I have no doubt GitLab has too many employees and can benefit from being a more focused company, but it's tiring reading these layoff posts so chock full of buzzwords. I guess they're desperately hoping if they prognosticate about AI enough it will placate the investors.
If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806
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.
"Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.
In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.
It doesn't make sense for it to be 40% of their values, especially if they're losing money (or very close to it).
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.
(Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)
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.
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?
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.
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.
All the responsibility is still yours though.
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.
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.
I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.
GitHub is already the main platform for random open-source projects, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. GitLab's selling point is essentially "Github, but not by Github". They would do Just Fine offering a highly-restricted free account for the handful of hobbyists who care enough about leaving GH but don't care enough to go to Forgejo & friends and for the people doing evaluations, offering free credits to the few high-profile FLOSS projects who accidentally end up on GL-the-SaaS instead of self-hosted GL, and for the rest just focusing on paid corporate customers.
Does anyone know what caused this?
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.
Yeah, sure. A couple of years ago it was Covid overhiring.
You know the one thing that is never ever going to be given as a reason for layoffs? The growing salary-productivity gap.
Until I got to "One platform, three modes." and my brain just pattern matched "AI slop" and the entire post dissolved into meaningless for me.
I don't know if I can stop my mind reaching this conclusion. I'm sure someone at GitLab made some effort to carefully edit the post... But that it wasn't entirely rooted in a human who'd worked out how this stuff goes, but clearly had lots of AI writing it out... Just made my instinct go "this isn't worth paying attention to after all".
Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.
I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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....
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...
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...
... 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?
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 defined 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.
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?
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 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.
Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?
At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.
Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?
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.
> 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?!
>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.
Ah, yes, finally gitlab will have the same uptime leves as GitHub.
Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..
AnonGitLabEmpl•2h ago
sausagefeet•1h ago
> 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•1h ago
jrochkind1•47m ago
crote•33m ago
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.
MeetingsBrowser•29m ago
reaperducer•31m ago
Plenty of time to whip up a dead man's switch.