Tag: organizational culture

Summary and Thoughts on Being/Becoming a Staff Support Engineer

I recently organized an AMA on Being and Becoming a Staff Support Engineer. This was meant to be similar to last year’s Being/Becoming a Senior Support Engineer. Normally, I would have actually waited longer to do it, since I only got promoted in February and I feel like I haven’t been working at the Staff level very long. However, at the end of May, our other Staff Support Engineer, Will Chandler was transferring to the development team. So, I decided before he transferred would be a good time to have the AMA. Additionally, I invited Drew Blessing, our first Staff Support Engineer (who had transferred to development a couple years ago) to also join the group of people answering questions.

This is not just a summary of the answers from that AMA session though. I’ve tried to put the answers and thoughts together with the previous video that I recorded with Lyle Kozloff while I was still working on becoming Staff, and some additional insights. Continue reading “Summary and Thoughts on Being/Becoming a Staff Support Engineer”

Documentation is important in every organization: Writing down all the things

I’ve worked in many types of organizations though mostly in public and non-profit, and it seems particularly in smaller organizations, or in organizations where they’re not building products, documentation is not always seen as necessary. I once asked a manager to attend the Write the Docs conference and they didn’t think it was relevant to my job. Granted, writing documentation was not part of my job description, but I didn’t quite understand how they couldn’t see its importance. Documentation is not just about product documentation. Continue reading “Documentation is important in every organization: Writing down all the things”

Summary and Thoughts on Being/Becoming a Senior Support Engineer at GitLab

Ever since becoming a Senior Support team member at GitLab, I’ve had various conversations about becoming and being a Senior level team member; even more so after I became a Senior Support Engineer (SSE). A couple of recent conversations made me realize that a lot of team members have questions and we should have a way to share the answers, so I organized “Ask Us Anything” (AUA) sessions on Being and Becoming a Senior Support Engineer. Continue reading “Summary and Thoughts on Being/Becoming a Senior Support Engineer at GitLab”

Reflection Part 1: My first year at GitLab and becoming Senior

About a year ago, I wrote a reflection on Summit and Contribute, our all staff events, and later that year, wrote a series of posts on the GitLab values and culture from my own perspective. There is a lot that I mention in the blog post series and I’ll try not to repeat myself (too much), but I realize I never wrote a general reflection at year 1, so I’ve decided to write about both years now but split into 2 parts. Continue reading “Reflection Part 1: My first year at GitLab and becoming Senior”