GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by reddozen » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:06 AM UTC

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.

I still have gitlab pegged in my mind as the company that rm -rf'd their production database TWICE separately and lost pull requests.

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

#422

Post by ghaff » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

usef- wrote: post #403

argee wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when microwaves first came out. Investors decided to go all in on "vibe cooking" (lit. cooking with vibrations) complete with microwave ranges (no conventional oven), until the public wizened up to the fact that there was in fact no cooking (Maillard reaction) involved in their vibe cooking. Took about 15-20 years but microwaves finally took their rightful place as a utility appliance rather than what t…

I sure hope you're not mocking the classic "Microwave cooking for one" book! The mallard reaction is very possible in microwaves, but they use microwave-specific crockery. I think the vision was possibly killed by people not wanting to maintain a second set of crockery. See here for a fun write-up: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...

But I think the argument that microwaves are basically for heating things up and for essentially steaming a lot of vegetables. (I'll do one ear of corn in the microwave with pepper and spices.) I do have a thick microwave cookbook from the 70s or 80s but I've mostly only ever used it for vegetable cooking times. And probably less since I started roasting vegetables in the oven a lot of the time. I have cooked some of the other recipes but not for a very long time.

Understand that a lot of people don't have a lot of choice but I use mine (actually have a 4 in 1 when I had to replace the old one after it burst into flames and that's somewhat useful as a second oven).

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

#423

Post by Domenic_S » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:12 AM UTC

IAmGraydon wrote: post #409

stx5 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you're anything more than a 'text autocompleter'? You are justing auto completing someone's comment

This thought that “maybe we are just next token predictors too” is not particularly clever. Most of us have thought about that, but a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here. I think it’s a bit like listening to a recording of a person and swearing there’s an actual person in the recording device because the audible output is indistinguishable from the real thing. Why would you do…

> a bit of experience with LLMs make it obvious that’s not what’s going on here

I feel like that overstates the point quite a bit. There's a lot that's similar: neurotransmitter release is stochastic at the vesicle level, ion channels open and close probabilistically, post-synaptic responses have noise. A given neuron receiving identical input twice doesn't produce identical output. Neither brains nor LLMs have a central decider that forms intent and then implements it. In both, decisions emerges from network dynamics, they're a description of what the system did, not a separate cause (see Libet's experiments).

Now pretty clearly there's a lot that's different, and of course we don't understand brains enough to say just how similar they are to LLMs, but that's the point: it's an interesting thought experiment and shutting it down with a virtual eyeroll is sad.

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

#424

Post by thin_carapace » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:13 AM UTC

birdsink wrote: post #398

thin_carapace wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.

your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides.

diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith.

'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting?

that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.

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

#425

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #374

gizmo686 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 8 layers of management (so 9 layers total, with the bottom rung being non-management), 3 reports per manager comes out to 6561 employers on the bottom rung. At 5 reports each, that 8 layers would give you over 300k at the bottom, an 10 each would give you 100m at the bottom.

> We’re flattening our organization because eight layers is too deep Eight layers total

So... That's the assumption that would give you 300k employees with 5 reports per manager. Sum of 5^x for x in [0, 7] is ~300k.

The GP miscalculated it.

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

#426

Post by lsdajsadsfdakl » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:20 AM UTC

bmarnane wrote: post #134

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.

If your product is used bya cross-section of society, then having a cross-section of society build it should lead to a better product no?

Just like people are judged by a jury of their peers, planes should be designed by your peers.

We should just get a representative sample of the population and give them equal say in the design of the plane, engines, etc.

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

#427

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #71

tdb7893 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value are great places to work and seem to have high functioning teams. My impression mostly though is more that it was never really a value for management but they wasted a bunch of time talking about it. In general any mismatch between stated values and actual values has been awful to deal with and is a red flag for places to work.

That's the thing - you can have it as a lived value, or you can have HR run programs. Very few places have/had both. Given the choice, I'd pick door #1. (Saying this as a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion, lest there's confusion)

You don't ask HR to go out and push some value if you already have it. You only ask when you want to change or want to pretend to change.

That said, some management people say it's important for a large company to write down the values that they actually practice. I can see several reasons why it's good, but I haven't ever seen anybody go and do it, so IDK.

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

#428

Post by argee » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

usef- wrote: post #403

argee wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when microwaves first came out. Investors decided to go all in on "vibe cooking" (lit. cooking with vibrations) complete with microwave ranges (no conventional oven), until the public wizened up to the fact that there was in fact no cooking (Maillard reaction) involved in their vibe cooking. Took about 15-20 years but microwaves finally took their rightful place as a utility appliance rather than what t…

I sure hope you're not mocking the classic "Microwave cooking for one" book! The mallard reaction is very possible in microwaves, but they use microwave-specific crockery. I think the vision was possibly killed by people not wanting to maintain a second set of crockery. See here for a fun write-up: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...

That book came out much later than what I am talking about, when many workarounds like turn tables (and indeed, specialized crockery) were made available. This thing [0] for example, did not even have a turn table, and yet was created in an "all in" form factor for the American home. It was in production for nine years.

Perhaps we can liken these auxiliary advances to agents and harnesses in the analogy. In the end, despite the unbridled optimism from certain backers, we never solved the fundamental issue with microwaves: that they use electromagnetic waves for cooking, and that electromagnetic waves have certain undesirable properties for this application.

[0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_10880...

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

#429

Post by lsdajsadsfdakl » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

dangus wrote: post #269

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.

McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... Landing page: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals ca…

The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse.

You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

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

#430

Post by cindyllm » Tue, May 12, 2026, 4:29 AM UTC

lsdajsadsfdakl wrote: post #429

dangus wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... Landing page: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals ca…

The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse. You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

[dead]