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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

#781

Post by malandrew »

sokoloff wrote: post #718
Ancalagon wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.

I want to work for a company that’s financially strong (or at least profitable). If that means they sometimes fire people, that’s ok. I want my “don’t fire them” to be based on a premise that I’m creating much more value for them than I cost. That’s a stable situation for all parties, short and long term.

It doesn’t work like that though for publicly traded companies. Even if you bring in more revenue that they be are paying you, it can be attractive to fire you to juice the stock price on Wall Street.

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

#782

Post by fsckboy »

sokoloff wrote: post #767
fsckboy wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it works because high compensation and strength of job market, not "results in". these (high paid) workers have a lot of power individually which balances against the scale power of the organization. Not so for low skill workers. At will employment will not lead to higher wages for low skill workers. It will lead to fuller employment, more overall wages.

Are you arguing that low-skill workers should then choose to form a union?

I understand why low-skill workers want to form unions, just like I understand how people want to buy gas and drive a 1 ton internal combustion engine around by themselves, it makes their lives better in the short term.

but in that comment I went on to say that the overall (aggregate, total) wages paid by greedy, rapacious capitalists to low-wage workers (taken as a group) will be higher without unions. It's well known that unions get higher wages for their members at the expense of unemployment for their non-members.

I think the right answer is policies that decrease the power of large employers by making sure that they are always competing against other large employers. I don't think there should be 1 Amazon, I think Amazon should be broken into a half dozen Amazons. Bezos would continue to own the same %age of the Amazons as he does of Amazon, so it's fair to him, but Amazon would no longer be a monopsony in the the labor market and the small vendor marketplace, nor have monopoly power for consumers, so fair to everyone else also.

such a hard core market solution as I'm proposing would probably drive wages down, but it would also drive prices down, and driving prices down (or holding back increases, nobody wants deflation) is a really powerful way to increase standards of living

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

#783

Post by ngc248 »

uncletammy wrote: post #570
JasserInicide wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work ... I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.

I took it as a double entendre. We took advantage of the WFH policy and the company also took advantage of us, coz more work got done, since we had nowhere to go.

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

#784

Post by pelasaco »

I was there in 2020/2021 and declined their offer. Too many distractions, the company didn't look like concentrated in the business but more in sjw activities. Being minority myself, I didn't feel comfortable having to go through some 3 hours diversity interview. I just wanted to work on github,not join a woke club.

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

#785

Post by skrebbel »

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…

> think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down

This is called “contracting” and it has been around regardless of whether there’s an office.

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

#786

Post by ozim »

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.

You know that crowds can have multiple different opinions that are conflicting at the same time.

Wait for it… even single person can hold 2 or more conflicting opinions or views at the same time. Fun part is they also can and will use them in discussions as they see fit.

There is no law or logic involved.

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

#787

Post by parano1d »

What if Tech Companies can lay off people fairly risk free now, due to the statistical data gathered from remote work tools like Microsoft Teams?

That activity data, makes it easier to distinguish between essential and non-essential workers, especially for larger companies.

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

#789

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

scarface74 wrote: post #719
berkeleyjunk wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Agree. The only thing preventing this going all the way is the friction in timezones and difficulty in co-ordination (i.e. still requires someone local to the remote people to manage their work).

Well for my line of work (app dev/cloud consulting) there is lot of face time, video conferencing with clients, travel to client sites, etc. But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.

Non-government, international start-ups won't have any of these restrictions.

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

#790

Post by twelve40 »

ben7799 wrote: post #499
acdha wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One notable contrast I see is that many of the dotcoms which failed had been predicted years in advance based on poor business models where they had no plausible way to make a profit. There are some companies like Uber which are struggling with that but most of these are profitable & won’t be leaving room for newcomers. Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t h…

One thing I see different is back then there were tons and tons of small startups that vaporized. Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.

could you expand on the Uber having no way to make money part?

> Uber reported $595 million in profit

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