Dimensional Data

It’s 9:13 am and 20 degrees outside in Big Sky, Montana. I’m bundled up in my warm rainbow pride ski suit. Dangling 30 feet in the crisp air, perched on a ski lift, I’m on my way up to a double black diamond run 9,382 feet above sea level. There are few people out this early on a Wednesday morning. I ski off the top of the lift and enjoy a beautifully untracked run of champagne powder snow, fresh from last night’s snowstorm. This is a normal start to the workday for me. And I have a bit of a secret to admit, this is exactly why I joined GitLab. Something’s gotta give Rewind two years to January 2020, before I joined GitLab. Before I had materialized my daily skiing routine. Before I moved to Big Sky. Before the global Covid-19 pandemic. I had decided I needed to make a change in my life. I had spent the past decade of my life climbing the startup tech career ladder. Along the way I had sacrificed my health, happiness, and my mental and emotional well-being. I was burnt out. While I don’t think I’d change anything going back, I knew the next decade wouldn’t sustain that lack of work and life balance. I needed to get back to being the person my friends and family knew: a slim guy with a smile always on his face and a hopeful outlook for the future. You’re invited! Join us on June 23rd for the GitLab 15 launch event with DevOps guru Gene Kim and several GitLab leaders. They’ll show you what they see for the future of DevOps and The One DevOps Platform. A remote change GitLab had been on my radar for a number of years as many of my tech friends had become DevOps engineers, but I had not used it myself. What I did know was at the time they were one of the few truly remote companies with no offices and a global team embracing an async work style. While I hadn’t ever worked remotely before, I knew I liked the idea of not being stuck in a bland office of noisy and distracting open floor layout workspaces surrounded by silly ping pong tables and unlimited snacks. My previous employers thought these things made for a ‘supportive environment and ‘great work culture’. I couldn’t disagree more. It was a scary thought to have less structure, but my previous decade had shown me those offices weren’t conducive to my sanity, happiness, or productivity. So I decided, let’s go all in. I knew I wanted to make a big change, so I tested GitLab when I was interviewing. I gauged reactions from my interview panel as I described my desire to move to a ski mountain and balance working and skiing. I was caught by surprise. Every person I interviewed with loved this idea and encouraged me that GitLab’s remote and async working style would be supportive of this plan. Just about everyone had a story of how they themselves had adjusted their schedule to add flexibility to their lives. I was convinced. This was the future. A global pandemic Two months after joining GitLab in January 2020, the pandemic ruined my plans to relocate to a wintry wonderland. I delayed […]

Working at a startup is demanding. GitLab team members are often under a lot of pressure. From mental health awareness to our posts on identifying burnout, GitLab wants to ensure our team members are working efficiently without feeling overwhelmed. Recently, GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and Michelle Hodges, vice president of Global Channels, discussed how managers can support their team members and help prevent burnout. Sid and Michelle emphasized that the earlier a manager can identify burnout the better. Identifying burnout in a remote environment is more difficult than in a co-located workplace, but looking for early hallmarks such as exhaustion and reduced enthusiasm can help managers get ahead of the problem. Sid shared the following 12 strategies managers can utilize to support their team and prevent burnout: Encourage time off. Even taking a half day can help. Managers can take an active role in encouraging team members to take time off by telling their team members about their own upcoming vacations. Managers can ask team members when their next vacation is and, if they don’t have one, encourage them to plan one. Lower the pressure. When a manager senses that someone on their team may be getting close to burnout, they can lower the pressure of goals and objectives and key results (OKRs) and also ask about goals less frequently. Be more positive. Frankly, managers can be a significant source of stress, so try to be more positive about the team member and their reports. Increase headcount. Most of the time, there’s too much work for too few people, so managers can explore options to increase headcount. This can be temporary, such as borrowing time from someone on another team or hiring a consultant. Offer team members coaching. External coaching can help team members open up about their struggles, including working with their manager. Remind employees of mental health care resources. Point employees toward the company’s mental health benefits and services. GitLab provides support to all team members through ModernHealth. Express gratitude. Send team members gifts to their home to show gratitude and an investment in your personal relationship. Celebrate progress. Burnout is often caused by a feeling of stagnation. Seeing the progress you’re making day-to-day is hard. Managers should create space to celebrate small wins and reflect on the mountains you’ve climbed. Sympathize. The work is tough. Have conversations about it. Lead by example. Managers should set and maintain working hours. For instance, Sid says he waits until the next working day to respond to Slack messages that happen after 6 p.m. Help team members to be more effective by: Reviewing recurring meetings and identifying what can be done async Talking about what they’re working on and helping them identify what work isn’t as important Identifying work that can be delegated to other team members, and empowering them to do so Managers can also encourage team members to name things they won’t do. Reduce the number of hours worked by agreeing to reduce effort. Managers can ask team members to identify things that are likely to fail. Taking time to reflect on results can be very insightful and can allow team members to reduce their effort without compromising quality. Share burnout concerns with others. Using judgement or with permission, managers can give context and ask others to […]

It’s an exciting time to be working in a customer- or partner-facing role at GitLab. Our role with customers is to build personalized relationships and demonstrate how we can help them solve problems with a best-in-class DevOps platform. As we grow, our customer and partner focus plays a key role in building a healthy, connected workplace culture at GitLab. So we asked some of our leaders and team members from across the Sales, Channel Partner, and Account Management teams to share their insights. Here’s what we learned. The opportunity we have to become the leader in DevOps means hiring more top-tier talent “We are on a journey as a company where we believe we have got this exciting market opportunity. We’ve got a great product that fits the market really well, and that product is an industry leader. “We believe a lot of companies are going to buy DevOps. We need to make sure that they buy that from us and that’s a hard thing. That execution requires lots of top talent. We want to keep growing, as a team and individually, to capture more market share. That’s going to take a lot of people who are great at what they do.” Michael McBride (a.k.a “McB”), Chief Revenue Officer Why GitLab is an ideal place to grow in a sales or channel partner role “We sell direct to enterprise and mid-market and SMB customers. I look after both the sales organization that manages those partners and supports them and their engagement with our direct selling force, as well as the programs and enablement and functions that it takes to integrate those partners into our go-to-market. “I believe we’ve got great technology, great market timing, high customer need, lots of customer value, and a great product. That makes for a pretty awesome mix from a partnering perspective. It’s lots of fun to manage partners who are aiming to grow their businesses at the same time. It’s going to make the partners very happy.” Michelle Hodges, VP, WW Channels “At my previous company, we were an unknown entity and you had to really pull out all the stops to get people just to take a call with you or to test the product or buy the product. Whereas, with GitLab, I would get on calls and customers are super excited to meet people from GitLab. There were quite a few cases where people were already going to buy GitLab, but they just needed someone to help them understand what they wanted to buy. It was a salesperson’s dream because you are working with people who not just love the product, but love what the company stands for. “I remember one time I was in a coffee shop, and I had a GitLab sticker on my laptop. Someone saw that – he was a developer, he came up to me and said, ‘Wow, you work at GitLab. I love that company and we use it in our team.’ I felt a bit like a celebrity getting spotted on the streets.” Anthony Ogunbowale – Thomas, Named Account Executive, EMEA What makes our culture unique “The things in the company handbook can be kind of unbelievable to folks from the outside, when they say there’s unlimited vacation time or they value results, not hours. But […]