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Comment by semiotagonal | Hacker News Reader

It might have been better to simply reference the discussion without singling out the person involved. At the end of the day it was an organizational decision. It's to GitLab's credit that there's enough transparency to even see this; I don't think it's too cool to turn that into a finger-pointing tool. As a developer, we don't do this with bugs. Perhaps bad business decisions are not any different.

(For the record: I don't know this person, I am not this person, I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone at GitLab at all.)

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I understand your viewpoint, and to be honest I was on the fence about posting names, but I decided to for 2 important reasons:

1. First, the info is totally public and easily viewable in any case.

2. I think there is a danger in just saying "It was an organizational decision." When everyone is "responsible", then no one is. And in addition, both of the people mentioned are senior execs at the company. Having to deal with public scrutiny is one reason they get paid more.

I do give GitLab a lot of credit for being transparent, and for (at least for now) backing off this decision. But I hope they are able to do a deeper root cause analysis of what went wrong. While obviously on a whole other order of magnitude, Boeing didn't fuck up because MCAS was a faulty piece of software, they fucked up because they let financial concerns take precedence over engineering ones.

EDIT: one other thing, since I brought up 2 folks who I think made poor decisions, I should have pointed out Lukas Eipert (@leipert), who was the engineer who originally brought up his strong objections. Even more telling, when Eipert was asked to re-review the code change, he explicitly asked to be taken off the review - his sentiment was clear.

The whole point of transparency is to facilitate accountability, so it does not help to shy away from accountability in service of encouraging transparency. Of course, transparency is definitely something to laud, but it's only half of the ideal.

You're putting pressure on the norm that organizations should be sharing this sort of thing. If the norm were strong, the pressure wouldn't keep people from sharing similar things in the future. But since the norm is weaker we need to be careful to nourish it, not pushing it harder than it can stand.

(I wrote more about this: https://www.jefftk.com/p/responsible-transparency-consumptio...)

This is a person in a C-level position. It's very much inherent in those positions to take responsibility in situations like this. If the comment had been made by a random fellow team-member without any authority, I would have been more inclined to agree.

The difference here is that bugs generally lack motive and agency. Bugs are often unintentional.

When faced with bad intentions, it is imperative that a community name offenders. It is, as others replied, an important distinction for accountability.

A CFO concerned about valuation and experienced in negotiating contracts should be thinking:

1) Fortune 1000 companies and the government will never accept this. I need to make sure the product team is designing a way to allow these customers to shut this off.

2) This is more risk than we will gain from tracking individual customers. We can't afford to indemnify our customers against these third-party tools. How will we address GDPR, CCPA and future regulations if we don't allow an opt-out?

An organisation cannot make decisions. At the end of the day, it is always a person. In this case, maybe it was the wrong person. What is the trouble in questioning this process?

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