> The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.
No good way to execute lay-offs, my preference would be to do it like a band-aid. What use is it to do it in open unless they plan on having gladiatorial matches to keep your job. Otherwise it's just like a painful game of Duck Duck Goose.
TLDR: Because of AI the future belongs to the engineers, so we took the noble decision to stop hoarding them on our payroll and make sure there are enough to go around for the other companies.
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.
With it’s current AI setup GitLab still couldn’t make anything that could be called great in UX so I can’t wait to see what they can do by eliminating the remaining human factor. Can’t personally wait seeing tickets like these [0] open for months with bots telling you that everything will be alright.
How these companies act like these changes are for the better good and how "we are different" is just gross.
The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.
Not even the balls to do the deed yourself. This reads like Shrek's "Some of you may die,... but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."
I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.
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.
I was finding this really interesting, that maybe a human had written it and it really reflected a vision for how we build software in this new world. I want to know the way, I'm curious!
Until I got to "One platform, three modes." and my brain just pattern matched "AI slop" and the entire post dissolved into meaningless for me.
I don't know if I can stop my mind reaching this conclusion. I'm sure someone at GitLab made some effort to carefully edit the post... But that it wasn't entirely rooted in a human who'd worked out how this stuff goes, but clearly had lots of AI writing it out... Just made my instinct go "this isn't worth paying attention to after all".
Can't imagine that slop is going to save them. Gitlab is a totally directionless, beyond self-hosting which I think is commendable, shoddily implemented product. I don't hate it, in that it is at least predictable, but the lack of basically any interesting view on how software should be developed or even look is such a waste.
GitLab never ceases to amaze me in terms of just how bad their product roadmap is. Practical things like CI improvements are put off over UI rebranding on unicorn colours. Yet, good tooling is exactly why people used to pay for GitLab. For better or worse maybe this finally can change and we can get more customer oriented roadmaps again
>removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work.
I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] thread> The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.
No good way to execute lay-offs, my preference would be to do it like a band-aid. What use is it to do it in open unless they plan on having gladiatorial matches to keep your job. Otherwise it's just like a painful game of Duck Duck Goose.
Plenty of time to whip up a dead man's switch.
https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
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.
If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806
"Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.
In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.
Yeah, sure. A couple of years ago it was Covid overhiring.
You know the one thing that is never ever going to be given as a reason for layoffs? The growing salary-productivity gap.
Until I got to "One platform, three modes." and my brain just pattern matched "AI slop" and the entire post dissolved into meaningless for me.
I don't know if I can stop my mind reaching this conclusion. I'm sure someone at GitLab made some effort to carefully edit the post... But that it wasn't entirely rooted in a human who'd worked out how this stuff goes, but clearly had lots of AI writing it out... Just made my instinct go "this isn't worth paying attention to after all".
Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.
I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.