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.

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pargon 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Didn'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.

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treis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You know how many layers of management I have Bob?

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groby_b 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

8 layers of management???

At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.

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malaproping 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

They have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.

	▲	gizmo686 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		At 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.

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andrewstuart2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'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.