7 ms·

To me this seems like a huge self-inflicted mess by GitLab. Normal companies don’t make touchy personnel issues public. Things like “we need to stop hiring Russ

by lacker 7y ago

To me this seems like a huge self-inflicted mess by GitLab. Normal companies don’t make touchy personnel issues public. Things like “we need to stop hiring Russian employees onto the support team because clients disapprove”. It’s cool to be so open in an abstract sense, but watching this play out in public really just makes me want to not air this sort of issue out in public when it comes to my own workplace.

icebraining 7y ago
"If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong." -- Sir Arnold, Yes, Minister
- mprev 7y ago
  I want transparency from my government. Would I want an unwavering commitment to do everything in the open from my employer? Clearly people who joined GitLab knew that was the deal and, while I see the point you're making, VC-funded code hosting (plus extras) isn't in the same league as the government.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Is it "no Russian employees" or "no employees located in Russia"? Because there's a big difference here, and the latter is a pretty common policy (and de facto true for the vast majority of companies, even if not intentionally). See e.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/12/google-closes-russia-office-after-internet-crackdown.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/12/google-closes-russia-office-...
- gpm 7y ago
  It's the latter. (Strictly speaking "no employees in <roles that need admin credentials> residing in Russia or China")
  - sytse 7y ago
    Indeed. This is about residence not about nationality. As for making this public we are public by default. But we are learning that anything involving countries needs to be communicated with a lot of context. Countries are a core part of people their identity. In the future any decision involving countries will still be public but the discussion will not be.
    - okasaki 7y ago
      > Indeed. This is about residence not about nationality. The two are so correlated that they might as well be the same, and it strikes me as dishonest to make the distinction.
      - throwawaypolicy 7y ago
        Changing your country of residence when you get a new job is perfectly normal. Changing your nationality is not.
        okasaki 7y ago
        I don't have the numbers of course, but I would imagine the number of remote gitlab employees who changed their country of resistence upon employment to be close to zero, so it's definitely not normal.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        I work at Google and I know plenty of people who moved here from abroad for the job. Gitlab is remote-only though so I doubt they see many job-related moves.
      - mrunkel 7y ago
        They are completely different. It's like saying "we don't hire people in Alabama" and "we don't hire black people". Are those two statements equivalent? There very well may be real reasons not to hire people in Alabama, (I'm making these up).. Onerous regulations, taxes too high, etc. Not hiring a class of people because of what they are is very different. The whole problem at Gitlab is that nobody could articulate a concrete reason to ban people who live in Russia whereas in China they wouldn't hire them because of the Great Firewall and the block of google whose services were important to job functions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
awinder 7y ago
Yeah this, but it's also pretty clear that gitlab has a lot of internal mess to clean up too. Looking at these comment threads it's amazing that people from all over the company just drop in to spout off, lines of delegation are very important in running a business, otherwise people don't stay in their lane. Then there's just generic poor manners / immaturity along with apparently retaliatory behavior. So yeah opening it up makes them look awful for everyone to see, but they also shouldn't just shut down public access because they've got a bunch of remedial "how to run a real business" lessons to learn too.
- AnonGitLabEmpl 7y ago
  It used to be welcomed for anyone in the company to discuss these things. That is still in our values that anyone and anything can be questioned that can be seen here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#anyone-and-anything-can-be-questioned https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#anyone-and-anythin... That isn't entirely true anymore since there is a strong fear of retaliation, so many have chosen to stay quiet.
  - awinder 7y ago
    Yeah understood that it's intentional, but something being intentional doesn't make it a good idea. Once you outgrow a small number of people this is ultimately going to end up being relationship-destructive and a nuisance -- which is what I see all over these threads. But I get that there's certain personality types and people who experienced the good of that system mourn its loss, which sucks too.
- sjburt 7y ago
  Gitlab has clearly been internally out of control for years. If you're a user you're pretty accustomed to reporting a bug only to see it get delayed, ignored. Feature requests are even worse; if it doesn't have some internal champion it will be ignored for years. It's almost hilarious, you will ask your rep for something, they will tell that it is coming, and then you can watch them plead with the devs to complete silence. Meanwhile more half baked features like "Auto Devops" and "Cycle Analytics" are piled on. The docker/runner based CI is barely functional and any serious project runs up against the limitations of it (and the abysmal syntax of .gitlab-ci.yml) regularly.
dustinmoris 7y ago
There's nothing cool even in an abstract way if you're discrimminating people based on race and heritage in a public way. It's called racism and bigotry and the more public it is the more disgusting it is.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  It's also against the law. If GitLab's actions really were as you describe, they'd be in real trouble.
- tracker1 7y ago
  It's not a matter of race, it's a matter of location... GitLab has made the decision to not allow administrative (or any?) roles for those located in Russia or China. It's not about race, from what I can tell. Russia and China engage in state sponsored industrial espionage, hacking and sometimes destructive measures frequently. Of course others have as well, but not nearly to anything resembling the same level and scale. It got so bad at work, we had to block the entire country subnets at our routers. I would also think that most corporations would probably not allow for this. While the recent South Park episodes show a lot of humor, they don't even scratch the surface of how bad things are and how much internal influence and coercion those countries have on their residents. Some of the best programmers I've worked with in my career are expats from China and Russia, including running a dev team out of China a while back, but I absolutely would not want to do significant (software/development/it) infrastructure business with residents of those countries in practice. It's unfortunate in the software development space in particular.
- manigandham 7y ago
  They're not discriminating based on race or heritage. That is nothing but made-up outrage. Limiting access by regional location is something all countries and companies do, especially for sensitive data with complex security policies.
em-bee 7y ago
what i find interesting is that i think this applies to public discourse in general. ideally, we should be able to solve ANY disagreement in private among those affected, without input from those who have no business being involved. reality is that we have public discussions about issues that cause a lot of damage to those actually involved. public discourse prevents people from fixing mistakes and clearing up misunderstandings. once a statement is public, it is effectively no longer possible to apologize for it because there will always be some people who reject the apology and discredit it, when they even have no involvement in the actual issue. this is the problem we have with mass media that doesn't do much solve problems but has a strong influence in driving the negotiating parties apart. there are issues that need to be discussed on a global level, but most of what we are actually discussing does not need to be public.
antpls 7y ago
To me, all involved people in Gitlab are grown-up adults and they know everything is public. If someone wants to publicly bring up "touchy personnel issues", then they know what they are doing.

