Working distributed - but how?

This is a talk about distributed work, how it is done at Elastic. How do we work together, how does the development process look like, what are the hard parts about distributed work, what does work exceptionally well?

Transcript

1. Alexander Reelsen
   alex@elastic.co
   @spinscale
   Verteilt arbeiten - aber wie?!
   

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2. Office?
   

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3. Open Plan Office?
   

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4. Co-Working?
   

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5. Home-Office?
   

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6. Home Office once per week?
   

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7. Company w/ single location?
   

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8. Company w/ several locations?
   

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9. Company across timezones?
   

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10. How much time do you spent
    commuting?
    

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12. open source
    

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13. Wikipedia
    

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14. Github
    

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15. Docker
    

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16. NASA
    

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17. Slack
    

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18. Autoscout24
    

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19. Xing
    

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22. Open Source ≠ business model
    

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23. WE BELIEVE IN OPEN SOURCE. AS A
    DISTRIBUTION MODEL. AS A WAY TO BUILD A
    BUSINESS. AND AS OUR FUTURE AS A COMPANY.
    Shay Banon, Elasticsearch Creator, Elastic CEO
    

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24. commercial features
    CCR
    Centralized config mgmt
    Alerting
    Security Machine Learning
    Graph
    Rollups
    Reporting
    SQL
    Upgrade Assistant
    Monitoring
    Canvas
    Logs UI
    Infrastructure UI
    APM UI
    

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25. solutions
    

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26. Elastic Stack as a Service
    

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27. support
    

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28. consulting
    

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29. training
    

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30. certification
    

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33. > 1200 employees
    

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34. 19 offices
    

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35. > 35 countries
    

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36. > 30 languages
    

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37. > 19 timezones
    

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38. distributed
    

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39. scalable
    

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40. scalable
    

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41. ... culture, tools, processes
    How do you work together?
    

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42. culture
    

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43. trust
    

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44. intrinsic motivation
    

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45. extrinsic help
    

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46. equipment
    

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47. 16 weeks paid parental leave
    

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48. timezones
    

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49. asynchronous discussions
    

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50. communication
    

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51. slack
    

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52. github
    

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53. email
    

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54. salesforce
    

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55. discourse
    

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56. zoom
    

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57. transparency
    

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58. transparency
    

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59. communication
    overflow
    

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60. weekly email updates
    

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61. monthly department updates
    

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62. monthly all hands
    

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63. isolation
    

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64. x-school
    

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65. mentoring
    

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66. always on
    

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67. bi-yearly in person meetings
    

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68. conferences
    

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69. trainings
    

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70. Development process
    

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71. no scrum
    

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72. no kanban
    

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73. no waterfall
    

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74. time based releases
    

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75. product roadmap
    

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76. team per product
    

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77. Elasticsearch Team
    Area
    Lead
    Devs
    Area
    Lead
    Devs
    Area
    Lead
    Devs
    Area
    Lead
    Devs
    Tech
    Lead
    Tech
    Lead
    Team
    Lead
    Team
    Lead
    Product
    Manager
    Product
    Manager
    

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78. Elasticsearch Ingest Kibana Clients
    STACK LEAD
    ...
    

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79. (cross) team work
    

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80. test triage
    

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81. fixit friday
    

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82. weekly release status
    

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83. bugpool
    

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84. support dev help
    

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85. Personal tidbits
    

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86. home office is a drug
    

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87. less sick days
    

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88. holidays are sacred
    

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89. un-bus-factor
    

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90. video first
    

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91. flexibility
    

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92. hobbies
    

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93. Summary
    

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94. it's all about the infrastructure
    

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95. hiring pool
    

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96. commuting
    

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97. experience
    

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98. satellite employees
    

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99. employees are adults!
    

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100. management must lead
     

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103. … ask all the things!
     have fun at VillageCon!
     Discussion
     

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104. 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
     Links
     

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105. … ask all the things!
     have fun at VillageCon!
     Discussion
     

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