I'm old enough to have made some serious mistakes on the job over the years. Thankfully, the worst ones were when I was much younger, but I know that I could still make a worse one before I retire.
Here's what impresses me about Gitlab: They not only say they're committed to honesty and transparency, they actually practice it.
It's easy to see this as some cynical PR move, but to me it's refreshing that they have addressed specifically what happened to the employee who made the error. It makes me believe that they are working very hard on fixing their practices to ensure this kind of failure won't happen again, and I trust they will share (as @syste said in this thread) what those changes are once they have it sorted out.
"Oh, how naive you are!" some may say, to which I respond, "Oh, how cynical and inexperienced you are!" Human failure is inevitable. Designing systems (whether in code or in management practices) that tolerate this inevitable failure is very difficult.
This sort of event can be the catalyst for tearing out what didn't work and creating a much stronger foundation for the future, but only if blame is set aside and honesty is allowed to prevail in the "after action" analysis. Call it PR if you like, but I see a healthy desire to deal with what actually happened and fix it rather than falling into the trap of pointlessly assigning blame.
Consider that it took congressional hearings and someone with the chutzpah of Richard Feynman for NASA to own up to the shuttle explosion. A far worse event, with far worse consequences, but the aftermath of those events and NASA's complete unwillingness to hold itself accountable and deal with reality cost it a lot of credibility.
Here's what impresses me about Gitlab: They not only say they're committed to honesty and transparency, they actually practice it.
It's easy to see this as some cynical PR move, but to me it's refreshing that they have addressed specifically what happened to the employee who made the error. It makes me believe that they are working very hard on fixing their practices to ensure this kind of failure won't happen again, and I trust they will share (as @syste said in this thread) what those changes are once they have it sorted out.
"Oh, how naive you are!" some may say, to which I respond, "Oh, how cynical and inexperienced you are!" Human failure is inevitable. Designing systems (whether in code or in management practices) that tolerate this inevitable failure is very difficult.
This sort of event can be the catalyst for tearing out what didn't work and creating a much stronger foundation for the future, but only if blame is set aside and honesty is allowed to prevail in the "after action" analysis. Call it PR if you like, but I see a healthy desire to deal with what actually happened and fix it rather than falling into the trap of pointlessly assigning blame.
Consider that it took congressional hearings and someone with the chutzpah of Richard Feynman for NASA to own up to the shuttle explosion. A far worse event, with far worse consequences, but the aftermath of those events and NASA's complete unwillingness to hold itself accountable and deal with reality cost it a lot of credibility.
Good on you, Gitlab.