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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

#441

Post by axlee »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #346
axlee wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For meetings, calls, screensharing, and scheduling it's superior to Slack in every single way. Written experience is worse though. If only Slack spent a month writing a "Schedule a meeting with those people, and add the meeting with a link to everyone's calendar" feature, they would be on par.

One reason Slack maybe doens't, is nobody actually chooses Teams over Slack because of feature set. They choose Teams over Slack because it's "good enough" and included with Office360 which they already have. Meeting Teams feature set may not actually get Slack any more customers at all.

We do use Teams and Slack, Teams for scheduled meetings and Slack for everything else, just because Slack's scheduling is non-existent while something great comes out of the box from Teams (and yes, also because we get it "for free" through O365, and wouldn't be paying for Zoom). We wouldn't have to deal with Teams if Slack upped their game.

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

#442

Post by chasely »

dcchambers wrote: post #281
fullshark wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The whole experience the last few years has taught me a valuable lesson about how simple and reactive all of these tech companies are. No one really knows what they are doing. Other than a very few special people, most of the leaders at these major tech companies are not super-geniuses. They are human like the rest of us and subject to all that it means... Irrational, over-reactive, subject to the whims of the stock…

I find it freeing to know that no one really knows what they are doing. Looking into startup world from academia, it seemed like these people really were thoughtful and strategic in how they operated.

After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid, just that business is hard and the environment is always changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe" types, but you can create a good business solving the most immediate and pressing problems.

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

#443

Post by dntrkv »

splatzone wrote: post #216
ushakov wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...

This is the kind of needless extravagance that makes people cynical about the tech industry

That's not really extravagant. I'm assuming it's just a meeting/work room with an oval office theme. It's a very cheap imitation of the oval office. They would have had to buy a lot of the same furniture pieces either way. They just had some fun with it.

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

#444

Post by jrochkind1 »

blincoln wrote: post #410
m348e912 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>If I were forced to use teams I would quit. It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams. I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do. My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise…

I use enterprise Teams on a Windows 10 laptop and it is the worst overall chat/conferencing experience for me in over 25 years of technical work. About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality. It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently te…

> Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).

Oh yeah, this has been happening to us lately. Quitting Teams (not just disconnecting from video meeting) and restarting seems to restore.

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

#445

Post by jrochkind1 »

ushakov wrote: post #128
electrondood wrote: post #23

When I visited the GitHub office in SF in 2017, it was nearly empty. Given how extravagant and beautiful it is, it struck me as a colossal waste of money even then.

They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...

wait... why?

I would have assumed that tweet was a joke. Because... why?

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

#446

Post by ryanisnan »

geuis wrote: post #428
rossdavidh wrote: post #420

Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs. Having been through layoffs in semiconductor manufacturing in the 90's, when you had to, you know, get the people from work and take them to a place and all that, it involved paying a lot of money for extra security and such. With no offices, it's a lot easier, and you never have to meet the person face to face. Five years from now, I think w…

Look, you can't have it both ways. People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it's going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that. Which is it? As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.

Not to mention being remote and caring for employees are not mutually exclusive factors.

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

#447

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

jsnell wrote: post #431
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Teams is used by companies who have IT departments that do absolutely insane things like DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue. These are the morons that Microsoft is selling to, and giving advice to as on how to configure it. So you wind up with a system that's almost worse than not having anything at all. Our Sharepoint installation w…

> DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue. Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).

Look, I fully understand the reason given, and, like government programs, it all sounds nice and looks good on paper, but we are simply NOT in that litigious a business space. And, frankly, simply deleting everything as we go seems like something that public safety laws should PREVENT, but I digress.

Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.

So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.

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

#448

Post by throw_m239339 »

throwaway2214 wrote: post #155
mathverse wrote: post #30

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.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

"Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice"

Once is an accident, twice is a coïncidence, three times it's a pattern.

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

#449

Post by relaxing »

SahAssar wrote: post #418
relaxing wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unthreaded chats are all private, no? If you want to use the group chat it forces you into threaded (or is there a way to switch out of that?)

Are you talking about threads or channels? It sounds like you are describing what slack calls channels.

Yes, in the places I've used Slack, channels were the default mode of communication.

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

#450

Post by toraway1234 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #201

I 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.

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