All right, well welcome everyone. I know many people have said it already, but thanks so much for joining us today at our first ever GitLab Open House. I'm super excited to be here today with my colleague, Katarina. My name is Ryan Demmer. I work in our talent acquisition team for GitLab. I'm a recruiter here. I recruit on a lot of different technical positions across lots of different teams here at GitLab. I'm based here in San Antonio, Texas. So if there's anyone in Texas out there, feel free to give me a thumbs up or a plus one in the chat. We'll be watching for you all out there. I've been with GitLab about seven months now, going on eight months. Some people call me a veteran. Some people call me a newbie, but I'm still learning and we're iterating a lot. But again, welcome to us. I said I'm here in San Antonio. This is my home office. Like Darren said, if any of you saw Darren's presentation, sometimes you'll find me on my back porch or my dining room table. Sometimes one of my dogs comes in and says hello. That's just kind of the GitLab way of doing things. So welcome to our presentation about learning about how to conduct and how to be efficient and do well on a remote interview. So before we get started though, I'd like to push it over to Katarina and let her introduce herself. Thank you, Ryan. So I'm Katarina. I'm not based in the US. I'm based in Portugal, a little bit far away. I don't know if we have anyone from Portugal, probably not, but if yes, please put a plus one on the chat, we'd love to know. I'm based out of Lisbon specifically. I've been with GitLab for a year and a half, a little bit more than that. So if Ryan is a veteran, I have no idea what I am. Haven't thought about that, should probably. So as he said, we're here today to explore a little bit around some tips and tricks about remote interviewing. So, Ryan, let's kick off. All right, sounds good. And during the conversation, if you have questions, by all means, add them in the chat or you can add them to the Google doc as well, and we'll be answering those at the end. So we are gonna try to have some questions and answer time at the end. So a little bit about GitLab. So we're over 1,300 team members globally distributed in over 65 countries around the world. So just think about that. I worked in an organization previously that was like 60,000 employees and we were all US based. So it's really cool to be able to work on such a diverse team with team members from everywhere around the world. I feel like Catery and I are really good friends, even though we're a long ways apart around the world. We have over 100,000 organizations that co-create with us, as well as we've had over 3,000 code contributors to GitLab. So if you don't know, we are an open source project and anyone can contribute. So that's a little bit about GitLab. So before we get started, let me give you a little bit kind of rundown of what we'd like to talk about today. So we're gonna talk about how to prepare for the interview. So before you get online, everything that you need to do to get ready, we're gonna talk about during the interview, which is super important, how to conduct yourself. And then kind of after you get off or during your research, how do you assess a remote company and understanding if that's gonna be the right fit for you and what you're looking for in an organization. So here we go. So before the interview, you've gotta prepare. If you look at GitLab, we have, I think Darren said over 7,000 pages in our handbook now. There's lots and lots of resources to go take a look. We have our values out there. We have documentation about the team you're interviewing. Do all of that research, spend the time ahead of time to understand the company that you're gonna be interviewing with. It will go a long ways. That might be one of the first questions that's asked when you get on an interview. So what do you know about the company? I start a lot of my conversations with that as well. But if it's not GitLab, many companies have different resources that you can tap into prior to the interview. So some highlights, talking about the values of the company, like I mentioned, the team, anything that you can get your hands on, do that. We have lots of, there's lots of YouTube channels there. Lots of companies have those. Go take a look at the YouTube channel to see what the company's all about. But in addition to that, after you've kind of done your research about the company, check your technology. This is something that we're all getting used to around the world, GitLab. We've been doing this since almost our inception, but it's new to many people. We use a suite of technology, mainly Zoom for synchronous communication, but there's lots of other technology that companies are using out there. My wife, she uses Microsoft Teams for her company. G Suite, so Google Meets, Skype. There's lots of options. So make sure that before you get to the interview, you've downloaded whatever software that you need. You've tested it maybe with a friend. You can even have somebody log in from your own household just to make sure everything's working ahead of time before you click to get onto that interview so that you can be prepared and you're not scrambling and might throw you off or anything