581–590 of 907 posts
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>Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.
Or, just do some socializing outside of work.
Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.
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This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.
Why should a company be forced to continue to pay for employees they aren't in need of?
What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor?
And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers.
You as an employee have far more to lose.
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.
I work in a role where help I ramp a lot of recent graduates into industry. I can say this comment doesn't comport with my experience. The kids are alright. One old practice that has helped a lot is pair programming. I employ strong-style pairing when I work with a new hire which helps them ramp up on our practices quickly IME. A new practice which has helped immensely are in-person "burst weeks" every 3 months or so…
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.
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…
Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.
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.
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…
My first instinct was that this model wouldn’t work because employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers. But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless. I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.
It’s called contract employment.
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They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
On the seal: "melius simul quam solus" means: "better together than alone." On the scale of extravagant perks and celebrations of success it is a fairly minor and inexpensive one.
https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~otS2Mwn...
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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…
> they have a wider pool from which to choose This goes both ways for employer and employee
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Or, just do some socializing outside of work.
People keep saying that. Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.
My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.
Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.
Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.
I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.