IIRC.

Gitlab is also 3 years younger as a company, and Github had a undeniable first-mover advantage in the space.

GitLab the open source project was started in 2011. GitLab the company didn't start until 2014. GitHub is 6 years older than GitLab.

On the other hand, GitLab didn't have to do any UI work to start with, they just appeared to copy and paste GitHub.

Huh? It doesn’t look the same at all, or at least it doesn’t now or at any time I used it.

Today they have their own identity, but when they started GL was basically a clone of what GH was at the time.

I'm sure the fact that they pay near zero in office rent/leases helps such companies with cash flow.

You're also likely to get more productivity form employees that don't have to spend 2-3 hours per day traveling. I found myself working a full 8-9 hours when working from home, whereas if I was traveling to the office I'd be looking to duck out after 6-7 hours. The 3pm slump is a drag and I personally dread the commute home. Those few extra hours mean that I can squeeze out more code.

I'd like to point out that my comment mostly referred to the article's original title, which was click-bait referencing GitLab's "secret" to multi-million dollar "success." Spoiler alert: the "secret" was remote work. I took issue with calling their organizational structure of 100% remote work a secret strategy, and with calling their current revenue and valuation a comparative success or that they could be directly attributed to their remote structure.

The updated title is much more informative, accurate, and devoid of click-bait hype.

Github is also the first mover and the dominant player in the market.

It's silly to try to say the differences in their success are based on remote work or not.

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