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GitLab's CFO was kind enough to leave public evidence of his incompetence: "I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition o

by ohazi 7y ago

GitLab's CFO was kind enough to leave public evidence of his incompetence: "I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that." [1] In the previous thread people were referring to the HiPPO problem (Highest Paid Person's Opinion). I'm willing to bet that it's the same story at Ubiquity. But despite occasional backpedaling, there are rarely any real consequences for the irredeemably stupid managers who push for crap like this. Unfortunately, that's probably the only way to make it stop. In my opinion, if the outcry is bad enough for a company to backpedal on a decision like this, then it's already bad enough that they should fire the manager responsible for making the decision in the first place. These aren't line employees. The company doesn't pay them more than everybody else for fun -- they're paid to understand the business well enough to know better. People in these positions tend to be natural risk takers. If there are never real consequences, they're going to continue to bet anything they can get their hands on for a shot at personal gain, and the company and their customers are going to foot the bill. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#note_203849107 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...

dylz 7y ago
In [1] it's even worse that you have Gitlab's "VP of Legal" and "Director of Global Risk and Compliance" chasing after the CFO's comments telling him that's illegal. That seems kind of messed up to an outsider, like the CFO is completely disregarding and ignoring critical staff that know more than he does in specific regulated fields.
- nkrisc 7y ago
  > In [1] it's even worse that you have Gitlab's "VP of Legal" and "Director of Global Risk and Compliance" chasing after the CFO's comments telling him that's illegal. That doesn't shock me though, and I would say is expected. After all, it's their job to know what's legal and watch over the decisions the company makes.
ploxiln 7y ago
Don't penalize GitLab too harshly for having public issues and discussion. The obvious fix will be to just not have all this public, which is what all other companies of non-trivial size do. I think the CFO's comment was illuminating, but not really worse than I would expect from any misc C-level in any industry.
- ohazi 7y ago
  That's a very valid point, and I don't want to go too overboard in my criticism. However I don't think my assessment is wrong. If he really was the one pushing for this decision then I think he should be fired. It's not just about getting it so wrong when he should have known better, it's about ignoring all of the internal push-back from employees who were trying to prevent him from fucking it up the first place. Bullies in the C-suite should be removed. > but not really worse than I would expect from any misc C-level in any industry. This is my take as well, unfortunately, but I think it needs to change. There are loads of competent people who can perform these executive jobs. The bar should be higher.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I don’t think making an executive decision is necessarily “bullying.” The nice thing about public comments and development is that you would see some non-hypothetical evidence of such action. I don’t think it’s unnatural for an OSS product dev team to think this way. I don’t like that they implemented it, but I think it’s positive they rolled it back. Firing a CEO for such a situation will result in worse software, I think. It won’t make the next CEO less likely to make a dumb mistake. But it will make them less likely to be public or to roll back changes. If the consequence of a fairly minor mistake (given GitLab’s history of super smart decisions in the past 10 years) is firing, then management will make sure nothing is ever considered a mistake again.
    - DoctorOetker 7y ago
      >then management will make sure nothing is ever considered a mistake again. but it's ultimately the customers who decide if something was a mistake by switching to different products... hence company foots the bill
Spooky23 7y ago
The CFO isn’t incompetent. You agree to all sorts of awful terms by default, including automatic acceptance of changes, severability, etc. It’s less obvious with GitLab given the nature of the business, but in most cases the vendor has the power in the relationship and can basically tell the customer to fuck off. Where are you going to go, Github? Same deal with Ubnt. Their core consumer market is WiFi. The competitors are Google, Amazon, Spectrum/Comcast/etc, and a bunch of random companies. Backpedaling is dumb — they are better off letting the angry internet people spew for a few weeks. If you care about privacy, you’re not buying Google WiFi or Eero.
- ohazi 7y ago
  There are companies like Oracle where you pay them boatloads of cash despite knowing that their business is designing new and innovative ways to screw you. The decision to give money to companies like these are almost never technical... it's political or driven by fear or incompetence. Then there are companies like GitLab and Ubiquity. Most of their customers give them money because someone on the engineering team is discerning, persuasive, and trusted by management. These companies are not capable of pulling an Oracle without losing a significant amount of business, and everybody in the C-suite needs to understand this. Deciding to implement telemetry because everybody else is doing it is not going to fly here.
myrandomcomment 7y ago
If you fired every manager that every made a bad call because of some lack of understanding then every company would be empty. Everyone screws up due to a lack of understanding at some point. The key is how they react and course correct. The ability to make the decision and re-evaluate as needed is the reason they are are in the role they are in. Having been a IC, MTS, Manager and Exec I can tell you it is not always simple to transfer your views as an individual contributor up the stack when faces with choices that effect the bottom line of the business. On the face of it saying "hey we should auto collect crash data" seems like a reasonable thought process. I am happy with how they handled this. I recommend their products. I have them installed at work and at home. A few weeks ago I sent an email to them about getting an RMA for something that is clearly their issue. The support person was unhelpful. Lucky someone else reviewed my quite strong reply and said, please RMA it. I plan to do so tomorrow (I have been traveling for 30 days so..). Lets see what happens. No company is perfect. Most suck. So far over the last 5 years I have been over all happy with Ubiquity.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  They are violating the GPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432134 They might offer good products, but they're benefiting from the work of thousands of other people, improve on it and don't give back. If you think this is fine then I guess so is Chinese companies stealing western IP.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    If they're violating the GPL, and no one sues them for it, why should I care? Clearly the rights holders don't.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Ubelievable honestly. While I have a high opinion on Gitlab and am sure they will rectify this error, a CFO should know the audience of the products they offer. These statements endanger the success of the whole company. I would think a CFO should keep that in mind. At that paygrade I would expect nothing less.