by lacker 7y ago

icebraining 7y ago

"If people don't know what you're doing, they don't know what you're doing wrong." -- Sir Arnold, Yes, Minister

mprev 7y ago
I want transparency from my government. Would I want an unwavering commitment to do everything in the open from my employer? Clearly people who joined GitLab knew that was the deal and, while I see the point you're making, VC-funded code hosting (plus extras) isn't in the same league as the government.

CydeWeys 7y ago

Is it "no Russian employees" or "no employees located in Russia"? Because there's a big difference here, and the latter is a pretty common policy (and de facto true for the vast majority of companies, even if not intentionally). See e.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/12/google-closes-russia-office-after-internet-crackdown.html https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/12/google-closes-russia-office-...

gpm 7y ago
It's the latter. (Strictly speaking "no employees in <roles that need admin credentials> residing in Russia or China")
- sytse 7y ago
  Indeed. This is about residence not about nationality. As for making this public we are public by default. But we are learning that anything involving countries needs to be communicated with a lot of context. Countries are a core part of people their identity. In the future any decision involving countries will still be public but the discussion will not be.
  - okasaki 7y ago
    > Indeed. This is about residence not about nationality. The two are so correlated that they might as well be the same, and it strikes me as dishonest to make the distinction.
    - throwawaypolicy 7y ago
      Changing your country of residence when you get a new job is perfectly normal. Changing your nationality is not.
      - okasaki 7y ago
        I don't have the numbers of course, but I would imagine the number of remote gitlab employees who changed their country of resistence upon employment to be close to zero, so it's definitely not normal.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        I work at Google and I know plenty of people who moved here from abroad for the job. Gitlab is remote-only though so I doubt they see many job-related moves.
    - mrunkel 7y ago
      They are completely different. It's like saying "we don't hire people in Alabama" and "we don't hire black people". Are those two statements equivalent? There very well may be real reasons not to hire people in Alabama, (I'm making these up).. Onerous regulations, taxes too high, etc. Not hiring a class of people because of what they are is very different. The whole problem at Gitlab is that nobody could articulate a concrete reason to ban people who live in Russia whereas in China they wouldn't hire them because of the Great Firewall and the block of google whose services were important to job functions.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

