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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

#651

Post by esafak »

thin_carapace wrote: post #282
threecheese wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> 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...

Which homogenous country with thousands of years of existence did you have in mind when writing this??

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

#652

Post by esafak »

spaqin wrote: post #380
PradeetPatel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the industry's greatest strength is actually outsourcing bulk of the work to culturally homogeneous, cheaper labor countries of Eastern Europe and South [East] Asia.

The ones I know live in Silicon Valley, and make good money. Who are you referring to?

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

#653

Post by whalesalad »

petetnt wrote: post #13

With it’s current AI setup GitLab still couldn’t make anything that could be called great in UX so I can’t wait to see what they can do by eliminating the remaining human factor. Can’t personally wait seeing tickets like these [0] open for months with bots telling you that everything will be alright. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806

fwiw when using pgbouncer i find that disabling in-app connection pooling has improved performance. a pool on top of a pool is diminishing returns.

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

#654

Post by jzb »

hemul3n wrote: post #186

> Our transparent restructure process creates uncertainty that is real and it's hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I ask that you reflect on the why, what and how and engage your manager in a real conversation about the work, the questions and concerns you have, and what the next chapter looks like for you. Your manager may not have all the answers, because they too are going through this period of uncerta…

Lord. I pity the managers that are going to be worrying about their jobs sitting in 1:1s with people who are also looking for answers when there really aren’t any to give.

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

#655

Post by earthdeity »

funimpoded wrote: post #596
vultour wrote: post #515

GitLab could be the perfect case study on AI-powered efficiency improvements. I have never interacted with a piece of software that, for every single problem I found, there was an open issue always at least 4-7 years old that was just being shuffled around by managers adding and removing random labels. Surely with all of these ridiculous developer productivity gains enabled by AI, they should finally be able to fix a…

Dunno how it is these days, but that reads like Android roughly 2012-2020. I once found a looooong bug report thread on their issue tracker 7ish years old that had all the usual waves of promises that a fix might make the next release, then silence, then repeat, and the usual challenges to the bug’s status every time a release happened, plus it saw community members correctly diagnose the problem in the first couple…

On a similar note, Firefox doesn't support , which I was surprised to see (chrome landed it in 2012). I checked their issue tracker and... as you describe. Browsers are complex, of course, but they do stand out as a really glacial corner of the software world.

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

#656

Post by mullingitover »

servo_sausage wrote: post #595
mullingitover wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes. I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did). I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other dir…

If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI. Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements. Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender proce…

If hiring practices were purely operating on merit and free from discrimination, we wouldn't have studies repeatedly showing that people with the 'wrong' names, and otherwise identical resumes, weren't called back as frequently.

> Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on

HR departments have screwed around with delays in the interview process long before anyone ever imagined the concept of expanding the candidate pool, doing blind resume screening, and standardizing the interview process. I don't think having fairer hiring processes created this problem.

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

#657

Post by dcchambers »

freedomben wrote: post #642

GiLab is one of the saddest stories in SaaS I can think of. They had an enormous opportunity years ago thanks to their relatively good product, open source nature, and free private repos (before github started offering that), but they squandered it by focusing heavily on "enterprise" and pricing themselves in a ridiculous way that made it non-sensical for startups and small companies. Their CI product alone was the b…

Their pricing has always been a challenge, but I think the biggest issue is that they went way too wide early on in an effort to capture the market. Their product pool was a mile wide but only an inch deep. People quickly realized many of the features they were promised were very rough around the edges or a limited POC. Their UX is pretty unintuitive as well, IMO.

The company is fascinating. The "everything is open" nature of how they build the business is an incredible value for people that want to see how the sausage is made...but it hasn't ultimately lead to a better product.

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

#658

Post by jpadkins »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #77
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.

Let these people keep betting their companies, futures and net competency on text autocomplete. The future is bright for me and everyone else that isn't falling for it.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

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

#659

Post by darkwater »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #648
duxup wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who knows the fix to some of these issues might be a hell of a lot more worked now that the bug has been baked in and the "real" fix is herculean now.

Good point. Related: a lot of what seem like simple tickets require a real conversation about "well, how should this work?"

Yes, there are plenty of those tickets in GitLab public tracker, for example the "Allow defining scheduled pipelines triggers as yaml" [1] one is a good example. But still, it's a 6 year old ticket that has been clearly shuffled around with nobody taking full ownership of it, probably because it was never deemed important by higher level product management.

And this is for a "feature" and it's the first that came into my mind for $REASON, but there are similar tickets for very annoying bugs.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/296630

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

#660

Post by LtWorf »

mirekrusin wrote: post #647
LtWorf wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might get worse for 2 reasons: 1. AI free training sets no longer exist. This might degrade quality, although some claim that it will not. 2. Cost. Right now they are burning a lot of money to convince people it's good. But they might not be able to keep it up forever and need to increase prices (which few will want to pay) or degrade the quality to save money.

non synthetic pre-training text got exhausted long time ago, now focus is more on quality and rl/post-training. cost will keep going down and more powerful chips will be available, like it always was. reinforcement learning doesn't have fixed ceiling, advancements in software will keep happening as well. things like distilling smaller models will likely become free – ie. through speculative decoding which speeds up l…

> cost will keep going down and more powerful chips will be available, like it always was.

cost is not a monotonous function.

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