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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

#641

Post by MonkeyClub »

noodleman wrote: post #485
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 doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will not be any more visible than a remote worker. I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.

> I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.

Sure we are, and aggregates in fact, not individual figures.

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

#642

Post by Marsymars »

svachalek wrote: post #595
karaterobot wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This really resonates with me. I had a solid team of what you’d call B-grade engineers for years, but for various reasons most of the team left over the past couple years and were replaced with C’s.

Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.

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

#643

Post by grepfru_it »

mardifoufs wrote: post #379
grepfru_it wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they are not talking about the elephant in the room, the AWS spend. Cut back on that and these layoffs probably aren't necessary. The problem is the sheer size of GitHub data and the unreliability of Azure. There is an entire datacenter that is unused because data locality severely limits performance.

Are they using both AWS and Azure?

Yes

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

#644

Post by MonkeyClub »

BurningFrog wrote: post #274
dcchambers wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It also makes sense as a hedge if the WFH trend fizzles out.

It won't fizzle out, if the 15-minute city plans are anything to go by: work global, live local.

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

#645

Post by rising-sky »

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.

> Which is it?

Is the expectation here that "people on HN" are a monolith and only capable of singular thought? Are you suggesting there can't or shouldn't be any room for diversity of thought and debate?

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

#646

Post by kfarr »

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.

It could be coordination but unlikely to be collusion, some of the FAANG already made that mistake

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

#647

Post by scarface74 »

nogridbag wrote: post #635
scarface74 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average tenure at most tech companies are around 3 years. I assure you that most of your “friends” at work won’t keep in touch with you three years after you leave.

Complete opposite experience for me. Worked for a startup a couple of years as a young dev, made some amazing friends including my wife. 12 years later we're all quite a bit older and still meet up every couple of months (and now our kids are best friends).

I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies. Only two of them has anyone heard of. One was a fortune 10 company at the time (ruined by the decisions of Jack Welch) and one is currently a fortune 10 company. I keep in touch in real life with three people. One person followed me between three companies between 2008-2015 and I married the other.

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

#648

Post by zztop44 »

scarface74 wrote: post #623
zztop44 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s painless compared to trying to do the same thing without it.

But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.

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

#649

Post by sanderjd »

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.

Very few (but not zero!) of my meaningful relations have been through work.

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

#650

Post by BizarreByte »

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…

> Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.

Exactly, which is why labour of all classes and types should organize and gain power against businesses. Too bad the labour movement was killed decades ago.

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