Gitlab Handbook's HN Page
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
A lot of companies would never want this sort of thing to be out in the open. But really, why not? I imagine it helps to keep things sensible if you know that a thousand eyes could be trawling over your employee policies. You're certainly not going to be promoting astroturfing or other undesirable activities.
At the same time, you aren't burdened with deciding what to share. Many (most?) companies tie themselves in knots trying to decide what to share, and end up sharing nothing.
Sharing everything means less time spent deciding what to share and more time developing the stuff in the first place.
Personalized analytics and tracking roll-out (including on-prem) was pulled back ~2 years ago[0], they're on another try[1] currently with a heavy-handed hiding approach. Including small additions to release notes[1], short lived and hard to find feedback threads[2] etc...
Including deleting/hiding tickets that get posted on HN[3][4] and contain plans/info that users might take negatively/provide negative feedback on.
[0] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/5672
[1] - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/07/20/improved-billing-an... - "4. operational data"
[2] - https://forum.gitlab.com/t/updates-to-de-identifying-service...
[3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/342078 - "Pseudonymization MVC Rollout Plan"
[4] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28840685 - issue submitted to HN[3] that got deleted/hidden quick.
PS: full disclosure, I've been an active opponent of these changes, as they are illegal in the EU and make it impossible to self-host the service while protecting our users privacy.
There's a reason (many? most?) people are jerks. Being a jerk works.
Companies, being groups of people, are also jerks.
It's a cycle and I can confidently say, working in a company that has used the same approach to win customers over, it's really hard to keep the honest culture going.
Yes, but I would argue that it only takes a few sociopaths to ruin an entire community, by exploiting trust, and doing other things that most other people wouldn't dream of doing.
Might I recommend perusing "Meditations on Moloch"? It will both depress you (since you seem like a decent person) and give you a framework for why and how these things happen.
If there are ways we can improve how we engage with the HN community, myself and our team would love your feedback.
Is this a specific group rather than just devtool founders of IPO'd companies? HashiCorp founder Mitchell is still here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mitchellh
Will be interesting to see if, once stripe goes public Patrick sticks around.
I haven’t used Gitlab, but since this is HN I’ll throw an advice your way anyway: I would LOVE to see a really good code review tool. GitHub has made improvements, but I love reviewable and want at least one of GitHub/Gitlab to have a really amazing code review experience. Things like being able to organize discussions, encouraging better code review etiquette (somehow)… just make it possible for developers to review code.
In both case to be a success you need a complete reoorg or your company. Which makes it unlikely to happen
Given we are so transparent, it seems that most folks who conduct interviews at GitLab expect candidates to have done a fair bit of research in advance of the interviews. So if you're looking to join the Developer Evangelism team, brushing up on our handbook and familiarizing yourself with what we do would be a good idea. That will allow you to come to the interview prepared to frame your experience and abilities through the lens of how we work and the results we aim to deliver to GitLab and our community.
We share details on the process in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/interviewing
One thing I did when I was excited about the Developer Evangelist role: I started writing a document in the open, collecting thoughts what I learned, what I want to do, and which ideas could help this drive forward. Markdown, Web IDE, Git commits. Don't check the commit times, they might be at 3am in the morning from an iPad :-)
https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/tech-evangelism
It was too ambitious, and strategies changed. Still, it allowed me create a single source of truth and define a path forward, preparing for coffee chats and later interviews. I like to come back occasionally for ideas on new content :)
I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?
Very rarely do devs at these companies feel comfortable enough to respond directly, I think, that's natural because most people aren't comfortable representing the company they work for. Usually when you see that happen, it's some coordinate effort internally to get a dev from some team to respond.
https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/marketing/developer-ev...
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
every dev tools startup out there does this.
> I think we’re I’m going is, when we see “Hi it’s Jon/Jane from gitlab …” is it a developer taking time out of their day to respond or is it a full time marketing person?
