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GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
- AnonGitLabEmpl 5mo agoOh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.
- sausagefeet 5mo agoAt 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.
- knollimar 5mo agothe people who would leave after a layoff can do so preemptively, perhaps saving headcount for someone else?
- starkparker 5mo ago[flagged]
- jrochkind1 5mo agoif 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.
- strange_quark 5mo agoUnless they're going to offer offer an insane buyout, like 1+ years of pay + benefits + some accelerated vesting, nobody who doesn't already have something lined up is going to take this offer. It's much better to stay with one foot out the door and just keep cashing that paycheck and collecting your monthly vest. Especially when you know layoffs are coming, nobody expects you to do anything until they actually pull the trigger, then there's a month or two afterwards where you can slack off because morale is in the toilet, people are still trying to figure out who's left, how the company is organized, which priorities are dead, stuff like that. Ask me how I know.
- jrochkind1 5mo agoAh, what you say makes sense, ok.
- crote 5mo agoThe 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.
- knollimar 5mo agoI don't think people doing layoffs are thinking far ahead. In my unqualified opinion, it's either to stop burn or to generate short term profit. Neither of these groups are valuing long term expertise
- crote 5mo agoIf they were thinking far ahead, they wouldn't need to do any firing at all - they would've gradually adjusted their hiring policy in time to avoid it.
- makeitdouble 5mo agoThese high performers will leave anyway if they see their environment drastically changing or feel the tide turning, except they'll do so months after you ripped the band-aid. It's not that different from making it part of the process in the first place.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo agoIt's defensible to have a voluntary separation program with clear terms. Microsoft, for example, announced on April 23 that a voluntary separation program would launch on May 7. On that day they announced the precise terms of separation, with affected employees given until June 8 to participate. Perfectly reasonable. What Gitlab is announcing here is that employees need to apply for a separation, at a yet-to-be-determined time under still-unknown terms, without a guarantee of acceptance, in the next 7 calendar days. Much different and just so much worse.
- Lihh27 5mo agothe order here is backwards. publish the package first and let people apply without committing. right now GitLab gets the signal before employees even get the terms.
- MeetingsBrowser 5mo agosort of a Michael Scott approach of asking people to quit so they don't have to fire anyone.
- anonymars 5mo agoSurely it's the low performers that are going to quit for new jobs!
- haute_cuisine 5mo agoCan someone explain why they're using terms like "voluntary separation window" instead of more natural language?
- bombcar 5mo agoHow would you describe “our best employees can take a severance package”?
- haute_cuisine 5mo agocan't find this quote in the article
- bombcar 5mo agoIt’s not - but voluntary separation with severance often leads to those with the best prospects moving on; which are often the best employees-but not always.
- reaperducer 5mo agoOh 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.
- ihateceos123123 5mo ago[dead]
- arm32 5mo agoTime to tell everybody about Forgejo, again.
- TranquilMarmot 5mo agoSeriously, 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.
- dewey 5mo agoThe market for people paying for Gitlab (Which feels more like GitHub but for Enterprise these days) is probably not even slightly overlapping with the market for people running Forgejo.
- sschueller 5mo agoAs soon as they support groups/folders I will switch. But I can't as my gitlab is all setup in many folders and sub projects. Having to rewrite all my CI will suck but will be worth it.
- ReptileMan 5mo agoTLDR: 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.
- bigbuppo 5mo agoI think they had more employees than customers.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mattas 5mo agoHere's their soon to be updated(?) handbook with the CREDIT values: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
- jrochkind1 5mo agoSoon to be updated, maybe not on the open web, cause Transparency is leaving...
- skrrtww 5mo agoA 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoLet 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.
- u_fucking_dork 5mo agoCalling it text autocomplete is played out and really just makes you look bad at this point.
- solid_fuel 5mo agoIt's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.
- nunez 5mo agoBy design. At least until we move away from attention being at the core of LLMs
- solid_fuel 5mo agoIt's not attention that's the problem, it's how we train networks offline with backprop. LLMs are the most successful form of neural network we have, and that's because they are token prediction machines. Token predictors are easy to train because we're surrounded by written text - there's data nicely structured for use as training data for token prediction everywhere, free for the taking (especially if you ignore copyright law and robots.txt and crawl the entire web). We can't train an LLM to have a more complex internal thought loop because there's no way to synthesize or acquire that internal training data in a way where you could perform backprop training with it. Even "train of thought" models are reducing complex thoughts to simple token space as they iterate, and that is required because backprop only works when you can compute the delta between <input state> and <desired output state>. It can't work for anything more complicated or recursive than that.
- jameskilton 5mo agoA 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.
- petetnt 5mo agoWith 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 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806
- Banditoz 5mo agoSmall 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?
- whalesalad 5mo agofwiw when using pgbouncer i find that disabling in-app connection pooling has improved performance. a pool on top of a pool is diminishing returns.
- verall 5mo agoThat issue looks like it was filed 3 months ago and there has been active development debugging and trying to fix it the whole time? I dunno, at mag7 i see painful infra bugs sitting on the vine for years... maybe my bar is low, but that bug looks like a good response
- keyle 5mo agoHow 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." "Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
- ams92 5mo agoWhat a shock, company whose share price is in the shitter lays people off and blames AI.
