[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":791},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/working-for-gitlab-a-support-engineers-perspective":3,"navigation-en-us":35,"banner-en-us":435,"footer-en-us":445,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Anton Smith":687,"blog-related-posts-en-us-working-for-gitlab-a-support-engineers-perspective":701,"assessment-promotions-en-us":742,"next-steps-en-us":781},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":24,"isFeatured":12,"meta":25,"navigation":26,"path":27,"publishedDate":20,"seo":28,"stem":32,"tagSlugs":33,"__hash__":34},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/working-for-gitlab-a-support-engineers-perspective.yml","Working For Gitlab A Support Engineers Perspective",[7],"anton-smith",null,"unfiltered",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"working-for-gitlab-a-support-engineers-perspective",false,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Working for GitLab - A Support Engineer's perspective","Reflecting on the last 12 months working for GitLab as a Support Engineer",[18],"Anton Smith","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749664102/Blog/Hero%20Images/gitlab-values-cover.png","2020-08-10","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHi everyone! My name is Anton and I’m a Support Engineer at GitLab, where I have been working for the last 12 months, and I’d like to share my story with you all.\n\nLast Friday afternoon, I was on a Zoom call with a colleague discussing some customer tickets. It was during this time that my phone started ringing. Not recognizing the number, and having that curiosity of wondering who it could possibly be, I placed my Zoom call on mute and accepted the call on my phone. The person on the other end of the line turned out to be a recruiter I had reached out to over a year ago. They explained that they had seen my Linkedin profile earlier in the day and they thought I was the perfect fit for a Senior PHP Developer role that had just opened up. Thanking them for getting in touch, I informed them that I would review the information they provided and get back to them. Since I was still in a Zoom call, I unmuted that call and told my colleague about how random it was that a recruiter contacted me after all this time. We had a chuckle and then resumed our discussion on customer tickets. However  in the back of my mind, I continued to think about the recruiter’s offer. So here I am reflecting on the past 12 months and my time at GitLab.\n\nBefore joining the team at GitLab, I was a full stack web developer for 10 years and had no prior experience working in a pure support role. The shift from a development career to support wasn’t one made by my own choice. Unfortunately at my previous employer there were some redundancies happening so I thought this would be a good opportunity to look around and see what else was on offer. With PHP development roles in scarce supply in my city, I would’ve needed to shift to a larger city if I wanted to stay in the same type of work. It was by mere chance that I saw an ad for the GitLab Support Engineer role on Linkedin. I pondered on the idea of applying for the position.\n\nAs a web developer, I was already very familiar with the GitLab product and had been using and administering the GitLab product since the source days, before the Omnibus and CI were even a thing! I even remember back then, the GitLab logo kind of looked like a grumpy fox, nothing like what our logo looks like today! I was also blown away by the GitLab Handbook and how transparent the company was on a public level.\n\nSo, I thought, why not? Let’s apply at GitLab and see how it goes. \n\nTo my surprise, the interview process was a great experience. I was met with many smiles, and had engaging conversations with all the interviewers. I definitely saw myself working here. When I was offered the position, I was thrilled, but while the relief of securing a new position started to fade, the new challenge was only just beginning. \n\nWhen I started my first few days at GitLab, I was super excited about working for an awesome company full of inspiring people, but I was also super scared. From my perspective, I had just changed career types and was now transitioning from a development role into a support role. It was definitely a gamble changing career types. I had some idea of what I was getting myself into, but honestly I was really worried that I would not be able to fulfil my duties in Support effectively. I was worried the job would be too difficult. I was worried that my colleagues would think that I am incompetent and question why I was even at GitLab. I was worried I’d miss writing code as I once did in my development career. It was also the first remote job that I had ever worked, and I wondered if I would feel lonely working alone at home. There were several times when I questioned myself - did I make the right decision coming to GitLab? \n\nThe main contributing factor to settling into GitLab was just how awesome the team was in making me feel welcome. It took a while for me to warm up to everyone, as I admit I was a little afraid, but when I was stuck on something, the team was always willing to help and I am so grateful to be part of that. Every time I was on a Zoom call with the team, I was always met with a friendly smile, and was constantly told that I should take my time learning the role, and not try to rush into everything. While internally struggling with myself to ask questions I considered stupid, I was encouraged to ask them anyway, because someone else might have the same question and as the saying goes “ there is no such thing as a silly question”.