When you see someone writing "Hi, Michael from GitLab here" it is not always a Developer Evangelist or a Community Relations team member. Everyone at GitLab can join the conversation here on Hacker News :)
John shared this thread with all team members in Slack, and Chad Wooley joined to answer the question how the handbook is built in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043995 Another example is Lyle Kozloff helping answer a support related question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30015461
You will see the Developer Evangelism team engage more often, as it is defined in the responsibilities (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...). The team currently covers PT, ET, CET timezones. I am located in Germany, CET.
> Devrel and evangelist is that a full time job or is it something a developer gets time off to do?
Developer Evangelists at GitLab have an engineering background, everyone has their own experience and preferences though. For example, I feel much more confident in C/C++, Go and Python, and want to learn Ruby on Rails, and Rust.
Potentially there's room to go more into detail in the team members overview: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... - all team member profiles are linked, where more social profiles are available. I'm using 'dnsmichi' nearly everywhere, keeping things simple.
Speaking for myself:
I was a maintainer of an OSS monitoring tool from 2009-2020, and love diving into backend engineering and Ops topics. At some point, I was doing development, community building, support, social media and marketing. And a bit of Developer Relations with speaking at events. This did not work out so well in 2019 in my previous job doing all of that, where other companies have different teams and multiple people for.
Then I saw the Developer Evangelist role at GitLab later in November 2019 in a tweet from Sid (https://poly.work/h/11Rk7Jqw), and toyed with a full time job, switching gears from full-time development to full-time developer relations / advocacy / evangelism. Friends had gone on their adventure too, Philipp Krenn from Elastic has been a great role model.
I made ambitious plans and took many notes in https://gitlab.com/dnsmichi/tech-evangelism preparing for my role, and got an offer to join GitLab in March 2020. It's been an exciting, wild ride in the past ~2 years. Not everything went well - I learned a lot from a comparison blog post discussed here on HN, and keep reflecting on how we can create better helpful content for everyone to benefit. Details in https://www.polywork.com/dnsmichi/highlights/a6f10cbf-515d-4...
I'm doing many things, sometimes too many, requiring me to refine scope and focus on the important topics. For example, 2022 will be a strong theme for Observability and OpenTelemetry, app instrumentation for developers and CI/CD Observability. I've started activities with launching a new community learning website on https://o11y.love/ and feature implementation ideas for CI/CD Observability in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/338943
A general problem in Developer Relations can be the feeling of not being successful, sometimes also called "imposter syndrome". I never thought that it could reach me, though I am reflecting on how to avoid these situations and keep writing my own "diary" / "log" in a timeline what I do. There are often small highlights which can make your day :) I have shared thoughts about it in a blog post which also dives more into Developer Relations activities: https://dnsmichi.at/2022/01/20/how-polywork-helps-devrel/
Hope this insight into my story and motivation helps :)
“Conveying without convincing.”
I think this guide is generally applicable to everyone interacting on HN, not just GitLab PRops, and while considering that I uncovered something I think would improve the value the guidelines.
Lots of online conversations get mired in back-and-forth persuasion, where each side is trying to convince the other of their viewpoint rather than just trying to convey it. This is essentially an impossible conversation to walk away from satisfied, because it’s rare that anyone can be convinced.
So, instead, focus on conveying. Ensure the facts are made clear and point out disagreements. Share your motivations and reasoning. Ask people to clarify when they say something you don’t understand, or could parse multiple ways. Leave disagreement alone, and don’t press it to change into agreement.
This is the toughest thing for anyone to do in conversation (“someone is wrong in the internet” xkcd here), but it’s absolutely the most essential skill and I don’t see it clearly called out. (Maybe I missed it though, it’s late!)
So, I would love to see that concept applied in guideline form. Teaching people to ensure comprehension rather than convincing, and to move on if it isn’t getting through, is the ultimate win in online chat, and I encourage adding it the the guide.
Thanks for the great feedback.
It looks that you don't follow your own advice about avoiding corporate jargon :)
> DevRel
Oh no, you broke the rules!
A bit off topic, but if I would like to introduce such a handbook on my team as well, what technology does it use? It looks and feels so much fresher, clean and responsive than a simple wiki. I see it is markdown files with some CSS, but what engine do you use to build and render the handbook.