- pargon 5mo agoI assume my company's annual bill will be streamlined accordingly.
- relaxatorium 5mo agoNah, AI's gonna let them ship more and more features you don't use so they can keep jacking the price up.
- Animats 5mo agoTheir 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- guelo 5mo ago[flagged]
- malfist 5mo agoDon't think I will
- IshKebab 5mo agoI'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).
- tdb7893 5mo agoPlaces 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.
- madamelic 5mo ago
- 7e 5mo agoI 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.
- IshKebab 5mo ago> 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.
- fidotron 5mo agoThe 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.
- u_fucking_dork 5mo agoBrother there’s nothing to capitalize on. They really don’t want an avalanche of free users bringing their shit down too I think.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agocompanies using paid github are in same spot. Tho I'd imagine many already moved over
- Game_Ender 5mo agoUnless you pay for enterprise then you are on the Enterprise Cloud Instance: https://us.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard https://us.githubstatus.com/posts/dashboard
- Marsymars 5mo agoI've never actually seen that status page before, and I'm not clear what it's measuring. My company pays for Enterprise Cloud, and we see all the same downtime as what gets posted to https://www.githubstatus.com/ https://www.githubstatus.com/
- semiquaver 5mo agoThat is the ghe.com status page, which it seems like no one actually uses, hence the good uptime. Most Enterprise Cloud customers don’t use it. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/data-residency/about-github-enterprise-cloud-with-data-residency https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/dat...
- everfrustrated 5mo ago
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- lbrito 5mo agoLayoff 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.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agoThe reason is investors want more money
- treis 5mo agoAt this point Gitlab investors haven't gotten any money.
- shimman 5mo agoGitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.
- SimpleSalmon 5mo agoSo much this. GitLab’s values and ethos were completely incompatible with becoming a public company. Sid is always seen as the good guy but it was his narrow minded greed that led here.
- elktown 5mo agoAha, it's public. That explains the inflated employee count. Same story every time.
- dmix 5mo agoThey have almost a billion dollars in revenue
- shimman 5mo agoAnd what good is that for the workers that still got laid off? Maybe software devs should have residuals.
- frabcus 5mo agoI 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".
- mhh__ 5mo agoCan'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.
- damsta 5mo ago> 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.
- jaredcwhite 5mo agoIndeed. I've only seen that "quality, depth and pace of innovation" is in inverse proportion to the adoption of slop machines within an org. The more sloppy they get, the more the output stinks to high heaven.
- wiseowise 5mo ago“Don’t make mistakes”
- usernametaken29 5mo agoGitLab 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
- rwmj 5mo agoThe new UI is terrible, and the most important change they've done this year is ... drum roll ... renaming merge requests as "work items", because reasons. Having said that, UI gripes aside, it works fine as a less complicated replacement for github.
- ricardobayes 5mo agoUntil very recently, in my experience the data filtering on issues was broken (at least on the self-hosted version). Also their diffing, they use "..." diffing, and ".." is not apparently there in their GUI. As a git diffing tool I found this very odd.
- maxloh 5mo agoI actually like GitLab's new UI, but their frontend is far too laggy given its complexity, especially since most of their pages are actually server-side rendered. It doesn't help that they use a weird combination of Vue 2 and jQuery in their codebase. I think that as a corporation promoting the use of AI, they should actually be AI users themselves. They should just rewrite that laggy UI in Svelte, Solid, or even vanilla JS. Any of those would work.
- jnwatson 5mo agoIt 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.
- globular-toast 5mo agoIf "writing software" means you took a bootcamp and can churn out some HTML/CSS/JS using a popular framework, then yeah, it won't be too valuable in future. However, if you mean you are able to deliver software to solve real problems in a variety of languages and platforms then I think you'll be ok.
- lta 5mo agoI'm sorely disappointed by gitlab, I was hoping they would be a safe harbor against this whole AI bullshit typhoon.
- Havoc 5mo ago>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.
- bob001 5mo agoMiddle management is also why there’s so many broken processes and challenges in the first place.
- vkou 5mo agoMiddle 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bob001 5mo agoA Director is middle management. Line managers are the ones that turn that into action and they are not middle management.
- retinaros 5mo agoNot really. Middle management is there to be in meetings all day long with nothing produced but identifying low performers.
- lpribis 5mo ago> 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- crote 5mo agoThis 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!
- cryzinger 5mo agoI'm no big-city product strategist, but this is what kills me about so many of these "we're pivoting to AI" announcements. Everyone else is doing the same thing (or already had a long time ago--like you said, GitLab is late to the game here), so squeezing yourself into an AI-shaped mold does exactly nothing to differentiate yourself from the competition. And if/when the AI hype machine sputters to a halt, the few companies that didn't do this will suddenly find themselves at an advantage, because they'll have real, actual differentiators to brag about. Like, I know there are actual reasons and incentives here for the ever-present AI pivot. But I think they're stupid and short-sighted incentives.
