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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

#411

Post by somenameforme »

tux wrote: post #370
solid_fuel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.

AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you.

It's literally how they work. I think the magic that none of us really expected is that our languages, human and computer, are absurdly redundant. But I think it makes sense, in hindsight at least. When we say things it's usually not to add novel or unexpected information that comes out of nowhere, but to elaborate or illustrate a point that could often be summed up in 5 words. This response is perfect sample of such.

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

#412

Post by strange_quark »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #33
knollimar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the people who would leave after a layoff can do so preemptively, perhaps saving headcount for someone else?

if you don't like the new direction you can leave now and get the known now severance package. All in all, I think it is right to offer people voluntary severence with package when you pull the rug out from under them as far as where they thought they were working.

Unless they're going to offer offer an insane buyout, like 1+ years of pay + benefits + some accelerated vesting, nobody who doesn't already have something lined up is going to take this offer. It's much better to stay with one foot out the door and just keep cashing that paycheck and collecting your monthly vest. Especially when you know layoffs are coming, nobody expects you to do anything until they actually pull the trigger, then there's a month or two afterwards where you can slack off because morale is in the toilet, people are still trying to figure out who's left, how the company is organized, which priorities are dead, stuff like that. Ask me how I know.

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

#413

Post by thayne »

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.

Tranparency is also missing from the new values. Can't say I'm terribly surprised,but I am disappointed.

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

#414

Post by blindriver »

slg wrote: post #303
blindriver wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again Mandates? There is this weird revisionist history that DEI was a Biden era invention that all these companies were forced to roll out in January 2021. These programs were simply the latest evolution of prolonged and steady cultural shifts. I remember attending events trying to promote diversity in the computer science depar…

I never used the word "Biden" once in my post. You should correct your biases.

Whether or not you are left or right, the objective truth is that a Democrat added DEI mandates and Republican removed the DEI mandates. I didn't say anything about whether or not that is right or wrong, but the fact that companies seemingly embraced DEI and then once a Republican removed it, then they abandoned it so quickly means they really didn't care about DEI at all and it was all phony. It just goes to show you that when they start praising themselves for being "moral" it's not because they actually care, it's because they are forced to and they don't give a shit about anyone.

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

#415

Post by DaSHacka »

tootie wrote: post #350
skrrtww wrote: post #11

A lot of the conclusions they're drawing in this post about the "agentic era" seem quite misguided and some don't really seem to make sense. I have no doubt GitLab has too many employees and can benefit from being a more focused company, but it's tiring reading these layoff posts so chock full of buzzwords. I guess they're desperately hoping if they prognosticate about AI enough it will placate the investors.

The memo also says they're eliminating a lot of middle management tiers which has been a theme for a lot of companies recently. It's also been a theme historically. Really has nothing to do with AI. It's just the classic executive view that they are paying people who sit in meetings and write emails instead of writing code. Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.

> Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.

I don't know, I've seen more big organizations that have a dysfunctional amount of middle management and "meetings about meetings" than ones that truly benefit from that culture.

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

#416

Post by swyx »

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.

is there a company that has kept DEI?

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

#417

Post by swyx »

SimpleSalmon wrote: post #336
shimman wrote: post #26

GitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.

So much this. GitLab’s values and ethos were completely incompatible with becoming a public company. Sid is always seen as the good guy but it was his narrow minded greed that led here.

how exactly was it incompatible and why do you thikn you know better

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

#418

Post by thayne »

sgarland wrote: post #252
semiquaver wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab was never going to be the ones to take the mantle GitHub left on the ground. They’re a “clone” company and have very few original ideas of their own.

They did it better. I’ve never met anyone who has used both GitLab CI and GitHub Actions and thought they were remotely equivalent.

Gitlab CI actually came befor Github Actions, but both were heavily influenced by Travis CI.

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

#419

Post by scronkfinkle »

solid_fuel wrote: post #172
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it text autocomplete is played out and really just makes you look bad at this point.

It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.

Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion. Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction, but now it's common place. As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum. You can describe things by their fundamental functions and make many things sound elementary but I find it counter productive given the capabilities we've seen from this technology

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

#420

Post by somenameforme »

mirekrusin wrote: post #384
solid_fuel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.

Your comment was also completion.

This retort doesn't make any sense. Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist. Our token base was 0. Put an LLM in that scenario and it will endlessly cycle on nothing and produce nothing, stuck in a snapshot in time. Put humans in that situation, and soon enough you get us.

This is like saying that somebody speaking Chinese is just playing the Chinese Room [1] experiment. The only reason it's less immediately obviously absurd here is because the black box nature of LLMs obfuscates their relatively basic algorithmic functionality and let's people anthropomorphize it into being a brain.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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