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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

#621

Post by scarface74 »

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.

I will take “getting paid less” in exchange for me living where I want to live over having to live on the west coast any day.

I couldn’t have had the 3200 square foot house built in the burbs in 2016 (when I was making $135K) in any place close to a tech hub.

Now I work remotely for $BigTech and I can live anywhere. I live in a resort area in Florida half the year and fly around the US the other half and rent my place out (professionally managed). I actually downsized and paid about the same for where I live now as I did in 2016 and no state income taxes.

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

#622

Post by doetoe »

scintill76 wrote: post #545
ecshafer wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why anyone would use VSCode, now. Between Intellij, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text there are at least 4 better Editors / IDE for any given language.

Due to JetBrains’s (alleged?) links to Russia, their products are banned at some companies. :(

The founders are Russian, but they actually condemned the invasion of Ukraine, and suspended sales in Russia and Belarus

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

#623

Post by scarface74 »

zztop44 wrote: post #548
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…

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.

Dealing with Kubernetes is “painless”?

But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.

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

#624

Post by Folcon »

oblio wrote: post #581
jjeaff wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that proximity matters, but there are many different ways of slicing proximity.

Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.

But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.

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

#625

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#626

Post by scarface74 »

dinobones wrote: post #456
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…

I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take. Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.

I associate “having a job” with prospect of “being laid off” and plan accordingly.

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

#627

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#628

Post by [deleted] »

jsdwarf wrote: post #565
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#629

Post by scarface74 »

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.

As someone who got my first, current and only job at a FAANG working remotely in GA, I declined the chance to be interviewed for a job that would have required me to relocate. I would have made probably $100K more than I was making as a senior enterprise dev.

Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.

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

#630

Post by mef »

allochthon wrote: post #603

A little depressing to see GitHub join the zeitgeist. Probably mandated from above by Microsoft. The next time I'm on a job search, I'll be de-prioritizing, and possibly even excluding, those tech companies that laid people off in order to signal to investors that they had their finances under control. I was kind of attached to GitHub, though, so this is disappointing.

How can you be sure that investor signalling is their motivation?
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