It's unfair to characterize the entire organization by one failure, but their data loss issue is not attributable to some obscure, convoluted technical issue or

It's unfair to characterize the entire organization by one failure, but their data loss issue is not attributable to some obscure, convoluted technical issue or freak accident. The simple fact is that they didn't verify that their backup and recovery infrastructure was working correctly. Moreover, they didn't have any automated monitoring confirming that the backups even appeared to be working. Those are things that every moderately-experienced IT person knows needs to be in place and occurring routinely. If you look up the doc, they have like 6 different places where they looked for backups and each point is like "We should have these backups, checking for them now... woops, it hasn't been working." The only reason GitLab's data loss wasn't even more disastrous is that an employee just so happened to take a manual snapshot 6 hours before the incident occurred. Now, I'm sure we've all been in situations like that. I don't think it necessarily reflects on the individual technical employees of GitLab. I think it says more about the organizational and management resources at the top. It was their job to ensure that the appropriate resources were committed to data integrity, and they failed to do so. 90% of us probably work at places with similar problems, but publishing "the secret to [managing technical employees]" fresh on the heels of such a spectacular organizational failure is probably unwise.