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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

#141

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.

This is nothing compared to 2000, or even 2008. You might have a point about offshoring. With tech workers insisting they're just as productive working from home, you might as well hire people in countries with cheaper homes.

This is not the case. Companies have already done this and It did not really work. Sure a lot of junior positions were and will be outsourced but the "good" worker will always be paid accordingly. This is why you can see companies hiring in India and then bringing a lot of people to the US.

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

#143
post #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.

from TFA "The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke wrote, telling staff they’re “seeing very low utilization rates” in their offices."

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

#145
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's wrong with Teams? It works well enough for me in Firefox on Linux. But OK, I only joined customer-initiated meetings, and was never presenting, only watching and talking, so maybe never used some important but non-working feature.

-It regularly sends me notifications that there’s new messages in threads I’m in. The new messages are from me -The phone dial in option doesn’t exist when you call someone through teams. Only on scheduled meetings. My laptop has audio issues so I have to awkwardly decline calls and send a meeting invite to whoever was trying to reach me. -Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into some incomprehensible in…

The thing that drives me crazy about Teams is that I can't figure out how to start a quick meeting. Just a single button that is easy to find that when I click it, it just makes a meeting for me. Does not matter the team or organization, just make a meeting and let me copy the details to send to people.

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

#146
post #125
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Teams long term and would give quite a bit to be able to use Slack. At least it's a great tool to focus our negative energies on, lol.

Call me when Slack allows collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets. I think there is little overlap between the part of the companies which benefit from Teams and the part that wants to use Slack.

Gsuite has the best collaborative editing.

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

#147

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.

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…

Yeah; its really important to keep in mind that in the majority of these layoffs, these companies are still employing at or above the number of people they were in Dec 2019. This isn't a business model correction; this is a "free covid money" correction. Everything that is happening was predicted by economists the moment the government started writing billions in checks during 2020; the fact that its only 10% in most cases, and hasn't substantively spread beyond Tech and Finance, is actually extremely good news, not something to feel dread about.

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

#148
post #27

The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I choose Teams over Slack any day. I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message. You want to search something on Teams, you get full threads, chat is part of documentation. You want to find something on Slack, you need to click on date of the related message and hope no one wrote any off-topic messages underneath. I often felt like Teams could replace unofficial documentation and most Confluence pages.

Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.

Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.

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

#149
post #27

The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.

this is terrifying. for all the grief people give Slack, I've used both and I would seriously consider leaving a company that expected me to use Teams long term.

/s?

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

#150

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.

Viable alternatives to VSCode have been around since the 90s
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