Incident reports are about focusing on the "what" and "when" not the "who". This is not about taking responsibility (you don't need to be published on the internet to do that) and you can always have a follow up post after the incident report has been published as a "what I learned during incident X".
While it's great you're OK with publishing your name, you've now set a precedent that says it's OK to do this to other developers. A blanket policy on keeping names out of the incident report protects others who may not be as willing to get their name of HN (as well as not having to make amendments or retractions if the initial assumptions are incorrect). It also keeps a sense of professionalism as it's clear that no blame is being assigned. I know that you guys are not assigning blame, but if I was to show this to someone outside of this discussion, they'd assume that it was a fingerpointing exercise, which does not reflect well on Gitlab.
Heck, they didn't even say to retract anything from the report, just maybe to leave adding names to things until a later date in future incidents.
"It also keeps a sense of professionalism as it's clear that no blame is being assigned" is not the same as "you guys acted unprofessionally!". It's letting the GitLab guys know there's a potential problem with the communication style at that point in the story.
I find it funny that in a comments section full of comments about allowing a frank learning experience you're being so down on someone giving tips to consider learning from.
Presumably in the coming days there will be a number of team meetings where you discover what went wrong, and what the action items are for everyone moving forward. The public looking info just needs to say what went wrong, how it is being fixed, and what will be done in the future to prevent it from happening again. I don't need names to get that.
Thinking that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way (or an "unprofessional"/"dirty laundry" situation) is quite contrarian to the Gitlab transparency model and their culture. If you don't like their culture, don't work there.
This is also an awesome advert to see how they work remotely all together and I'm sure they're hiring for DevOps people now ;)
/ArmchairPsychology
It appears to be only a couplefew people on HN who have a real problem with it, so maybe temper your generalizations in a way that they aren't.
> Being this transparent only makes me want to use (and contribute to) gitlab even more.
I hope you'll be there when someone doesn't hire the person responsible for their mistake so you can vouch for them.
You don't have radical transparency because the world is not the understanding meritocracy you think it is. There is no value to the employee for having radical transparency in a post mortem.