There's a 'github down' post here every other day.
The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.
There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
If they're asking you to do more for less pay and with fewer coworkers to help, don't feel bad if the company code turns into unmaintainable, unintelligible garbage. They can't really stop you. It's just AI. Something is going to have to give.
Every IC ought to use the present day as the opportunity to build a nimble competitor to their old employer (or whatever industry incumbents they want).
I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach .
But it's just more slop
Every company I've worked at hammers the "ownership" idea and I hate it so much. It's how they drive a culture where employees are expected to invest themselves into "owning" a problem space that can be taken from them at any moment. It's how they trick you into doing extra work that's not in your job description.
Unless you're ACTUALLY an owner, don't be fooled by an "ownership" value.
Conversely, you have "full ownership" and have the ability to decide the direction, as long as it's the same direction as your higher-ups have decided.
I read this and often think, yes, yes we know, but then I hear juniors at work taking these ideas at face value without considering things like stock splitting and preferred shares.
"Speed with quality" combined with that says a lot. Sounds to me like it will be the base expectation that their remaining developers slop out features in record time. Any failures will be theirs to "own" personally.
Owner is the one who gets the added value assigned to. At least according to the Das Kapital. So the check is easy - do you see the added value flowing onto your account or not.
Basically "screw any part about employees working together do what I say fast". What a shame. I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".
The code and product will turn to shit, and the company won't be able to extract itself from the mud.
Employees tasked with doing 10x more work with less help don't even have to feel bad about it happening. It'll also create employment opportunity in disrupting their old employer.
These companies are willingly signing up to become IBM.
I'm firmly not in Trump's anti-DEI camp but I have seen what can happen when you make it one of your core values. You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things. It's unlikely that a company like Gitlab really needs anything changing anyway.
It doesn't make sense for it to be 40% of their values, especially if they're losing money (or very close to it).
Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value are great places to work and seem to have high functioning teams. My impression mostly though is more that it was never really a value for management but they wasted a bunch of time talking about it. In general any mismatch between stated values and actual values has been awful to deal with and is a red flag for places to work.
That's the thing - you can have it as a lived value, or you can have HR run programs. Very few places have/had both. Given the choice, I'd pick door #1.
(Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)
> Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value
I am not sure if you had implied it but that would align with my experience as well: places that tout diversity were the worst places to work (as someone who is seen as 'diverse') while the ones that treated everyone the same and had the expectation everyone pulls their weight.
I absolutely despise people treating me differently because of who / what I am rather than doing good work. I will take mildly inappropriate good-nature jokes over head pats every day of the week.
I love wildly beyond mild inappropriate jokes as they are a litmus test for a thinking person. The people that take things way too sensitive are a net drag and buzz kill for doing the grinding required. It goes both ways too. I love it when people are agressive with me. So, by freedom of association, cliques form and I have no problem with nepotism because the ultimate currency in life is trust.
There are two ways to do diversity - the first is to put a brutal skill filter and take everyone that passes it no matter their skin color, body weight, religion or politics. The other is to reduce people to their demographics and push for (in)visible quotas. One of them leads to crappy results.
> You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things.
Someone I'm close to is going through this right now. They work at a place that officially highly values "inclusion", and their employer's website is dripping with virtue-signaling language related to it. But that someone is disabled, and in fact there's nobody at the organization who owns accessibility issues. Disability accommodations are haphazard, and often not timely. Why? Because no one owns them. They just get punted to an internal employee affinity group of disabled people who don't have a real chain of command, a real budget, or even a real prerogative to do accessibility work, let alone meaningful power— many of its members are routinely chastised by their bosses whenever they dedicate any time to solving access problems within the company. "That's not what we pay your for", "that's not your job", "I need you on this other thing", etc.
Meanwhile the organization receives public accolades from meaningless business press organization as a "great place to work" or even "great place to work for people with disabilities".
I think it's fine for companies to value diversity, and to value it publicly. A little virtue signaling is fine, as a treat; it may actually repel nasty people, encourage good behavior, or make employees feel more welcome sometimes. That stuff is good.
But there's also a real possibility that a company making diversity an explicit value results in lots of energy going into activities that let that company's executives pat themselves on the back about how good they are without actually doing much for inclusion. I wouldn't take any sizeable company's stated values too seriously, including that one.
