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by utku_karatas2 3388 days ago
That's one hell of a pessimistic view if I've ever seen one.

What I see is an brilliantly managed company despite having a globally distributed team, which has a great pace of development, which is carving a nice market share in an extremely tough market (developers) and against a fierce competitor (Github), let alone the other multibillion company backed Bitbucket.

And their radical transparency, as you put it, is a fascinating thing in and of itself. If anything it makes me feel intimate with the company. Hard to put it in words, maybe because I was a rather early adopter but if you follow them closely it's a like you're there on their board with spectator mode on. That's some invaluable experience for HN crowd.

Are we even talking about the same company?!
2 comments
cookiecaper 3388 days ago
Is the company "brilliantly managed" because they still exist? What is an example of this management brilliance? At this point, all the company has proven is that it is able to convince investors to give it money. I see a bloated company with over 100 underpaid junior-level engineers putting out subpar software.

The radical transparency may be a fun experiment and it may provide a lot of interesting data to parse, but it's not a good way to run a real company. It screams of impractical idealism. A lot of companies are bad, but GitLab wants to make sure that you know they're bad from a distance. In theory this is all great and nice. In practice, it hurts the company in both commerce and recruiting.

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aaron-lebo 3388 days ago
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

How do you get "brilliantly managed company" when they just had a massive data loss? How can you say that honestly?

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lox 3388 days ago
Is there a strong correlation between company management and ops practice?
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aaron-lebo 3388 days ago
Especially for small companies, I'd hope so. If management isn't even aware that they've got data backup issues, they're missing valuable information, yeah?

My boss makes sure I backup stuff...and we're not taking on millions of dollars in funding and customers.

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