Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 907 posts

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

#521

Post by flangola7 »

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'm not sure why anyone would think the people running these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else. In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they are even often quite weak.

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

#522

Post by mnd999 »

Remote only is short sighted. It might work okay for your experienced workforce, but for junior hires, especially new graduates, they get a lot from working alongside more experienced people. And when you’re young you want to go for drinks after work and socialise with colleagues. If you can’t keep the junior employees then your company has no future.

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

#523

Post by karaterobot »

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…

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.

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

#524

Post by andrew_ »

louwrentius wrote: post #340
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.

I think you are right but this site is mostly for the "Temporary Embarrassed Milionaires" crowd that identify more with those large companies than with the average worker. The irony is that many of them are actually part of this layoff reading this and still they don't agree with what is really happening. The inevitable periodic 'crash' that is part of the capitalist system is a feature, not a bug. It helps suppress…

Yeah that's bullshit. Came from a blue collar home, worked in the trades until I found my way into computers. Don't have a college education and carved myself out a nice career in tech being self taught and hustling for 20 years. From my perspective, this site is not for the "Temporary Embarrassed Millionaires," but unfortunately populated by too many from the "Sad I Missed The Bolshevik Revolution" crowd salivating whenever the opportunity to yell "You're oppressed brothers and sisters!" arises.

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

#525

Post by andrew_ »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #65
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.

To be honest we're not yet .com bubble level. That saw many many _bankruptcies_ . It took microsoft ~17 yrs to go from it's .com bubble to breakeven, though others rebounded faster. Also, if you're an engineer, keep in mind the org mix in layoffs. AFAIK It's more like the recruiter-pocalypse as companies do not foresee needing those headcount to increase headcount... Yes some engineers in the mix, but not a major com…

Too many are missing this. Recruiting, marketing, and sales are getting run through. There's been a glut of recruiters in the industry for at least 10 years. Anecdotally I'm under the impression most are low-skill workers.

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

#526

Post by seydor »

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…

Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to hide their digital footprints as well

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

#527

Post by [deleted] »

ricardobeat wrote: post #486
JasserInicide wrote: post #471

Earlier 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?

[deleted]

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

#528

Post by red-iron-pine »

vlowther wrote: post #520
ricardobeat wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s the case then why hasn’t the shift happened sooner?

Covid pandemic proved that most office jobs can be done remotely with little to no loss of productivity.

I would definitely argue a loss of productivity. But those costs are far outweighed by the benefits, such as less overhead, greater hiring radius, and flexibility. Plus a lot of the weaknesses are more managerial than technical, like synchronous vs async tasks and finding more effective ways to measure productivity.

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

#529

Post by aidenn0 »

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 know. It's almost like HN isn't a monolith and people reach for the "comment" button more often when they are critical than supportive.

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

#530

Post by h1srf »

roflyear wrote: post #391
mcast wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZIRP allowed companies to borrow infinite money at almost no cost

What mechanism allowed that? From what I recall corporate bond rates were low but not no cost low. Bank rates maybe were like a few percent but infinity money?

If you were MSFT or AAPL, you could issue 0%(or close to it) bonds and investors would lap it up. IIRC AAPL did issue a 0% bond at some point in the last few years.
Post reply on HN