Comment by acdha
5 hours ago
I’ve liked using GitLab but it’s definitely felt like their IPO lead to more chasing flash and less attention to quality. They yanked the support rep which customers used to get–everything goes through sales now–and started putting most features behind the hefty Ultimate price tier, and there are so many cute features which need more polish but since they’re not “AI” it seems like they’re ignored even though they have open issues with years of customers saying they have the same problem.
This has lead to a game: each time the sale pitch claiming big wins for their AI tools arrives, ask “when will we start seeing GitLab development back to pre-IPO speed?”
Nah, they were always chasing flash. I enjoyed using their products circa 2015-2020, but man they really leaned into the Pareto Principle. Every feature had rough edges, and they didn’t invest much in polish.
It’s a tough trade-off for a small team competing with a behemoth, and I guess their success indicates that they played their hand correctly. If you are going for the enterprise segment then checking off the feature requirements can be more important than making each feature perfect.
Gitlab’s CICD offering is way more robust than Github Actions.
I don’t think it was perfect back then either but it felt like it got worse. I think this may prove a strategic error: checking all of those enterprise boxes gets you in the door but they don’t have Microsoft’s clout in that market and depend on technical staff pushing for them over GitHub.
~2400 vs ~5600 isn’t “small team vs. behemoth”.
They were nowhere near 2400 in the time range I mentioned.