- anonymars 5mo agoReminds me of when struggling Firefox (then single-process) decided to basically redo their UI to copy Chrome: "So...you decided to throw away what distinguished you from your faster, more stable competitor?"
- semiquaver 5mo agoThey’re even repeating the debunked excuses GitHub has been making for their own failure!
- dvduval 5mo agoI 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.
- Steeeve 5mo agoWow 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"
- herpdyderp 5mo agoRight? I was seriously considering migrating everything in our company from GitHub to GitLab. Now I'm seriously considering self hosting our git instead.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo ago[flagged]
- npodbielski 5mo agoWow people do not know that?
- gloflo 5mo agoClickbait titled "Microsoft doesn't want you to know this"
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoDid you watch it...
- gloflo 5mo agoNo, why would I invest precious time in a product that disrespects me? The title could be the "this".
- walrus01 5mo agoI don't know if that really solves your problem if the main trunk of development for gitlab is being run through several AI slop machines before they push it to what they call stable, then you download that (or use a debian, redhat package for gitlab which originated from it) and self host on your own machine the results of the AI slop fest.
- rvz 5mo agoGitLab has achieved "AGI" internally.
- bigbuppo 5mo agoDoes AGI mean Abhorrent Git Interface?
- monkaiju 5mo agoJust 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
- whimblepop 5mo agoGitLab'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/ 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.gitlab.com/handbook/values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260510150031/https://handbook....
- SilverElfin 5mo ago[flagged]
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo ago[flagged]
- LambdaComplex 5mo ago> here's an archive from yesterday, for when that changes GitLab's "internal" workings are surprisingly public, so you can just look at the git history yourself: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/blob/main/content/handbook/values/_index.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/blob/ma...
- retinaros 5mo ago« See how agentic AI transforms software delivery »
- MeetingsBrowser 5mo agoSomeone 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...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- trhway 5mo ago>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 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...
- crote 5mo ago> 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?
- trhway 5mo ago>Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion? i see it isn't your first rodeo :) So, in Dotcom the companies needed huge financing for hardware and those money were the main limiter, in Cloud SaaS era small teams with relatively small financing mostly for salaries were able to deliver large - AirBnb, Uber, WhasApp, ... - and the employees, their brain abilities and their ability to work together were the main limiter. Now with AI we don't have these limiters. I'd say the slopped up Claude Code and OpenClaw are the examples of the new wave which is just starting. >large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products. Oh, yes, each wave the software is even more sh.tty than before, and this time i think we're really in for a shock to our imagination of how sh.tty it can get. All these datacenters here and later in space would need some slop to churn through :) My bet is that we'd not have a software as a static set of bits existing for more than one execution. I think we'll have Just-In-Time software. An ephemeral one. It will be generated on the fly for specific task and discarded after. That will keep those datacenters busy at least for some time. Another storyline i, with some horror, expect is merging of the coming boom of actual physical robots with the boom of AI-slopped software - that should be fascinating :)
- ahmadtbk 5mo agoIsn't there like 100 ways to host git repos now?
- looneysquash 5mo agoIt'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?
- semiquaver 5mo agoTokens, I’d wager.
- Miner49er 5mo agoYeah doesn't make sense. My guess is they are doing this to prep for an acquisition. Probably by an AI company or Datadog or similar.
- rirze 5mo agoWhile 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.
- tapoxi 5mo agoThey actually fixed the Gitaly thing a month or two ago
- rirze 5mo agoThank god. I left that job 9 months ago so that's good to hear. Sucks that it's `(Beta)`, but progress I guess. Edit: Nvm, I found the asterisk; Full HA requires Gitlab to make Praefect Kubernetes-native and that is not done yet. [1] [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitaly-on-kubernetes-generally-available/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitaly-on-kubernetes-generally...
- retinaros 5mo agoIs there a polymatket for when its gonna be layoff due to hantavirus overhiring?
- torben-friis 5mo agoLots 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.
- pargon 5mo ago> 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?
- this_user 5mo agoDidn'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.
- itake 5mo agoI 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.
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
- skywhopper 5mo ago“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?
- kajman 5mo agoI'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.
- nijave 5mo agoAtlassian Bitbucket
- calvinmorrison 5mo agowhat value does gitlab provide that some glue scripts dont i am sorry
- zmmmmm 5mo agoRather 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?!
- rdedev 5mo agoWon't this be bad for agents since now you need to provide this new API in their prompt, as opposed to just regular git which the model has seen enough in its training data
- zmmmmm 5mo agohistory suggests so .... people do keep trying to make agent native tools and workflows, but time and time again it turns out to be better just to expose raw inputs and tools to them and let them work with those. See skills beating MCP in most cases where their purpose overlaps for example - it's more effective just to let an agent write git commands than give it a "git tool" with a structured interface. People don't seem to grok the intuition of how heavily biased training on trillions of token of human language and existing software code makes the models towards working well with raw input.
