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by torben-friis13 hours ago |
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upvoteby pargon13 hours ago|
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> 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?

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upvoteby this_user12 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby itake7 hours ago|
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I 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.

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upvoteby swiftcoder4 hours ago|
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Yeah, 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
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upvoteby WJW1 hours ago|
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Companies 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.
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upvoteby Hendrikto1 hours ago|
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If 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.
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upvoteby darkwater1 hours ago|
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But salaries - sorry, operational costs - are an inverted pyramid.
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upvoteby treis12 hours ago|
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You know how many layers of management I have Bob?
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upvoteby ForHackernews1 hours ago|
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You have to translate from management speak: They see the largest opportunity ever to make more money, by spending less money on staff.
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upvoteby groby_b13 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby michaelt5 hours ago|
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https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/structure/

> GitLab has at most eight layers in the company structure (Associate/Intermediate/Senior, Manager/Staff, Senior Manager/Principal, Director/Distinguished, Senior Director, VP/Fellow, Executives, Board).

> [...] You can skip layers but you generally never have someone reporting to the same layer (Example of a VP reporting to a VP).

So they're counting the board of directors as a layer above the CEO.

I'm speculating, but they probably also have an unbalanced tree - you'll often see the IT security chief reporting directly to the CEO (because it's important to keep on top of, and they need authority to do their job) but only having 50 people below them in the org chart.

In some corporations you also sometimes get almost-nonexistent ranks created to smooth over a reorganisation. If a level 5 bureaucrat decides to merge the departments of two of their level 4 bureaucrats, they could demote one of them. Or they could make one into a level 4.5 bureaucrat.

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upvoteby rocky19761 hours ago|
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That’s not what layers refers to. What they mean is how many managers between the CEO and an employee. Made up Example: CEO->CTO->VP of Infrastructure—> Director of Platform-> Sr Manager of AWS platform —> infra engineer would be 6 layers
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upvoteby ricardobayes2 hours ago|
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Gitlab has approx. 2300 employees (!)

I never really got why they need to be a public company in the first place.

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upvoteby nialv71 hours ago|
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That's mad. Gitlab feels like software made by 50 people. Consider how unpolished it is and how slow it is moving.
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upvoteby ricardobayes51 minutes ago|
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You're onto something, I've been part of enterprise projects with a <10 engineer team that had more polished and diverse feature offering.
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upvoteby intelVISA54 minutes ago|
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Did you typo an extra 0?!
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upvoteby malaproping9 hours ago|
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They have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.
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upvoteby Aurornis5 hours ago|
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Mathematically 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.

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upvoteby swiftcoder4 hours ago|
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If its anything like the other tech companies, you'll have a bunch of overworked low-level managers with 20+ reports each, and then somewhere up the chain you'll find directors and VPs chilling with 1-2 reports
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upvoteby vkou1 hours ago|
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Solution: fire half the line managers, and make the rest also do IC work.

If anyone has a VP-level position open, I'm willing to send you my resume. There is a salary level at which I am willing to do work entirely without shame.

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upvoteby 5 hours ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby gizmo6869 hours ago|
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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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upvoteby CoffeeOnWrite8 hours ago|
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> We’re flattening our organization because eight layers is too deep

Eight layers total

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upvoteby marcosdumay7 hours ago|
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So... 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.

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upvoteby IshKebab4 hours ago|
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That's a really crazy number of employees considering they have one product that barely seems to change and is at best on par with similar products created by comparatively miniscule teams (Phabricator, Forgejo).
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upvoteby andrewstuart212 hours ago|
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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.

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