WIP: Support Engineer Job family country-of-residence block
Edit as of 12-Nov-2018: This is still a discussion and there is no official policy confirming this yet. GitLab has posted an update and clarification of this policy on its blog here: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/11/12/update-on-hiring/
All comments must remain within our Code of Conduct.
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.
The countries involved are:
- China
- Russia
This issue is to track the addition of the process to the support handbook, and whatever recruiting processes need to be update to make certain that:
- We do not make offers to individuals residing in these countries
- Current team members are prevented from moving to these countries and remaining in a role that prohibits it.
We do not have a technical way, today, to handle this based on permissions. Doing so would also force us to confront the possibility of creating a "second class of citizens" on certain teams who cannot take part in 100% of their responsibilities, which is a dynamic some of us have experienced at other companies and found highly negative. As such we feel a country block is the most humane solution at this time--especially because it affects zero current employees.
We should look into the effort to do this on a permissions-basis. So everyone is clear what the effort would be, and roughly how long this would take.
Discussion in #job-family-country-blocks since there are multiple related issues open and content should be consistent, if not shared.
Note: In addition to Support, this also affects SREs in infra and SecOps & Anti-Abuse in Security (see related issue).
CC @sytses @mmcb @sunghaekim @rtakken @lmcnally1 @glopezfernandez