\n\nWith some determination, perseverance, and encouragement from the rest of the Support team, I began to feel better about my situation and gain more confidence in my role. With the GitLab application and its components being as big as they are, I quickly realised that I would not be able to learn everything in depth and should spend some time specialising in specific areas so I could feel competent in my role. \n\nUsing that logic, I took an interest to GitLab Geo in the early days, and I am now one of the Geo experts for the Asia Pacific region. One of the other initiatives I am currently working towards is learning about Kubernetes as we are seeing more customers run GitLab on this platform. Kubernetes is a fascinating topic for me and it’s definitely something I would have never explored as a web developer. Basically, I became a knowledge sponge and have been continuously assimilating information ever since.\n\nWith the change in role when moving to GitLab, I started out discounting the usefulness of my previous skills but shortly realised that they were invaluable in contributing to the team. I came across a pain point with downloads from Zendesk, our customer ticket system and how the downloads all went to a single folder. Using my web development skills, I built a browser extension that sorted ticket downloads into separate folders for myself. I remember hesitantly sharing this with the Support team, and I was stunned that so many of my colleagues were actually so happy that I created the extension. This encouraged me to get more involved with further initiatives with the team.\n\nAs time flew by, I continued to build on my confidence, learning more about the role and the GitLab ecosystem. I was always looking forward to sitting down at my desk everyday to work, especially to work alongside my colleagues in real time via Zoom on fascinating problems that customers were facing. As an ex web developer, I was always one that enjoyed the journey in solving a problem, the twists and turns that might pop up, and how to overcome any unknowns. I also jumped into Rails whenever I got a chance, as some problems require Ruby code to be written for customers to run, which satisfied my coding urges. These commonalities were also present in my role as a Support Engineer, which allowed me to easily migrate across the roles. There are some things in my job I still find scary, but it’s a good scary, as I see it as another challenge to take head on. Plus, if I can’t figure it out, there is a strong team I work alongside and they are always happy to offer some help if I get stuck.\n\nAfter reflecting on the past 12 months at GitLab, I then started thinking about the call I received from the recruiter. Sure, I had many doubts when I started and had experienced many high moments as well as low moments, but I definitely felt like being a Support Engineer was the right career for me. I feel like the leap of faith I took a year previously and changing career types had definitely paid off. I feel like a valued team member at GitLab and love how I work with a diverse group of people from all walks of life across the globe. I would not trade that experience for anything.\n\nThe next day, I called the recruiter back, and I politely declined their job offer, explaining that I now work remotely for a US company called GitLab and I love working for them. The recruiter of course was disappointed, but they also understood why I didn't want to leave.\n\nSometimes it’s a good idea to stop, look back and reflect. I quickly realised that I have achieved so much and positively impacted so many people over that time. I was so excited and scared when starting work at GitLab due to switching career paths, and I had many doubts. I’m glad I took a chance and saw it through. 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Shadow Takeaways from Jacie","Recap of my experience in the CEO Shadow Program.",[707],"Jacie Bandur","2021-05-18","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\nHi! I’m Jacie Bandur. I completed GitLab’s CEO Shadow program from 2021-04-26 through 2021-05-07. It was a really enlightening experience. I generally work in Learning and Development and consider myself a lifelong learner. I can’t even explain how much I learned in such a short about of time. I learned a lot about the business. I learned a lot about the product. But learned even more about the importance of iteration in everything we do.