- aiscoming 5mo agosteve yegee was saying this in december, that he had multiple people at companies with heavy AI usage telling him that git cant handle 1000+ commits per hour that these companies are producing now, that the agent can't push because between the push command initiation and its finish another push happened
- throwaway277432 5mo ago>Better pay. >Once approved, our new bonus program will give every team member who isn’t on an incentive compensation plan or bonus plan today, the opportunity to earn a cash bonus based on their individual performance, targeting 10% of salary, awarded at their manager’s discretion. LOL. So basically buckle up and do what you're told and grind. And hope your manager likes you or you'll get nothing.
- tonnydourado 5mo ago> We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up, and plan to right-size roles across the company to follow suit. Ah, yes, finally gitlab will have the same uptime leves as GitHub.
- hn_acc1 5mo agoWhen everyone is leaping head-over-heels into AI / agents, you need SOME part of your stack that is NOT that - slow, tested changes you can (mostly) trust, not "break everything quickly - again" stuff. Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..
- lifeisstillgood 5mo agoI genuinely don’t know what “ Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale “‘means not what “rebuilding the CI/CD as orchestration layer” means. I think you need to explain it like it’s a bash script else I don’t think you understand it. (Ironically I don’t think if this article was the prompt, I don’t think an agent would code it up the way you are thinking)
- iLoveOncall 5mo agoIt's truly amazing that GitLab has 2,500 employees to begin with when I haven't ever encountered a single company or project using their services, besides one or two obscure open-source project once every few years.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dewey 5mo agoIt’s enterprise software that’s used in big corporates. I don’t know why you’d expect to see it in the wild as regularly as hobbyist projects on GitHub.
- digitaltrees 5mo agoHaving used AI to write code, and seen the bs it outputs half the time, any org speed running to a parallel autonomous unreviewed code base is going to get hit with a massive rude awakening when their cluster f of a codebase melts down.
- stego-tech 5mo ago[flagged]
- simonw 5mo ago> planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams One of the really interesting things about GitLab was that not only did they have employees in a large number of countries but they also published their employee handbook which helped show quite how much work it was to support that: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-solutions/ https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment... lists 18 countries right now. I guess they're losing 5 of those. Here's a permalink to the current version of that page https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/7ce61c4be88b04061f9ad9ab5eb64db91ce89d2a/content/handbook/people-group/employment-solutions.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/... since it mentions that "Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging is one of our core values" and so is likely to be updated pretty soon! They even used to have a public payroll.md page detailing how payroll worked in multiple countries - they moved that into their private docs a few years ago but the last public version is here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/82ad50d380b11751645eedc733f7d663cf908d1f/content/handbook/finance/payroll.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/... UPDATE: I got the countries piece wrong. The linked OP says: > Reduced operational footprint: We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience. We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer. Team members who are in good standing and would like to relocate are welcome to do so. We'll continue to serve customers in those markets through our partner network where appropriate. I said they operated in 18 countries, so clearly my impression was out-dated and incorrect. Also "We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer" suggests to me that it's a 30% cut to countries with "only a handful of people", not a 30% cut to countries overall.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- haute_cuisine 5mo ago> We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience Are they going to rectify this by laying these people off?
- odie5533 5mo agoI have no doubt that with the properly applied power of AI, Gitlab too can make their product worse.
- simonw 5mo agoThis is quite an aggressively optimistic vision for the future of the software industry to tuck into a "workforce reduction" announcement: > The agentic era multiplies demand for software. 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. Also notable that the workforce reduction they describe doesn't appear to target engineers - they're "nearly doubling the number of independent teams" in R&D and "removing up to three layers of management in some functions".
- morkalork 5mo agoThe average value an individual software is lower but the volume is definitely higher, if github imploding regularly is any indication
- rdedev 5mo ago> hundreds/user/month What is this based on? The only thing I can think of is AI coding tools but only a few companies do it properly. I don't see gitlab capturing any of that spending Also the whole "removing layers". Today's prof g market video was about the topic. Afaik it was the Coinbase CEO telling the same. Do these people get together to discuss their talking points? Or are they signalling to investors?
- punkbit 5mo agoMakes sense! I’ve worked with teams where the main bottleneck wasn’t technical complexity or even the company itself; it was a people problem. Things like long discussions over formatting that should just be enforced by linters, pushing non-idiomatic patterns despite official docs and tooling recommending otherwise, or turning simple problems into meetings scheduled “for next week”, "in two weeks", "let's have a meeting and invite everyone" instead of just fixing the issue and opening a PR. Which sometimes takes 10 minutes! At some point it starts to feel like responsiveness and initiative are treated as threats rather than strengths. Autonomy and ownership matter a lot more than people realize. Wonder how that'll look like!
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- simonw 5mo agoThis title is editorialized - the original title is "GitLab Act 2" and both the workforce reduction and CREDIT values pieces are hidden in among the details.
- gnomespaceship 5mo agoIn this case, you could say the original title is also misleading, or at least it doesn't say what it's really about, so imho the edit was justified
- hemul3n 5mo ago> Our transparent restructure process creates uncertainty that is real and it's hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I ask that you reflect on the why, what and how and engage your manager in a real conversation about the work, the questions and concerns you have, and what the next chapter looks like for you. Your manager may not have all the answers, because they too are going through this period of uncertainty. The conversation still matters and your input shapes how we land as a team. Setting aside the whole "I'm not going to pretend otherwise which reads suspiciously like Claude, I don't understand how this is supposed to make employees feel any better. No one knows what's going on and through talking we'll figure it out? Mmmmmmhmmmmmm.