Is there a repo that holds the template to set up such a handbook?
Cheers and congrats. Always admired how you kept all your employees engaged with the handbook to not have it deteriorate, but thrive.
However, there's a lot more to it than that, and it's always actively evolving.
There's not currently a page which summarizes the architecture, but there are multiple pages and docs which are focused on processes around editing and maintaining the site. Here is a link which is a good starting point to see what's under the covers and how we use it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/git-page-update/#11-start-...
HTH! -- Chad
I appreciate this policy, it makes it clear that HN is a place to engage with the community, rather than a free advertising channel. Looking at the CEO's profile, the last time he made a submission about Gitlab was in 2018, so I'd say the policy appears to be followed.
Although I doubt we’ll ever reach that point so I’m wondering if there are other small communities around the web that are just more quality-oriented on the content shared (I just go to niche subreddits and mostly HN)
And I'm a member of some slacks that are just killer in terms of content and discussion.
Too bad about the memory hole.
(If you do move it to discord, invite pls :P)
You make it sound like this is a bad thing?
Letting people use handles has been a thing since way before modern gamer and it is probably the only right way if you want interesting people to share stuff.
Some (most?) of the most civil places that exist on the internet - including HN - has pseudonymity.
The only people who thrive with mandatory Real Names policies are:
- people who operate under a false but real looking name anyway (trolls etc)
- people who are squeaking clean by todays standards (and even not all of them because what about tomorrow or next week or next year?)
- people who have nothing to lose anyway or don't realize the problem of Full Name Policies.
> It has so many features designed around gaming.
It works really nice for non gaming too.
I actually agree with that point.
I'd like to mention though that one model I really liked was what the one that Google landed on with Google+: a central identity only known to one entity and then as many pseudonyms as you want that you can switch between but that can only be traced back by the provider, and where they promise not to do it except for good reasons.
Of course these days we know that such promises need to be backed by laws to really be effective, but what a nice idea - as long as the identity provider can be trusted!
Also, when I think of it Telegram has something very close to this if someone wants to test what it feels like. And just like Google+ it is not totally obvious: you first have to create a channel, then you can reply to other groups as that channel. Maybe you must activate something in your channel settings too.
The issue is being unable to have, under a single login, completely isolated identities for each server (or group of servers).
> It works really nice for non gaming too.
IMHO the Discord branding (specifically the copy) works great for a gaming audience but is slightly off-putting for a non-geeky audience (think non-tech business types).
I strongly dislike Discord because it is a proprietary platform. But the off-putting of "business types" sounds like a great feature!
Zulip, Discourse, Element(formerly Riot) / Matrix all exist and are fairly nice. And of course, IRC. Searching works well for Zulip/Element.
Until they pull a Google and either make it not-free, or drop it altogether. It is difficult to have any faith in the long-term prospects of all these services that depend mostly or only on the goodwill of a company.
I actually wrote a piece: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 ( discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 ) about the advantages/disadvantages of various chat/discussion software options.
"Coordinated response" is PR-speak for a company's PR team at best controlling the "message" and who delivers it, instead of half a dozen employees chiming in with "inconsistent messaging". Somewhere in-between: immediately calling/DMing certain employees known to toe the company line / have a good reputation publicly, and who are in a relevant department.
It's severely disingenuous, particularly since people interpret the quick appearance as the employee being active in the community, and never will you hear the employee say "well, actually, our PR team rang my phone off the nightstand and said "shmeddit is discussing _______, please immediately get on Slack to provide a response using talking points to some comments that are coming up."
At worst, it's also a company mobilizing, if necessary, a vendor who supplies an army of users (real or fake) on the platform to comment, upvote, downvote, flag, etc. They even have prearranged topics to boost/suppress, canned talking points, etc.
I think the most visible evidence of this is a certain electric car company, which routinely abuses the DMCA takedown process to suppress videos that are unflattering. Google their name and "dmca video" and you can read all about it.
The same technique has been used by a certain rich playboy who sucker-punched a restaurant worker while someone was recording him without him realizing it, and the video made it onto reddit. The video kept getting either removed by moderators or DMCA'd.
