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Comment by ianamartin | Hacker News Reader

You can tell a company has totally lost their heads up their asses when you get the, "Whoa! We totally weren't expecting <product decision> to upset so many people!"

Like really? Considering what people use your product for, you honestly didn't expect this to upset people? Great. Your product team is hopelessly out of touch.

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That statement is for PR purposes; you can't take it at face value. Let me attempt a translation into plain English:

"I, personally, totally expected this, as did everyone who I talk to on a daily basis. But someone up the chain of command thought we could get away with it, and forced us to try and push this change. I'm going to use the pronoun 'we' to refer to the company in the abstract, and not anyone on the immediate team I work with, because I jolly well can't be throwing my boss's boss, who happens to also be a commisar from the large company that recently acquired us, under the bus."

Which large company was it that recently acquired GitLab Inc.? I must have missed that.

Nah, you didn't. I was mistaken - I thought I had read something about that recently, but it looks like it's just that they raised another round of funding last month.

Funding rounds are changes in ownership structure.

Sure, but that just changes it to "someone up the chain of command is hopelessly out of touch". Still doesn't bode well.

> But someone up the chain of command thought we could get away with it

That person is Paul Machle (CFO):

"I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that." [1]

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...

Ouch, that whole thread under there is painfully oblivious:

> @cciresi if we follow Paul's guidance and just make this part of our terms and conditions, are we covered legally?

Earth to GitLab: You are not yet big enough to be at the "are we covered legally" stage. You are toast if that is your mindset.

When someone raises an ethical question and instead of addressing ethics, the company calls in the lawyers to address whether it's legal... your company is likely on the wrong track.

To be fair I’d say half the time I’m summoned into a discussion like that it’s because the person asking fully expects and wants me to say no to the proposal. Raising an issue with the plan of action set forth by someone more senior can be tricky to navigate politically.

On the other hand, if you need to find a hill to die on, this is probably a good one.

AKA "well it's not illegal," a lousy lower-bound.

Man, that reply in particular left the biggest impact on me. The fact that this c-level exec is making decisions like this in such a ham-fisted way would scare me away if I were a customer. There are a chain of repercussions as a result of this.

Having been in a few of these kinds of discussions inside companies, it's super-fascinating to find one that is open to the public! It shows what is always true: that any "corporate decision", seemingly made by some sort of AI machine, was actually made by one specific (usually unidentified) person. Popcorn moment for sure.

Twelve thumbs down and one middle finger. (I'm not a native speaker of emoji and I'm not sure what the 8 ball means). These are from employees?

I suspect the think was more along the lines of: let's slip it in and hope nobody notices or at least the ones that notice don't raise a hue and cry about it.

And now that it's turned out to be false, the dominant strategy is to offer a half apology along the lines of "We're sorry, we didn't expect that it'd be such a big deal".

Incidentally, it's quite reminiscent of the Grace Hopper quote: "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

> I suspect the think was more along the lines of: let's slip it in and hope nobody notices or at least the ones that notice don't raise a hue and cry about it.

"let's slip it in and hope nobody notices" == "mgmt heads up their asses"

I don’t think that really applies to companies that are still living by the grace of their popularity.

Gitlab is heavily dependent on developers pushing their product to the enterprise, because any executive would be far more happy with Atlassian (e.g. cheap and it works)

> "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

When people use that quote, I try to be charitable and assume that they don't intend its literal, face-value meaning.

But if they do, my response is: I will not forgive you because you're not truly repentant. This is all part of a strategy where you see what you can get away with, and you show no signs of repenting that overall strategy.

Hmmm... maybe I'm a hardass.

That places them on the "companies I probably wouldn't be happy working for" list. Certainly there are folks there who tried to speak up about it who were likely railroaded.

That's the vibe I get on just about every one of Gitlabs new screed posts on here recently. Hopefully there actually is some employee consensus on decisions, though.

As a rule, the structures around product teams tend to discourage asking if it's better to not ship a thing. When you measure a team by what (and how many things) they ship, they are always going to default to shipping things.

This is hitting too close to home. Currently on a team that does what’s on the task list without questioning anything—driving me up the wall.

This is a function of the organization, not the team.

If you hear ‘do it anyway’ after raising concerns one too many times, eventually you just do it.

Not necessarily. It depends on exactly what "it" is. I have quit jobs before because I was required to implement something that I considered an egregiously terrible idea.

The structure thing is spot on. Decisions like this tend to get made when management has found a way to essentially silence any feedback (by making feedback pointless). This is why I cringe whenever I hear the phrase "leadership team". Whenever I hear that phrase deployed it's almost always to diffuse responsibility for a bad decision so no single person has to answer for it. Which amusingly is the opposite of real leadership: real leaders actually accept responsibility for the decisions they make.

This is... insightful.

It brings to mind a larger question of how we (as an industry) should be measuring developer and team productivity, though. “Story points” are largely designed to solve this issue, but in my experience they are quickly co-opted to mean something different to each stakeholder.

At a past employer, I experienced their trying to measure productivity by “net lines of code”. That didn’t work well, either. I prefer refactoring and simplifying to pretty much any other type of task, and it isn’t at all uncommon for me to end a day - or a sprint - with a negative NLOC. I see at a positive, as each LOC carries with it an ongoing cognitive and maintenance burden. Thankfully, that scheme didn’t last long :)

This is absolutely true. It's absolutely what killed Digg with Digg V4 IMO.

I can't possibly believe anyone who ever used Digg could have taken a look at Digg V4 and thought "Oh yes, a feed full of spam, just exactly what I come to Digg for". But the team had already invested a ton of work, and organizationally it would have been next to impossible to say "Shit, we fucked up, lets hold off". So at least I give GitLab credit that they backed off (for now).

Sounds pretty standard operating procedure for product teams in large software companies, actually.

Sad. But systemic to the industry.

Some bonehead got in charge and forced this through. People were screaming internally but ignored as trouble makers. So it goes.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm just making a generalization and am not affiliated with Gitlab.

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