Extremely unprofessional behavior, especially for someone with a law degree. Three serious issues:
#1: She shouldn't be speculating about legal liability in a non-privileged medium. Even if she's correct, the risk is too high that her statements will later be quoted out of context. Keep it in a privileged medium, ideally an in-person meeting or phone call. This is absolutely basic stuff, and I'm sure it's taught even at Mitchell Hamline.
#2: Even if you disagree with a decision, don't leave a written record that you believe your company is legally in the wrong. There are exceptions (you believe you'd be personally liable, and you want the paper trail to make it clear you didn't make the decision), but there is absolutely no reason to make that record public.
#3 (Related) Don't burn bridges on your way out the door. This isn't specific to law - it's just good professional practice. The world is smaller than you think, and you're poisoning your professional network. Doing it publicly is even worse. Why would you be willing to hire someone who has demonstrated that they will publicly torch your company if you make a significant decision they disagree with.
Do you think it's possible that any potential liability could already have been exposed when the issue itself ( https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5555 ) was opened, prior to compliance becoming aware of it? It contains the statement:
"In e-group on Monday October 15, 2019 we took the decision to enable a "job family country-of-residence block" for team members who have access to customer data. This is at the expressed concern of several enterprise customers, and also what is becoming a common practice in our industry in the current geopolitical climate."
It could be that better legal scrutiny during contract negotiation might have prevented this becoming an engineering, hiring and compliance concern.
Gitlab is an all-remote, very open startup, where the company's employees can publicly discuss not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia with an abundantly clear paper trail in the public issue tracker.
Do you believe her actions are inconsistent with those values - or are you saying as the values are problematic, she should not have upheld them?
> Do you believe her actions are inconsistent with those values - or are you saying as the values are problematic, she should not have upheld them?
Her actions appear to be inconsistent with being a good lawyer.
Part (most?) of being a good lawyer is knowing when to shut up and when to tell your client to shut up.
In addition, there is some level of attorney/client privilege to consider. Quite often, two companies will have 4 sets of lawyers in the room for particularly sensitive things. Counsel for the companies and then counsel for the counsel. This ensures that what is discussed stays under attorney/client privilege.
Apparently, Gitlab operate very openly about even that kind of sensitive matter. In that situation, the whole openness would make absolutely no sense if you can't disagree in the tracking system actually used to communicate. In the context of all the details already published by all parties because of the company policy, the resignation sentence is completely benign.
> There are exceptions (you believe you'd be personally liable, and you want the paper trail to make it clear you didn't make the decision), but there is absolutely no reason to make that record public.
Yeah, this is the only thing that makes sense to me. I'm assuming somehow she thought she was about to be on the hook for something and is ejecting with public notice to avoid the fallout.
However, I'm also more than a little concerned about her legal judgement. I really can't see how blocking employees in certain countries is illegal--especially for China and Russia. Country of residence is not a protected class, but China and Russia, specifically, have sanctions of various levels applied against them.
Completely agree. What Candice Ciresi did was unprofessional and inaccurate. It reveals what little she knows about the law as well as how to be a competent and trusted legal advisor. Who would hire her now?
Completely disagree. Candice Ciresi was extremely professional and seemed to be the only one actually looking out for the company (another example is her stance on the telemetry issue). Many ethical companies would consider hiring her.
Gitlab on the other hand seems to be easily swayed by large contracts and willing to compromise their “remote first” values for money.
It’s also disappointing they don’t have a technical solution to this.
#1: She shouldn't be speculating about legal liability in a non-privileged medium. Even if she's correct, the risk is too high that her statements will later be quoted out of context. Keep it in a privileged medium, ideally an in-person meeting or phone call. This is absolutely basic stuff, and I'm sure it's taught even at Mitchell Hamline.
#2: Even if you disagree with a decision, don't leave a written record that you believe your company is legally in the wrong. There are exceptions (you believe you'd be personally liable, and you want the paper trail to make it clear you didn't make the decision), but there is absolutely no reason to make that record public.
#3 (Related) Don't burn bridges on your way out the door. This isn't specific to law - it's just good professional practice. The world is smaller than you think, and you're poisoning your professional network. Doing it publicly is even worse. Why would you be willing to hire someone who has demonstrated that they will publicly torch your company if you make a significant decision they disagree with.