A good thing some company are going all in on remote. In the UK most companies are going back to requiring office presence
GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
381–390 of 907 posts
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#382I really liked Shopify's remote model of not closing offices, but turning them into "ports" for teams in major cities to get together throughout the year for planning, team building, and retreats. You had an official place to get together, enjoy the perks of tech company offices, but with the intention of deep short bursts of interaction rather than focused work.
Yea a lot of companies have done this to great effect - but I am curious to see what happens when lease renewal time comes. Paying for all that office space to remain ~empty 95% of the time does not look good on a budget.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dojo was cool, and the roof garden, plus the Western themed poker room and the Victorian drawing room with secret book cases that led to other rooms. It was the most extravegant place I ever visited, and as stated, it was almost empty. Still I got to have a couple of free beers and walk off with branded t-shirts, hoodies and even a baby-grow.
There is no reason to have this. Imagine how many lives they could've improved if they just donated a chunk of the money that allowed them to have offices like this to charity
You're right, absolutely. It's cool but the money they spent here is pretty ridiculous
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#384GitHub has had so many outages in the last year. I can't imagine this is going to get better if they are going to lay off 10% of people. So many companies developer productivity relies on GitHub being up. I hope the remaining the folks who were not impacted can make large strides in increasing reliability of GitHub.
If you divide outages / new feature then they are one of the best. Last few years they innovated like crazy. Opening VSCode straight from the repo is still my best feature. CoPilot hype is shadowed by chatGTP, but still it is one of their most impressing inventions. GitHub Actions, entire project management (although I still cannot choose colors for "sticky notes" in the project board). They where very innovative comparing to their competition e.g. GitLab.
Over this we have less visible feature like sec scanning that warns you when one of your secrets was actually made public. Or just old good dependency vulns scanning (too noisy for me).
That's why I find this very surprising, company that can innovate this much surely can make use of those people. Maybe this come from Microsoft headquarters, if MS layed off some people then all subsidiaries have to do the same? If so LinkedIn will be next...
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse than losing your job?
I would consider taking a pay cut and moving to a cheap suburb and work for the government or a bank before working for a big tech company that uses Teams. I would only use Teams on a small group or some kind of very highly paid consultant gig.
What do you prefer, Slack? Something else?
I find the whole premise of these kind of chat tools, combined with cultural patterns of using them, to feel like forced distraction.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have done the same at Zendesk. We've reduced our office footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to work in an office environment. I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spike…
I'd be interested what the financial analysis looks like leasing or owning hubs vs a cadence of offsites annually remote first orgs usually hold, considering meeting space + hoteling for staff during the meet. I'll chip in for this analysis and blog post!
That sounds like an interesting analysis, but I'm curious if this is one of those moments where economics around it will be deeply shifting over the next few years and any analysis will likely have to adjust frequently.
For instance, even before the remote work shift in 2020 many cities were heavily competing on conference and hotel space allocations for an interesting variety of economic reasons (tourism dollars that float alongside, for instance). As more "corporate Downtown" downsizes their office footprints to go more remote, some of that real estate inventory is going to go to apartments and condos, but also I would expect that there would be just as much pressure to convert it to hotels and conference space and WeWork-style hoteling office space.
I wonder if that's going to snowball into dirt cheap conference prices in a growing list of cities. Especially if you start to factor in non-traditional "hub" cities (especially those non-traditional for tech). I've heard that's an appeal of Denver, Colorado as an annual onsite retreat city for remote first orgs as it has a large conference and hotel inventory that still has some very cheap periods outside of the usual tourist periods. I can point out that cities like Louisville, KY and Indianapolis, IN have massive inventories of hotel and conference (and exposition) space with some incredibly cheap calendar windows and still heavily competing among each other for more hotel/conference inventory every year. (I can also suggest which of those two cities in particular has better tourism options, but that may as much be hometown bias, so I'll save it.)
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that I agree with the above comment, but Valve is a private company. Hence, they would not be beholden to shareholder pressures. Perhaps the argument the posted intended was to never join a pubic company?
> Hence, they would not be beholden to shareholder pressures. Private companies have shareholders & related interests/pressure as well.
True, but Gabe Newell owns over 50% of Valve so I'm guessing the pressure in this case is more limited.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very expensive) create an irrational emotional attachment and are very hard to downsize on them without impacting morale.
It’s disturbing to think that people think human connection is irrational. I guess y’all forgot that that was how labor unions were formed.
I'm not sure human connection is an equal comparison with offices. There's plenty of human connection, both in person and not, to be had with coworkers without centralized offices.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hence the need for an investigation. I don't think there is collusion, but I wouldn't be surprised. My conspiracy (let me put the tinfoil hat on) is that corporates and mega rich people wanted the recession badly because they can benefit from it. But it didn't happen so they're doing the layoffs and increasing prices to manufacture the recession despite their all-time high profits.
Genuine question. How would the mega rich benefit more from the recession than from a stable or high growth environment? Seems easier to capture a bigger piece of the pie when the pie is growing for everybody no and nobody complains? Not to mention the social and political unrest which might be triggered by a recession. Recent and old history has shown times and times again that it is when people go hungry or despera…
Two things contribute to why I think that:
History taught me that the rich benefit from piece and from unrest.
Knowing human greed and that it's always greener on the other side.
But as I said, it's just a conspiracy theory that the recession is being manufactured.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#390The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.
Teams is the result of Microsoft taking a look at Slack and saying, how can we make this feel more like Excel?
Well, Excel does not come with a complete broken auth. MS posts stats of how horrible the Internet sec is and it is just that you mostly can't even use the service without going into auth hell.