91–99 of 99 posts
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.
> If tech can look past the totalizing shame it currently feels, it can more honestly evaluate both its accomplishments and its shortcomings, and find a way to weave them together into a memorable public legacy. I don't live in the U.S., but I think the article has over done this no? Shame in the entire sector? This can't be real.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's still really hard to beat working from home Citation needed. Personally, working from home is an absolute nightmare for me. There is an endless list of chores and things to do around the house that are a constant distraction and mind-space consumer, it is hard to disconnect at the end of the day, I am continually continually interrupted by family members (...and if I am not I am worrying if the kids are ok sin…
When you are at the office, who watches your kids? I had a few coworkers that skipped out on daycare when they worked from home. Then they complained about being interrupted all the time by their kids. IMO, there is nothing wrong with putting the kids in daycare while you are working at home.
So e.g. blood-curdling scream from your kid and then silence. Or lots of laughing and running about and then a huge crash and bang followed by silence as something is clearly falling over.
What do you do? Just shrug and ignore it because there is someone else down there? Of course you cant. 99.9% of the time its all fine, but you can't just turn off that sensation of needing to keep half-a-brain listening for something major happening. The divided attention is a killer for productivity.
Out-of-sight-out-of-mind at the office is an absolute godsend. Day care is very, very expensive in the UK (especially if you earn over £100K) so financially it is often not viable to send them to daycare for 5 full days a week (this will often cost £2-3,000 a month in London, often more than a mortgage or rental costs)[1]
1 - personal experience, the only data I could find is UK average of £15K a year (https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-mu...) but that is UK average, not London. For comparison the UK average house price is £285K, but in London it is £742k. I suspect the average figures include a lot of people who earn under 100K and so get some aspect of free care - any tech worker will be earning more than this so gets zero help.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
For me 90s job hunting everything looked Regus style corporate
wow, this article and the tacky, random, gimmicky office it describes... yet another day where i am thankful that I work in finance where people still have a modicum of taste and don't treat their employees like insufferable children
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...
The sliding barn doors on open shelves mystify me: https://officesnapshots.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/githu... You don't get the cabinet to keep the dust off of the dishes, but we'll keep the cabinet doors so that they're still in the way? It's like a nudist suspending a zipper over their crotch.
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...
> Every morning GitHubbers choose where they want to work: in one of two bars, several cafes, a library, a park, a speakeasy, a museum, a coder cave, or from home. This is what it looks like when you have more money than sense. Just imagine. You want to build an office for people to work in to create your business. So you build a half dozen unrelated storefronts, just so your workers have the convenience of working f…
Now, if I wanted to be cynical, I'd think that building what amounts to a bar in your office might be an effort to try and bring the illusion of a healthy work/life balance into the office to squeeze out a couple extra hours of work. If it looks like a bar and feels like a bar, will working in that bar still feel like working? For the most part, but it's that little difference that might be important.
That said, I don't actually think it's so blatantly manipulative. If people were already a bit more on the unhealthy side of a work/life balance--something that isn't exactly unheard of with plenty of tech companies--the design choice probably felt like it was reintroducing, at least to some extent, something already missing for some employees.
In any case, given the cost of building and furnishing new offices considered "nice" or "fancy" in this context, designing sections of the office to look like bars, libraries, or the Oval Office probably didn't add much to the overall budget. After all, you were going to furnish those areas, anyhow. For anything over that, you'd likely try to justify it in terms of increased employee morale and comfort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 small…
> proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe Maybe you're talking about something different, but this happened, didn't it? ADO supports Git alongside TFS (not Sourcesafe, but Sourcesafe has been dead forever and was pretty much dead when GitHub first started). It's very much store-brand GitHub repos, much of it is the same but there's tons of features missing and the code review tools aren't as good. As…
Also, AFAIK, the Microsoft monorepo in git did not originally live in ADO. I'm not sure if it does now, either, although it'd make sense for it to as the ADO dogfooder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were a bunch of blank spots in the article, I assumed my ad-blocker was blocking the images. So I turned it off and surprise surprise, it was all just spots for ads. Definitely crazy.
Couldn’t read the article due to it being paywalled. Are you telling me that that's the experience they give to people who pay? Jesus f'ing Christ.