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Comment by malaproping | Hacker News Reader

They have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.

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).

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.

There are 800 on the engineering team

GitLab is a way more complex product

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.

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.

> We’re flattening our organization because eight layers is too deep

Eight layers total

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.

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.

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