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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

#471

Post by JasserInicide »

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.

I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work (and probably want my next job to be remote too), I still fully believe it's a long term "leading lambs to the slaughter" type of plan. Companies save big on remote in so many ways. No more offices. No more weekly happy hours (just do a company retreat every 6 months). They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose. Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.

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

#472

Post by turdprincess »

microtherion wrote: post #380
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having recently spent a few weeks in large, quite nice, but nearly empty offices (because I wanted to work in office for a change, but most of my cow orkers had other plans), I realized that holding on to oversized offices can backfire, because as nice as the space is, it felt somewhat demoralizing after a while to be nearly alone in such a vast building.

It seems like the thing to do is to downsize offices until they correctly meet usage. So, take your number of employees, multiply by percentage that usually comes into the office, add a buffer for growth, and have an office for that.

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

#473

Post by moneywoes »

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…

The bigger thing I think is offshoring

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

#474

Post by gorjusborg »

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.

There are a bunch of different people reacting to a stressful change in economy and its effects on the job market. That's all.

It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to clean house).

Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison their valued contributors just to have their competition scoop them up.

The emphasis here is on Good. Bad companies likely will jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction because they aren't paying attention. Remote work is one of those factors that some companies are struggling to set policies for.

Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many people on HN work for them.

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

#475

Post by serf »

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.

>Which is it?

I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet.

An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-drone.

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

#476

Post by bombcar »

noirbot wrote: post #311
Dopameaner wrote: post #144

An observation, Microsoft subsidiaries are being told to use teams. Cisco subsidiaries are being told to use webex in place of slack. We might be in a new world of chaos

I generally agree, but it also does feel like just an extension of dogfooding. If you work for a company that has a product that solves a certain business need, it generally makes sense that you wouldn't hire a different company to solve that need. Obviously in this case the reasonable response is that Teams and WebEx are worse products and MS and Cisco haven't shown much inclination to fixing that, but that's more t…

And perhaps those companies having to eat their own shit will make them finally fix them.

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

#477

Post by JasserInicide »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #350
lampshades wrote: post #5

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.

Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the acti…

Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's first recession and thinking the world is ending.

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

#478

Post by guhidalg »

serf wrote: post #475
geuis wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Which is it? I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet. An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather…

That's never going to happen. Most people (maybe not you, you savant) need someone's physical presence to see them as a real person. The phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" did not become irrelevant just because I can email someone across the world.

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

#479

Post by radicalbyte »

alluro2 wrote: post #322
radicalbyte wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashing constantly and being a resource hog killed Slack for me. That and DMs being visible to whoever pays.

Teams, specifically on Mac and Linux, has been a shit-show of instability, weird one-off behavior, blank screens on start, login loops etc for my team. With how amazingly well Microsoft did with Visual Studio Code, it's a bummer how it seems that none of that expertise can be translated to other teams (in this case, the Teams one) as well...

Teams crashes my 5950x in video calls. Otherwise no issues but I can't claim to have used it much.

Discord is by far the best of the bunch combined with Jitsi.

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

#480

Post by bombcar »

nickpeterson wrote: post #235
adverbly wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on that could actually happen? It's not officially open source or anything?

Pretty easy, just release new features as paid plugins that need subscriptions and make minimal updates to the core program.

Just make it part of Microsoft365 and don’t really bother updating the original. Done.
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