On the one hand, yeah, you should respect people who are different from you. On the other hand, this is really so obvious that I doubt elevating it to a “core value” makes much of a difference. Are there marginal people who wouldn’t respect diversity unless it was a core value?
Then again I don’t even know what it means for something to be a core value. What is the practical upshot of “collaboration” being a core value of a company? Were people not collaborating before?
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.
Let these people keep betting their companies, futures and net competency on text autocomplete. The future is bright for me and everyone else that isn't falling for it.
Wow gitlab. Right when everyone was looking to see if you could lead with all the fails at github, you basically said "We're going to throw our source at ChatGPT and see what happens"
Right? I was seriously considering migrating everything in our company from GitHub to GitLab. Now I'm seriously considering self hosting our git instead.
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.
>The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we're making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it
>Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one
To meet their largest opportunity ever, they believe they need less resources. I'm not sure I understand how that follows.
>We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up
Is this also in the list of "we create code twice as fast and the bottleneck is review so YOLO no bottleneck?". I've yet to see a convincing justification for this. If anything, if you're going full throttle all the more reason to watch the steering wheel, no?
That said, 8 layers of management is a lot of management, and every line of the message seems like leadership truly believes they are sinking in bureaucracy. Let's see how unneeded those 3 layers they're cutting were.
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.
Middle management exists to turn conflicting marching orders from the directors into less conflicting marching orders for the line workers, and to keep any negative feedback on how fucking stupid the directors are from ever reaching them.
They don't cause the broken processes. They are the symptom of a broken executive process. A fish rots from the head down, and the people at the top get exactly the kind of company that they ask for.
Middle managment is also where most of your negative feedback is lost. I think moving fast in general needs tighter feedback loops and this is simply not possible in large organizations.
Do you really think that upper management wants feedback that the stupid fucking ideas they have are boneheaded? The point of middle management is to absorb it so it doesn't reach the children at the top and make them feel bad
> Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
Really? In my experience it's the rank-and-file employees who have this knowledge of how to get on with it without ceremony and politics. And the broken processes and politics are created BY the middle managers.
Rather striking statements that have me somewhat concerned:
> Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We're doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces
Is there any broader consensus or information on this? Git doesn't scale? is being rebuilt for agents?! Monoliths are out and services are back? Humans are second class citizens now (human shaped interfaces - bad!!)?
What the hell are they planning to do in there at Gitlab?!
While hosting internal services for 4 years, Gitlab was the only service that ran hybrid. Wish they could get their act together and focus on actual engineering again.
If anyone at Gitlab management is reading this; getting your microservices to run fully stateless in a Kubernetes cluster should the #1 goal. No disclaimers about potential risk. It's been 5+ years. Get it together. Stop bolting on minor package management features no one is going to end up using anyways.
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'd hate to be their customer right now. Is this the only "corporate-scale" forge besides Github?
There's a lot of cool things happening between Gitea/Forgejo, Tangled, and Radical, but I doubt the latter two have any significant usage beyond OSS hobby projects. I'm not sure if the former two do, either.
GitLab's old values are for now still listed in their handbook:
> GitLab’s six core values are Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent. We react to them with values emoji and they are made actionable below.
Since those terms don't speak for themselves individually, it's worth seeing what they're supposed to mean to get a sense of what GitLab is forsaking now. Each section is actually pretty lengthy, so you should go look and skim for yourself.
It just struck me. I always thought I had writing software to fall back on, in case my main gig doesn't work out. I don't think it will still be there when I'm ready to return.
> 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.
The problem is that such voluntary separation programs tends to disproportionate attract high performers. You're losing the "10x engineer" who has stuck around because they like being here - despite getting attractive offers from the competition.
The mediocre people who dread looking for a new job during a hidden recession aren't going to leave. They can't afford the risk of not being able to find a new place of employment before the severance pay runs out.
if you don't like the new direction you can leave now and get the known now severance package. All in all, I think it is right to offer people voluntary severence with package when you pull the rug out from under them as far as where they thought they were working.
“Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load .... Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services.”
Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?
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".
GitHub is publicly destroying itself in a desperate attempt to realize Microsoft's AI dreams, and as its main competitor your response is... to do the same?