\n\n### Qualifications to Participate\n\nI wanted to start this off with touching on qualifications to participate in the program.\n\nI am the type of person that has gone through most of my life thinking I’m not qualified for things. I’m not qualified for that job, that promotion, that program. The list goes on and on.\n\nWhen I saw the [CEO Shadow program](/blog/ceo-shadow-impressions-takeaways/) kick off in 2019, I really wanted to participate. I was a little intimidated. Who wouldn’t be, spending 2 weeks with the CEO of any company? But time passed and all the sudden it was 2021 and I had not taken any steps to participating in the program.\n\nIf you are sitting there waiting for someone to tell you that you are qualified to participate in this program, I’m not big on giving “pep talks,” but here’s me telling you - You are qualified for this program. There’s never going to be a good or perfect time to do it. Tell your manager you want to do the CEO Shadow program. Stop waiting. Sign up today.\n\nNote: Take a look at the [eligibility](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/shadow/#eligibility) section of the CEO Shadow page for more information on signing up.\n\n### Pre-Program Tips\n\nThere are many things recommended for shadows to do pre-program outlined on the CEO Shadow handbook page. As I was going through the program there were things that I thought helped me (or would have helped me).\n\nHere are my top 6 recommendations:\n\n1. Make sure your team knows you will be unavailable for 2 weeks. This isn’t a program that can or should be done alongside your normal day to day work. I found catching up from the 2 weeks away kind of difficult because I was trying to keep up on what was going on and I had a bunch of half done things.\n1. Talk with people who have done the shadow program - schedule at least 3 coffee chats with CEO Shadow Alumni.\n1. Have food that is easy to eat quickly. Sid’s meetings are back to back most days, so you will have small amounts of time to eat throughout the day. Sid does eat during calls, which you are welcome to do, too, but if you are taking notes, it is difficult to eat. And this will make you realize why speedy meetings are so important!\n1. Listen to the [Executive Leadership LinkedIn Learning course](https://www.linkedin.com/learning/executive-leadership/).\n1. Be prepared to ask questions. When doing the program virtually, there isn’t a ton of time for asking questions, so when one would come up, I would add it to a note on my computer and ask if there was ever time with just the shadows and Sid.\n1. Take at least 1 day off after the program. Take even a couple of days off if you can! This is recommended on the handbook page, but I can’t stress this enough.\n\n\n### Takeaways\n\n**Group Conversations**\n\nI’ve been at GitLab for almost 4 years. When I joined, I made it a point to attend as many GC’s as I could. I had gotten out of the habit of attending Group Conversations. After attending them again for 2 weeks, I realized how important they are to understand better what is going on across the business. Everything in the organization is so intertwined. It’s helpful to understand what other teams are working on and succeeding in.\n\n**Feedback**\n\nWe should all be giving and receiving feedback often. We have a whole [handbook page on giving and receiving feedback](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/guidance-on-feedback/). Read the handbook page and watch the videos, as well. Practice giving feedback. I recommend using the [1-1 agenda](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/suggested-agenda-format/) Sid uses, because Feedback is an essential piece of that agenda, and it makes feedback more of a routine thing.\n\n**Biggest Takeaway**\n\nWe have an incredible team here at GitLab, from Engineering to Product to Sales to People and all the groups in between. There are so many great ideas. I observed the constant reinforcement by Sid to start with something small and build on it. You can ALWAYS make something more complex. It’s hard to go back to something more simple when you start with something complex.\n\nA couple of quotes that I heard from Sid during the program that reinforced this point:\n\n- “Every complex system evolves from a simple system that worked.”\n- “It’s very clear what is the simple solution. We can always make it more complicated as we go on.”\n\nI know they are very similar, but they happened in different meetings on different days, so the point was reinforced repeatedly.\n\nDuring the program, I reflected on the projects that I’am working on. How many of them am I trying to do too much on before releasing. Probably all of them. When I’m working on projects in the future, I will break them down into smaller, more doable chunks. Iteration is hard - it’s a skill to be practicing constantly.\n\n\n### Overall\n\nOverall, the program was really insightful and impactful. If you haven’t participated in it yet, I cannot encourage you enough to do so!