A large number of VHNWI's/UHNWIs have standing contracts with reputation management firms for exactly that sort of action.
Often people post online about their complaints about how a product or service doesn't do x when it does but they haven't found it or its newly added. When the PR team can drop in and give a quick update its quite useful.
I don't think anyone in marketing and PR believes social listening companies actually catch even a significant minority of mentions. The things you get an API or a scrapeable feed out of are drop in the ocean.
Or maybe such services are out of my budget?
Easy, the API allows you to see all the latest X comments/submissions. Setup something to just text-match your name and hit whatever notification endpoint when matching. I think there are services for this that includes HN already too.
> Or YouTube/Tiktok/Twitch?
YouTube often offers captions for videos, otherwise it's not too hard to generate yourself. Apply same strategy as for HN but for YouTube/TikTok/Twitch. If it has sound, you can usually automatically transcribe it.
This also goes for TV shows like news and whatever. There are services that are transcribing every single news show and scrapes the transcriptions for mentions of brands/companies and whatever. You can use those services to see when your brand gets mentioned, and some services even send you a five-minute snippet of when you were mentioned. I'm sure the same exists for basically every single multimedia medium out there.
Neither an API nor a scrapeable feed is required for you to get a scrapeable feed from it in the end :)
I've heard dozens of pitches for such products, but they all end up being either
1) unable to grow due to legal reasons (transcripts are derivative works and thus even creating them, let alone publishing them, is restricted under copyright)
2) pivot to become Yet Another Social Listening Tool with a high-touch sales-heavy SaaS business model. They end up negotiating a deal for direct access to the firehouse feeds with the social media companies themselves, with all the strings attached (completely public content only, sometimes restricted to accounts of certain size, etc).
It was a long time ago I worked with companies large enough to care about a possible TV mention, and the company we used no longer seem to be around.
But, after a quick search, it seems there are alternatives out there, ever tried any of these?
- https://mention.com/en/blog/monitor-broadcast-mentions-tv-ra...
- https://www.criticalmention.com/media-monitoring/broadcast-m...
- https://www.cision.com/monitoring-analytics/broadcast/
- https://www.meltwater.com/en/products/media-monitoring
Yes, you're gonna have to negotiate with them, it's part of doing sales/purchases for/from larger companies, for better or worse.
I saw your message in Slack, GitLab Developer Evangelist waving from Germany :)
Fixed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...
They have 1500 employees around the world, how is Gitlab a small company? :-))
It makes sense on one level; of course a submission has more credibility if someone else feels like the content is compelling enough to share.
But that's a bit like saying "get interviewed by the New York Times (or the Wall St Journal, your daily paper, etc) because that interview is going to have a lot of credibility". Sure, it's nice if you can do it, but most of us won't ever get interviewed (unless you're Corey Quinn[0]).
On another level, the ability to self-promote (a little bit) makes HN better, because it gives everyone a reason to submit and increases the volume and depth of content.
I unapologetically post content from my personal blogs and my employer that I think is valuable (you can see my submission history, of course [1]). I limit it to ~10% of my submissions. I also spend time submitting what I think are high value links and adding comments when I feel I have something to add. I won't say all my submissions have been perfect and I've definitely gotten feedback from the community over the years about some garbage submissions, but I've learned what kind of submissions spark interest and/or commentary.
In other words, I'm acting like a community member, rather than someone who dumps links for traffic and runs.
Of course I'd rather have someone else stumble on my sites/links and post them, but either my content isn't compelling enough (in which case the voting system will weed it out) or it isn't being discovered by people who want to share it (which is the problem allowing self-posting addresses).
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/technology/corey-quinn-am...
Well that's good news, at least
I initially named the post "Mercurial being rewritten in Rust" and that's how it made it to the front page, if I recall correctly, close to the first spot, even.
As soon as mods renamed it, it dropped like a rock.
See ya in a couple hours "Manager, Developer Evangelism".
Honestly the article is business focused but straight laced, seems like pretty good PR for Gitlab.
