I don't think they were using this as justification or explanation in their eventual reversal. I think they provided these quotes as interesting tidbits. Kind of like pull-out quotes on an article. You can ignore them entirely and still get the gist of the post.
On a more general note: It's got to be incredibly hard to do what GitLab does with their extreme transparency. I feel like we have to be careful about reading too deeply into things and nitpicking their culture or process. HN is full of "expert" advice, much of it being terrible. They weighed their options, invited feedback, then made a decision.
I appreciate what GitLab does in being so transparent. None of us are owed explanations or insight into how they operate, yet they go out of their way to provide it. Kudos to syste and his team!
Thanks. The most useful advice was shared in private. People coming to our office to share war stories of regretting moving to bare metal. I also received dozens of people sending direct messages via twitter because they couldn't share their stories publicly. Some of the best advice are things that we can't share publicly. For example a major company going bare-metal and then spending a lot of time to set up an authorization system that you get for free with AWS IAM.
Did you have to sign a NDA? Because if people send you random advice via email after reading a blog post then this sounds to me very much like "publicly sharing" their experience...
I disagree. It's a private email. Gitlab can ask permission to post, but it would be impolite and perhaps unethical to assume a private email is now "public". If they wanted it public, they could have chosen to provide a comment on HN, Twitter, etc.
Exactly, everything is private unless it was posted in public by the author or explicit permission was given. We have a transparency value, but we understand that other organizations are different. And even we assume that our private communication will stay private.
Apparently according to syste some of the best arguments came from emails, so he could have put those arguments anonymised and trimmed down to the main points into the blog post, which would have respected the company's privacy while still sharing good arguments, unless there was a NDA which would prohibit that.
So I disagree with you, because you look at this very black and white while the reality is grey.
On a more general note: It's got to be incredibly hard to do what GitLab does with their extreme transparency. I feel like we have to be careful about reading too deeply into things and nitpicking their culture or process. HN is full of "expert" advice, much of it being terrible. They weighed their options, invited feedback, then made a decision.
I appreciate what GitLab does in being so transparent. None of us are owed explanations or insight into how they operate, yet they go out of their way to provide it. Kudos to syste and his team!