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Comment by cjbprime | Hacker News Reader

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cjbprime

Yes, seems a little tone-deaf to publish a puff piece about GitLab at the moment.

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Why? It's not a puff piece boasting about their backup plans, they're talking about their remote work strategy.

What's tone-deaf is the vitriol some people are spilling in this thread.

Spot on

Thanks, I really appreciate that! But to be honest I don't think it's vitriol so much as that people rightly expect better from us.

Some of the reactions are understandable, but I expect most people on HN to be able to separate unrelated issues like these. Some of the comments here are absolutely unnecessarily hostile.

Not that this excuses anything, but maybe it'll help explain it: This interview was recorded a little while before the incident when we were unaware of some of the issues we have in process. Now that we're aware, we are working on correcting these things.

But you're right, the timing of this piece was probably not ideal.

Not ideal perhaps but on the other hand one bad mistake doesn't negate everything you do or say forever that would be extremely unforgiving.

...and it's not like any large web company hasn't had some howlers over the years.

> This interview was recorded a little while before the incident when we were unaware of some of the issues we have in process.

Could you elaborate? I recently heard about GitLab probably less than a week ago and was under the impression they're a great company to work for.

She's referring to issues in the backup process specifically, not in the company culture (which IMO is pretty good).

When I say process, I mean some of our operational processes like making sure backups work. There was an incident with data loss last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13537052

Like any company, we have our own business operations issues too but it's still one of the best jobs I've ever had. We're pretty open about our flaws, to the point where the CEO even has a page that lists his out: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/ceo-pref...

Read The Checklist Manifesto if you haven't already. Short book, leaves a big impression.

Companies are run by people and consequently they're fallible. Every company makes mistakes occasionally. Gitlab handled theirs incredibly well. A more opaque company would have kept the problem, and the experience they earned handling it, to themselves. Gitlab's openness means we can all learn a little from their event. I think that's great. I wish more companies shared more when these things happen.

> A more opaque company would have kept the problem, and the experience they earned handling it, to themselves.

I liked their transparency a lot too! But it's neither possible nor acceptable to keep six hours of data loss and eighteen hours of continuous downtime "to yourself".

Agreed. It seems that HN did delay this a bit, but they probably should've given it at least a few more weeks.

Marketing 101. Flood negative with positive.

That was not our intention. This piece was recorded before the outage. We should asked to delay publication until after the postmortem was published. That would be the marketing 101 lesson, first show you corrected your mistake instead of talking about something else.

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