6 ms·

> Gitlab has 2,268 employees. That's probably an order-of-magnitude more than they need The state of their long open issue tickets suggest otherwise.

by nikau 2y ago

Aeolun 2y ago
Speed goes down as org size increases. We just delivered a one page form with 10-20 people in a month, and it was an almost impossible achievement.
merb 2y ago
The features they put out are not really that great anymore and most issues are about the core product and not the thing they want to sell you like, duo.
frognumber 2y ago
1975 called. They'd like to loan you their copy of the Mythical Man-Month. So to be clear: If all of those were SWEs, that would be 2,268 people to introduce bugs, and roughly 2.5M potential social links / interactions (and communications overhead). The issue queue is what results. Most projects are best done by about 2-10 person teams. That's about where you can maintain architectural coherence. Beyond 20, architectural coherence becomes impossible.
- 999900000999 2y ago
  So would the perfect GitHub/GitLab competitor be a 20 person team of highly paid engineers ( 400K USD straight cash comp) with outsourced marketing and HR ? I actually think most companies, particularly when VCs are pumping them full of capital, overhire. I guess this is to signal to the market we're doing cool things...
  - frognumber 2y ago
    From a purely "winning in the market" perspective, I think there-abouts. For optimal, I might go up a little bit more, since there are multiple products, but not a lot more. Some of the CI/CD stuff is pretty disconnected from the core product. There are very, very strong individual pressures to overhire. "I managed a 500-person team" sounds a lot better on a resume or otherwise than "I managed a 5-person team" (even if the 5-person team did more). I also wouldn't go all cash. I'd do the normal $150-$200k cash, and the rest in equity. I'd be very, very generous with equity. There are also time pressures, whereas many things take time to build. 5 people x 4 years >> 20 people x 1 year, at least if kept productive (which is sometimes hard with longer timelines)
    - 999900000999 2y ago
      For a startup I'd prefer my cash up front to be honest. I'm now thinking if elite companies ( no juniors , pay starts at 300k to 400k, no fluff) would generally out compete bigger organizations.
- nikau 2y ago
  I think its likely too late for gitlab, their code seems to suffer from poor outset design and has been hacked at too much. The fact there are 4 generations of job dependency tags alone must be a quagmire to modify.

> Gitlab has 2,268 employees. That's probably an order-of-magnitude more than they need The state of their long open issue tickets suggest otherwise.

by nikau 2y ago

> Gitlab has 2,268 employees. That's probably an order-of-magnitude more than they need The state of their long open issue tickets suggest otherwise.

Aeolun 2y ago

Speed goes down as org size increases. We just delivered a one page form with 10-20 people in a month, and it was an almost impossible achievement.

merb 2y ago

The features they put out are not really that great anymore and most issues are about the core product and not the thing they want to sell you like, duo.

frognumber 2y ago

1975 called. They'd like to loan you their copy of the Mythical Man-Month. So to be clear: If all of those were SWEs, that would be 2,268 people to introduce bugs, and roughly 2.5M potential social links / interactions (and communications overhead). The issue queue is what results. Most projects are best done by about 2-10 person teams. That's about where you can maintain architectural coherence. Beyond 20, architectural coherence becomes impossible.

999900000999 2y ago
So would the perfect GitHub/GitLab competitor be a 20 person team of highly paid engineers ( 400K USD straight cash comp) with outsourced marketing and HR ? I actually think most companies, particularly when VCs are pumping them full of capital, overhire. I guess this is to signal to the market we're doing cool things...
- frognumber 2y ago
  From a purely "winning in the market" perspective, I think there-abouts. For optimal, I might go up a little bit more, since there are multiple products, but not a lot more. Some of the CI/CD stuff is pretty disconnected from the core product. There are very, very strong individual pressures to overhire. "I managed a 500-person team" sounds a lot better on a resume or otherwise than "I managed a 5-person team" (even if the 5-person team did more). I also wouldn't go all cash. I'd do the normal $150-$200k cash, and the rest in equity. I'd be very, very generous with equity. There are also time pressures, whereas many things take time to build. 5 people x 4 years >> 20 people x 1 year, at least if kept productive (which is sometimes hard with longer timelines)
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    For a startup I'd prefer my cash up front to be honest. I'm now thinking if elite companies ( no juniors , pay starts at 300k to 400k, no fluff) would generally out compete bigger organizations.
nikau 2y ago
I think its likely too late for gitlab, their code seems to suffer from poor outset design and has been hacked at too much. The fact there are 4 generations of job dependency tags alone must be a quagmire to modify.