like that. But in addition to the software, make sure that your hardware is ready to go. So I always recommend some sort of headphone device. So I use these, these are just like, these are the Apple AirPods, Catarina. You can see she has like just the plug-in type. There's lots of other options though, as you can see, you can use your like big ear headphones. There's lots of earbud type. But what that does is that you get a good connection in your ear as well as most of those things have some sort of microphone to help with the sound. That's gonna be a lot better. It's funny I'm actually saying that because right before we went on stage, I tested, we were testing our technology and everybody was telling me I sounded horrible. So we had to like disconnect and reconnect and guess what? It worked fine. And this was like three minutes before we came on stage today. So it's really important to get this stuff right. In addition to some sort of headphones, I'd recommend some sort of camera that you are going to be on video. So whether it's an external webcam pictured here, if you use the webcam that's on your laptop, that's fine. I've had tons of people do it on their cell phones or iPads, other mobile devices. But the most important thing is just to make sure it's all working properly before you get to the interview. So everything's good and it's not a distraction and you can just spend your time talking to the person you're interviewing with and working with them.  So it's important that you're going to optimize your lighting. So this isn't something that you would normally think about but in a all remote interview or a virtual interview, this is something that's extremely important. So you could see a couple of things here that kind of maybe not the best lighting. So maybe having the laptop on the table where you're looking down at it. So it's kind of a weird angle. If you have some backlighting, you can see in the photo there that your face is gonna be really dark. If you have lighting on the side, it's gonna have quite a few shadows. The best way to do it is to have the lighting in front of you.  That's something that's really important too. Me personally, I'd never worked remote before so we actually put some extra lighting in this room because I knew I was gonna be on camera all day, every day but just for an interview, don't go put in lighting in your house. Maybe you can just use a lamp or a window, something like that to optimize that.  It's gonna be a little bit awkward if you haven't done it before but once you get used to it, it's gonna feel a lot better.  You might have to give yourself a little pep talk ahead of time but look yourself in the mirror, be yourself. We want you to perform your best so that we can evaluate you and your skills. And then lastly, when it comes to preparation prior to the interview, make a plan and pace yourself. So be cognizant of time. Many times on virtual interviews, there is a limited time. So you might have 30 or 45 minutes maximum to get everything in that that recruiter or that hiring manager needs to talk to you about. So be mindful of how you're talking, be concise, making sure you're not going too far off tangent to bring the conversation back to relevant information. Also prioritize what you want to highlight. So be prepared when a recruiter or someone asks you to tell me a little bit about yourself. Be prepared to maybe like a two minute elevator speech, if you will, to be ready for that. And then also block some time a little ahead of time, a little bit afterwards in your personal schedule so that if time does go over, you have that time and you don't have to rush out. Or if you are taking a break from work at home or there's a commute back to work or whatever the case, make sure you have the time ample so that you can focus and be ready for the interviewer and just being able to be yourself. So that's how you get ready for the interview. Next, I'm gonna let Katarina talk about what you actually do during the interview. Thank you, Ryan. So now that Ryan touched a little bit on how to prepare before an actual interview, I will share some tricks to have in mind during an actual remote interview. So bear with us, Ryan is gonna be literally my right hand passing on the slides. So bear with us if we are not able to do it perfectly but we'll do our best. You will probably realize that many of the advices and tips that we will give you throughout the presentation can easily apply to the traditional face-to-face interview. So you're probably already thumblerized with this tip so it's gonna make things way easier. So some of the key tips in our opinion are maintaining eye contact with the interviewer by, for example, not forgetting to look into the camera. Keep your intonation and body language positive. You can see that throughout a video call as if you were in a room physically. You also need to keep calm if things go wrong. Sometimes technology is not in our sight, can play some tricks and you can encounter problems in a remote interview. If you keep calm, this will demonstrate that you know how to deal with challenging situations. So that you are adaptable as well. Be on time even though your remote is just as unprofessional to keep an interviewer waiting in a remote interview. And put a plus one in the chat if you're like me. I don't know about you, Ryan, but I have always. 