AdministrativeA

Thanks for putting that together, I do remember reading that exchange. I can't help but think this is more than just a single customer tho. I was talking to someone who told me offhand that this was actually decided on by the executive team and the customer didn't say ban hiring in Russia or China. The way they put it is the customers asked about people in Russia or China accessing their data and the executive team came up with this as a solution because they have no technical solution they can put together quickly.

Looks like there's a lot more happening privately that we don't know about and is probably why she decided to resign.

For sure I totally see both points to this but from reading the discussion in the issues it looks like there are several very legitimate legal concerns the executives are ignoring to do this. From what I read her objections weren't specific to if this is good or bad for customers, but if it was legal or not. Seems like the legal concerns were just ignored and they decided to move forward without addressing them. I think she even outlines some steps for things they need to do if they plan to move forward but the executive team just rejected the advice completely.

One other thought: in most companies, you just don't open an office there. Or you lock your data down. But they don't have the technical capability to monitor or restrict access to prod data (their VP said this).

Because they're remote they can't just not open an office there so they have to restrict hiring to keep Chinese and Russians living in China and Russia out. Normally what would happen is you'd hire them but then not give them access to prod data (usually by saying it requires some background check or clearance you know they can't get) or when it's illegal not to give access, just lock the data down. The alternative is probably illegal, but it's the only one that GitLab has.

We use GitLab self-hosted at my company so I've been following this for a while.

My speculation is there's pressure for the C suite to push this Russia and China hiring ban for some reason. Looks like the board is telling the CEO this has to happen or they're in negotiation talks to be acquired by a big company like Google who wants this to happen now and the backlash to have passed by the time it's announced. So this will happen whether it's illegal or not (and it looks like it will and is illegal) but the risk will cost less than the reward.

If they go to court they spend at most a few mil fighting it over the course of a few years and the executives walk away super rich anyway. If they don't go to court they walk away even more rich. But if they don't do it they might rely on an IPO that's looking shaky because of this bad decision making for the past 2 months. So even if it's illegal, it still makes sense to do this. It looks like an exit strategy because they will never be personally liable.

She probably sees this and knows everything going on behind the scenes, but she won't walk away super rich from this but could lose her law license by engaging in discrimination.