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Comment by Perihelion | Hacker News Reader

Yes, those are the initials of an employee here. Sorry for the confusion!

As much as I appreciate GitLabs extreme openness, that's maybe something that by policy shouldn't be part of published reports. Internal process is one thing, if something goes really bad customers might not be so good at "blameless postmortems" if they have a name to blame.

That is why we went with initials. And I hope customers understand the blame is with all of us, starting with me. Not with the person in the arena. https://twitter.com/sytses/status/826598260831842308

It seems to me that, as a customer, it is blame-shifting away from the company to a particular person. Blameless post-mortems are great, but when speaking to people outside the company I think it is important to own it collectively, "after a second or two we notice we ran it on db1.cluster.gitlab.com, instead of db2.cluster.gitlab.com." I believe this isn't your intention, but that is how I interpreted it.

In our postmortems we explicitly avoid referring to names and only refer to "engineers" or specific teams. There is no reason to refer to specific names if your intention is a systems/process fix.

To me those "Engineers" read as faceless replaceable cogs. This initials make it personal, its better, we can now say "YP" thats exactly you, hey, chin up. Sounds better than "engineering team 42".

You write CEOs name on all your publications, of course always taking credit/glory, but why not let engineers do the same, take credit/ownership when doing a nice commits, and when fucking up. We're all people first, and prefer to speak/talk to people and not Engineering Team MailBox at Enterprise Corporation.

We are all responsible for this, starting with me. We don't blame any person. References to people are just to determine what happend. Also see https://twitter.com/sytses/status/826598260831842308

Yeah, I know, I read your reply. I think it is wrong.

Is your username a Spin reference?

Haha, it wasn't intentional. I'm just a space nerd. That book ranks pretty highly on my list of things every space nerd should read though.

I quite enjoyed it! Also, +1 for space. And Greek.

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