Everyone deserves a chance to be better. I hope more people convicted of crimes are able to get the opportunity to build a better life for themselves. And I hope more employers are inclined to give those opportunities.
It looks from the outside like the opposite - you changed the policy explicitly so you can refuse to deal with organisations whose ideas and opinions you're not receptive to.
Worse, it looks like you just reversed direction because the Register made fun of you. You went from being willing to work with all organisations to reserving the right to drop any organisation on a whim. I wonder, what does Gitlab believe exactly?
You aren't the CEO but apparently the actual CEO lets you set global sales policy, so perhaps you can illustrate with some examples how your new-new policy will work.
I ask because the edited policy looks more like a personal speech code than something designed for companies. Do software development organisations routinely "encourage violence towards protected groups"? They don't, in my experience. So which organisations did you have in mind when writing it? Who exactly will you refuse to do business with now who would have been served before? You list some categorisations that look quite vague and state it's not a full list.
For example, in recent times certain political factions have argued that immigration control is violence against protected groups: can you clarify if you do/would sell Gitlab to ICE?
Honestly, you could submit and merege request to our handbook to change global sales policy and tag our CEO to review and merge if he agrees :) Admittedly, this is a unique way to run a company. Other companies are limited by only getting ideas from a small group of people that are directors and executives. At GitLab we understand that good ideas can come from anywhere and we embrace that.
I get where you're trying to go with this, but a core value of 'iteration' just means you don't have any values. Any value you may claim to have can be 'iterated' at any time into the polar opposite, which makes any statement of what GitLab believes as a group to be worthless. You should accept that your organisation stands for nothing. It's not so bad. Most people work for such firms.
Ultimately the values of a company must come from the CEO, as he is the only person who can enforce them. Your CEO can and does decide what the policy is, the fact that he uses PRs to do so is a distraction. But it appears he either doesn't know what he believes or his beliefs are so weak that criticism from some random journalist or marketing woman is sufficient to change them completely.
We currently use GitHub. Microsoft isn't perfect but its position on selling to customers is pretty well established: they sell to anyone who uses computers, and always have. Satya Nadella does not reverse his companies policies because someone filed a pull request. This is reassuring. I don't want to ever be in a situation where Chrissie Buchanan, a blog writer of no importance at all, gets to influence our business relationships because who the hell knows when she might decide that her personal "values" don't include doing business with us? What even are her values? She refuses to explain when asked: just more evidence GitLab makes it up as it goes along.
I have nothing against your software. Other than the fact you're a distributed company and make a GitHub competitor, I didn't know much or have any opinions about you before this incident. But frankly this looks astonishingly unprofessional. Businesses want certainty and you give none.
For those who are a little confused about the no politics at work thing...
If you read the policy we link to about politics, we mention people talking politics during coffee chats, 1-on-1s, etc, but as a general rule we don't lead with those topics.
We focus on inclusion, and we have been very successful at that by respecting others and making work a collaborative, judgment free place. As someone who sometimes has the minority opinion I have absolutely loved this policy, and I feel closer and more accepted by my colleagues as a result.
what marketing firm do you work for? Oh you're literally the content marketer for gitlab lol (as per your comment history). you're literally getting paid to say this.
Fair point. I disagree. I’ve worked with plenty of sincere and reasonable marketers. None of them have shilled publicly under their own name when they weren’t sincere. Startups are on the above average side of hard working and thoughtful people, in my experience. If you want to shit on marketers, go ahead.
Hi, the content marketer here. I'm just quoting the presentation we gave at Google Cloud Next '19 almost exactly. Instead of making you watch a 30+ minute video, I outlined the core points from the presentation so that you could still be in the loop.
While I don't take offense to your comment, I think you made it for a reason. It's an ad hominem fallacy. These are our staff engineer's words almost to the letter, if I had posted it in his name would you have taken it at face value? I think it's important for us to ask these questions of ourselves and analyze why we form certain opinions.
That said, I do appreciate the feedback, and thank you for your comments. I'll try to keep your opinions in mind with future posts as I certainly never want to come off as having an "agenda." We're not running some BuzzGitFeedLab mill here :) .
I thought Andrew gave a wonderful presentation, and yes, we do use Pingdom as a tool to measure these things.
