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.
I work at GitLab and can shed some light here. As a 100% remote company we work in all timezone. Writing things down actually helps make things more efficient. At my last job, to get anything done I needed to call a meeting because state lived in people's heads. When someone left, of if you couldn't get them to a meeting, it was very painful. It took forever to get things done because you needed to physically be present in order to work. At GitLab because so much is documented it's easy to pick up state and collaborate with co-workers in all timezones. What's cool, is because it's public, other random people will jump in and help you out that you'd never expect since they have access to everything you have.
I've been at GitLab about 2 years. While I've worked remote and on teams with remote members, there is a huge difference when everyone is remote.
I'd estimiate that I am 2x-3x more productive than any job I've had before because of the all-remote culuture. I get to work less and produce more outcomes. Documenting everything and having documentation from others is a major reason for this.
Funny thing, when I joined the team at GitLab over a year ago I was really annoyed by this since I'd been using PR for the better part of a decade. Now I'm so used to saying MR that PR sounds very strange. All in all, "merge request" is a more accurate term and no one ever gets confused about it like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pu... I think it would be great if other tools just called it an MR as that seems to be the term that is easier to understand.
After joining you got brainwashed of course ;-))
It's a minor detail but it's still irritating for me that it doesn't have the same name as in Github. More accurate or not, but Github was first.
MR is much easier to explain to people who are not familiar with git than PR. Everyone who has used at least one version control system knows what merge is, whereas pull is a much less clear term.
Yes, you've touched on a key difference between Jenkins and GitLab in general:
Jenkins: only does CI/CD, needs to be integrated with a suite of other tools.
GitLab: end-to-end DevOps in one application that has native project planning, source code management, CI/CD, artifact repository, configuration management, and observability built-in.
So Jenkins-X Serverless is about the Jenkins service itself running in a serverless paradigm. Or "using Knative to run Jenkins"
GitLab Serverless is a configuration management feature that allows you to build, deploy, and manage your own serverless functions from the same place where your issues, code, artifacts, etc. are. Or "Using GitLab (which uses Knative) to run your functions."
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion about GitLab's business model? GitLab is pretty clear on the homepage.
The business model is to compete in 9 different categories, only one of which is GitHub. (GitLab pricing is also higher than GitHub which makes sense when the offering provides more the functionality.)
> Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediately.
Sounds like wherever you were working before was doing it wrong.
I work remote and no one ever expects immediate email or slack. It is because the whole company is remote that this is the case - you can't have this type of expectation when folks are in every time zone across the globe.
Although I love remote, it's not for everyone. There's a lot to be said for perks like gym, dental, etc. It's really nice that you found a good fit!
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.