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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

#591

Post by palata »

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.

You can have a fix desk for employees who want to be on site, and have a bunch of "free desks" for the remote ones who want to come to the office.

Sometimes it's nice to be remote, sometimes it's nice to be in the office. Some people like it 100% remote, other 100% on site.

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

#592

Post by palata »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #505
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". Good. Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business…

Actually, if you accept to work for free, a good business decision would be to stop paying you.

Would you act personally surprised or offended or hurt if your company made that business decision?

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

#593

Post by mvanbaak »

guhidalg wrote: post #478
serf wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Try having video calls.

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

#594

Post by dalyons »

gtowey wrote: post #488
jrochkind1 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That oval office replica was the entrance to the office. The reason they gave publicly was that since it was people's first impression they wanted to make it grand. And since the admin employee was the first person to greet visitors, they felt it was the most important job in the office and wanted to give them a badass desk to do it from.

it worked on me! i was super impressed. and then you leave the oval office and it turns out it was floating in a much larger room. Cool effect, best office i've ever been to. I think they got rid of the desk (or made it not the entrance) when trump got elected

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

#595

Post by svachalek »

karaterobot wrote: post #523
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'…

Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is.

You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it.

And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.

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

#596

Post by octodog »

dcchambers wrote: post #215
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.

We have done the same at Zendesk. We've reduced our office footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to work in an office environment. I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spike…

Provided employee productivity is the same (or better) this model still has Zendesk ahead. It doesn't really matter if utilization is low - if you've closed 10% of your offices you're paying 10% less rent than you were before.

Would there be opportunities for further efficiency by fully closing them and renting space a few times a year? Possibly, yes. But that doesn't mean the current model isn't an improvement on the previous one.

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

#597

Post by hgsgm »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #532
seydor wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do your job, usually cheaper. if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.

What if I am in Georgia?

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

#598

Post by Gigachad »

mnd999 wrote: post #522

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'm about to leave my job if they don't get enough office space for us. They downgraded to a coworking space with no monitors and not enough desks. I'll never take another fully remote job. 3 years remote at different companies and it's hell.

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

#599

Post by siftrics »

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…

> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity

Why should I be required to employ you if you cost more than the value you produce? No one owes you anything. If you're so skilled, get another job elsewhere.

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

#600

Post by KerrAvon »

bagels wrote: post #585
jsdwarf wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.

Yeah, bullshit. Maybe you didn't live through all the panic about offshoring in the 1990's, but all of our jobs would have been sent to Southeast Asia if they could have been by now. Remote changes nothing. They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.
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