> 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.
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
> Consider how unpolished it is and how slow it is moving
Probably because a lot of it is built on top of decades old ruby code. I've seen Merge Requests for months in review because they need to make sure the page doesn't take a minute to load or just crash the entire thing. And its not like those MRs were ground breaking.
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).
Phabricator (now Phorge) was developed by a team of 2-3 people for most of it's life, with a little help from several moderately active contributors like myself.
Gitlab is a really big conglomeration of services and daemons and tools written in multiple languages. It's approximately an order of magnitude more complicated than the relatively straightforward and (IMO) well designed Phabricator architecture.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown on technical vs non-technical roles. I can't imagine it takes even 50% of that to actually develop the product.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.