Rather than going for a "Humans first, robot assistants welcome" approach which promises to deliver things like stability, reliability, trustworthiness, and human connections, they decide to go all-out on firing the humans and letting bots handle things like code review while explicitly shifting the existing human-first company values towards making the remaining humans responsible for the bot's mistakes.
They could've chosen to market themselves as the sane save haven for the GitHub exodus. Instead they choose to go down in history like Google abolishing "Don't be evil". But hey, I bet chanting "AI! AI! AI!" (albeit quite late to the game) will deliver a very solid lukewarm increase in shareholder value!
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.
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.
While there are a lot of little knobs that can tweak performance, it shouldn't be slow out of the box, yet it is the number one complaint about GitLab.
I recently switched everything from bitbucket to GitHub mostly just because GitHub is more integrated with the AI tools I use. I feel like they’re probably still pretty big in Europe, but they’re losing in some markets more than before.
>Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands. Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.
We've seen these tech waves several times - C and COBOL instead os ASM, CAD/4GL, template generation, Visual Basic and the likes (good old Delphi), Java (which allowed to a lot of mid-inept people to write compilable non-immediately-crashing programs), spread of python, and now AI. Every time we have an expansion of the industry, and every time glorious promises which get delivered on modestly. The point here is that they get delivered on.
And with AI i suppose it will be similar, though much better than before. In those previous waves human brain was the limit. This time we throw that limit away from the start - nobody will be able to comprehend the sheer amount of AI-generated code. Yes, that approach will hit some limit down the road of course too...
I have no doubt that AI is making some programmers quite a bit more productive. But if it is even 10% as good as all the marketing claims, we should be seeing an explosion of new tech startups, and a huge increase in feature shipping rate and number of bugs closed. Why isn't this obviously happening? Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion?
What I am seeing instead is million-line AI slop pet projects whose sole "user" is its developer, and large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products. If there's no genuine user value being delivered, who's going to pay for those thousand-dollar-per-month developer tools?
Just today we started a new cycle at work to move from GitHub to Forgejo, its such a refreshing tool... So fast, supports everything we need (and more), and no AI slop. Very happy with our decision
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.
Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency.
New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.
In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.
There's a 'github down' post here every other day.
The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.
Nope, full throttle and stimulants, just because.
There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Does anyone know what caused this?
Also no more Transparency.
If they're asking you to do more for less pay and with fewer coworkers to help, don't feel bad if the company code turns into unmaintainable, unintelligible garbage. They can't really stop you. It's just AI. Something is going to have to give.
Every IC ought to use the present day as the opportunity to build a nimble competitor to their old employer (or whatever industry incumbents they want).
They're literally setting themselves up for this.
I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach . But it's just more slop
Why would they want to become the target for free users vibe coded slopware? I don’t think many of them are converting to paying customers.
Investors actually want slop-branded AI on everything right now, so it checks out for companies to maximize for it. We are so fucked.
> Ownership Mindset
Every company I've worked at hammers the "ownership" idea and I hate it so much. It's how they drive a culture where employees are expected to invest themselves into "owning" a problem space that can be taken from them at any moment. It's how they trick you into doing extra work that's not in your job description.
Unless you're ACTUALLY an owner, don't be fooled by an "ownership" value.
Ownership implies both accountability and agency. In practice you often get all of the accountability, none of the agency.
Conversely, you have "full ownership" and have the ability to decide the direction, as long as it's the same direction as your higher-ups have decided.
All the responsibility is still yours though.
Yeah that's the rub. You have the responsibility for the thing you "own" but not true choice or control. Responsibility without authority. It sucks.
You need to take the mercenary mindset and look after You Inc. first
I read this and often think, yes, yes we know, but then I hear juniors at work taking these ideas at face value without considering things like stock splitting and preferred shares.
"Speed with quality" combined with that says a lot. Sounds to me like it will be the base expectation that their remaining developers slop out features in record time. Any failures will be theirs to "own" personally.
Owner is the one who gets the added value assigned to. At least according to the Das Kapital. So the check is easy - do you see the added value flowing onto your account or not.
Basically "screw any part about employees working together do what I say fast". What a shame. I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".
