<story><title>What it was like working for Gitlab</title><url>https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/what-it-was-like-working-for-gitlab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cousin_it</author><text>So, he joined as employee #28 reporting directly to the CEO, then gradually more managers were slotted in above him, then one of the managers put him on a PEP, then he got the hint and left. I wanna say this story is pretty standard, and probably a big part of the reason why people in big companies often don&amp;#x27;t do great things.&lt;p&gt;Heck, even if you start a project within a company and it gets successful, the company can just slot in people above you, so you become employee #n in a project that you started, and then these people can say you underperform and so on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwboatyface</author><text>My read is that he was one of those early employees that is a huge pain to manage. They want to do what they think is fun and interesting and they have strong opinions about shit that is ultimately inconsequential. It&amp;#x27;s a nightmare to manage an IC who is friends with the CEO and doesn&amp;#x27;t think you&amp;#x27;re making the right choices. But ultimately they don&amp;#x27;t accept accountability for any decisions, they just move bop around and cause problems.&lt;p&gt;One tell-tale sign is endpoint security and using his own device. It&amp;#x27;s the kind of permissive cultural thing that does not scale because of compliance issues and developer productivity overhead. But it&amp;#x27;s very hard to wrench these long-time devs away from their preferred Linux distribution which requires conditional build stuff everywhere to support. Use a work computer for work, let them monitor the updates and stuff, as long as they&amp;#x27;re not using the webcam to record you who cares?&lt;p&gt;The database backup story - my guy you were on the database team. Backing up the databases is job 1. You can&amp;#x27;t just passive-voice away &amp;quot;oh there were no backups&amp;quot;. But of course he&amp;#x27;s more interested in fighting about sharding architecture than actually keeping the site running day-to-day.&lt;p&gt;His big takeaway is that Gitlab didn&amp;#x27;t spend enough time on performance for their hosted offering which was a huge money loser. Just because he thinks performance stuff is fun to do, if the hosted offering is a money pit of course they&amp;#x27;re not throwing more resources at it. You have to make an actual business case for why your thing is more important and makes money more than another project. You don&amp;#x27;t just engineer in a vacuum for the fun of it.</text></comment>
<story><title>What it was like working for Gitlab</title><url>https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/what-it-was-like-working-for-gitlab/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cousin_it</author><text>So, he joined as employee #28 reporting directly to the CEO, then gradually more managers were slotted in above him, then one of the managers put him on a PEP, then he got the hint and left. I wanna say this story is pretty standard, and probably a big part of the reason why people in big companies often don&amp;#x27;t do great things.&lt;p&gt;Heck, even if you start a project within a company and it gets successful, the company can just slot in people above you, so you become employee #n in a project that you started, and then these people can say you underperform and so on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mawadev</author><text>I have that at the current company I work at. Some manager started a successful project with me and the management is too greedy and busy trying to replace me and the manager by bringing in politics, social dilemma and putting layers of management between everyone. Truly a sad state to be in. I learned my lesson as to why you should never truly care about what you do at work. Feels like the project will rather go belly up and disintegrate because of that.</text></comment>