- makeitdouble 5mo ago"talk to your manager" is code for "don't straight go rant on SNS over this" For some people it might actually be worth it, not to solve anything but to talk to someone. It still sucks anyway.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- jzb 5mo agoLord. I pity the managers that are going to be worrying about their jobs sitting in 1:1s with people who are also looking for answers when there really aren’t any to give.
- deferredgrant 5mo ago[flagged]
- cdrnsf 5mo agoWe're going to turn our infrastructure in to code slop in the hope that we can scale to host all of your code slop in the same way that GitHub's code slop has failed to host code slop.
- simonw 5mo agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=gitlab+stock https://www.google.com/search?q=gitlab+stock shows their stock price was ~$52 a year ago and is $26 today, so down 50% in 12 months. It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy. If investor fears are that AI makes GitLab's business less valuable, including this in their "GitLab Act 2" announcement makes a whole lot of sense: > The agentic era multiplies demand for software. 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. Wrote a bit more about this on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/
- Yoric 5mo ago> It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy. That's how I interpret the move, too.
- dandellion 5mo agoLooking at their stock it has always been going down, even before AI. How could we know that the reason it's going down now is they were not making enough noise about AI, and not whatever it was that was making it go down before?
- simonw 5mo agoWe can't. It's rarely possible to confidently say why a stock moves. Hence "quite possible" in my comment.
- throwawaypath 5mo agoDown almost 15% now. Investors hate the CEO's buzzword bingo slop.
- HumblyTossed 5mo agoAll these corporations either showing their true colors because the current admin, or they're scared to death of the current admin. Either way, it's fuck employees!
- saadatq 5mo ago“ AI is the substrate on which future software gets built” - when you see the word substrate in corporate speak, you know where that’s from…
- rdedev 5mo agoRelevant video: https://youtu.be/WAUnmQt2Z7Y?si=Gll0AkqyAdsSjqlA https://youtu.be/WAUnmQt2Z7Y?si=Gll0AkqyAdsSjqlA My manager has started speaking like this. He showed a slide recently which had the words AI and Quantum nearby
- robinhood 5mo agoOf course this is happening. Gitlab's values were only there for marketing - just take a look at their massive turnover of employees who get burn so fast they don't have time to update the About page fast enough. Gitlab is a terrible company, period.
- gnomespaceship 5mo agoYou're wrong about the values. Since the start, GitLab's values were real and lived, unlike every other company I've been at. Only after Staples' takeover as CEO and C-suite changes, they started eroding rapidly, starting with Transparency. Source: I'm ex-GitLab
- robotmay 5mo agoYeah it was a pretty awesome place to work up until the IPO, my first year was probably the most enjoyable I've ever had at a job.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoHow many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale. I've done some organizational consulting in the past, often trying to help companies understand why their employees don't trust management. I suspect the powers that be thought that post was decent, and I think the GitHub survivors will likely ignore most of it. And I don't know anything about what's going on there. But if you told me GitHub employees were made MORE nervous by that post than LESS, I would not be surprised.
- CGamesPlay 5mo agoHow do you think the GitLab employees felt about it?
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoI obviously picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
- sgarland 5mo ago…this is GitLab, not GitHub.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo agoYou say tomato, I say tomahto. Yes, my mistake. I shouldn't post things before my mid-afternoon coffee.
- smhaziq 5mo agoI think you might have GitHub and GitLab mixed up.
- OhMeadhbh 5mo ago
- threecheese 5mo agoAm I alone in being extremely sensitive to LLM-style writing, observing it in this article, and feeling a little upset about that? The letter to employees ticks several of the boxes, and if I’m not wrong that’s kinda shitty. Or perfectly aligned with the spirit of the announcement (or both).
- sgarland 5mo ago> Great engineers are problem solvers and builders who care about system design, distributed systems, reasoning through failures, safely integrating new capability into critical systems, and making decisions under ambiguity. Yes, and the people who are all-in on agentic AI are, in practically every example I’ve seen, not that. They’re the jackasses giving Claude root access to their prod DB and then writing a blog post about how much they’ve learned from their mistake.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dunder_cat 5mo agoAfter CVE-2023-7028 (account takeover via password reset, IIRC you just had to add a semi-colon between the correct email and the attacker email and it'd email both) was exploited against my cluster, the boasting about fully-automated changes and reviews scares me. I hope I'm far from the only one that hasn't forgotten issues like this. I'm aware that the defective code was not written by AI but nonetheless, GitLab is what stands between many small organizations and their most precious resources. I was fortunate that 2FA stopped the damage, but what's going to happen the next time? What if my organization is permanently damaged because we taught the machines to go fast and break things, too [1]? [1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago> [1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier. I would love to help a non-profit and so, I am curious but what are your thoughts on authentik/authelia and others, can they might help in any use case to what you are suggesting, I would love to have a more in-depth discussion! Also thanks for working at non-profit, although I am not entirely sure what is about but thanks to your non profits and all the other hard working people working at non profits for a better world once again!