The code and product will turn to shit, and the company won't be able to extract itself from the mud.
Employees tasked with doing 10x more work with less help don't even have to feel bad about it happening. It'll also create employment opportunity in disrupting their old employer.
These companies are willingly signing up to become IBM.
It looks like they are switching to ai only code review. It will go to shit for sure lol
I'm firmly not in Trump's anti-DEI camp but I have seen what can happen when you make it one of your core values. You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things. It's unlikely that a company like Gitlab really needs anything changing anyway.
It doesn't make sense for it to be 40% of their values, especially if they're losing money (or very close to it).
Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value are great places to work and seem to have high functioning teams. My impression mostly though is more that it was never really a value for management but they wasted a bunch of time talking about it. In general any mismatch between stated values and actual values has been awful to deal with and is a red flag for places to work.
That's the thing - you can have it as a lived value, or you can have HR run programs. Very few places have/had both. Given the choice, I'd pick door #1.
(Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)
Lived values need to be discussed sometimes…
> Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value
I am not sure if you had implied it but that would align with my experience as well: places that tout diversity were the worst places to work (as someone who is seen as 'diverse') while the ones that treated everyone the same and had the expectation everyone pulls their weight.
I absolutely despise people treating me differently because of who / what I am rather than doing good work. I will take mildly inappropriate good-nature jokes over head pats every day of the week.
I love wildly beyond mild inappropriate jokes as they are a litmus test for a thinking person. The people that take things way too sensitive are a net drag and buzz kill for doing the grinding required. It goes both ways too. I love it when people are agressive with me. So, by freedom of association, cliques form and I have no problem with nepotism because the ultimate currency in life is trust.
There are two ways to do diversity - the first is to put a brutal skill filter and take everyone that passes it no matter their skin color, body weight, religion or politics. The other is to reduce people to their demographics and push for (in)visible quotas. One of them leads to crappy results.
> You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things.
Someone I'm close to is going through this right now. They work at a place that officially highly values "inclusion", and their employer's website is dripping with virtue-signaling language related to it. But that someone is disabled, and in fact there's nobody at the organization who owns accessibility issues. Disability accommodations are haphazard, and often not timely. Why? Because no one owns them. They just get punted to an internal employee affinity group of disabled people who don't have a real chain of command, a real budget, or even a real prerogative to do accessibility work, let alone meaningful power— many of its members are routinely chastised by their bosses whenever they dedicate any time to solving access problems within the company. "That's not what we pay your for", "that's not your job", "I need you on this other thing", etc.
Meanwhile the organization receives public accolades from meaningless business press organization as a "great place to work" or even "great place to work for people with disabilities".
I think it's fine for companies to value diversity, and to value it publicly. A little virtue signaling is fine, as a treat; it may actually repel nasty people, encourage good behavior, or make employees feel more welcome sometimes. That stuff is good.
But there's also a real possibility that a company making diversity an explicit value results in lots of energy going into activities that let that company's executives pat themselves on the back about how good they are without actually doing much for inclusion. I wouldn't take any sizeable company's stated values too seriously, including that one.
On the one hand, yeah, you should respect people who are different from you. On the other hand, this is really so obvious that I doubt elevating it to a “core value” makes much of a difference. Are there marginal people who wouldn’t respect diversity unless it was a core value?
Then again I don’t even know what it means for something to be a core value. What is the practical upshot of “collaboration” being a core value of a company? Were people not collaborating before?
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.
Let these people keep betting their companies, futures and net competency on text autocomplete. The future is bright for me and everyone else that isn't falling for it.
Calling it text autocomplete is played out and really just makes you look bad at this point.
Wow gitlab. Right when everyone was looking to see if you could lead with all the fails at github, you basically said "We're going to throw our source at ChatGPT and see what happens"
Right? I was seriously considering migrating everything in our company from GitHub to GitLab. Now I'm seriously considering self hosting our git instead.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIdBfjL62s
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.
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806
Small aside, if they're dropping their transparency company value does that mean that issue won't be visible anymore? Is that the future for Gitlab?
Lots of interesting information here:
>The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we're making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it
>Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one
To meet their largest opportunity ever, they believe they need less resources. I'm not sure I understand how that follows.