I agree. I suppose that’s a positive side effect of conducting business so openly. You’ll feel extra responsibility to set policies that are sensible not only internally but also to the general public.
Why doesn't someone just update the bot to post in those channels as well?
Not trying to belabor the point, and I'm sure there are nuances (especially with blog posts), but releases seem (a) likely to continue forever & (b) to use well-formed URLs.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is an incorrect view of HN. The last bit is true, but it's fine on HN to upvote or downvote based on whether you agree with it personally. This was established by pg himself many years ago.
I don't think that controlling your employees' upvote or downvote rights is a good idea. You may want to add an advisory that downvoting a comment about GitLab could be unproductive, but anything beyond that feels micromanage-y.
Address multi-faceted comments by breaking them down and using points, numbering and quoting.
Except when the facets are purely technical, this approach trends toward full defensive point by point rebuttal.
Once the points counting starts, the logic of points-counting becomes part of the public performance.
In general, people don’t like to have their comments picked apart in public because it doesn’t solve their problem. And because it is an aggressive response to what is usually just wanting to have ones say.
It is a tactic better suited to the context of private communications and with the appearance of having given the matter a few hours thoughts. Otherwise it tends to “broaden the front” when done in public performance.
It’s not likely to make HN better. YMMV
As a general form, it implies that the first comment wasn't very clear and/or it's thinking not well organized...while of course showing that the response is well structured thought.
On the other hand, all stakeholders consent to Shisa Kanko in the context where it is used, and the communication channel is strongly bounded. The channel excludes opinions, expressions of deep feeling, and open ended questions. There's no circumspection.
I find that it's much better to just address the general argument and maybe the very major points specifically if necessary. I think bad-faith arguments on the internet have made a lot of people really defensive and aggressive, though. I've seen a lot of people smugly arguing past each other about how they aren't discussing things properly ("you didn't even address all of my points"), and the discussion always devolves to just arguing about arguing.
You must let the cats come to you instead of chasing them.
It might be worthwhile for the Gitlab community team to consider changing https://about.gitlab.com/blog/ to something not tucked away on the about subdomain.
I also realize I might be in the minority of users typing out URLs (no use of bookmarks).
And no, Elon Musk is not a good example :)
But recently I've had (and continue to have... still not resolved) a pretty unpleasant experience with their support software. It just seems like the typical comedy of errors where a series of software integration papercuts between them and Zendesk adds up to a really bad experience, made much worse by the fact that our issue hasn't been fixed which is making us more stressed.
I am a member of multiple Gitlab groups and owner of one. I am simply not able to log in to the support portal to leave a ticket. Then I replied to a zendesk ticket and then somehow I get this message about support entitlement. I mean why not just speak in English? Why use terms like "Support Entitlement" – just say, which org/group are you with? Or just look me up in your database. An email address is unique. So that's confusing.
This roundabout has caused us to spend days and days just to reactivate an account that was locked out due to 2fa (not Gitlab's fault). We haven't even gotten to actually solving the problem. We're stuck on basically "I don't know who you are from your email address so you need to tell me who you are" even though I'm using the owner email address for that account.
I'm sure Gitlab's support TEAM must be great, but it fails spectacularly due to what seems to be flawed Zendesk <-> Gitlab integration itself. Please fix this guys, I know you're on top of everything else. It just feels like a forgotten set of tools.
Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk?
There's a couple of general points though that I'd love to comment on.
> Why can't I just SSO using my GitLab credentials into Zendesk?
I'd love to have this as well - it makes complete sense (especially for our SaaS customers - it wouldn't help as much for self-managed). In order to get it implemented we need GitLab.com to become a SAML or JSON Web Token source. We have an open feature request for that here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/238419
Even with that implemented we'd still have some challenges identifying who should be getting support without occasionally asking for proof of a support contract. As you said, you're part of multiple GitLab groups. It's well possible that some of those are on our Free tier and others on Paid tiers. In some contexts you'd be eligible for Support, and in others you might not be.
Usually this speed bump only hits the first time you contact support. Once you've opened a ticket we'll have you linked up correctly.
