Docker Inc. started like many startups with engineers working from a single location. For us, this was in the Bay Area in the US. We were very office-

Our journey from office-centric to remote-first

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2021-06-20 19:00:09

Docker Inc. started like many startups with engineers working from a single location. For us, this was in the Bay Area in the US. We were very office-centric, so the natural way to increase diversity and to get engineers from different cultures to work together was to open new offices in diverse locations. Right from the start, our goal was to mix American and European ways of producing software, giving us the best of both cultures.

In 2015, Docker started to open offices in Europe, starting with Cambridge in the United Kingdom and followed by Paris in France. With these two locations, the long road to gaining experience working with remote employees began.

Having multiple offices scattered around the world is different from being fully remote. But you still start experiencing some of the challenges of not having everybody in the same location simultaneously. We spent a great deal of our time on planes or trains visiting each other.

Despite the robust open-source culture of the company, which shows that you can build great software while not having everybody in the same room, we still had a very office-centric culture. A lot of the context of a given product conversation or decision was linked to a given office. When you were not in the office where the decision was made, you only had partial information about the decision.