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GitLab has a strong engineering team. I appreciate this article. For those with experience, what's the best approach to introducing a documentation / "writing u

GitLab has a strong engineering team. I appreciate this article. For those with experience, what's the best approach to introducing a documentation / "writing up a post-mortem culture" into a company that traditionally doesn't value these things?

freddie_mercury 8y ago
Start doing it. Celebrate it. Reward it. Keep doing it. Like all culture changes it isn't complicated, just hard.
rezrovs 8y ago
It depends very much on your current scope of influence. It can be hard to change a whole company, but easier to start with yourself and your team. Try doing one and see how it is received.
dsumenkovic 8y ago
At GitLab we really care about our culture and core values [1]. As freddie said below: "Start doing it, celebrate it, reward it". If you are not sure how to make the first move, I would like to say that transparency is what really pushes everyone forward. Start iterating on transparency, it may be hard but you will see the great results and it will make everyone around collaborate much more. You probably heard of the event [2] which occurred almost 2 years ago - people are still talking about it and we are really happy and impressed to see everyone, including us, learning from that experience. I hope this non-technical suggestion will help you to think about a solution to your question. If your team is not used to this kind of openness, eventually they will like the positive feedback from the community (we see that as a small iteration :-)). A comment section at [2] may be the extra source of motivation. Have a nice day, Djordje - Community Advocate at GitLab [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency [2] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...

freddie_mercury 8y ago

Start doing it. Celebrate it. Reward it. Keep doing it. Like all culture changes it isn't complicated, just hard.

rezrovs 8y ago

It depends very much on your current scope of influence. It can be hard to change a whole company, but easier to start with yourself and your team. Try doing one and see how it is received.

dsumenkovic 8y ago

At GitLab we really care about our culture and core values [1]. As freddie said below: "Start doing it, celebrate it, reward it". If you are not sure how to make the first move, I would like to say that transparency is what really pushes everyone forward. Start iterating on transparency, it may be hard but you will see the great results and it will make everyone around collaborate much more. You probably heard of the event [2] which occurred almost 2 years ago - people are still talking about it and we are really happy and impressed to see everyone, including us, learning from that experience. I hope this non-technical suggestion will help you to think about a solution to your question. If your team is not used to this kind of openness, eventually they will like the positive feedback from the community (we see that as a small iteration :-)). A comment section at [2] may be the extra source of motivation. Have a nice day, Djordje - Community Advocate at GitLab [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency [2] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...