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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

#721

Post by eulers_secret »

scarface74 wrote: post #621
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.

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 plac…

I’ve been pricing out a truck+trailer combo to work remote and see North America.

I’m starting to get serious about it and it’s really exciting.

Remote offers so many possibilities for a more enriching life. I’d for sure take a 20 or even 30% pay cut (to <$100k)to enable this, easy!

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

#722

Post by jabits »

WoodenChair wrote: post #711
simplicio wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but that works both ways. Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions. In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less l…

> Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions. Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcas…

When you’re young maybe, but after ten or fifteen years of “deep social connections”, working remote can be quite peaceful and satisfying. Personally I’ve always been more productive working at home.

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

#723

Post by WoodenChair »

jabits wrote: post #722
WoodenChair wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions. Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcas…

When you’re young maybe, but after ten or fifteen years of “deep social connections”, working remote can be quite peaceful and satisfying. Personally I’ve always been more productive working at home.

Well I'm 35. You can decide if that's young or old. Some people are just more social than others of course.

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

#724

Post by brasic »

ushakov wrote: post #128
electrondood wrote: post #23

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...

My favorite room was the "secret room": a wood-paneled library which was only accessible via a hidden door: https://twitter.com/cbrasic/status/1623879372116529155

And it wasn't even the most impressive library in the office...

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

#725

Post by astrange »

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…

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. Other employers are now competing for those workers too!

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

#726

Post by mike22 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #576
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want whatever you're smoking. Outlook is the poster child for overengineered software. It's the pointy end of Microsoft's attempt to make their software be all things to all IT department buyers' checklists.

I don't know if its some crap in our top tier banking corporation's customization of Office 2016 suite, but outlook feels I am in Windows 95 era, running maybe some 486 DX2/66MHz machine with fabulous 8MB of RAM and loud clicky slow HDD. I click on email, it takes few seconds to render that few lines of text. I click on one below, same 3-5 seconds. Emails I read few mins ago. Click on Calendar, again 3-5 seconds for…

Then there’s the times people update the bug-tracker-table-in-a-Confluence-page, and Confluence sends an email alert about the edit to those “watching the page (which is everyone who ever edited it). In Outlook the scroll bar literally shrinks before my eyes as it renders the email from top to bottom.

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

#727

Post by scarface74 »

eulers_secret wrote: post #721
scarface74 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plac…

I’ve been pricing out a truck+trailer combo to work remote and see North America. I’m starting to get serious about it and it’s really exciting. Remote offers so many possibilities for a more enriching life. I’d for sure take a 20 or even 30% pay cut (to <$100k)to enable this, easy!

I wouldn’t go that far. My goal was to still live as if I was making the same thing I made before I came to BigTech

And for context: my budget at 49 years old could easily be supported by what a returning intern got at my current company. We aren’t talking about a lot of money by tech standards.

Housing: we were paying around $3500 a month all in - mortgage, utilities, yard, pest control etc. When we stay in our “Condotel” between October and mid March we are paying less than $3000 all in, the mortgage + HOA (CDD) thst covers everything else including utilities, access to three pools, a lake, a gym, three restaurants onsite, a running trail etc all included.

Our budget for hotels is about $3500/month - midrange Hilton extended stays also with gyms and pools.

-ground transportation - we had one car with a car note, that and maintenance, gas and car insurance for two cars came up to around $1000/month. We sold both of our cars. That’s now our Uber/occasional rental car budget.

- flights - before our “vacation budget” was around $8000 a year. Now that’s our domestic one way plane budget for the year.

I looked at a budget from 2016 when I was making $135K (less than a returning intern offer at my current job and I was 43 at the time), and my yearly spend has only increased by the $8000 flight budget.

Now “my“ budget does include my wife’s “allowance” that she was providing for herself when she was working part time in the school system. We agreed for her to stop working post Covid and when I got my current job.

Also, I give myself an “allowance” too that’s actually less than hers.

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

#729

Post by Myrmornis »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #238
romellem wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not kidding, one of the reasons I left my last job was when our parent company forced Outlook, Sharepoint, and Teams on us (vs. Google mail, Google Drive, and Slack). That change on its own isn't the worst thing of course, there were other reasons why I was considering leaving, but it was definitely one of the last straws. Those MS solutions are just worse than the competition, and getting frustrated at your bugg…

Gmail is so much better than outlook it's honestly insane. The way it handles email chains is infinitely better than outlooks, which often leads to responses just getting lost when someone replies all to a message that wasn't the most recent. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'our' fault, as I'm sure someone will point out. But in the years of using Gmail at my last employer, it just worked.

I would honestly like to know more about how to make it handle email chains. My work is happily quite email free but recently I've been involved with a company in my private life and I'm finding the email chains in Gmail incomprehensible -- the old emails aren't folded; I seem to have to scroll past millions of copies of the same email signatures with images in the signatures, as well as tons of quoted text from random copies of the group conversation at earlier points in its life, trying to hunt out the "real" last email. Is this normal?

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

#730

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.

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