491–500 of 621 posts
Admins have to reinvent that bicycle for decades, stop it now, please!
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I myself initially added my name to the document in various parts, this was later changed to just initials. I specifically told my colleagues it was OK to keep it in the document. I have no problems taking responsibility for mistakes, and making sure they don't happen ever again.
That's courageous but this wasn't your mistake, it was the CEO's mistake. They owe you a vacation and apology for putting you in that terrible position!
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Honestly, if I were interviewing the guy, that would almost be a bonus! Like, everyone makes mistakes, we're all human, but I can guarantee you that THAT person will never make that particular mistake ever again. And he's going to be 10 times more diligent than the average engineer in making sure there are good backup/restore procedures.
There's a probably apocryphal story like this about a guy forgetting to refuel a plane. The pilot made sure that guy was solely responsible for refuelling his plane in future, because he knew he'd never forget again.
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BBC's Horizon has a really good episode about checklists and how they're used to prevent mistakes in hospitals, and how they're being adopted in other environments in light of that success. It's called How To Avoid Mistakes In Surgery for the interested.
Here's the book on this topic- The Checklist Manifesto https://smile.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Righ...
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I myself initially added my name to the document in various parts, this was later changed to just initials. I specifically told my colleagues it was OK to keep it in the document. I have no problems taking responsibility for mistakes, and making sure they don't happen ever again.
That's awesome, but why publicize it? This isn't an act of contrition for you, no one outside your team really needs to see your dirty laundry, and actually comes off as unprofessional to me. The gitlab team is a team, and you take responsibility as a team. Placing names and initials in the liveblog makes it look like SOMEONE is trying to assign and pass off blame, even if that is not what is happening. Presumably in…
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> They really should focus on creating jobs that pays $200,000+ a year, regardless of living location For those who haven't been following along, Gitlab's compensation policy is pretty much intentionally designed to not pay people to live in SF. It's a somewhat reasonable strategy for an all remote company. But they seem to have some pretty ambitious plans that may not be compatible with operating a physical plant.
> pretty ambitious plans I would point you to some very ambitious feature proposals on their issue tracker, but I can't for obvious reasons. I think GitLab is at a cross roads and this setback might be the eye opener they need. Moving forward, they really need to re-evaluate how they develop and evolve GitLab. For both online and Enterprise. This idea of releasing early and on the 22nd works very well for low hanging…
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That's courageous but this wasn't your mistake, it was the CEO's mistake. They owe you a vacation and apology for putting you in that terrible position!
I'm not sure if it's the CEO's mistake, or any specific individual's mistake for that matter. In this particular case many different problems coalesced, producing one giant problem. If it wasn't me, somebody else would have eventually made the same mistake; perhaps with even greater impact.
Tom Watson Jr., CEO of IBM between 1956 and 1971, was a key figure in the information revolution. Watson repeatedly demonstrated his abilities as a leader, never more so than in our first short story.
A young executive had made some bad decisions that cost the company several million dollars. He was summoned to Watson’s office, fully expecting to be dismissed. As he entered the office, the young executive said, “I suppose after that set of mistakes you will want to fire me.” Watson was said to have replied,
“Not at all, young man, we have just spent a couple of million dollars educating you.”
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Yes, good tip from "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet is to use the "I intend to" model. For every action you are going to undertake that is critical, first announce your intentions and give enough time for reactions from others before following through.
"I intend to" is actually a phrased deliberately used a lot during military mission briefings. I always wondered why, I guess it's deliberate.
There's also the distinction between specific orders - "you are to". Knowing the commander's intent, and his commander's intent (known as 1 Up and 2 Up) enables Mission Command, the concept of giving latitude to subordinates to achieve the mission in the best way possible within the confines and direction given to them.
Finally there's the ritual of it, NATO forces expect to operate within multi-national structures where English won't be a first language. There is a "NATO sequence of orders" which should be roughly followed. It means everyone knows the structure of what is coming up and when in the brief - so you don't get people asking questions about equipment when the limitations are being explained, they know that comes later. Opening, especially from a junior officer, with "my intention is" is essentially like having a schema definition at the start of a document - it defines the structure of what is coming for those who are going to be parsing it.