- jmull 5mo agoSounds panicky to me... changing everything all at once for all the reasons. I guess someone will be selling enterprises something that lets them say, "We're doing AI too!" Might as well be gitlab?
- davexunit 5mo agoSure am glad I moved everything off of Gitlab awhile ago. Trainwreck of a company.
- tsh3lley 5mo agoIf you were impacted, Magnetic (AI Tax Prep for CPA firms) is hiring senior - staff level engineers in SF https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic Email me subject “gitlab” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
- arcza 5mo agoImagine how refreshing if the press release simply said: "We over-hired, we're ram-packed full of managers pinging each other on Slack all day and need to cut costs to sustain our operation. We think GitHub's shit and we want to be a nimble org with a fighting chance at eating their lunch. We're also gonna provide 1000 free runner hours/mo to open source projects that move from GitHub to gitlab, and we're gonna make project namespaces on gitlab.com a first class thing like GitHub did"
- bitsytomato 5mo agoGitLab workers could do the funniest thing and all take the voluntary package.
- henry2023 5mo agoI'm happy I'm no longer a shareholder of this company. Software stocks won't win longterm if their value proposition is "we vibe code now".
- dewey 5mo agoThere’s still a big difference between “vibe coding” which is what it was called 2 years ago when people tried to “one shot” whole products and AI assisted / agentic development in more structured ways like it’s happening right now in many companies. In capable hands it’s a great tool.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoI'm glad this website is still alive: https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/
- TeeWEE 5mo ago> 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 Two big red flags here. First git itself is distributed and built for scale. I guesss they mean “gitlab” instead of “git”. But such a huge mistake would never go unnoticed. Are they going to rebuilt git?? Secondly: a big rebuilt of monolith to services. Firstly there is nothing wrong with a Modulith. Secondly “rebuilt” will cause a lot of busy work without immediate value for customers. And first of all: this announcement is done due to the stock price not AI The productivity increase with AI is inflated because they want their stock price up. Sell Gitlab stock while you can. The leadership team has no clue what they are doing. Sadly non engineering leaders buy into this dogma. AI is very usefull but in my experience doesn’t 10x if you don’t YOLO it.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago> Sadly non engineering leaders buy into this dogma. AI is very usefull but in my experience doesn’t 10x if you don’t YOLO it. It makes you have 10x more the errors if you YOLO it ;) especially at a scale even remotely comparable to gitlab :/ Doesn't really inspire the greatest of confidences when they are literally dropping the ball on one of the greatest opportunities as github is being ensloppified. Sometimes I wonder if I am more passionate towards my 7$/yr vps's and websites running on it than 7 billion $ companies (GitLab has a market cap or net worth of $4.36 billion. The enterprise value is $3.10 billion.[0] to be exact) break things and move fast should work when you have 1000 users on your website, not 1000 full on entreprises (probably more for gitlab) > I guesss they mean “gitlab” instead of “git”. But such a huge mistake would never go unnoticed. > Are they going to rebuilt git?? These comments make me realize again how you all (who were alive ie) must have felt during the pets.com and dotcom mania. Some of these sentences are almost onion-video like titles. Its so all weird at a certain point. I am unsure how to feel about this. [0]: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/gtlb/statistics/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/gtlb/statistics/
- yalok 5mo ago> First git itself is distributed and built for scale. there're different dimensions for "scale" - like handling large monorepos, orders of magnitude more commits, tighter requirements for latencies (for agentic use, e.g. for agentic history navigation)...
- nijave 5mo agoOh the irony. It was just last week I was lamenting Gitlab's lack of AI support. Best I could tell, Gitlab's solution to AI hitting servers is "block it with Anubis"
- wayeq 5mo ago> Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one. "We did nothing wrong, but ended up in the wrong shape!"
- Melatonic 5mo agoSurprised at the negativity here - did most of you read the source ? They seem to be mostly reducing headcount of managers and claim (supposedly) to be prioritising engineering. On top of that their redesign sounds interesting - they want to adapt the platform itself (and concept) to deal specifically with how AI "users" will code and submit changes (and the rate of and interaction of that model) vs humans. We'll see how this plays out but this doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all (assuming humans of course still get priority).
- glub103011 5mo ago[dead]
- momo26 5mo agoNot making sense to me at all. The AI era should be a great opportunity for Github to show their reliability and developer-first law, but they decided to all in AI. As a developer, what I need is a well-working repository, not a agent that write, review, even publish the code for me.
- mvdtnz 5mo agoThis has nothing to do with GitHub.
- iandanforth 5mo agoI don't understand how people can use the phrase "right-size" without a crushing sense of embarrassment and shame. Did you swallow a business consultant from 1990? That and phrases like "go forward strategy" say either 1. I do not know how to communicate like a human or 2. I am afraid of speaking naturally because it impinges on my self image as a business leader or 3. I do not want to accurately describe what I'm doing because that might expose my fragile ego to the possibility that I'm doing something which hurts people. "We're firing a bunch of people because we think we don't need them anymore due to AI and we'll make more money without them." There are times when businesses must fire people to stay afloat and it's a business that objectively needs to exist. This isn't one of them, so don't waste everyone's time with your BS, please.
