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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
by torben-friis 5mo ago
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.
- 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 agoYeah, they never fire the VPs and SVPs in this process. Just a bunch of the hard-working line managers who are actually involved in the day-to-day engineering work
- WJW 5mo agoCompanies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.
- rurp 5mo agoHow does that justify keeping the people who created the mess in the first place and mass firing people who didn't?
- darkwater 5mo agoBut salaries - sorry, operational costs - are an inverted pyramid.
- Hendrikto 5mo agoIf one person at the top of the pyramid earns 100 times what people at the bottom earn, cutting a few of them is still meaningful. Also, cutting a single/few person(s) that are mismanaging the whole organization is extraordinarily valuable too.
- groby_b 5mo ago8 layers of management??? At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.
- malaproping 5mo agoThey have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.
- gizmo686 5mo agoAt 8 layers of management (so 9 layers total, with the bottom rung being non-management), 3 reports per manager comes out to 6561 employers on the bottom rung. At 5 reports each, that 8 layers would give you over 300k at the bottom, an 10 each would give you 100m at the bottom.
- CoffeeOnWrite 5mo ago> We’re flattening our organization because eight layers is too deep Eight layers total
- marcosdumay 5mo agoSo... That's the assumption that would give you 300k employees with 5 reports per manager. Sum of 5^x for x in [0, 7] is ~300k. The GP miscalculated it.
- Aurornis 5mo agoMathematically that would work out to a lot less than 8 layers of management. I wonder if they have 5-10 employees per manager at the bottom of the org chart, but a lot of middle managers and manager-like titles mixed through the middle.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- treis 5mo agoYou know how many layers of management I have Bob?
- blitzar 5mo ago15 pieces of flair is the minimum.
- andrewstuart2 5mo agoI'm on board with your gut that this feels more YOLO than careful but to be fair, in the engineering world fly by wire is very much precedented. I'm specifically thinking of the B2 bomber where it's essentially unflyable without a computer between the inputs and the outputs. Partially just keeping the plane from turning into a frisbee by reacting faster than a human possibly could, but also treating the controls inputs as the intent and manipulating the control surfaces programmatically in order to make that work. It's not quite the same thing of course but I think there's some carryover. Still. Not a huge fan of this announcement or the general ways the landscape is evolving these days.
- conciliatory 5mo agoThis is a great analogy to what this time in IT and tech feels like. We are moving up a layer in terms of abstraction, and for those of us who cut our teeth in processes where we had lower level understanding it feels very destabilizing. I've been telling my team for a few years now that becoming an "agent manager" is the path forward - it's more true now with the latest revelation that "managers are out of style", and every role will have some IC component. I've seen it in my work - I can express intent more clearly to Claude and get immediate feedback for any technical tasks, so my team needs to be able to create intent at a higher level and translate that to their agent team, rather than getting directive task alignment. We've been through these pendulum swings before - this should start to stabilize in a few years... That's the industry vet perspective - I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel different this time though...
- jurgenburgen 5mo ago> We are moving up a layer in terms of abstraction I’ll believe it when I don’t need to understand the code. Until then it’s just autocompletion with (a lot of) extra steps. Wake me up when I can actually let agents do the IC work without having to be the accountability sink that gets fired when things go wrong.
- ForHackernews 5mo agoYou have to translate from management speak: They see the largest opportunity ever to make more money, by spending less money on staff.