GitLab’s Eric Johnson on Radical OpenCore Transparency

In this episode, we’re talking to Eric Johnson, the EVP of Engineering at GitLab. 

Eric oversees a distributed team of engineers at GitLab, which is one of the world’s biggest all-remote companies. And no, it’s not covid-remote -- the company is natively remote, with 1,200 people across 67 countries.

GitLab is an open-source DevOps platform that makes software development faster and easier. It has over 100,000 customers serving millions of users. We’ll hear from Eric about the technical culture inside the company that makes the platform so valuable to developers at both enterprises and startups -- and how it’s operated remotely for nearly a decade.

GitLab’s culture is based on radical transparency. Everything is meticulously documented, shared, and publicly edited. That’s a crucial piece of bringing everyone together in a remote environment. It can also be a challenge for technical executives and managers.

So why create this kind of culture in the first place? 

As Eric explains, it helps remote teams make decisions very quickly, with confidence. It’s also a core piece of the platform itself -- setting it apart from other DevOps providers.