- AdmiralAsshat 5mo ago> A letter to our customers and our investors. You can always tell when the title is incredibly vague or bereft of details (e.g. "An update about our product") that it's going to be some flavor of either lay-offs, shutting down, or other enshittification.
- recov 5mo ago[dead]
- whirlingzebra 5mo agoNow I know why my recent application didn't end up going anywhere
- ern 5mo agoEngineering has always been about more than writing code. That's true, but it's interesting how FizzBuzz as said to be the bete noir of the average dimwitted software developer, and how much cutting-edge engineering organizations used to emphasize code in their recruitment processes. If writing code is being replaced by "engineering judgement" it's going to need a much smaller cohort of developers. Too many opinions spoil the broth, after all.
- jaredcwhite 5mo agoThe future of forges is decentralized, and I'm getting all I need now out of Forgejo/Codeberg/Codefloe. I'll be handcoding software merrily away on platforms which don't suck and aren't beholden to techbros spewing buzzwords.
- shmerl 5mo ago> We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs What can go wrong.
- woah 5mo agoThis is like when Bob Dylan went electric
- npodbielski 5mo agoI was thinking of switching to Forgejo because gitlab as great it was to this point is enormous. Small service to have git, some web ui and pipelines that run build will be enough.
- shevy-java 5mo agoIn the last few weeks we increasingly see Microslop GitHub becoming worse. Now GitLab announces it will have to fire people - the AI slop cuts away at finacnial gains here. AI slop is killing everything.
- outlore 5mo ago“Our company doesn’t make any money and burning tokens didn’t seem to help so we’re gonna lay some people off to make number go up”
- mock-possum 5mo agoMeanwhile they can’t manage to get ‘keep both’ implemented in their interactive merge conflict tool. You have to edit it by hand.
- aweb 5mo agoIs there a specific list of countries whee they'll be closing down?
- gnomespaceship 5mo agoNot yet, they'll share it on June 1
- localhoster 5mo agoAnother one bites the dust
- sheepscreek 5mo agoIf you put the typical knee jerk reaction aside, the article is a pretty good read on where things are headed. Particularly interesting is their gut feel around problems requiring deep technical knowledge multiplying and the talent that can solve them becoming the scarcest. What we are witnessing so far has been just the tech world’s reaction. As typical companies catch on to the agentic era, we’re going to see more layoffs. A part of it may be due to “unlocked productivity” but more of it will be to make space in their ranks for hiring more AI native workforce. Which will also be scarce at the beginning. I think we should get ready to see a very different kind of talent war, and at a scale and pace never seen before.
- ivolimmen 5mo agoSo basically they are saying: do not code here because we are letting machines code... nice.
- gabrieledarrigo 5mo ago> the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market. Reduce the work force of 30%. I don't know, dude, you didn't convince me.
- vultour 5mo agoGitLab 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 all of these ancient issues quickly and clean up the backlog. Nope, “workforce reduction” thanks to AI again. This charade is getting boring.
- denvrede 5mo agoI'm certain that if they would start doing that, without a proper strategy / workflow when it comes to QA, it will be GitHub reloaded. You'll be able to watch the decline in real-time.
- close04 5mo agoI think what OP means is that these companies keep promising AI is exceptional for one thing but for some reason it's never used for that. The only visible outcome of AI in these companies is that they spend so much on it they end up laying off employees. Has any of the companies who went all in on AI gotten better at their job because they went all in on AI?
- stingraycharles 5mo agoBut that’s the issue the parent is highlighting, you can’t just throw AI at these problems because the bottleneck is decision making, it always is, and AI is bad at that. So nothing really changes in terms of product development velocity, it’s just headcount reduction. But that’s not what their own marketing strategy communicates.
- dude250711 5mo agoEven slop-maker-makers themselves struggle: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues What hope slop-maker-users have then?
- mugivarra69 5mo ago[dead]
- ComplexSystems 5mo agoYet another round of layoffs. Is there a fallback career? :-/
- sschueller 5mo agoIs this the best move for the customer or the investor?
- rwmj 5mo ago[flagged]
- nalekberov 5mo agoI will never trust nor respect businesses, who fires its people because “AI agents can plan, code, review, deploy, and repair”.
- drdrek 5mo agoAs someone that is raising money from VCs, I feel really sorry for large VC backed companies right now. What you see here is the Product-VC tension of the AI era, and in a large company its devastating. Users want a product that delivers the value they are looking for, VCs are looking for infinite AI scale, these do not meet. So founders need to present two different values and visions, one for customers and one for VCs. In a small early stage company you can pretty easily hide each side from the other so you can deliver value to your customers while dancing the VC dance, but as you get larger its harder. I think founders will endure and VCs will calm down at some point, but there is going to be some suffering along the way. Oh and have you heard that they built Cluade code with only 20 people? (ignore 12 years of AI research expertise head-start and that Anthropic now has thousands of developers)
- twoodfin 5mo agoThe message was pretty clear that the only “users” that matter to them now are agents. It’s not clear at all this is the wrong move.
