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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

#741

Post by throwawaypath »

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…

[flagged]

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

#742

Post by IAmGraydon »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #480
IAmGraydon wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 one-way audio channel is indeed too weak for a person to distinguish a person from a recording, but a bidirectional audio channel is easily strong enough: the person can verbally ask the person-or-recording a question and see if it is acknowledged. I claim that a modern frontier LLM can be given simple instructions that make it impossible for a person to reliably distinguish it from a person over a bidirectional te…

You’re missing my point. If you brought that voice recorder back in time a few hundred years even without the 2-way communication, people would swear there is a disembodied person in there, and you would be accused of being a witch. This is because humans always anthropomorphize things with human-like traits that they do not deeply understand. Yes, LLMs can now take human input and create human-like output. But the connection I’m trying to make is that these things are a black box to most of us, and we are yet again anthropomorphizing. We are still lacking the understanding part.

With all due respect, your claim is ridiculous. It’s incredibly easy to spot an LLM in an interactive chat. The tells are endless.

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

#743

Post by polynomial »

throwawaypath wrote: post #621
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…

Down almost 15% now. Investors hate the CEO's buzzword bingo slop.

Calling it "Act 2" certainly isn't helping with investors.

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

#744

Post by 20after4 »

IshKebab wrote: post #512
malaproping wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.

That's a really crazy number of employees considering they have one product that barely seems to change and is at best on par with similar products created by comparatively miniscule teams (Phabricator, Forgejo).

Phabricator (now Phorge) was developed by a team of 2-3 people for most of it's life, with a little help from several moderately active contributors like myself.

Gitlab is a really big conglomeration of services and daemons and tools written in multiple languages. It's approximately an order of magnitude more complicated than the relatively straightforward and (IMO) well designed Phabricator architecture.

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

#745

Post by gloflo »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #687
gloflo wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clickbait titled "Microsoft doesn't want you to know this"

Did you watch it...

No, why would I invest precious time in a product that disrespects me? The title could be the "this".

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

#746

Post by apple4ever »

gritspants wrote: post #664
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…

There's no reason to tie every software companies rise and fall to AI. Several years ago they changed their enterprise licensing costs. It was such an aggressive and needless cash grab (1k/dev). The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

This seems like the more likely reason. People wanted to give them money, but they didn't want to take it unless it was in a giant pile.

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

#747

Post by usef- »

daemin wrote: post #733
usef- wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "text autocomplete" supposed to be an insult? To text auto-complete a physicist I would have to understand physics as well as them. To text-autocomplete your words I would need to model your brain.

Text autocomplete is just a descriptor of the technology. To do text auto-completion all you need to know if the probabilities of words appearing after other words, no understanding of those words or the meanings behind them is necessary.

You do need some kind of understanding to correctly know what's coming next

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

#748

Post by drpotato »

dzonga wrote: post #630
maxloh wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like GitLab's new UI, but their frontend is far too laggy given its complexity, especially since most of their pages are actually server-side rendered. It doesn't help that they use a weird combination of Vue 2 and jQuery in their codebase. I think that as a corporation promoting the use of AI, they should actually be AI users themselves . They should just rewrite that laggy UI in Svelte, Solid, or even va…

web-components & vanillaJS will solve their slow UI.

> moving to technology X will solve problem Y

First time?

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

#749

Post by akoboldfrying »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #742
akoboldfrying wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A one-way audio channel is indeed too weak for a person to distinguish a person from a recording, but a bidirectional audio channel is easily strong enough: the person can verbally ask the person-or-recording a question and see if it is acknowledged. I claim that a modern frontier LLM can be given simple instructions that make it impossible for a person to reliably distinguish it from a person over a bidirectional te…

You’re missing my point. If you brought that voice recorder back in time a few hundred years even without the 2-way communication, people would swear there is a disembodied person in there, and you would be accused of being a witch. This is because humans always anthropomorphize things with human-like traits that they do not deeply understand. Yes, LLMs can now take human input and create human-like output. But the c…

> With all due respect, your claim is ridiculous. It’s incredibly easy to spot an LLM in an interactive chat. The tells are endless.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674?hl=en-GB

"When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant"

My "ridiculous" claim is confirmed by science.

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

#750

Post by mlhpdx »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #714
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…

> As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. This is a non sequitur. Jervons paradox doesn't apply here. No-one is sitting around going "you know what I need? More software". The supply side is exploding. Demand? I dunno man.

> The supply side is exploding. Demand? I dunno man.

Isn’t that the nature of the paradox; that we can’t predict where the demand comes from and yet it does?

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