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Well… we have a culture of transparency we take seriously. I spent 3 years in law school that many times over my career have seemed like wastes but days like to
by eastdakota 11mo ago
Well… we have a culture of transparency we take seriously. I spent 3 years in law school that many times over my career have seemed like wastes but days like today prove useful. I was in the triage video bridge call nearly the whole time. Spent some time after we got things under control talking to customers. Then went home. I’m currently in Lisbon at our EUHQ. I texted John Graham-Cumming, our former CTO and current Board member whose clarity of writing I’ve always admired. He came over. Brought his son (“to show that work isn’t always fun”). Our Chief Legal Officer (Doug) happened to be in town. He came over too. The team had put together a technical doc with all the details. A tick-tock of what had happened and when. I locked myself on a balcony and started writing the intro and conclusion in my trusty BBEdit text editor. John started working on the technical middle. Doug provided edits here and there on places we weren’t clear. At some point John ordered sushi but from a place with limited delivery selection options, and I’m allergic to shellfish, so I ordered a burrito. The team continued to flesh out what happened. As we’d write we’d discover questions: how could a database permission change impact query results? Why were we making a permission change in the first place? We asked in the Google Doc. Answers came back. A few hours ago we declared it done. I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate. I sent a draft to Michelle, who’s in SF. The technical teams gave it a once over. Our social media team staged it to our blog. I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did. That was the process.
- anurag 11mo agoAppreciate the extra transparency on the process.
- philipgross 11mo agoYou call this transparency, but fail to answer the most important questions: what was in the burrito? Was it good? Would you recommend?
- eastdakota 11mo agoChicken burrito from Coyo Taco in Lisbon. I am not proud of this. It’s worse than ordering from Chipotle. But there are no Chipotle’s in Lisbon… yet.
- luckys 11mo agoThere's a lot of good food places in Lisbon that you might not be familiar with yet. Enjoy your stay
- dentemple 11mo agoI DON'T see this as transparency. There is ZERO mention of the burrito in the post-mortem document itself. 0/10, get it right the first time, folks. (/s)
- jofzar 11mo ago> I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did Damn corporate karma farming is ruthless, only a couple minute SLA before taking ownership of the karma. I guess I'm not built for this big business SLA.
- dentemple 11mo agoWe're in a Live Fast Die Young karma world. If you can't get a TikTok ready with 2 minutes of the post modem drop, you might as well quit and become a barista instead.
- ynx0 11mo agoHow do you guys handle redaction? I'm sure even when trusted individuals are in charge of authoring, there's still a potential of accidental leakage which would probably be best mitigated by a team specifically looking for any slip ups. Thanks for the insight.
- eastdakota 11mo agoTeam has a good sense, typically. In this case, the names of the columns in the Bot Management feature table seemed sensitive. The person who included that in the master document we were working from added a comment: “Should redact column names.” John and I usually catch anything the rest of the team may have missed. For me, pays to have gone to law school, but also pays to have studied Computer Science in college and be technical enough to still understand both the SQL and Rust code here.
- noname120 11mo agoCould you elaborate a bit on how going to law school helped? Was it because it made it easier for you to communicate and align with your CLO?
- tinfoil3843 10mo agoProbably because he could check legalities of a release himself without council. It is probably equivalent to educating yourself on your rights and laws so if you get pulled over by a cop who may try to do things that you can legally refuse, you can say no.
- richardlblair 11mo agoA very human and authentic response. Love to see it. Fantastic for recruiting, too.
- anitil 11mo ago> He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did I'd consider applying based on this alone
- realaaa 11mo agothat's very cool, thanks
- jeffrallen 11mo agoA postmortem postmortem, I love it. Transparency to the power of 2.
- tuetuopay 11mo ago> I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate. I'm so jealous. I've written postmortems for major incidents at a previous job: a few hours to write, a week of bikeshedding by marketing and communication and tech writers and ... over any single detail in my writing. Sanitizing (hide a part), simplifying (our customers are too dumb to understand), etc, so that the final writing was "true" in the sense that it "was not false", but definitely not what I would call "true and accurate" as an engineer.
- auto 11mo agoI'm not sure I've ever read something from someone so high up in a company that gave me such a strong feeling for "I'd like to work for these people". If job posts could be so informal and open ended, this post could serve as one in the form of a personality fit litmus test.
- tinfoil3843 10mo agoI really appreciate this level of transparency. Thank you for being a good person in such a powerful position in the world.