4 ms·

Watching GitLab is somewhat painful. I feel like they make every possible mistake you could do as an IT startup and because they are transparent about it people

Watching GitLab is somewhat painful. I feel like they make every possible mistake you could do as an IT startup and because they are transparent about it people seem to love the fact that they screw up all the time. I don't know if I share the same mentality, because at the end of the day I don't trust GitLab even with the simplest task, let alone any valuable work of mine. It's good to be humble and know that mistakes can happen to anyone and learn from it, etc., but when you do in 2017 still the same stupid mistakes that people did a million times since 1990 and it's all well documented and there's systems built to avoid these same basic mistakes and you still do them today then I just think it cannot be described any different than absolute stupidity and incompetence. I know they have many fans who just look past every mistake no matter how bad it was only because they are open about it, but common, this is now just taking the piss no?

egwor 10y ago
I had exactly the same feeling. One of my friends was a doctor at a hospital and there was a serious mistake which my friend reported to the consultant. The consultant made a good point that it was never just one mistake that caused the serious mistake; it was a series of smaller mistakes that hadn't been checked or addressed. (the argument was that there were processes to avoid these kinds of mistakes) If you read the post they also noted that they were also in the process of accidentally removing one of their own employees which make me think that there are other problems going on here. Maybe part of the problem is that I think that the industry has a problem that it isn't willing to learn from the experiences of others? (I feel like we have 'just enough learning' and 'experienced folk who raise concerns are considered stuck in their outdated ways' and 'people who make a silly mistake like that must be an idiot'). I think that since we clump together those that have had formal training with those that haven't we aren't encouraging the value of this education. I'm also fully aware that some self-learned developers are much more competent rather than a college educated developer.
- dustinmoris 10y ago
  I don't actually think it has anything to do with education. I think it really comes down to common sense. Any half intelligent engineer would always first research good practices, pitfalls and existing information which has been gathered from decades of other experienced engineers before doing anything stupid on their own. It seems that GitLab is lacking this attitude.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    > Any half intelligent engineer would always first research good practices, pitfalls and existing information which has been gathered This is all nice theory, but in the end we're all humans. Pretending that you'll never make a serious mistake is just tat, pretending.
    - dustinmoris 10y ago
      True, but no one is pretending to never make a mistake. There is a huge spectrum between never making a mistake and making the most fundamental mistake because developers were ignorant to 20 years of industry knowledge.
      - AsyncAwait 10y ago
        True, but I don't think that they "were ignorant to 20 years of industry knowledge", it rather seems that they poorly understood/implemented that knowledge, which is something that's much harder to guard against and usually takes years of experience to get right. Do you remember all the issues Twitter had some years back? Twitter certainly has better access to top talent than GitLab, but it happens to the best of us. As long as they stay on top of it from now on, I think of it as a required exercise to maturity.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    You can look as hard as you want on the internet, you'll never find any advice or good practice on managing production systems and migrations. The decades of experience are not documented.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

egwor 10y ago

I had exactly the same feeling. One of my friends was a doctor at a hospital and there was a serious mistake which my friend reported to the consultant. The consultant made a good point that it was never just one mistake that caused the serious mistake; it was a series of smaller mistakes that hadn't been checked or addressed. (the argument was that there were processes to avoid these kinds of mistakes) If you read the post they also noted that they were also in the process of accidentally removing one of their own employees which make me think that there are other problems going on here. Maybe part of the problem is that I think that the industry has a problem that it isn't willing to learn from the experiences of others? (I feel like we have 'just enough learning' and 'experienced folk who raise concerns are considered stuck in their outdated ways' and 'people who make a silly mistake like that must be an idiot'). I think that since we clump together those that have had formal training with those that haven't we aren't encouraging the value of this education. I'm also fully aware that some self-learned developers are much more competent rather than a college educated developer.

dustinmoris 10y ago
I don't actually think it has anything to do with education. I think it really comes down to common sense. Any half intelligent engineer would always first research good practices, pitfalls and existing information which has been gathered from decades of other experienced engineers before doing anything stupid on their own. It seems that GitLab is lacking this attitude.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  > Any half intelligent engineer would always first research good practices, pitfalls and existing information which has been gathered This is all nice theory, but in the end we're all humans. Pretending that you'll never make a serious mistake is just tat, pretending.
  - dustinmoris 10y ago
    True, but no one is pretending to never make a mistake. There is a huge spectrum between never making a mistake and making the most fundamental mistake because developers were ignorant to 20 years of industry knowledge.
    - AsyncAwait 10y ago
      True, but I don't think that they "were ignorant to 20 years of industry knowledge", it rather seems that they poorly understood/implemented that knowledge, which is something that's much harder to guard against and usually takes years of experience to get right. Do you remember all the issues Twitter had some years back? Twitter certainly has better access to top talent than GitLab, but it happens to the best of us. As long as they stay on top of it from now on, I think of it as a required exercise to maturity.
- user5994461 10y ago
  You can look as hard as you want on the internet, you'll never find any advice or good practice on managing production systems and migrations. The decades of experience are not documented.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]