1000 tabs open. Actually I did really well today. I closed them all was a challenge for me. But when you're in a remote interview, just have your notes there or some kind of document that you would need to go to. And even though it's better to be 100% focused on the window that you're gonna do the video call. Next one, another important aspect is having talking points to your interview. Because one, it shows that you are prepared for the interview and we talk about a lot during Ryan's presentation about preparation. Relates your experience and knowledge to the job description and the team you're aiming to join. And if you're nervous, it can be easy to talk over the interview. So this actually makes you slow down to have things prepared beforehand. Next one. So although forget lab and we heard on Darren's presentation and throughout Ryan's as well. Remote was always and has always been a part of our culture. We are all aware that this setup is new for many people and for many organizations. It was kind of forced by the pandemic we're living at the moment. But the truth is companies and people are kind of in a need to adapt to remote. For that reason, it's very important for you as a candidate to be able to assess a remote company. So first question you can ask is about onboarding as it is crucial for joining a new organization. So you can ask how it's the onboarding process, the timeline, if you're gonna have someone to help you throughout the process, like an onboarding buddy, like we call it here at GitLab. Will you also have access to any training and any learning materials? So for example, here at GitLab, the onboarding, it's very complete in my opinion. We have tasks for the managers. We have tasks for IT, for the body, for the people operations team, even before the person starts, that way they'll have access to all the tools, all the systems and all the information they would need to get started. Then it's roughly divided through the week by different tasks to complete. You'll have like a checkbox and you'll also have an onboarding specific to the team you're joining. So roughly the whole onboarding process is about three, four weeks and we highly encourage people to take time to do it. So this can be very different in another company. I wanted to share a little bit what we do here at GitLab, but it's very important in our opinion to ask about this. Next one. So the second question you should ask is how will I communicate fully remote? So be sure to ask what kind of tools will be provided for you to work in that fully remote company. At GitLab, for example, we heavily rely in async versus sync communication. So we use tools like Google Locks to type what is discussed in every meeting and we actually are doing this live in the Google Lock that we shared with everyone to add the questions that they have regarding the sessions, regarding the presentations and so on. We also use Slack for any major announcements, any major shareings we want to do with the company because we keep in mind that we have people that are based in different time zones. So that way they can see those announcements, those shareings asynchronously. And we rely heavily in our handbook for any updates that we do in our processes and in our procedures. So the third question should also be around the benefits provided. So will I be able to expensify my office equipment, for example, since I'm not going to a traditional in-person office, will I be able to expensify if I want to buy a desk, if I want to buy an ergonomic chair, for example? How does it work, the time off? Since, for example, I'm in Portugal and I know that it's normally mandatory to have 25 days per year. So it's gonna be different if I'm based in a different country. What about the salary? Will I be paid accordingly with the country that I'm based? Will the cost of living be taking into consideration? Other benefits. I know these days, technical companies use a lot stock option as a benefit. Do I understand how stock options work? It's better to ask. Working hours, I'll probably have team members that are based in a different time zone than I am. So will I be able to communicate with them? Will I need to cover those times zones as well? You need to ask these questions. Since I'm remote, can I work from whatever I want? And what about if I want to move? Can I move easily without any consequences? These are all important questions for you to do and it can differ from company to company. Finally, in our opinion, it's also key to ask about your employment type. Am I going to be a full-time employee or have a contractor agreement? So since remote companies hire people all over the world, maybe they need to have a few different setups to hire them, right? That would be my thought. So it's important to understand the specifics of being a full-time. Employee or being a contractor, for example, in each location because it's different from what it's like to be a contractor in Portugal than what it's to be a contractor in the US, for example. Will I be hired by the company I'm being hired for or are they using a third party to be able to employ me? As companies can have different ways of