- ricardobayes 5mo agoNever really got how gitlab got so big, what's their USP? To my knowledge they don't really have anything that is not reproducible rather easily.
- oblio 5mo agoOn premise Git forge with integrated issue tracker, CI/CD platform, and probably other 20 development adjacent tools. It has a ton of features so for sure it's not easily reproducible.
- rcxdude 5mo agoOne issue I have with them is that they pretty much had all the features I use a few years after they started, and they have, for the most part, just kept adding new ones of dubious value instead of polishing the core ones.
- rtdq 5mo ago> We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up Uh, if this is what I think it means, I wouldn't trust using a product where their company thinks that approvals for reviews can be automated.
- lintfordpickle 5mo ago>> "We've been working through some significant changes inside GitLab over the past few days" I can't seem to get past this - all these decisions (and a work-force reduction :() are the result of a few days of pondering? I've had stomach aches that have lasted longer ..
- bayindirh 5mo ago> Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair. "The Machine Stops" by Forster [0], anyone? Honestly, I can't believe how repeatedly people ignore or don't know the warning signs put up by previous people. Yes, it's science fiction, but so is 1984, Brave New World and Pump Six. When will we go through something between 2001[1] and Tacoma[2]? Will we ever learn? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_(video_game)
- spwa4 5mo agoWhat would you suggest as an alternative? Gitlab really sucks in my personal opinion, but what are your experiences with: Gogs https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ (this IS gitea btw) Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ Self hosted or cloud hosted. Also excluding Github because, please just fracking don't.
- esafak 5mo agoThere is such a dire need for a viable Github and Gitlab competitor. Forgejo is the one I've one tried but it's lacking.
- metric10 5mo agoOh wow, $GLAB is down 31.68% YTD and they are announcing a massive restructuring and work force reduction. Is this th en---oh wait, AI!!!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- qwshGA 5mo agoThey are losing money and they are grasping at the AI straw. All free software projects should leave GitLab immediately. Why should we support the IP thieves?
- Miner49er 5mo agoThey promise to not use customer code to train models. AFAIK, that hasn't changed.
- freedomben 5mo agoGiLab is one of the saddest stories in SaaS I can think of. They had an enormous opportunity years ago thanks to their relatively good product, open source nature, and free private repos (before github started offering that), but they squandered it by focusing heavily on "enterprise" and pricing themselves in a ridiculous way that made it non-sensical for startups and small companies. Their CI product alone was the best in the business for a while but they priced it such that it made no sense for most people. A real shame. It's sad to think of what could have been with better management.
- dcchambers 5mo agoTheir pricing has always been a challenge, but I think the biggest issue is that they went way too wide early on in an effort to capture the market. Their product pool was a mile wide but only an inch deep. People quickly realized many of the features they were promised were very rough around the edges or a limited POC. Their UX is pretty unintuitive as well, IMO. The company is fascinating. The "everything is open" nature of how they build the business is an incredible value for people that want to see how the sausage is made...but it hasn't ultimately lead to a better product.
- great_wubwub 5mo agoSo is New Relic, which also featured the same CEO and CTO. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
- noisy_boy 5mo ago> We’re re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams. This seems to be the new emerging theme. I wonder if the idea is to let these smaller teams fight it out and those who survive, do so at the expense of others? If so, instead of meritocracy, usually politically savvy ones win. Or maybe the motivation is deliberate fragmentation allowing for easily picking and choosing for further reduction? Or maybe I'm just too cynical for my own good.
- smeggysmeg 5mo agoEmployees maybe are too collaborative? And management thinks dividing and conquering will give them an even bigger hand.
- computerz420 5mo agoBill Staples and his band of inept buddies (he hired all his ex-MS friends to replace the c-suite at GL) ruin another company and get each other rich via the enshittification of a decent product. Sucks that this company was once one of the good ones. Having the employees compete in the Hunger Games for their jobs over the next few weeks is just unnecessarily cruel and stupid. Weak leadership, bad strategy.
- ngai_aku 5mo ago...Annnnd there's the active incident May 12, 2026 17:56 UTC INVESTIGATING We are seeing elevated error rates across GitLab.com and GitLab.com services. We are investigating the issue and will continue to update as we have more information. May 12, 2026 17:37 UTC INVESTIGATING We're investigating elevated error rates on GitLab.com. Some users may experience intermittent failures or degraded performance while we work to identify the cause. We'll share another update as soon as we have more information. ------ https://status.gitlab.com https://status.gitlab.com
- vira28 5mo agoIf I have to guess on why they are providing voluntary exit option, because they have a lot more folks from Europe.
- sudb 5mo ago> the TAM is exploding at a step function rate This stumped me for a while! what are the interpretations, infinite or 0?
- zty5678 5mo ago[dead]
- porknbeans00 5mo agoWhen you see a decision like this. It's obvious to everyone outside the organization that this is a very bad decision that can only hurt them and their customers. And you want there to be a lever to pull to call a bet on the executives responsible. So that when this blows up in their face. As we all know it to be a certainty that it will. That they will all be fired and all of their compensation clauses are voided.