Gitlab about to go to shit

[pikesley@mastodon.me.uk]

"It's important to us not to miss out on this race-to-the-bottom"

[pikesley@mastodon.me.uk]

"We're planning to flatten the organization, removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work"

Their MBAs spent the weekend prompting fucking Claude Code didn't they?

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@pikesley they asked claude to prompt itself.

[rotnroll666@mastodon.social]

@tante @pikesley Retrained on the Cloudflare post from last week…

> I want to be direct: I want to do this once, and do it right, and not revisit our structure anytime in the foreseeable future. The team that comes through this restructure is the team that builds Act 2, and you should be able to plan your life and your work without bracing for what comes next. Let’s talk about what’s changing and how we get it right.

[nyanbinary@infosec.exchange]

@tante @pikesley metaprompting is such a wild concept to me, what do you mean, you need help speaking to the magic box... from the magic box???

[bjorndown@mastodon.social]

@pikesley "Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. "

Genuinely wondering whether there is "hard data" that supports this statement or if it is just "software brain".

Like "I like to go on the computer and it made me rich therefore the computer must be central to human existence"

[fabienmarry@mastodon.social]

@pikesley
“We’re re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams.”

No such thing as “independent teams” on a single project. Just uncoordinated teams.

Soon they’ll realise that and will waste soooo much time building a structure to re coordinate…

[tofuwabohu@subversive.zone]

@pikesley reevaluating their operational footprint

[tante@tldr.nettime.org]

@richardE @pikesley if you run it for a company (as my employer does) it's already there mostly

[cora@hachyderm.io]

@pikesley

> 3. We’re re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams.

HFS, they had approximately 30 "larger" R&D teams?

I mean, I don't _use_ GitLab; it's only ever been an annoyance for me pushing back on accommodating its use by contractors who didn't understand how to use git in the first place, but I regularly find myself agog at the sheer sizes and breadths of some of these teams.

It's almost like we've had middle and upper management treating engineering as a quantity problem rather than a quality problem for decades because that's how everyone is incentivized when the C-suite has contracted a summarization fetish, and they've been looking for an off-ramp that AI and some creative word salad provides.

Also, that's as far as I could bear to read. I find ingesting someone else's LLM output as savory as rifling through a meth den clothes hamper.

[christopherkunz@chaos.social]

@pikesley That announcement is the most excruciating example of corporate Newspeak: "rewiring internal processes", "right-size roles", "voluntary separation window", "Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, and Customer Outcomes", "culture of excellence".

Lots of emdashes, lots of bold-faced intro sentences to long winding paragraphs. Does Bill Staples not even announce a fundamental change including potential mass layoffs in his own words?

[larsmb@mastodon.online]

@pikesley To be blunt, for most managed people, their managers & CxOs replacing themselves with Opus & max effort would, with reasonable probability, be a noticable improvement.