What does closing all offices mean? Do they go full remote or employees are going to move to Microsoft offices
It's always been fully remote
GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
491–500 of 907 posts
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#492Just wait till Microsoft starts charging a license for vs code and developers heads implode.
It would be a huge bait and switch, but honestly I would most likely end up paying for it. I spend over 4 hours a day in VSCode, and it's better than everything else I've used
I know, right? It even made me take up writing extensions as a hobby. Mostly linters and syntax highlighters for really exotic file formats.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
>i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit
I've never used Teams. Why does everybody hate it?
The video is largely fine for my uses (last couple years it's come a long way), but the text platform is just so bad for me sitting with it and slack at my desk. Like night and day.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teams for video, not so bad. If they were replacing Slack with Teams, that would be horrible.
Surely they are just trying to gradually switch everything to Teams. Seems weird to use a slack clone for video chat only but continue to use slack for the chat.
Isn't it more the scheduling of meetings? Does slack have a reasonable way to schedule huddles and integrate them with calendars? My company does scheduled meetings on teams and everything else on slack.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
then nothing can ever be malice. This razor sucks.
No, but it means you should probably have specific evidence of malice before assuming it. It's similar to Occam's Razor: Just because "the simplest explanation is usually the best", does not mean that the simplest explanation is always right. But it's usually a good idea to start with the simpler explanation because a simpler theory is easier to interrogate.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#496Will they just be using Microsoft's offices?
No, github has always been fully remote.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much. I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off…
This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of operations no longer exists." In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
This, think companies going out of business left and right. Not 5-15% layoffs after the company doubled or tripled in size over 2-3 years.
Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months or a year and came back with huge pay cuts.
Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers in their house they took when the company closed and management/investors didn't want any of it.
I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#498I 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.
What is needed is something like WeWork for large office gatherings. Something between a WeWork and a hotel conference center. The former is not really made for big meetings. The latter is either very expensive, too large or too small. You need a space for 10-200 people to meet and collaborate... not a conference center.
Almost every hotel has some kind of conference center. You can absolutely rent a conference center for 10 people for a week in any city in america.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much. I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off…
One notable contrast I see is that many of the dotcoms which failed had been predicted years in advance based on poor business models where they had no plausible way to make a profit. There are some companies like Uber which are struggling with that but most of these are profitable & won’t be leaving room for newcomers. Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t h…
One thing I see different is back then there were tons and tons of small startups that vaporized.
Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.
Re: GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If that’s the case then why hasn’t the shift happened sooner?
Previous big waves of the shift were referred to as "outsourcing", "offshoring", etc.