Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

about.gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 750 posts

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

#601

Post by estimator7292 »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #575
simonw wrote: post #156

> planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams One of the really interesting things about GitLab was that not only did they have employees in a large number of countries but they also published their employee handbook which helped show quite how much work it was to support that: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment... lists 18 countries right now. I guess t…

> We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience Are they going to rectify this by laying these people off?

[dead]

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

#602

Post by u_fucking_dork »

solid_fuel wrote: post #388
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your house is literally just a box. You can dress it up however you want but it has 4 walls and a lid.

Mine has like, 8 walls, but sure. It's a box. Crucially, it was sold as a box. Not a thinking machine. Your attempt at an analogy will make sense when someone tries to install a house as middle management at some company.

If you ignore all the complexity and discard every detail, it’s literally just a box. Yet curiously you aren’t living in a cardboard box, or an aluminum shed.

Point being, which you know and are being willfully ignorant about, is that it’s more complex than that. And you’ve neatly discarded the detail that they’re multi modal.

I will freely admit though, analogy is useless when interacting with someone who has already made up their mind.

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

#603

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #560
solid_fuel wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It all still functions with text prediction >> Wilful ignorance can't be fixed. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I can point you to ReAct loops and tool-calling and agent-based systems. If after being pointed those you still choose to be stuck on the "it's just text prediction" then that's a problem you are creating for yourself, and only you can get unstuck on a proble…

> Tool calling? The model emits JSON as it autocompletes the prompt, and the json is then parsed out and transformed into an HTTP call. No. Code assistants determine which tool they can execute to meet a specific goal. They pick the tool, the execute the tool (meaning, they build command line arguments, run the command line app, analyze output, assess outcome) as subtasks. And they do it as part of ReAct loops. If th…

> And they do it as part of ReAct loops. If the tool fails to run, code assistants can troubleshoot problems on the fly and adapt how to call then tool until they reach the goal.

Yeah, but fundamentally all of this is implemented as next token prediction, given the context (which the tool results are).

Honestly, it's pretty amazing how much we can do with next token prediction, but that's essentially all that's happening here.

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

#604

Post by simonw »

dandellion wrote: post #543
simonw wrote: post #196

https://www.google.com/search?q=gitlab+stock shows their stock price was ~$52 a year ago and is $26 today, so down 50% in 12 months. It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy. If investor fears are that AI makes GitLab's business less valuable, including this in their "GitLab Act 2" announcement makes a whole lot of sense: > The agentic era multiplies demand for soft…

Looking at their stock it has always been going down, even before AI. How could we know that the reason it's going down now is they were not making enough noise about AI, and not whatever it was that was making it go down before?

We can't. It's rarely possible to confidently say why a stock moves. Hence "quite possible" in my comment.

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

#605

Post by roenxi »

somenameforme wrote: post #420
mirekrusin wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If that is the argument though, current AI aren't just autocomplete - because we could reasonably show an AI an image or a video and have them call a tool rather than return text. That'd be comparable to a pre-language human.

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

#606

Post by bombcar »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #124
IshKebab wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the only metric for your initiative is disastrous; you WILL work toward that metric and ensure disaster.

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

#607

Post by bombcar »

haute_cuisine wrote: post #584
sausagefeet wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they are honest about it: > The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it. No good way to execute lay-offs, my preference would be to do it like a band-aid. What use is it to do it in open unless they plan on having gladiatorial matches to keep your job. Otherwise…

Can someone explain why they're using terms like "voluntary separation window" instead of more natural language?

How would you describe “our best employees can take a severance package”?

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

#609

Post by bombcar »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #600
bombcar wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira bugs celebrate being old enough to drink.

Honest question, why don't they just close the issue if they don't intend to fix them?

Because an enterprise customer might decide it’s a needed fix tomorrow. I’ve seen it happen - 20 year old bug on the backlog and suddenly it jumps to the front of the line.
Post reply on HN