A presentation at Search Meetup Hamburg in August 2019 in Hamburg, Germany by Alexander Reelsen
Working distributed Alexander Reelsen alex@elastic.co @spinscale
Office?
Open Plan Office?
Co-Working?
Home-Office?
Home Office once per week?
Company w/ single location?
Company w/ several locations?
Company across timezones?
How much time do you spent commuting?
elastic stack
Elastic Stack as a Service
solutions
Wikipedia
Github
Docker
NASA
Slack
Autoscout24
Xing
support
consulting
training
certification
2012
1500 employees
19 offices
35 countries
30 languages
19 timezones
distributed
scalable
How do you work together? … culture, tools, processes
culture
trust
intrinsic motivation
extrinsic help
equipment
16 weeks paid parental leave
timezones
asynchronous discussions
communication
slack
github
email
salesforce
discourse
zoom
transparency
communication overflow
weekly email updates
monthly department updates
monthly all hands
isolation
x-school
mentoring
always on
bi-yearly in person meetings
conferences
trainings
Development process
no scrum
no kanban
no waterfall
time based releases
product roadmap
team per product
Elasticsearch Team Tech Lead Tech Lead Team Lead Product Manager Product Manager Team Lead Area Area Area Area Lead Lead Lead Lead Devs Devs Devs Devs
STACK LEAD Elasticsearch Ingest Kibana … Clients
(cross) team work
test triage
fixit friday
weekly release status
bugpool
support dev ramp
support dev help
Personal tidbits
home office is a drug
less sick days
holidays are sacred
un-bus-factor
video first
flexibility
hobbies
Summary
it’s all about the infrastructure
hiring pool
commuting
experience
satellite employees
employees are adults!
management must lead
Discussion … ask all the things! https://speakerdeck.com/spinscale/working-distributed-but-how
Links https://www.elastic.co/community/all-things-code https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code https://www.elastic.co/products/x-pack/open https://spinscale.de/posts/2018-05-08-five-years-homeoffice.html