>We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up
Is this also in the list of "we create code twice as fast and the bottleneck is review so YOLO no bottleneck?". I've yet to see a convincing justification for this. If anything, if you're going full throttle all the more reason to watch the steering wheel, no?
That said, 8 layers of management is a lot of management, and every line of the message seems like leadership truly believes they are sinking in bureaucracy. Let's see how unneeded those 3 layers they're cutting were.
> 8 layers of management is a lot of management
Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?
8 layers of management???
At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.
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.
It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.
Not with 8 layers of it. Institutional knowledge lies between managers and engineers and maybe one layer above that, not further
Middle management is also why there’s so many broken processes and challenges in the first place.
Middle management exists to turn conflicting marching orders from the directors into less conflicting marching orders for the line workers, and to keep any negative feedback on how fucking stupid the directors are from ever reaching them.
They don't cause the broken processes. They are the symptom of a broken executive process. A fish rots from the head down, and the people at the top get exactly the kind of company that they ask for.
GitHub was famously flat and far more successful than them.
Middle managment is also where most of your negative feedback is lost. I think moving fast in general needs tighter feedback loops and this is simply not possible in large organizations.
Do you really think that upper management wants feedback that the stupid fucking ideas they have are boneheaded? The point of middle management is to absorb it so it doesn't reach the children at the top and make them feel bad
> Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
Really? In my experience it's the rank-and-file employees who have this knowledge of how to get on with it without ceremony and politics. And the broken processes and politics are created BY the middle managers.
Not really. Middle management is there to be in meetings all day long with nothing produced but identifying low performers.
GitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.
Rather striking statements that have me somewhat concerned:
> Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We're doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces
Is there any broader consensus or information on this? Git doesn't scale? is being rebuilt for agents?! Monoliths are out and services are back? Humans are second class citizens now (human shaped interfaces - bad!!)?
What the hell are they planning to do in there at Gitlab?!
Layoff something something AI.
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.
The reason is investors want more money
While hosting internal services for 4 years, Gitlab was the only service that ran hybrid. Wish they could get their act together and focus on actual engineering again.
If anyone at Gitlab management is reading this; getting your microservices to run fully stateless in a Kubernetes cluster should the #1 goal. No disclaimers about potential risk. It's been 5+ years. Get it together. Stop bolting on minor package management features no one is going to end up using anyways.
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.
Brother there’s nothing to capitalize on. They really don’t want an avalanche of free users bringing their shit down too I think.
I'd hate to be their customer right now. Is this the only "corporate-scale" forge besides Github?
There's a lot of cool things happening between Gitea/Forgejo, Tangled, and Radical, but I doubt the latter two have any significant usage beyond OSS hobby projects. I'm not sure if the former two do, either.
GitLab's old values are for now still listed in their handbook:
> GitLab’s six core values are Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent. We react to them with values emoji and they are made actionable below.
Since those terms don't speak for themselves individually, it's worth seeing what they're supposed to mean to get a sense of what GitLab is forsaking now. Each section is actually pretty lengthy, so you should go look and skim for yourself.
Here's the page: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
And here's an archive from yesterday, for when that changes: https://web.archive.org/web/20260510150031/https://handbook....
Time to tell everybody about Forgejo, again.
Seriously, I moved all of my personal projects to a self-hosted Forgejo and all my open-source projects to Codeberg and haven't looked back.
It's not clear to me from that post how they will be spending the money they'll save by firing 60% of our R&D team.
Could someone explain it?
If you have a lot of new stuff to build, and if you're not currently losing money, why start a new initiative with a layoff?
> Where you should expect to see us evolve is in the quality, depth and pace of innovation we ship.
Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.
What a shock, company whose share price is in the shitter lays people off and blames AI.
It just struck me. I always thought I had writing software to fall back on, in case my main gig doesn't work out. I don't think it will still be there when I'm ready to return.
Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.
At least they are honest about it:
> 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.
the people who would leave after a layoff can do so preemptively, perhaps saving headcount for someone else?
The problem is that such voluntary separation programs tends to disproportionate attract high performers. You're losing the "10x engineer" who has stuck around because they like being here - despite getting attractive offers from the competition.