Recently I've been working on improving contact management and making sure customers are aware of what they can do to make their first support ticket the best experience it can be. You can track that effort in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/support/-/epics/156
> Why use terms like "Support Entitlement" – just say, which org/group are you with?
We have to consider both our self-managed customers and SaaS customers with our language. For GitLab.com customers naming a path completely works (and is one of the ways you can prove your entitlement: https://about.gitlab.com/support/managing-support-contacts.h...). For Self-managed we have to map account names exactly and need a bit more as some organizations have visibility of tickets between users, in which there may be sensitive data.
I think you're right that it could sound more human. I've opened up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-team-meta/-/is... to discuss improvements.
If you have any thoughts, feel free to participate!
I'll keep an eye on these issues and will reach out at some point. The support entitlement stuff is more about just using plain English language. Most users don't know what that means. I'm the owner of the org and I barely know what that means.
I can think of a couple of projects that I wish they'd followed this policy.
Every time there's a post about [REDACTED], I check the submitter's history, and 9 times out of 10 their history consists exclusively of promotional posts for [REDACTED].
* traffic (which is nice, but not super sticky)
* the comments (which I've found to be insightful and useful in showing both flaws in my arguments as well as additional areas for research/writing)
* the follow-on traffic, as people share it in newsletters, slacks, facebook groups, twitter, etc, etc
A community used to drive interest in marketing ops/acquisition/IPOs up
People at HN know that very well, in fact, very often, the companies that get to front page are somewhat related to HN, very often they are investors ;)
Content is King.
If you have to game the "system", sorry, I mean, provide "social media guidelines" to this extent, maaaaybe your [whatever you're trying to push/advertise/spread] isn't all that worthwhile...? Especially in the "nerd" world, it seems word of mouth will get out without having to rely on such inane strategizing.
I understand that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and other companies/orgs likely have similar strategy pages, but it all seems a bit, i dunno, anti-HN to me.
Overall the policies seem pretty common sense and hands off which is good! Hopefully this community is robust against astroturfing (something I'm worrying about with Reddit)
Additionally, a lot of the rules on the page make it more likely that contributions to HN by Gitlab team members offer good community value.
Edit: to be clear, I wasn't trying to game the system. I was just so excited that the product I'd been working on appeared on a site I often read. Only in retrospect did it occur to me why one would have anti-vote ring detectors. Yes, I was naive.
Also, any large company has procedures for PR. It’s a part of life.
1. Other companies probably have similar strategies but it's behind closed doors to act however nefarious they would like, not open docs that can be criticized here publicly like Gitlab has.
2. The MO (modus operandi) here seems entirely about reading customer feedback and engaging with it. That's like YC startup advice numero uno. They explicitly mention not to submit content or get people to upvote.
Having guidelines can help with this kind of thing. Of course, guidelines that advised a lot of astroturfing or disingenuous engagement would be pretty icky indeed…
It is so easy for an entire company to come off as "tone deaf" in a public forum due to avoidable errors.
Smart people deserve to be allowed to speak in places like HN. GitLab has gotten it pretty darn right in creating a some guidance for such people, AND by making the guidance public.
This document looks less like guidance for gaming a system and more like instructions for being respectful to an influential community, but that's just my read.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
[2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensation...
I work for a company called FusionAuth. Check out my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mooreds which includes my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mooreds/
Cheers!
I hope other companies will follow the sane trend, but realistically this will probably never happen.
In any case, Gitlab's strategy is IMHO a winning one. It's literally embracing the Open Source culture, where you get contributions from people outside your company and help back the community. Good job Gitlab!
The software is OK (the cloud offering is unstable compared to similar offerings). The company though is another thing altogether not a great place to work. This is a pure PR post which is being used to show them in a better light.
I have no affiliation with Gitlab besides I've tried their self-hosted option years ago. But comments like this without any substance behind it leave a sour taste in my mouth. "why is it not a great place to work at?" and "how do you know this?" are the first two questions that come to mind that are the bare minimum that should be added, otherwise your comment is just borderline gossiping.