651–660 of 907 posts
When I visited the GitHub office in SF in 2017, it was nearly empty. Given how extravagant and beautiful it is, it struck me as a colossal waste of money even then.
They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
The level of extravagance there was amazing.
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Viable alternatives to VSCode have been around since the 90s
The explosive success of VSCode reveals that this is not true.
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.
Hey, there is always GitLab!
Do they all just follow the trends?
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.
My heart goes out to the laid off employees, though I think they'll be able to find solid jobs (or start their own companies) when they're ready. What I'm more surprised by is: 1. GitHub operating so independently from Microsoft at large that they have their own layoffs (not included in the 10k people that Microsoft announced they'll be parting ways with). 2. GitHub operating SO INDEPENDENTLY that they can decide to…
Seriously WTF? I swear none of these companies were anywhere near a need for layoffs. Do they all just follow the trends?
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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…
If you spend 10M/annum on salaries, is your 1M/annum for an office really a big burden?