4 ms·

It is fair game to judge us based on our blog. At the same time it is a free-for-all for employees for blog posts marked Unfiltered as this one is. The author a

by sytse 6y ago

It is fair game to judge us based on our blog. At the same time it is a free-for-all for employees for blog posts marked Unfiltered as this one is. The author apologized in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26555617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26555617 and we've made 8+ updates to the article to reduce the bias https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/commits/master/sites/marketing/source/blog/blog-posts/2021-03-22-we-are-building-a-better-heroku.html.md.erb https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/commits/maste...

fooey 6y ago
That sort of disclaimer is either naive or disingenuous No one knows or cares what "unfiltered" means. My initial take was "unfiltered" meant "straight talk." There's no reason for a casual visitor to have any clue it means "rando blog rant spam." This sort of post on this sort of domain is implicitly endorsed by the corporation and it's malpractice to pretend otherwise.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  It's an admirable attempt to break the stuffy "professional" atmosphere. Let people be themselves, imperfections and all. For that, I applaud the effort. Maybe they want to detract the type of person who places this much weight on such silly matters because those exact types in my experience are difficult to work with.
ignoramous 6y ago
Wow. sytse, there's no one else I know who's your equal in the kind of leadership you show in managing GitLab. The transparency, the honesty in everything GitLab does is truly astonishing. Thanks for letting folks like me who know next-to-nothing about building companies be a fly-on-the-wall from oceans away, watch your meetings on YouTube, go through your plans and processes, observe eng designs and discussions around them, among other valuable career-building things. What you're doing is tectonic, all the while continuing to grow what's already a huge business. Thank you.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  Idk about transparent. They deliberately hid their "open compensation calculator." https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation... That's increasing opaqueness.
  - boleary-gl 6y ago
    GitLab employee here. That was based on requirements outside of our control - and it is still available to employees and candidates. Everything is public by default, except for things that can't be - but we're public about what isn't public: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#not-public https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#not-public
funnygitlab 6y ago
> At the same time it is a free-for-all for employees for blog posts marked Unfiltered as this one is. So you allow your employees to have a "free-for-all" approach when posting blogs to your official company website? So tomorrow, one of your employees can post a "We are now Heroku" or "We have acquired Heroku" or some such post and your response will be to blame the author (even though, as per the records, in this current case you are one among the approvers of this blog[1]) and tell the rest of us that since this blog is in "Unfiltered" section, the readers are to be blamed for taking the blog seriously? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557589

by sytse 6y ago

fooey 6y ago

That sort of disclaimer is either naive or disingenuous No one knows or cares what "unfiltered" means. My initial take was "unfiltered" meant "straight talk." There's no reason for a casual visitor to have any clue it means "rando blog rant spam." This sort of post on this sort of domain is implicitly endorsed by the corporation and it's malpractice to pretend otherwise.

dimitrios1 6y ago
It's an admirable attempt to break the stuffy "professional" atmosphere. Let people be themselves, imperfections and all. For that, I applaud the effort. Maybe they want to detract the type of person who places this much weight on such silly matters because those exact types in my experience are difficult to work with.

ignoramous 6y ago

Wow. sytse, there's no one else I know who's your equal in the kind of leadership you show in managing GitLab. The transparency, the honesty in everything GitLab does is truly astonishing. Thanks for letting folks like me who know next-to-nothing about building companies be a fly-on-the-wall from oceans away, watch your meetings on YouTube, go through your plans and processes, observe eng designs and discussions around them, among other valuable career-building things. What you're doing is tectonic, all the while continuing to grow what's already a huge business. Thank you.

reducesuffering 6y ago
Idk about transparent. They deliberately hid their "open compensation calculator." https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation/compensation-calculator/calculator/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation... That's increasing opaqueness.
- boleary-gl 6y ago
  GitLab employee here. That was based on requirements outside of our control - and it is still available to employees and candidates. Everything is public by default, except for things that can't be - but we're public about what isn't public: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#not-public https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#not-public

funnygitlab 6y ago

> At the same time it is a free-for-all for employees for blog posts marked Unfiltered as this one is. So you allow your employees to have a "free-for-all" approach when posting blogs to your official company website? So tomorrow, one of your employees can post a "We are now Heroku" or "We have acquired Heroku" or some such post and your response will be to blame the author (even though, as per the records, in this current case you are one among the approvers of this blog[1]) and tell the rest of us that since this blog is in "Unfiltered" section, the readers are to be blamed for taking the blog seriously? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26557589