Recently switched to a company using Github, and assumed I'd be blown away by their offering because of their size.

Well, I was, but not in the way I'd hoped. They're absolutely awful in comparison, and I'm beyond confused how it got to that state.

If I were running a company and had to choose between the two, I'd pick Gitlab every time just because of Github actions.

I wonder why they chose to move back to Github Actions rather than evaluate something like Buildkite? At least they didn't choose Cloud Build.

Maybe it was just the pain of switching but that was my initial impression.

It also has the problem of not having a local dev runner for actions. The "inner loop" is atrociously slow and involves spamming your colleagues with "build failed" about a thousand times, whether you like it or not.

IMHO, a future DevOps runner system must be an open-source, local-first. Anything else is madness.

Right now we're in the "mainframe era" of DevOps, where we edit text files in baroque formats with virtually no tooling assistance, "submit" that to a proprietary batch system on a remote server that puts it into a queue... then come back after our coffee to read through the log printout.

I should buy a dot matrix printer to really immerse myself into the paradigm.

The entire code is a wonderful mess. We found that when we early-adopted ephemeral runners, that the control flow is full of races and the status code you get at the end is indicative of exactly nothing. So even if the backend is just having a hickup picking up a job with an obscure Azure error code, you better just throw that entire VM away, because you can't know if that runner will ever recover or has already done things to break the next run.

There are better solutions out there.