🌎 Sourcegraph is an all-remote company, which means:

• We work asynchronously across time zones and continents.
  • You choose when you want to work. (Most people work the normal working hours for their time zone.)
  • You don't need to ask permission or tell anyone if you need to step out.
  • We try to limit the number of synchronous meetings, but there are some company and team meetings that you need to attend which might be outside of your normal working hours. We do our best to optimize meeting times for all involved participants.
• All teammates are encouraged to work remotely. Sourcegraph provides a budget for home offices or office spaces to teammates as needed.
• We use our business office address in San Francisco to provide a mailing address, for corporate filings, and on-site workplaces as legally required.

❓FAQ

Q: How are you able to maintain team cohesion while working remotely?

Having a shared set of values and trust among teammates is the foundation for a cohesive team, and we have that here at Sourcegraph. The are are a few things we are mindful of in an all remote environment:

• We rely heavily on written communication. Nothing else works when you want to communicate and coordinate work across many time zones.
• Non-verbal cues (e.g., tone, facial expression, posture) affect how information is interpreted
  • Written communication can feel cold and negative by default, unless the writer makes a conscious effort to lead with positivity (e.g., "Great!", "Thanks!", "I agree!"). This becomes less of a risk if the speaker and listener already have a good working relationship.
• Written communication is most effective when the writer thinks about what questions readers will have and preemptively answers those questions in the original communication.
• We try our best to replicate spontaneous interactions and conversations that might happen in an office (e.g., in a break room, in the hallway, at lunch) to build connection among teammates.
  1. We use https://donut.com to schedule 1-1s between random teammates each week.
  2. We host a bi-weekly company meeting, weekly team meetings, and regular 1-1s with your manager, teams schedule regular optional "watercooler" meetings with no agenda where teammates can join and chit-chat.
  3. Teammates also frequently hop on a video chat to chat, pair program, or work through an issue together (just like you would in an office).
  4. We host twice yearly company offsite (Sourcegraph Merge) to connect as a team, align on strategy, and work together.
  5. We haveCompany travel and meetups so teammates can meet up with their team to bond.

Q: Is it harder to support less experienced teammates on an all-remote team?

The fundamentals of supporting teammates (regardless of their experience level) are the same on all-remote teams, it is just that the processes are different. Video chats can be arranged just as easily as stopping by someone's desk to introduce yourself or showing up at someone's office to express informal concerns.

Q: Is there an expectation to work over the weekends?

There is no expectation that people will be responsive over the weekend/vacation/evening/etc except some circumstances that do require this, but generally there will be early/predictable notice—e.g., on-call duty.

Some people prefer to work in a really flexible way, which can sometimes mean that they want to hack on something on a Saturday instead of a Friday afternoon, for example. Others prefer a set schedule. Both are valid options. Moreover, due to our global team one person's weekend can be someone else's weekday.

Tip: Configure GitHub notifications to send Sourcegraph related ones to your work email. After that it is just a matter of not checking your work email (or Slack) at times that you don’t want to do work. Slack has settings to pause notifications, and you can remove work email from your phone if that would help you not check it during non-work times.

Helpful links

• Our journey to all-remote
• How we communicate at Sourcegraph