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.
what? microsoft doesn't own any projects hosted on github other than their own
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.
The updated title is much more informative, accurate, and devoid of click-bait hype.
- 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.