> Consider encouraging direct reports to keep their 1:1 document open in their browser throughout the week
A bit unexpected, doesn't seem healthy to me. Surely there are more important things happening in the average week other than career progression?
EDIT: I better stop reading this as I've always liked GitLab, but am catching some heavy Lumon vibes :D this is one of the possible agenda items: "SING - if added, the person who added it leads a singalong with all willing participants in the meeting" (at https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggeste...)
In my book, yes. Things like delivering value to customers, building great products and doing work that you'll be proud of. Career goals are quite often orthogonal to those.
> Is there really anything more important than career progression?
In a particular company? Yes, most things are. In my professional life? Yes, but career progression ranks pretty darned high. However, my career progression is a layer of abstraction above whatever company I happen to be working for, and can really only be effectively managed at that level.
> your manager is there to help you get paid more.
That's not the most important thing I want from my manager. The important things I want from my manager are making sure I have what I need to do my job, making sure that I am not being unnecessarily hampered in doing my job, and making sure that I am working in sync with the rest of my team and other teams toward a common goal.
In other words, the most important thing a manager can do for me is to keep the skids greased.
If you want to get paid more, then don't engage the company for "career progression". 90% of that stuff is designed by HR for "engagement" to keep you on the hamster wheel. A lot of that stuff at my company is kept under the retention category in HR, which tells you all you need to know.
If they like you, you will get promoted anyway rather than engaging in that sort of stuff.
Once a week is way too often in my opinion, and the whole setting is much too formal.
I prefer 1-to-1s to be informal without agendas. Once a month is enough. It is a time to build rapport and trust and obviously it has to be "synchronous" and in person if possible.
I used to do every other week with my previous manager and I feel like that was an appropriate pace. Unfortunately my new manager wants to do it every week and that's definitely way too frequent.
Somewhat related: if somebody is interested in King's story in more depth, I can really recommend Jonathan Eig's book from 2023, titled "King: A Life". Amongst many other resources, he has used the (back then) recently released FBI files about King. He did a really stellar job of portraying MLK not just as a legend, but also as a human being.
At work, I use the Inbox Zero strategy combined with Gmail's keyboard shortcuts. It's really powerful, a total game changer. The nicest thing for me is that I can easily keep track of not just stuff that I have to react to, but email threads where I am the one waiting for a reply. You can read about it in many places, there are tons of tutorials (both written and video) out there. As far as I know, it's the way most Google employees are using Gmail too.
If you can be a manager of one [1], then absolutely, yes. If not, then I can imagine it being really frustrating a lot of times.
Based on my past work experience, working at GitLab is more similar to being a freelancer in terms of freedom and flexibility - with all the benefits of being an employee (professional community, job security, etc.) too.
I don't really know what you mean by that. Yes, the salaries are tied to locations [1]. But I get compensated well above the average compared to doing the same job at other companies (including international ones) in my country (Austria).
While the thing about unions is generally true in the European Union, universally it isn't. Take Hungary (where I am from) as an example. Trade unions there are practically non-existent. Most of them got destroyed by the state during the mismanaged adaptation of capitalism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ones remaining are a shadow at best (in terms of power) of what's there in Austria or Germany.
The rest I wholeheartedly agree with! (Waving from Vienna, oida!) My comment here is purely just for additional context. :)
Very true, but workers’ rights are still generally held in higher regard than in a lot of other countries… more due to begrudging compliance with EU directives than anything else, but it could be worse.
Maternity leave is very good, paternity leave recently improved, laws on overtime are relatively strict (although somewhat loosened since the “slave law”) shift allowances are decent, rules around notice periods, probation periods and termination are all relatively fair.
It’s also true in the (admittedly-no-longer-EU) UK that unions are fairly weak nowadays except in very specific industries, such as the railways, public sector, etc.
Not much. Work as an employee until you build out a network big enough to rely on to get contracting jobs. It's faster if you work in professional services or technical sales roles as an employee already.
Ex-Microsoft, current GitLab employee here. The way you describe using Microsoft's tools in your company is pretty much how things worked at Microsoft while I was there 3 years ago.
If you'd like to build a handbook similar to GitLab's, this page of our handbook can be a great starting point: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook...
> The way you describe using Microsoft's tools in your company is pretty much how things worked at Microsoft
That is mind boggling. How on earth can MS have an efficient knowledge management with this setup?
How frustrating was it too use for you?
The most sensible way forward seems to me would be just set up a single company SharePoint with a doc store with a predefined data layout. No associated team space around that. Move communication 100% to slack. Link / pin the relevant SP folders to the slack channels.
Just for the dev team this would work as we never moved chat from slack to teams. But we need to
1. interact with the less technical parts of our org (product management, quality & regulatory, BI, V&V, Legal etc)
2. Interact with colleagues from other subsidiaries.
They all use teams, so conversations & especially meetings will happen on teams, people will still store docs and notes there just out of convenience or lazyness.