employment, full-time contractor agreements, another way could be being hired through a third-party company. So a professional employment organization as we occur here at Github as well. And will my benefits change according with my type of countries of contracts? Any country or many countries may have specific benefits that are mandatory by law, for example. So it's important to kind of understand if that will make any kind of implication in the contract. So next one and final one, after me and Ryan been rambling around here, we wanted to mainly share with you these four words that kind of resume the whole presentation. So communication is key during all the process. It's important to any interview process to be honest, but 100% it's important for a remote interview process. Adaptation is vital as well as many of you are not used to interview remotely. It's basically the same as a face-to-face interview. You just need to adjust a little bit to the differences. It's very important to show engagement. If you're prepared correctly and we talked a lot about preparation, you can easily show that you're engaged in the process. And it's just basically a change of mindset. It will seem awkward in the beginning, but after a while, it's not gonna seem awkward at all. So that's a wrap. I hope you all have enjoyed and took something positive out of this presentation. We will kick off for any Q&As, but if you feel more comfortable, you can always send me or Ryan an email. We shared our emails in the slide deck and we will do our best to answer. So I will go into our shared Google Doc to see if there's any questions. Bear with me one second. We have a lot of questions in the doc, which is great. So I find it. So we have a question from Phoebe that I will verbalize it. How can someone make their resume stand out? Oh, I lost a question. Someone was typing probably, yeah. So how can someone make their resume stand out so that they can land an interview with Github? Ryan, do you want to take this one? Yeah, I can go ahead and talk about that. Thanks for the question, Phoebe. And it's interesting enough that many of the things that you would do for just an in-person resume are gonna be the same for a resume for a remote company. So the only thing that I would recommend, I was trying to think about this because I did see the question ahead of time is if you want to highlight maybe that you have worked in a remote environment before, that is definitely something that's attractive to a company like GitLab where we already work in a fully remote environment. And so the transition to our style of work is much easier and much quicker. Just some general tips about resume writing and how to format it. From a technical perspective, I would highly recommend some sort of just kind of text box that has the technical stack that you've worked in. Many of us look for those keywords that are very specific to the roles that we're recruiting for. So for example, I recruit for backend engineers in Ruby on Rails and Go language, right?  In addition to that, try to keep things chronological so that we can understand the work history that you've had, try to keep it short and concise so that we are able to kind of quickly assess if you have the experience that we're looking for. You have to remember that recruiters, we review a lot, a lot of resumes. I don't even know how many, we at GitLab, we do not have some like search engine that's doing it for us. We actually go and read the resumes. So it's important to see some of those key highlights at the top of your resume so that we can see them fairly quickly. So that's a little bit about the just kind of resume. Next question also from Phoebe is, what advice do you have for someone looking to make? Oh, sorry. We are actually at the time and we need to prep for one all. So thank you so much, both. If you don't mind jumping in and answering those questions asynchronously, we'll get Phoebe her answer via the dock. Thank you, Emily. Thanks all. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Have a good day. Bye.


This is the key question. Now, who's mission control? Who controls what goes on there? Who's in charge? A famous philosopher said 50 years ago technology is not what we seek, but how we seek Technology is a tool I think if you go to Silicon Valley technology is not a tool anymore. It's God Technology is the purpose of life And so I here I think in Europe we have this belief that we want to remain human and we want to Technology serve us and this is what we have to do. We have to read humanized technology Make it human again


