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.
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.