GitLab operated across sixty-five countries with no office before remote work was fashionable.
Before the pandemic made it mainstream, distributed work had operated at scale for years. GitLab, the software company, grew to more than 1,300 employees across sixty-five countries by 2020 without a single office.1 Automattic, the company behind WordPress, had more than 1,100 employees in seventy-five countries by 2019, all working remotely.2 These were not experiments in progress. They were functioning companies with revenue in the hundreds of millions.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the experiment onto everyone else. In April 2020, an estimated forty-two percent of the U.S. labor force was working from home full-time, according to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom.3 What had taken GitLab years to design, millions of workers adopted in weeks, often without preparation, training, or infrastructure.
The results were mixed but measurable. A Stanford study found that remote workers showed a thirteen percent performance increase compared to in-office counterparts, along with higher satisfaction and lower attrition.4
The debate that followed was less about productivity than about control. Many executives called workers back to offices even when output data suggested remote arrangements were effective. A 2023 study from the University of Pittsburgh found no significant improvement in financial performance among S&P 500 companies that mandated return-to-office policies.5
Distributed work is not a single model. GitLab publishes a public handbook of more than two thousand pages documenting its asynchronous practices.6 The distinction between "remote work," where some workers are away from a central office, and "distributed work," where no central office exists, reflects fundamentally different assumptions about where authority resides.