The mediocre people who dread looking for a new job during a hidden recession aren't going to leave. They can't afford the risk of not being able to find a new place of employment before the severance pay runs out.
if you don't like the new direction you can leave now and get the known now severance package. All in all, I think it is right to offer people voluntary severence with package when you pull the rug out from under them as far as where they thought they were working.
sort of a Michael Scott approach of asking people to quit so they don't have to fire anyone.
Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.
Plenty of time to whip up a dead man's switch.
Here's their soon to be updated(?) handbook with the CREDIT values:
https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
Soon to be updated, maybe not on the open web, cause Transparency is leaving...
I assume my company's annual bill will be streamlined accordingly.
Nah, AI's gonna let them ship more and more features you don't use so they can keep jacking the price up.
“Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load .... Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services.”
Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?
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".
This feels like a massive own goal.
GitHub is publicly destroying itself in a desperate attempt to realize Microsoft's AI dreams, and as its main competitor your response is... to do the same?
Rather than going for a "Humans first, robot assistants welcome" approach which promises to deliver things like stability, reliability, trustworthiness, and human connections, they decide to go all-out on firing the humans and letting bots handle things like code review while explicitly shifting the existing human-first company values towards making the remaining humans responsible for the bot's mistakes.
They could've chosen to market themselves as the sane save haven for the GitHub exodus. Instead they choose to go down in history like Google abolishing "Don't be evil". But hey, I bet chanting "AI! AI! AI!" (albeit quite late to the game) will deliver a very solid lukewarm increase in shareholder value!
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.
How these companies act like these changes are for the better good and how "we are different" is just gross.
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.""Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
Isn't there like 100 ways to host git repos now?
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.
> Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade
It's Ruby, which is pretty horrific but still I think there was probably something not quite right in your setup because it isn't normally that slow.
While there are a lot of little knobs that can tweak performance, it shouldn't be slow out of the box, yet it is the number one complaint about GitLab.
Someone should gather all the creatively worded layoff announcements and put them into a museum.
Aside, none of these announcements even attempt to make sense.
GitLab's TAM is exploding, demand is through the roof, LLM tooling is making each IC more productive, and to capatalize on this moment GitLab is
... "transparently restructuring" by asking employees to quit so they don't have to lay off as many...
I recently switched everything from bitbucket to GitHub mostly just because GitHub is more integrated with the AI tools I use. I feel like they’re probably still pretty big in Europe, but they’re losing in some markets more than before.
A reminder that every line of code written is a liability, not an asset.
If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.
what value does gitlab provide that some glue scripts dont i am sorry
I'm sorely disappointed by gitlab, I was hoping they would be a safe harbor against this whole AI bullshit typhoon.
They went all-in on AI features rather than making it less slow.
Is there a polymatket for when its gonna be layoff due to hantavirus overhiring?
« See how agentic AI transforms software delivery »
GitLab has achieved "AGI" internally.
Does AGI mean Abhorrent Git Interface?
>Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands. Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.
almost like a copy of my post :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982975
We've seen these tech waves several times - C and COBOL instead os ASM, CAD/4GL, template generation, Visual Basic and the likes (good old Delphi), Java (which allowed to a lot of mid-inept people to write compilable non-immediately-crashing programs), spread of python, and now AI. Every time we have an expansion of the industry, and every time glorious promises which get delivered on modestly. The point here is that they get delivered on.
And with AI i suppose it will be similar, though much better than before. In those previous waves human brain was the limit. This time we throw that limit away from the start - nobody will be able to comprehend the sheer amount of AI-generated code. Yes, that approach will hit some limit down the road of course too...
> The point here is that they get delivered on.
... so where's the delivery?
I have no doubt that AI is making some programmers quite a bit more productive. But if it is even 10% as good as all the marketing claims, we should be seeing an explosion of new tech startups, and a huge increase in feature shipping rate and number of bugs closed. Why isn't this obviously happening? Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion?
What I am seeing instead is million-line AI slop pet projects whose sole "user" is its developer, and large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products. If there's no genuine user value being delivered, who's going to pay for those thousand-dollar-per-month developer tools?
Just today we started a new cycle at work to move from GitHub to Forgejo, its such a refreshing tool... So fast, supports everything we need (and more), and no AI slop. Very happy with our decision
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.
I think they had more employees than customers.