by ohazi 7y ago

dylz 7y ago

In [1] it's even worse that you have Gitlab's "VP of Legal" and "Director of Global Risk and Compliance" chasing after the CFO's comments telling him that's illegal. That seems kind of messed up to an outsider, like the CFO is completely disregarding and ignoring critical staff that know more than he does in specific regulated fields.

nkrisc 7y ago
> In [1] it's even worse that you have Gitlab's "VP of Legal" and "Director of Global Risk and Compliance" chasing after the CFO's comments telling him that's illegal. That doesn't shock me though, and I would say is expected. After all, it's their job to know what's legal and watch over the decisions the company makes.

ploxiln 7y ago

Don't penalize GitLab too harshly for having public issues and discussion. The obvious fix will be to just not have all this public, which is what all other companies of non-trivial size do. I think the CFO's comment was illuminating, but not really worse than I would expect from any misc C-level in any industry.

ohazi 7y ago
That's a very valid point, and I don't want to go too overboard in my criticism. However I don't think my assessment is wrong. If he really was the one pushing for this decision then I think he should be fired. It's not just about getting it so wrong when he should have known better, it's about ignoring all of the internal push-back from employees who were trying to prevent him from fucking it up the first place. Bullies in the C-suite should be removed. > but not really worse than I would expect from any misc C-level in any industry. This is my take as well, unfortunately, but I think it needs to change. There are loads of competent people who can perform these executive jobs. The bar should be higher.
- prepend 7y ago
  I don’t think making an executive decision is necessarily “bullying.” The nice thing about public comments and development is that you would see some non-hypothetical evidence of such action. I don’t think it’s unnatural for an OSS product dev team to think this way. I don’t like that they implemented it, but I think it’s positive they rolled it back. Firing a CEO for such a situation will result in worse software, I think. It won’t make the next CEO less likely to make a dumb mistake. But it will make them less likely to be public or to roll back changes. If the consequence of a fairly minor mistake (given GitLab’s history of super smart decisions in the past 10 years) is firing, then management will make sure nothing is ever considered a mistake again.
  - DoctorOetker 7y ago
    >then management will make sure nothing is ever considered a mistake again. but it's ultimately the customers who decide if something was a mistake by switching to different products... hence company foots the bill

Spooky23 7y ago

The CFO isn’t incompetent. You agree to all sorts of awful terms by default, including automatic acceptance of changes, severability, etc. It’s less obvious with GitLab given the nature of the business, but in most cases the vendor has the power in the relationship and can basically tell the customer to fuck off. Where are you going to go, Github? Same deal with Ubnt. Their core consumer market is WiFi. The competitors are Google, Amazon, Spectrum/Comcast/etc, and a bunch of random companies. Backpedaling is dumb — they are better off letting the angry internet people spew for a few weeks. If you care about privacy, you’re not buying Google WiFi or Eero.

ohazi 7y ago
There are companies like Oracle where you pay them boatloads of cash despite knowing that their business is designing new and innovative ways to screw you. The decision to give money to companies like these are almost never technical... it's political or driven by fear or incompetence. Then there are companies like GitLab and Ubiquity. Most of their customers give them money because someone on the engineering team is discerning, persuasive, and trusted by management. These companies are not capable of pulling an Oracle without losing a significant amount of business, and everybody in the C-suite needs to understand this. Deciding to implement telemetry because everybody else is doing it is not going to fly here.

myrandomcomment 7y ago

If you fired every manager that every made a bad call because of some lack of understanding then every company would be empty. Everyone screws up due to a lack of understanding at some point. The key is how they react and course correct. The ability to make the decision and re-evaluate as needed is the reason they are are in the role they are in. Having been a IC, MTS, Manager and Exec I can tell you it is not always simple to transfer your views as an individual contributor up the stack when faces with choices that effect the bottom line of the business. On the face of it saying "hey we should auto collect crash data" seems like a reasonable thought process. I am happy with how they handled this. I recommend their products. I have them installed at work and at home. A few weeks ago I sent an email to them about getting an RMA for something that is clearly their issue. The support person was unhelpful. Lucky someone else reviewed my quite strong reply and said, please RMA it. I plan to do so tomorrow (I have been traveling for 30 days so..). Lets see what happens. No company is perfect. Most suck. So far over the last 5 years I have been over all happy with Ubiquity.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
They are violating the GPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21432134 They might offer good products, but they're benefiting from the work of thousands of other people, improve on it and don't give back. If you think this is fine then I guess so is Chinese companies stealing western IP.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  If they're violating the GPL, and no one sues them for it, why should I care? Clearly the rights holders don't.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Ubelievable honestly. While I have a high opinion on Gitlab and am sure they will rectify this error, a CFO should know the audience of the products they offer. These statements endanger the success of the whole company. I would think a CFO should keep that in mind. At that paygrade I would expect nothing less.