app02 Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:36:52 +0000 Fireside (https://fireside.fm) Software Defined Interviews - Episodes Tagged with “Gitlab” https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/tags/gitlab Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0200 Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like en-us episodic Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like Software Defined Talk Deep discussions about technology, enterprise IT, and the like yes Software Defined Talk softwaredefinedinterviews@cote.wtf Episode 124: The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/124 a4a2167f-2cb9-4f13-af10-067073382ca9 Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0200 Software Defined Talk 124 The Chief Therapy Officer, Job Titles as Culture Change, and AI as Spreadsheets, with Bryan Ross full Software Defined Talk 1:09:48 yes <p>Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.</p> <p>Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.</p> <p>You can watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w184M4RtlIU" rel="nofollow noopener">the video version of this episode</a> as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.</p> <p>Mentions:</p> <ul> <li> <a href="https://bryanross.me/" rel="nofollow noopener">Bryan Ross’s home page on the World Wide Web</a>, which links to everything else.</li> <li> <a href="https://chieftherapyofficer.co.uk/" rel="nofollow noopener">Chief Therapy Officer</a>, Bryan’s Substack.</li> <li> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanross/" rel="nofollow noopener">Bryan on LinkedIn</a>.</li> <li> Coté's <a href="https://cote.pizza/shit-people-say/" rel="nofollow noopener">list of "laws," anecdotes, and common shit people say</a>. See also <a href="https://hacker-laws.com/" rel="nofollow noopener">Hacker Laws</a>. Special Guest: Bryan Ross.</li> </ul> Bryan Ross, GitLab, field CTO, chief therapy officer, platform engineering, DevOps engineer, job titles, sysadmin, context engineer, Goodhart’s law, metrics, balancing metrics, VM provisioning, decommissioning, repaving, microservices, monolith, LAMP stack, Kubernetes, golden paths, developer velocity, shipping faster, UK Postal Service, customer satisfaction, AI adoption, frontier models, model routing, FinOps for AI, agentic engineering, diffusion of innovations, Conway’s law, non-determinism, CI, coding agents, AI evaluation, tool sprawl, Jenkins, Tanzu, Substack, The New Stack Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.

Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

]]> Bryan Ross is a Field CTO at GitLab, a role he describes as straddling sales, customer success, and solution architecture - or, as one of his customers renamed it, chief therapy officer, which he has since turned into a Substack. Whitney and Coté talk with him about what the job actually looks like: getting catapulted into an account by the sales team, asking a lot of questions, and finding out about four minutes in that the tech problem is a human one. He makes the case that changing job titles - sysadmin, DevOps engineer, platform engineer, now context engineer - is mostly an organization trying to change its culture without knowing how, and that the real difference is mindset: keeping a box alive versus serving one team versus building a product. There’s a long stretch on metrics, including Goodhart’s law, why every metric needs a balancing one, and why he cared more about how many VMs were being decommissioned than how many were being provisioned. Also: whether anyone actually needs to ship faster (Coté’s pharmacy doesn’t), the UK Postal Service discovering that a friendly postman beat a modernized delivery fleet on customer satisfaction, and why copying Google is usually the wrong move. On AI, Bryan’s argument is that it will end up like spreadsheets - a few experts building the macros, everyone else using and lightly tinkering with what they made - and that which model you use should be a finance and data governance decision, not a developer one. Plus the hazard of a nicely formatted report: the pastel-shading trick for spreadsheets nobody will check, and why an AI scoring something 6 out of 10 gets the same unearned benefit of the doubt.

Also, ordering pizza in Amsterdam.

You can watch the video version of this episode as well, if you prefer that kind of thing.

Mentions:

Special Guest: Bryan Ross.

]]>