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GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

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Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#131

This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back. Maybe companies truly will start offshoring.

It's class war. The hedge funds see workers purely as a cost. They ignore the value workers create. This class war has been going on since Reagan and even before that (oil crisis early 70s). It's just only now spread to tech workers. See the chart here: www.epi.org/productivity

Especially tech workers in the US were incredibly cocky not realizing they are the working class too. It was inevitable that we will all get hit because of that attitude.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit

Teams for video, not so bad. If they were replacing Slack with Teams, that would be horrible.

> ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations. This move will be complete by September 1, 2023. We will remain on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much. I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off…

This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists." In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.

I was lucky enough to grab a new position through someone I knew fairly quickly. But, in the month it took for the company to actually extend an offer, I didn't have so much as a nibble from anyone else. And I definitely knew people who just got out of the industry.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode would be dropped like a stone

Not until there is a viable alternative. But with the integration of Github Co-Pilot, they can now make subscription fees from all of those users of VSCode.

There’s already a de-Microsofted fork called VSCodium. Most people would probably migrate there, and development will proceed independently.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#136

Interesting about the offices. Is it because they are merging with MSFT even more or because they are embracing a remote-only philosophy?

That was my question as well. I wonder if they'll phase out the GitHub offices, then, after a time, force workers to RTO to existing MSFT offices.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#137

This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back. Maybe companies truly will start offshoring.

> I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous.

Go read up on the .com bubble popping.

The layoffs look huge because the increase in headcounts were so huge in the past 2 years:

https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/...

It's like saying "I lost a ton of weight recently! I'm down 20 lbs!" when you gained 50 lbs over the last 2 years.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#138

I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should be immediately investigated.

Was the pandemic hiring spree coordinated also? Just copycat behavior the whole way through imo.

It's mostly copycat behavior. https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...

These companies are either setting all-time profit and revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records. Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.

Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

#140

I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should be immediately investigated.

Was the pandemic hiring spree coordinated also? Just copycat behavior the whole way through imo.

ZIRP allowed companies to borrow infinite money at almost no cost
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