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Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

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Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#32

Am I crazy ? ..didn't GitHub pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic? Definitely before 2016. They were one of the first to scale salaries to where you lived and set a lot of the common industry standards. It was all about dogfooding their own product and working remote using Github itself. They were all about NOT having an office. I never even realized they h…

> didn't [GitLab] pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic?

We were doing this in the early 90s (even before the WWW). Foosball tables, fire engines, beds to nap in, kitchens full of food: none of that is somehow magically new

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#33
post #4

Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267 ) https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-... https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...

I worked for a furniture store that did modern home and office furniture and decor. That was the nicest I'd ever seen. Horrible place to work though.

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#34
post #4

Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267 ) https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-... https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...

Does this make anyone else hungry for a burger and a beer? The interior reminds me of the many brewery/restaurants that have come up in town over the past few years.

Yeah they look like "generic hamburger place on the expensive side"

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#35

Looking back it really is funny how impressed people used to be by dumb office perks. Free food and coffee? Sure, for the convenience. But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.

The coolest office perk we had was a ping pong table and keg. We also had a very good table tennis player come by and give us lessons every few weeks. A lot of great memories from that time, but everyone got older, married, had kids, and stopped hanging out after work. About a year before covid we went fully remote.

Now, I'll never go into an office again if I can help it. But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion.

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#36
post #23

> GitHub—which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 The makers of Sharepoint and Sourcesafe bought Github, truly the end of an era. :(

To be fair, the guys who rejected Sharepoint and Sourcesafe (for being shit) to have secret "illegal" Github Enterprise accounts (not managed by Microsoft Corp, but internally by the team) who later became upper management and executives are the ones that bought Github.

Microsoft culturally changed, hard; in some ways good, in some ways bad.

Fun fact, they had an internal proposal to buy Github when it was much smaller: rejected by the old guard; then a proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe, also rejected.

In the end, they bought Github at a muuuuuch more expensive price, and it was still worth it given how half the company was secretly using Github Enterprise and then checking in their "final" work into the big monorepo.

Now the monorepo is git, and Microsoft first-party supports git on Windows using their on-top-of-NTFS-because-NTFS-sucks layer.

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#37
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home For you, it’s really hard to beat working from home. For some people, it’s really hard to beat working from an office.

He didn't say it was for everyone, did he?

Yes, it was clearly implied when they said, “people.”

Otherwise they would have said, “it really is funny how impressed I used to be”.

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#38
post #4

Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267 ) https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-... https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...

Does this make anyone else hungry for a burger and a beer? The interior reminds me of the many brewery/restaurants that have come up in town over the past few years.

The interior reminds me of everything. It is the bootstrap.js of interior design.

Re: Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

#40

Looking back it really is funny how impressed people used to be by dumb office perks. Free food and coffee? Sure, for the convenience. But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.

> once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.

This is fairly subjective/personal. Unless another horrendous global pandemic results in me being legally required to (odds of this seem... medium? The period between the 1918 flu pandemic and covid was historically rather high), I don't plan to work from home again. Not for me, at all; I wouldn't consider taking a remote-only job.

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