The ARL partnership here in California and specifically in the Los Angeles Basin is unique because it brings an innovative perspective not only from our core base at ARL West, but also our regional ties to the universities coupled with the science and entertainment communities. The Army has challenges for the soldier of the future and when those come to the university our faculty, our students, our researchers get to start thinking about what are the solutions to these really challenging problems and it takes our research in whole new directions. ARL brings me really interesting problems, but sometimes I bring technologies that's looking for a problem and you need a partnership to identify how best to bring technology to solving real-world problems. We want to look at fundamental science, but we also want this applicable to a practical situation. So a lot of practical application will give us some kind of inspiration about what to study, what kind of research you want to do. The team at ARL West has fundamentally influenced the way we approach basic human cognitive neuroscience. The mission critical sort of questions they push us to understand decision-making not just by itself. Decision-making that matters for a life and death matter. We're able to have a real testbed of great experimental research that we can't get anywhere else. Working with arm service personnel is a perfect experimental laboratory for mindset and performance. We can take those strategies, techniques and apply them to any number of domains, be it in business and sports and anything else. Open campus initiative is a unique model among all the DOD labs. It allows us to form informal and formal collaboration without any monetary benefits. It's purely based on knowledge sharing, expertise and also resource sharing. ICT is a university-affiliated research center. We have a focus here on what we call immersive technologies. Those technologies overlap a lot with the human information interaction mission that ARL West has. The mixed reality lab here at ICT It's a research lab that looks at immersion. This can be really useful for training, for doing scientific experiments, working with complex data. There's a number of different opportunities for us to enhance what humans can do. What's unique about UCSB are our strengths, particularly in materials and engineering, in bio and on top of all that we have an excellent extremely collaborative faculty and we can pull these things together that allows us to be extremely effective for the ARME research laboratory. Caltech is part of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies where we've been able to meet ARME researchers, host them here on campus, go out and visit the ARME labs. So I have a post doc now who is here in part because of ARL West and so it allows us to have a more interactive engagement. Having ARL employees and scientists placed directly at universities like this and actually having extended physical sites allows us to draw on these population of grad students that become the next scientists for ARL. We have eager students who are willing to work on impossible things and sometimes they even make them happen. So we have this collection of just brilliant young scientists who are looking for something useful that they can do with their ideas and their technology. By working with people from across the scientific spectrum where that be people who are doing vehicle technology or computational systems or human research, by being under one roof at the ARL West Hub we're able to do this creative brainstorming up front to build projects that are going to be impactful for the future soldier.


Man, I gotta tell you, these first three episodes of television of Zoro have been so well done. One topping off the other, expanding the world that Episode 4 called Revenge makes complete sense in is fantastic storytelling. What do they do in Episode 4? They literally take Don Diego out of the game. Okay, we'd say that it ended on a cliffhanger, that three, you can check out that playlist anytime, guys.  This is full spoiler talk, full spoiler talk. So he's basically convalescing the entire episode till the end. So what does that mean? You give spotlight to all these co-starring characters that have been over the last three episodes. The first three episodes introduced and there's a lot. Okay, let's break it down. So there's the other Zoro, Nalim, who has taken over and she's the one who guts him at the beginning of the episode, thinking he's dead. He's not. She goes on a warpath in this episode. It's basically her revenge. We say revenge, it's hers, the main one, but there's other ones. Nalim takes on the Zoro mask and basically, and not his, it's her own kind of configuration of it, which I think is interesting as well. I'll get to that in a second. It's Civil War she's trying to create with the governor and the Mexican-Spanish units there that run LA. Very cool, very interesting. To where some of the indigenous population of her tribe are following her, some aren't, they are torn, okay? So that is very interesting. But what's different about her Zoro and his, she's killing fools. Exactly. Our Zoro, Don Diego does not. So I find that very, very, very pivotal. A lot of these co-starring characters and what they're doing is going to be pivotal. I see this for the rest of the season. The governor. The governor is an all out evil dude, fantastically played by this actor. And what he is doing is he's testing the loyalty and the limits of the captain. Who's Enrique, who is a good dude and has been established is engaged to Lolita. And Lolita believes he's a good man as well, but we see the captain's limits and him crossing those lines all in the sake of his duty to the governor. And you can see it slowly eating at him during this episode.  