Priorities

I’m the director of development for the secure, govern, data science, and growth sub-departments.

In addition to leading development for these development sub-departments, I also focus on:

Protecting GitLab from attackers
Coordinating escalations for specific large customers
Public speaking on various topics
Mentoring inside and outside of GitLab

Background

I’m a veteran of three successful startups (including GitLab) and have experience in multiple areas, including healthcare, finance, and security.

Links about Wayne:

How to collaborate with Wayne

I subscribe to servant-leadership
Continuous learning is fundamental to me. I read approximately one book weekly and aspire to take one online class every month.
I subscribe to the philosophy of “saying what you are going to do and doing what you say.”
I am an advocate for remote work because it is highly effective for both the company and the individual.
At work, nothing makes me happier than when:
- A user benefits from a change developed by my team
- A prospect becomes a customer because of a feature developed by my team.
- A team member learns something new and expands their horizons
- A process or procedure, or technology is improved that benefits the overall company, team members, or the technology industry as a whole
I prefer to use this 1-1 format
I do skip-level meetings with those who work for my direct reports every three months. I am always available for ad-hoc discussions as well.
Some of my favorite business books include:
I am in Atlanta, GA, USA (Eastern US).
I am most productive in the morning.
When reaching out to me, my preferences are:
- Tag me in a merge request
- Tag me in an issue
- Tag me in a message in a Slack channel
- Send me a 1:1 message in Slack
- Send me an email
I prefer that, when feasible, all recorded meetings should be made public on GitLab Unfiltered. I continue to be pleaseantly surprised by how this can increase collaboration inside and outside the team.
I always try to explain the “why". Engineers are often asked to focus on the “what” and “how”. However, explaining the "why" makes sure they are engaged and also enables the engineers to find better ways to achieve the goals.

Video meetings

I am working on interrupting people less, slowing down my pace, and pausing more often. I am working on these things to increase the clarity of what I am communicating. In particular, rather than interrupting a speaker when I have something to say, I am trying to indicate that via non-verbal communication via video.
When on video, I will sometimes use the Zoom emoji feature rather than interrupting the speaker to express my feedback on something.

Engineering Director shadow program

I created and continue to operate the Engineering director shadow program, which allows anyone at GitLab to shadow me for a week and provides mentoring, learning opportunities, and career development exploration.

Dashboards I use

I use these dashboards to inform me on metrics for my teams:

Corresponding handbook pages:

My OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

My OKRs can be found in Ally

A subset of my Q4 OKRs can be public and are in these categories:

Grow team member's careers

10 starts in Q4
Complete annual team member assessments
50% of team has taken TeamOps training
Do >=3 engineering director shadow weeks

Application health

UX: 18 Pajama component migrations
Support Ruby 3 upgrade
Resolve 3 S1/S2 customer facing bugs. Issue searches: sec, growth, modelops
Add X maintainers

Increase revenue by delivering customer results

Ship features to achieve Best in Class

License finder / database
Continuous vulnerabilty scanning
Rule refinement

Wayne Haber's README

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