awinder 7y ago

Yeah this, but it's also pretty clear that gitlab has a lot of internal mess to clean up too. Looking at these comment threads it's amazing that people from all over the company just drop in to spout off, lines of delegation are very important in running a business, otherwise people don't stay in their lane. Then there's just generic poor manners / immaturity along with apparently retaliatory behavior. So yeah opening it up makes them look awful for everyone to see, but they also shouldn't just shut down public access because they've got a bunch of remedial "how to run a real business" lessons to learn too.

AnonGitLabEmpl 7y ago
It used to be welcomed for anyone in the company to discuss these things. That is still in our values that anyone and anything can be questioned that can be seen here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#anyone-and-anything-can-be-questioned https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#anyone-and-anythin... That isn't entirely true anymore since there is a strong fear of retaliation, so many have chosen to stay quiet.
- awinder 7y ago
  Yeah understood that it's intentional, but something being intentional doesn't make it a good idea. Once you outgrow a small number of people this is ultimately going to end up being relationship-destructive and a nuisance -- which is what I see all over these threads. But I get that there's certain personality types and people who experienced the good of that system mourn its loss, which sucks too.
sjburt 7y ago
Gitlab has clearly been internally out of control for years. If you're a user you're pretty accustomed to reporting a bug only to see it get delayed, ignored. Feature requests are even worse; if it doesn't have some internal champion it will be ignored for years. It's almost hilarious, you will ask your rep for something, they will tell that it is coming, and then you can watch them plead with the devs to complete silence. Meanwhile more half baked features like "Auto Devops" and "Cycle Analytics" are piled on. The docker/runner based CI is barely functional and any serious project runs up against the limitations of it (and the abysmal syntax of .gitlab-ci.yml) regularly.

dustinmoris 7y ago

There's nothing cool even in an abstract way if you're discrimminating people based on race and heritage in a public way. It's called racism and bigotry and the more public it is the more disgusting it is.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago
It's also against the law. If GitLab's actions really were as you describe, they'd be in real trouble.
tracker1 7y ago
It's not a matter of race, it's a matter of location... GitLab has made the decision to not allow administrative (or any?) roles for those located in Russia or China. It's not about race, from what I can tell. Russia and China engage in state sponsored industrial espionage, hacking and sometimes destructive measures frequently. Of course others have as well, but not nearly to anything resembling the same level and scale. It got so bad at work, we had to block the entire country subnets at our routers. I would also think that most corporations would probably not allow for this. While the recent South Park episodes show a lot of humor, they don't even scratch the surface of how bad things are and how much internal influence and coercion those countries have on their residents. Some of the best programmers I've worked with in my career are expats from China and Russia, including running a dev team out of China a while back, but I absolutely would not want to do significant (software/development/it) infrastructure business with residents of those countries in practice. It's unfortunate in the software development space in particular.
manigandham 7y ago
They're not discriminating based on race or heritage. That is nothing but made-up outrage. Limiting access by regional location is something all countries and companies do, especially for sensitive data with complex security policies.

em-bee 7y ago

what i find interesting is that i think this applies to public discourse in general. ideally, we should be able to solve ANY disagreement in private among those affected, without input from those who have no business being involved. reality is that we have public discussions about issues that cause a lot of damage to those actually involved. public discourse prevents people from fixing mistakes and clearing up misunderstandings. once a statement is public, it is effectively no longer possible to apologize for it because there will always be some people who reject the apology and discredit it, when they even have no involvement in the actual issue. this is the problem we have with mass media that doesn't do much solve problems but has a strong influence in driving the negotiating parties apart. there are issues that need to be discussed on a global level, but most of what we are actually discussing does not need to be public.

antpls 7y ago

To me, all involved people in Gitlab are grown-up adults and they know everything is public. If someone wants to publicly bring up "touchy personnel issues", then they know what they are doing.