\n",{"slug":711,"featured":12,"template":13},"ceo-shadow-recap",{"content":713,"config":725},{"title":714,"description":715,"authors":716,"heroImage":718,"date":719,"body":720,"category":9,"tags":721},"Why I love contributing to GitLab","Making small meaningful changes is what it's all about.",[717],"Austin Regnery","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679501/Blog/Hero%20Images/new-feature.png","2021-05-11","It was mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, and I had 10 minutes in between meetings. So I decided to try and solve a pain point of mine.\nYou see, I had to memorize this HTML snippet to create a collapsible section in GitLab Issue descriptions and comments, but I kept forgetting it. Was it `summary` or `section`? I could never remember.\n```html\n\u003Cdetails>\n\u003Csummary>Insert Title\u003C/summary>\nHidden content\n\u003C/details>\n```\nEven though it is not vanilla Markdown, GitLab knows how to interpret some HTML. I used this formatting trick fairly often since full-page screenshots can occupy a lot of screen space, which leads to excessive scrolling.\nSo I decided to poke around our codebase to see how the other Markdown shortcuts worked. To my surprise, it was pretty straightforward. Each shortcut had a simple text input that mapped to each button. This implementation was simple to replicate since I just needed to copy/paste and replace a few words.\n![Image of Vue and Haml files with editor shortcuts](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/vue-haml.png){: .shadow}\nThe Vue and Haml files with the new shortcut\n\nI started a branch and began hacking away at the code. Now, I would never call myself a Software Engineer, but I like to try and make things from time to time. I was able to add a new shortcut to the toolbar to insert this code snippet for me in less than 10 minutes. No more memorizing! Making contributions like this is what makes working at GitLab so special.\nNow, it wasn't ready for production, but I at least had something that worked. I shared it with my UX colleagues in Slack, and it started to gain traction with several up-votes and few constructive comments on how to make it better.\nWith the functionality flushed out, a few other designers helped me get a better icon added to our SVG library. Using clear iconography is critical for communicating information more clearly.\n| Initial Icon | Final Icon |\n| - | - |\n| ![SVG of chevron right icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/chevron-right.svg) | ![SVG of details block icon](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/details-block.svg) |\n\nThe last thing to do was resolve my failing tests, and I had several teammates help me do that.\n![Gif of the shortcut being used](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/demo.gif)\n\nToday [this change](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/54938) merged! Now I solved a pain point for me and others. It took a few months to go from idea to production, but the effort was super low. I'd say the return on my initial investment, 10 minutes, is super high.\n> Having a direct impact on a product was never an option for me before joining GitLab.\n\n![Image of participants in the Merge Request](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab/participants.png)\n\n\nThank you to everyone that helped me deploy this\n",[722,723,724],"UX","product","AWS",{"slug":726,"featured":12,"template":13},"why-i-love-contributing-to-gitlab",{"content":728,"config":740},{"title":729,"description":730,"authors":731,"heroImage":733,"date":719,"body":734,"category":9,"tags":735},"Placebo Lines on the Pipeline Graph","Have you noticed the connecting lines missing on your pipelines lately? Here's why",[732],"Sam Beckham","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749679507/Blog/Hero%20Images/ci-cd.png","\n\n{::options parse_block_html=\"true\" /}\n\n\n\nHave you ever pressed the close door button on the elevator, in the hope that you'll save a few precious seconds?\nOr got frustrated at the person stood next to you at the cross-walk, neglecting to press the button?\nWell, maybe they know something you don't, or perhaps you know this already.\nMany buttons in our society lie to us.\n[David McRaney](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/02/10/placebo-buttons/) dubbed these, \"Placebo buttons\" and they're everywhere.\nThose elevator doors won't close any faster and the cross-walk button has no effect on the lights.\nThe only lights they control are the lights on the buttons themselves.\nThey give you the feedback you crave, but that's all they're doing.\n\nThese placebos aren't constrained to the physical world, they're prevalent in [UI design](/blog/the-evolution-of-ux-at-gitlab/) too.\nFrom literal placebo buttons like [YouTube's downvote](https://www.quora.com/Does-downvoting-a-comment-on-YouTube-even-do-anything), to more subtle effects like Instagram always [pretending to work](https://www.fastcompany.com/1669788/the-3-white-lies-behind-instagrams-lightning-speed), or progress bars that have a [fixed animation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/why-some-apps-use-fake-progress-bars/517233/).