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rhblake | 6 years ago

No need to speculate, it's right there in the GitLab issue. The now-resigned director of risk and global compliance Candice Ciresi wrote this six days ago [0]:

"The countries selected were not chosen because of legal requirements, they were not chosen based on risk, they were not chosen based on political climate (as other countries are facing heightened sanctions from the US). I do hope they were not selected because a customer asked for it - or that could violate anti-boycott laws. In fact, having no objective basis for the restrictions is not conservative - it is careless. (Please let me know immediately if a customer has requested that we not do business with any particular country as that may be a reportable event.) I recommend against proceeding until you have developed a sound basis - that gets applied equally - for any exclusion of any country."

To which VP of Engineering Eric Johnson replied:

"I appreciate your position. Please be aware there is an active, time-sensitive contract negotiation linked to this matter. And you need to advocate to the DRI that the company walk away from that contract in order to enact your proposal."

discuss

echelon|6 years ago

> "I appreciate your position. Please be aware there is an active, time-sensitive contract negotiation linked to this matter. And you need to advocate to the DRI that the company walk away from that contract in order to enact your proposal."

Could this public backlash sink that deal?

AdministrativeA|6 years ago

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.