I'm really frustrated that GitLab is doing layoffs

Published on , 430 words, 2 minutes to read

Winning at this could have been so easy

GitLab announced layoffs today. They don't state how many people are affected, but honestly I find this really frustrating for several reasons:

  1. This is the one time where they could have won by doing relatively nothing. GitHub is having big outages on a daily cadence. All they have to do is market themselves as "we're the stable one" and maybe add tooling to run your existing GitHub Actions in GitLab to make the transition easier. They could have won so hard it's not even funny because GitLab makes it trivial to host it yourself.
  2. This is yet another case of "the stock price has gone down but we don't want to look bad to investors so we'll say that AI is going to help us more". I'm increasingly skeptical of this claim, but it's what makes the company look good to the people with the money sooo...
  3. They claim that one of their main goals is "Speed with Quality". Usually this is a "of two, pick one" type of scenario. I shudder to think what may happen when GitLab turns into a feature factory powered by something on the lines of Protos.

Maybe GitLab did need to trim the fat, maybe they will come out of this stronger, but damn I just can't help but think about a world where they could have won without AI and just by being more stable than GitHub.

Numa is smug
Numa

One small problem with that: what you are suggesting makes sense. We live in clown world with clown world logic. Why would we be allowed to have things that make sense in clown world?

Also yes, I do know that clowning is actually a very difficult art to pull off correctly. Humor is one of the most difficult things on the planet because if you do it wrong you offend people. People that are offended generally aren't people that are laughing. As a character that largely amounts to being a jaded contrarian comedian this is something that comes up a lot when planning what I say.

Also maybe I'm just oversensitive to it at this point, but the layoff announcement really reads like Claude Opus output. What a fuckin' world.

Aoi is coffee
Aoi

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

Apropos of nothing, I'm really enjoying my experimentation with Tangled. More to come soon when I have more to say.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

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