\nThey're everywhere if you know where to look.\n\nAt GitLab, we created a placebo of our own in one of our core features; the pipeline graph.\n\nThose of you who have used our pipeline graph, will be familiar with its appearance.\nThere's a series of jobs, grouped by stages, connected by a series of lines depicting the relationships between the jobs.\nBut these lines might be lying to you.\nThese lines are indiscriminately drawn between each job in a stage, regardless of their relationship.\nThese lines are placebos.\n\n![The old pipeline rendering with lines connecting every job in a stage](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_old-graph.png)\n\nThis wasn't a problem to begin with.\nA basic pipeline has several jobs across a handful of stages.\nJobs in each stage would run parallel to each other, but each stage would run sequentially.\nIn the image shown above, all the jobs in the test stage would trigger at the same time. Once those jobs had finished, all the jobs in the build stage would trigger.\nWe used rudimentary CSS to draw lines connecting each job in one stage to each job in the next.\nThese lines weren't calculated based on their connections, but still reflected the story they were telling.\n\nSince the introduction of `needs` relationships in [v12.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/47063), pipelines got a bit more complicated.\nNow you could configure a job in a later stage to trigger as soon as a job in an earlier stage completed.\nLooking at our old example, we could set the API deployment to run as soon as our spec tests passed.\nThis skips the remaining tests and the entire build stage, turning our lines into pretty little liars.\n\nWe had many internal discussions about these lines, and how to show the relationships between jobs.\nThere's the [`needs` visualization](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/#needs-visualization), which does an excellent job of displaying these relationships, but the main pipeline graph was still inaccurate.\nFor the past few months, we've been [refactoring the pipeline graph](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/276949), giving it a new lease of life and fixing some of its issues along the way.\nOne of those issues were the faked lines.\nIn the new version, we can accurately draw lines between jobs.\nLines that actually depict the relationships jobs have with each other.\nNow the lines no-longer lie!\n\n![The newer pipeline graph showing the correct needs links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_new-graph.png)\n\nThe above image shows an unreleased version of the pipeline graph.\nYou can see the lines drawn between the jobs to show that the `deploy:API` job can start as soon as the `rspec` job is successful.\nSomething the old lines (shown earlier in this post) would have been unable to depict.\n\nOne unfortunate downside of this is that these lines can be quite expensive to calculate.\nThey're actual DOM nodes, drawn deliberately and placed precisely.\nOn smaller graphs this isn't a problem, but some of our initial tests have found pipelines with a potential 8000+ job connections.\nThat kind of calculation would grind the browser to a halt, and nobody wants that.\n\nAt GitLab, we believe in boring solutions.\nWe make the simple change that sets us on the path towards where we want to be.\nShip it, get feedback, and iterate.\nSo that's what we did.\nIn the first phase of this rollout, we shipped the new pipeline graph with no lines connecting the jobs.\nWe don't have to worry about the expensive calculations, and we still get to roll out the refactored pipeline graph.\n\n![The current (v13.11) pipeline graph showing no links between jobs](https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/placebo-lines_current-graph.png)\n\nWe know some of you will miss them, but fear not.\nBoring solutions are just technical debt if you don't iterate on them.\nSo the [improved lines are coming](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4509) in a future release, along with several other improvements to the pipeline graph.\nWe're already starting to roll out the new [Job Dependencies](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/298973) view which shows the jobs in a (much closer to) execution order.\nStay tuned for more updates, and watch [Sarah Groff Hennigh Palermo's talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2EKqKjB7OQ) for the technical side of this effort and a deeper dive into some of the decisions we made.\n",[736,737,738,739],"CI","frontend","agile","design",{"slug":741,"featured":12,"template":13},"placebo-lines-on-the-pipeline-graph",{"promotions":743},[744,758,769],{"id":745,"categories":746,"header":748,"text":749,"button":750,"image":755},"ai-modernization",[747],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":751,"config":752},"Get your AI maturity 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