What him and the governor do is really heavy duty. So that I found, I find that absolutely great drama, great conflict for our hero to come on through. In fact, he hears about what's going on and he tries to get out of his bed to stop this. And he can. He can. He's not. He's not there yet. There is some good comedy happening with Bernardo and May. May is one who in fact saves Dundiego initially and helps convalesce him. He's healing. She doesn't know where to go. She doesn't know what's going on. All she knows as a, as a, as a, as a concubine, I guess that's the best word maybe to put it is to please, you know, the, the master I want to say or whoever owns her at the time. So there's a scene where she's lying in bed with him. He's asleep. She's just lying in bed with him. I guess waiting to wake up, he does and she's, he's like, what are you doing in my bed? And she doesn't understand that she doesn't have to sleep with him.  But I'm getting a feeling she's going to end up being part of his fighting team towards the end. This kind of feeling, you know, that may is someone not to mess with. At this moment, it's been established that she's been traumatized. She's been saved. And now she's working for Don Diego. I like that moment. Okay. Lolita. I would say out of any of the characters, Lolita has been a little, a little too contemporary, which can be kind of, which can just take you out of the story. And that continues a little bit until she is saved by Don, her and her dad are saved by Don Diego, who's still not 100% but he's, he's able to write off to and save her. And the look she has on her face when he's, when she sees that it was Don Diego saving her is like, Oh my God, I love this guy. There's a scene that follows where she's helping him convalesce in the bed as well. And it's a fantastic scene. She still loves him. She is in conflict because she's still, she does think that Enrique is a good dude. And Don Diego, he can be impulsive and stubborn, but he's also in her eyes, which she says a hero, fantastic stuff. There's a lot to be said about a, a star's charm and looks and Renata Nothney is so well cast in this. She's beautiful, she, she, she can be tough and now she can be vulnerable that you're just buy it. Whereas she was kind of like this one dimensional annoying Tom girl, you know, you know, like the girl power of the, of the series. She still has that dignity, but she's torn now. She's torn and she goes and kind of cries in her mother's arms about what am I going to do? You know, I'm, I'm almost loving both great stuff, great stuff that's going to pay dividends again in later episodes with these sto co-starring characters. So what was kind of a little problematic for me is now solved. I get, I get her conflict. She's got something to do as a character now and hats off to the writers and the directors. Really. These guys are knocking it out of the park with a lot of these characters. Now there's some, there's some tertiary characters that will, will come into play as well. The van der Veen people out of New York trying to come and steal the land. He's hired Hitman. Then there's Don Diego's uncle. What was his name again? Let's get his name. Monasterio. He's coming into town. He's going to try to claim the, the inheritance as well from his dead father, his dead brother. Then there's a woman that we saw for a second with the white hat. She has not appeared at all Cecilia Suarez since that cemetery scene. Now at the end of this episode, there's a ring of fire Zoro fighting Zoro. It is so cool. It is so well done. I love it. And it is, it adds to many layers of what they're trying to, to, to say about what's going on in early California. You got the Spanish Mexican occupation, right? You got OPE. You got outside invaders trying to come in and buy land resources. You got the indigenous. You got the Mexicans. And, you know, Don Diego, as Zoro is just fighting for these poor indigenous people in injustice, that this is getting a little complex, a little heavy. And we're going to see how it, how it, how it all comes out. But, you know, really fast. This episode of revenge called, called revenge episode four. It is wonderful because it, it, it takes what we were giving these last, these first three episodes and it, it, it digs deeper with all the other characters. Fantastic. I mean, and that, that really is kind of some bold vision because two and three are so like pro Zoro, Don Diego, I'm a hero now. Let's do it. Then he gets taken out for an episode of convalesce. Fantastic. But Zoro is back. Our Zoro is back at the end of this episode. So I am looking forward, they're leveling up on the, the, you know, the, the killings, the drama, the, the, the governor just being a total, you know, just he has no conscious when it comes to the indigenous people and when it comes to taking out a Zoro. Great stuff. And this is a, this is an eight out of 10. These shows have been eight, eight point fives out of 10. I'm, I'm, I'm reserving that nine, that nine point five, that 10 out of 10. You know, I'm reserving that, but this is so entertaining. So entertaining. Zoro lives. Let's give you right now. Let's give you the Zoro watch party that I recently did with Midnight's Edge Espanyol. We do talk in Spanish and English, but it was such a fun time talking about episode one Zoro watch party. There you go. Right now, wherever you're at, keep that slant. Muy fuerte. Zoro lives.