GitLab employee here. I want to preface the below with the fact that I believe in our product and think we have a lot of highly skilled engineers. But the leadership failure occurring is wrecking the company.
Since sytse left and Bill became CEO a year ago:
- Our stock has gone down by nearly half
- he micro managed the CPO into leaving
- he's micro managing everything possible
- he's obsessed over generating AI buzz with mediocre actual product. Real product issues requested by paying customers take low priority
- he's brought in an army of New Relic yes men who don't have the experience or skills to do the job
- he micro managed the CTO into taking a leave of absence
- the VP of AI Engineering went into cardiac arrest (sounds like it was the stress)
- in an all hands, he went into a rant on how he gives his life for the company (and we don't), chastising us for rating him poorly in the company survey
- he's broken down into tears in 2 all hands
- he brags openly on how he's pressured people into working a 50+ work week
- there's a reorg basically every month. Nobody knows what their priorities are
- he threatened to cancel Christmas holidays for employees unless release goals were made
Also, the async work culture is dying rapidly. 3 years ago I would have 2-3 essential meetings per week. Now it's 2-3 per day, mostly repetitive.
I think it's possible to course correct and keep our product and company productivity really strong, but not with current leadership. Morale is in the dumps.
Some teams are more insulated from this than others and are still very strong.