I am a Senior Engineering Manager at GitLab. Was. I believed in CREDIT. Collaboration. Results. Efficiency. Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging. Iteration. Transparency. I had the mug. The mug was from 2019. It was orange. It sat on my desk for six years. Every all-hands, someone would reference CREDIT. Every performance review cycled through the letters like a rosary. Every new hire got a laminated card in their welcome packet explaining what each letter meant and why it mattered. I was a CREDIT Champion. Quarterly nomination. Q3 2022. The certificate is a PDF. The PDF is in a Google Drive folder. The folder is in a workspace that no longer exists. Last week, GitLab released the "Act 2" memo. Act 2 eliminates CREDIT. Act 2 also eliminates people. Same memo. Same paragraph. Same bullet point. The restructuring and the value deletion share a semicolon. They didn't kill the values and then, separately, lay people off. They didn't lay people off and then, quietly, retire the values framework. They did both in one sentence. One announcement. One act. Act 2. Here is what CREDIT meant when I believed in it: the company had principles that existed independently of headcount decisions. The values were the thing that stayed constant when everything else changed. That's what I told my team. That's what I told candidates in interviews. That's what the laminated card said. Here is what CREDIT meant when they killed it: the values were a feature of the company at a particular size. When the size changed, the values became legacy architecture. Deprecated. End-of-lifed. Like a product nobody uses anymore. I used it. The #values-in-action# Slack channel had 4,200 members. People posted examples of colleagues demonstrating CREDIT behaviors. Recognition. Gratitude. Iteration stories. The channel was archived in May 2026. No announcement. Just archived. The way you archive something you don't want people to find. But here is the thing I keep coming back to. They could have killed CREDIT quietly. A blog post three months later. A rebrand. "We're evolving our framework." Companies do this. It's normal. Expected, even. They chose to put it in the layoff memo. They chose to tell the people they were firing that the values those people believed in were also being fired. In the same breath. As if the values and the people were the same line item. As if eliminating one was inseparable from eliminating the other. And maybe it was. Maybe the values only existed to describe the workforce they needed at that size. Collaboration — because they had too many people for silos. Iteration — because they couldn't afford to get it right the first time with that headcount. Transparency — because with 2,000 remote workers, opacity was operationally expensive. Remove the people, and the values that described their labor become vestigial. Unnecessary. Legacy. The mug is still on my desk. The values are not. The job is not. But the mug is.