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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

#681

Post by zeroonetwothree »

JasserInicide wrote: post #477
thinkharderdev wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the acti…

Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's first recession and thinking the world is ending.

What recession? GDP is growing steadily and unemployment is at record lows.

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

#682

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

KerrAvon wrote: post #600
bagels wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not as optimistic based on recent moves that seem to be intended to rein the employees in and mollify investor class, but I agree that if they could, they would have done it already. Simple reality is that it is genuinely hard to do stuff well across time zones. Add to this kids and demand for work life balance and it gets impossible fast. Companies would love 'tried and ready' person, but.. that tends to come with age and age demands some modicum of consideration; one way or another.

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

#683

Post by zeroonetwothree »

JasserInicide wrote: post #477
thinkharderdev wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the acti…

Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's first recession and thinking the world is ending.

Technically 2020 was a recession. I guess we forgot already.

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

#684

Post by sokoloff »

TomSwirly wrote: post #590
oblio wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying that. Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.

You must hang out with some poor quality humans. 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 like (and appear to be liked by) many people where our politics are quite different, including my spouse. I value “how interesting are you to interact with?” far more than “how perfect a mirror are you?”

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

#685

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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.

IME the "top" junior engineers are still fine. They can figure out things on their. But the "mid-tier" ones really end up worse off. With proper mentorship and training they might be able to reach, say, 8/10, but with everything remote they end up at 5/10. Basically I haven't noticed the top end of new engineers getting worse, but the average definitely has.

And the "bottom tier" is definitely far far worse. It seems they just get jobs to work the minimum amount and barely do anything (r/overemployed perhaps)

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

#687

Post by sokoloff »

andrewmutz wrote: post #589
cutenewt wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have a wider pool from which to choose This goes both ways for employer and employee

I think this is true: employees will be able to choose from far more options, and they will have more competition. The first phase of this is competing with anyone in the US, but soon enough companies will be hiring abroad for zoom-based jobs. If a foreign employee can work in a reasonable time-zone, and has great english language skills, what's the difference?

I think “soon enough” started more than five years ago and accelerated in the last three.

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

#688

Post by burntwater »

scarface74 wrote: post #618
laurels-marts wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

That's fine, then I'll have friends in one place for three years, and then I'll have friends in another place for three years. I don't see the problem here.

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

#689

Post by philistine »

JasserInicide wrote: post #471
geuis wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

The workers will always lose out because the employer has more power. Accept that reality, and that the simple counter-balance is workers organizing.

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

#690

Post by HankB99 »

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".

No! I won't have it. That's the proper realm of the contractor.

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