The most famous example is probably Gitlab (https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/)
Since their IPO the work environment seems to have deteriorated though (https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/152o4bb/what_the_hell_is_going_on_at_gitlab/)
Curious to see if other people have any experience of real asynchronous work culture?
Honestly, that sounds like a horrible idea.
Yes, excessive meetings suck, but there are so many problems that are 20 emails over a period of 4 days, or a 5min call.
Yeah, our company likes to outsource stuff to India. The workers they hire there are deliberately underpaid and undertrained for what’s being asked of them, so that already makes communication difficult.
But the real problem is often rather the different time zones. You can practically only schedule a call with them in the late afternoon, when they’ll have all their other meetings, too.This is so problematic, that parts of the company now also like to hire underpaid, undertrained workers in a different country, which happens to be in the same time zone as we are.
Often neither the 5 minute call nor the 20 emails are needed but used because no prioritization is being made for the time or work of others because there’s not enough friction to force the prioritization. Not everything that is urgent is important and not everything that is important should interfere with urgent matters. The balance is difficult in any arrangement.
Also, you can send an email to schedule a call.
You’re conflating things.
Urgency is not a factor, but brevity and mental load. Writing mails takes time and forces you to jump between issues/contexts. Even if you answer all mails in one go, you still need to switch contexts again and again. Add to that the inevitable misunderstanding in written communication and you end up with hours of work for simple questions.
Of course there are issues that can be resolved via mail/tickets just fine, but many can’t. Forcing employees to choose a certain channel is not a good idea.
Also, you can send an email to schedule a call.
Why are companies going async? To go global. Now find a slot that works for Central/Western Europe and California. Good luck.
Now find a slot that works for Central/Western Europe and California.
I was scheduling calls from EST with people on AEDT 20 years ago. Companies having a global presence isn’t a new issue. Everything is a trade off and sometimes the cost of asynchronous work communication is beneficial.
The last job I had didn’t have a fully asynchronous culture, but did treat December and August as asynchronous months because it let people have more flexibility with time off.
Sounds nice
I’m working at a startup as a junior software engineer and have a biweekly meeting to discuss high priority tickets and general catching up. I often hear about other engineers that have to do daily stand-up meetings and I feel like that would just kill my momentum tbh
Interesting read… i wonder how much of that do Gitlab employees (managers and execs in particular) actually implement though.
It was a neat read! I’ll bet there’s stuff in there my team could steal. We try our best to be distributed and that comes with a lot of async.
