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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

#281

Post by arcza »

Imagine how refreshing if the press release simply said:

"We over-hired, we're ram-packed full of managers pinging each other on Slack all day and need to cut costs to sustain our operation. We think GitHub's shit and we want to be a nimble org with a fighting chance at eating their lunch. We're also gonna provide 1000 free runner hours/mo to open source projects that move from GitHub to gitlab, and we're gonna make project namespaces on gitlab.com a first class thing like GitHub did"

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

#282

Post by thin_carapace »

threecheese wrote: post #222
gsinclair wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s easy to make an objective case for how ‘D’ is a strength, however E and I are imo more values which intend to attract diversity.

there do exist objective arguments for the pursuit of diversity. there do also exist objective arguments otherwise.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641

heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case.

on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity.

so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.

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

#283

Post by datadrivenangel »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #112
echelon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code and product will turn to shit, and the company won't be able to extract itself from the mud. Employees tasked with doing 10x more work with less help don't even have to feel bad about it happening. It'll also create employment opportunity in disrupting their old employer. These companies are willingly signing up to become IBM.

It looks like they are switching to ai only code review. It will go to shit for sure lol

AI code review with code ownership is fine. If people have to build working software, they'll do that, or you hold them accountable. Modern software dev at most organizations has far more code review than is needed outside of soc2 purposes.

Of course, once you have a big incident, then the value of more human review becomes obvious.

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

#284

Post by semiquaver »

mullingitover wrote: post #272
semiquaver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases. Your sense? Based on what?

The enthusiasm for disparaging DEI combined with a lack of articulation of how they plan to quantify 'qualifications' in a non-biased manner. My sense is that they don't plan to do this at all, they don't have a plan, and they are going to blunder into patterns of discriminatory practices that DEI frameworks were protecting them against.

Who is “they?” All employers?

With respect, it seems like the hiring managers you were complaining about above weren’t the only ones operating mostly on vibes.

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

#285

Post by scarmig »

blindriver wrote: post #237
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 don't understand why companies are abandoning DEI so quickly and so decisively. What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again, are they going to add them back into their core values as swiftly as they abandoned them? At least companies like Coinbase made principled stances against forced DEI and employee activism earlier than everyone else. Doing it now seems weird be…

It always was unprincipled: regardless of whether someone's a fan of DEI or not, these companies are short-sighted, profit-driven, and at best reactive to trends. The only reason any person thought otherwise is that they were either desperately looking for a victory or desperately looking for an enemy to be angry about.

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

#286

Post by 2ndorderthought »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #283
2ndorderthought wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like they are switching to ai only code review. It will go to shit for sure lol

AI code review with code ownership is fine. If people have to build working software, they'll do that, or you hold them accountable. Modern software dev at most organizations has far more code review than is needed outside of soc2 purposes. Of course, once you have a big incident, then the value of more human review becomes obvious.

It's an important touch point for other code owners. I guess if no one is looking at the code anymore why even do an AI code review. It's kind of theatrical?

I seriously don't know how people are working like this now. I'm on my ass looking for work and in the last month it feels like everyone has completely lost their minds.

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

#287

Post by ecshafer »

crote wrote: post #136
gsinclair wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?

> How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person

Very weird to include social awkward geek in there. But my guess would be like 99% of dev teams do not have a trans or furry.

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

#289

Post by CaptainNegative »

crote wrote: post #232
noitpmeder wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill. The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.

Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well. See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo D…

I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.

Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.

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