561–570 of 750 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
8 layers of management??? At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.
Gitlab has approx. 2300 employees (!) I never really got why they need to be a public company in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.
I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system). bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.
A lot of the conclusions they're drawing in this post about the "agentic era" seem quite misguided and some don't really seem to make sense. I have no doubt GitLab has too many employees and can benefit from being a more focused company, but it's tiring reading these layoff posts so chock full of buzzwords. I guess they're desperately hoping if they prognosticate about AI enough it will placate the investors.
This one stood out to me:
>Machine-scale infrastructure. [...] Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. [...] Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale.
Git itself is so far down the list of bottlenecks that do or could hamper LLM-driven development, even projecting years into the future...
GitLab could be the perfect case study on AI-powered efficiency improvements. I have never interacted with a piece of software that, for every single problem I found, there was an open issue always at least 4-7 years old that was just being shuffled around by managers adding and removing random labels. Surely with all of these ridiculous developer productivity gains enabled by AI, they should finally be able to fix a…
You have never interacted with Jira?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
GitLab isn't open-source. It's "open-core". Third parties hosting GitLab instances don't have access to the same range of features that GitLab-the-company does.
Yes, copy and pasting from the gitlab site: "Editions There are three editions of GitLab: GitLab Community Edition (CE) is available freely under the MIT Expat license. GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) includes extra features that are more useful for organizations with more than 100 users. To use EE and get official support please become a subscriber. JiHu Edition (JH) tailored specifically for the Chinese market." Per…
I find it a bit concerning that this piece focusses so much on customers and shareholders... I know I don't pay, but perhaps sometime I will, and I am learning GitLab and applying at large orgs as GitLab consultant. All because of CE... So I hope it will stay. It is a nice and very complete on-ramp to EE.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The memo also says they're eliminating a lot of middle management tiers which has been a theme for a lot of companies recently. It's also been a theme historically. Really has nothing to do with AI. It's just the classic executive view that they are paying people who sit in meetings and write emails instead of writing code. Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.
> Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function. I don't know, I've seen more big organizations that have a dysfunctional amount of middle management and "meetings about meetings" than ones that truly benefit from that culture.
Tons of middle management that makes no decisions what so ever.
Everytime you ask a question, they delegate, until you end up at person 1 again and they just can't decide anything.
It's like they all have decision paralysis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system). bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.
Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system). bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.
Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.
The fact they can't capitalize on the current trainwreck of GitHub speaks volumes. If they had the right product people would be throwing money at them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brother there’s nothing to capitalize on. They really don’t want an avalanche of free users bringing their shit down too I think.
Gitlab used to be about as reliable as github. (ignoring the security oopses they used to have) They simply don't have (or didnt) the skills to scale. THey were talking about using ceph to run things (which gives you an idea about how green their infra team was)