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GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

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Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#121

Post by zmmmmm »

IshKebab wrote: post #29
7e wrote: post #19

I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.

> Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade It's Ruby, which is pretty horrific but still I think there was probably something not quite right in your setup because it isn't normally that slow.

yeah we run it on a tiny setup compared to that and it's fine. In fact, impressively snappy if anything.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#122

Post by crote »

u_fucking_dork wrote: post #95
kelvinjps10 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach . But it's just more slop

Why would they want to become the target for free users vibe coded slopware? I don’t think many of them are converting to paying customers.

They don't need to be.

GitHub is already the main platform for random open-source projects, and that's unlikely to change any time soon. GitLab's selling point is essentially "Github, but not by Github". They would do Just Fine offering a highly-restricted free account for the handful of hobbyists who care enough about leaving GH but don't care enough to go to Forgejo & friends and for the people doing evaluations, offering free credits to the few high-profile FLOSS projects who accidentally end up on GL-the-SaaS instead of self-hosted GL, and for the rest just focusing on paid corporate customers.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#123

Post by NewJazz »

Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

Also stop talking to your colleagues and start talking to "ai".

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#124

Post by bigstrat2003 »

IshKebab wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

I'm firmly not in Trump's anti-DEI camp but I have seen what can happen when you make it one of your core values. You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things. It's unlikely that a company like Gitlab really needs anything changin…

I think "inclusion" is fine as a value. "Diversity" is not, because it is an outcome and not an action one pursues. What matters is that all have equal opportunities to participate, and perfectly fair opportunities can create unequal outcomes through no fault of anyone's. Moreover, I think that fixating on the demographics of who joins the company is morally misguided. I want my teammates to be capable and enjoyable to work with, not to check someone's "we must have X number of minorities checkbox". Diversity initiatives always turn into the latter in my experience.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#125

Post by [deleted] »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #110
Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength. Does anyone know what caused this?

[deleted]

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#126

Post by walrus01 »

torben-friis wrote: post #87
Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

There's a 'github down' post here every other day. The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens. Nope, full throttle and stimulants, just because.

TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.

I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#127

Post by gsinclair »

PradeetPatel wrote: post #110
Animats wrote: post #17

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency. New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength. Does anyone know what caused this?

I think you need to make a case for DEI being “one of the industry’s greatest strengths”. It’s not obvious to me.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#128

Post by this_user »

pargon wrote: post #74
torben-friis wrote: post #70

Lots of interesting information here: >The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we're making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it >Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one To meet their largest opportunity ever, they believe they need less resources. I'm not sure I understand how that follows. >We're re…

> 8 layers of management is a lot of management Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?

Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#129

Post by hn_acc1 »

When everyone is leaping head-over-heels into AI / agents, you need SOME part of your stack that is NOT that - slow, tested changes you can (mostly) trust, not "break everything quickly - again" stuff.

Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#130

Post by cryzinger »

crote wrote: post #41

This feels like a massive own goal. GitHub is publicly destroying itself in a desperate attempt to realize Microsoft's AI dreams, and as its main competitor your response is... to do the same? Rather than going for a "Humans first, robot assistants welcome" approach which promises to deliver things like stability, reliability, trustworthiness, and human connections, they decide to go all-out on firing the humans and…

I'm no big-city product strategist, but this is what kills me about so many of these "we're pivoting to AI" announcements. Everyone else is doing the same thing (or already had a long time ago--like you said, GitLab is late to the game here), so squeezing yourself into an AI-shaped mold does exactly nothing to differentiate yourself from the competition. And if/when the AI hype machine sputters to a halt, the few companies that didn't do this will suddenly find themselves at an advantage, because they'll have real, actual differentiators to brag about.

Like, I know there are actual reasons and incentives here for the ever-present AI pivot. But I think they're stupid and short-sighted incentives.

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